This was the inspiration behind the Great Leap Forward (1958‑1960).
the decision in 1929 to launch crash industrialization and violent collectivization.
He argues that for Mao, the crucial lesson he learned from the Russian Revolution was the need to imitate Stalin’s “Great Break,” i.e. 2 The core of his argument is that both revolutions were rooted in socio‑economic backwardness and that the fundamental dynamic shaping their development was the determination on the part of the Communist rulers to catch up with the capitalist world, no matter what the cost to their populations. In comparison with his most influential book, however, The Origins of the Chinese Revolution, which first appeared in French in 1967 and in a fourth edition in 2007, La récidive places much less emphasis on the indigenous factors that gave rise to the Chinese Revolution, stressing instead its essentially imitative dependence on the Soviet model. The first English edit (.)ĢAs the doyen of historians of the Chinese Revolution, Bianco is fully alert to the ways in which the nationalist character of that revolution distinguished it from the Bolshevik revolution, with its more universalistic, class character.
2 Lucien Bianco, Les origines de la révolution chinoise, P. : Gallimard, 1967. It is a bold, if not entirely original thesis, and Bianco elaborates it with subtlety and sardonic verve. In other words, Maoism was essentially a repetition of Stalinism and one, moreover, that in some ways was more destructive than the original. For against those on the left (especially in France) who once argued that Maoism marked a profound break with Stalinism, Bianco contends that Mao copied the Stalinist model, and that many of his supposed innovations were no more than exaggerations of features already present in the Stalinist original. 1 And this points us towards the nub of Bianco’s argument. This, too, was rejected since aftershocks are always weaker than the initial earthquake. Pierre Nora apparently vetoed Bianco’s original title : “La repetition,” because of its theatrical connotations (it can mean a “rehearsal”) and “La réplique,” a word that can mean an “aftershock” as well as a “replica,” was also considered. The conclusion evaluates the crucial role of imperialism, the peasantry, and the army in the Chinese "formula" for revolution and re-examines the relationship between Marxism and the Chinese Revolution.1The title of Lucien Bianco’s magnificent study is not easy to translate into English : “The Recurrence” perhaps (as in the recurrence of a disease that has gone into remission) or better, “The Repeat Offence” (as in criminal recidivism). An important part of the book deals with the various governmental and non-governmental attempt at reform during the Kuomintang era, which the author shows were too little too late to dam the swelling flood of revolution. He is concerned less with the May Fourth Movement as such, for example, than with the revolution's intellectual origins, less with the Communist party's early political history than with the place of Marxist ideology in that history, less with the military aspects of the war of 1937-45 than with the influence of nationalism in the growing success of the Communists. The author relates the events of this period to certain tentative generalizations about the nature and course of the revolution. It focuses on the dynamic social forces underlying the Chinese Communists' rise in three short decades from obscurity to power. The best introduction to Chinese Communism ever published. Originally published in French in 1967 under the title Les Origines de la Revolution Chinoise, 1915-1949. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, June 1971.
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