People's History of Ideas Podcast · Matthew Rothwell

On the Experience of the National Bourgeoisie in the New Democratic Revolution

·27 min·1 clip

Mao’s Chongqing appeal promised merchants that the Party would not confiscate property if they supported the revolution.

1. People’s History of Ideas Podcast episode 112 examines Mao Zedong’s 1929 Notice to Merchants and Intellectuals and the later treatment of the national bourgeoisie in Shanghai. 2. The host frames the discussion around Mao Zedong and Zhu De’s seizure of Chongqing and the role of merchants and intellectuals in the new democratic revolution. 3. The episode asks whether Mao was manipulating Chongqing’s better-off classes or imagining a real role for them in revolutionary transformation. 4. Mao’s closing slogans promise that merchants who support the revolution will get protection for freedom of trade and no confiscation of property. 5. The host says those slogans are hard to reconcile with common assumptions about Mao’s politics and with the later socialist phase discussed in earlier episodes on the Sixth Party Congress. 6. The episode points to the Soviet New Economic Policy, which ran from 1921 to 1928, as the nearest concrete precedent for a communist party tolerating capitalist development. 7. The host stresses that the NEP was not the same as China’s democratic revolution, but argues it was a useful reference point for Mao and other Chinese leaders. 8. The episode suggests that Chinese communist thinking likely imagined a period of at least seven years in which the national bourgeoisie would be accommodated economically and somewhat politically. 9. The host then reviews changing Communist Party policy from 1929 to 1949, including the more accommodating line during the War of Resistance against Japan from 1937 to 1945. 10. The episode notes that this wartime policy formally accepted anyone opposing Japan as an ally, including landlords in some base areas. 11. Turning to Shanghai, the host says the city’s business leaders were often friendlier to the communists than listeners might expect after years of Kuomintang exploitation. 12. The episode describes Kuomintang rule in Shanghai as a period of violent pressure, including kidnappings of wealthy businessmen’s children for protection money and gangster alliances with the Green Gang. 13. It also says the Kuomintang’s post-1945 inflation and forced sales at low fixed prices pushed some capitalists to flee to Hong Kong before returning in 1949. 14. The host gives the example of Wu from the Shinshen Textile Company and mentions Rong Yiren as a major owner who stayed and worked with the new government. 15. The episode explains that when the People’s Liberation Army entered Shanghai in 1949, it came in trucks with red flowers and portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, but not Stalin. 16. The host says 49,000 Kuomintang municipal employees were mostly kept on, and that early communist inspectors were still learning how Shanghai’s factories and bureaucracy worked. 17. The episode then describes 1950 labor-capital consultative committees, the beginning of the Five Anti-Campaign in 1951, and the use of struggle meetings against bribery, tax evasion, stealing state property, cheating on contracts, and theft of economic secrets. 18. The host says the state later tightened control through nationalization of bottlenecks like salt, lumber, grain, and cooking oil before the 1956 transition to socialism. 19. The episode’s style is explanatory and historical, with long stretches of policy description, one extended detour into Shanghai economic history, and occasional direct address to listeners. 20. Listeners interested in Mao-era policy, Shanghai business history, or state-building under revolution will get the most from it, while people wanting a short story-driven episode may skip it.

As heard by us

A steady look at how revolution handled the people it could not simply write off.

The episode takes Mao Zedong's 1929 Notice to Merchants and Intellectuals as its starting point and asks a sharper question from there: how did a communist revolution deal with people who were not the main exploiters, but still sat on the better off side of the old order?

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Want Mao's pitch to merchants made concrete through Shanghai?

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