Essay

"Mao's use of terrror and propaganda were his most effective methods of winning support from the peasants".

Based on the following sources, to what extent to you agree with that claim?

The sources presented give slightly different perceptions of how Mao won the peasants over, and it seems that each gives evidence for different parts of these claims. I agree with this claim to a great extent based on what these sources provide for historical facts.

According to chapter 10 of source A, "China Since 1900", Mao used propaganda to spread communist ideas in Northern China. For example, there is a propaganda poster issued in 1944 which shows peasants helping the Red Army in the war against Japan. This piece of propaganda would instill the idea that all peasants were eager and ready to serve the Communists, presumably because the Reds would help them in return. What could also be interpreted as evidence of propaganda is other movements that the source references, such as the "Women's Associations" which did things like helping women to free themselves of abusive husbands. It might have been in the dogma of the party, but it certainly didn't hurt the communists in winning support from women (peasant or not, one would think). However, this source makes it seem as if terror wasn't used to keep peasants in line at all: it specifically states that the Red Army "operated under strict discipline...never treating the peasants badly". It also states that when the people of Yanan were forced to flee to caves after the town was bombed, "the top leaders of the communist party lived in the caves and did not have any special luxuries that the common people did not have". So, this source indicates that while propaganda was used, terror was not.

This excerpt from "Modern World History" also indicates that terror was not used to keep the peasants in line. It states that the Communists won the people over by land reform instead: "they seized the estates of rich landlords and redistributed them among the peasants". It could be argued that Mao used violence to win support from the peasants, but violence (or force) against the landlords. Rich landlords had their land taken from them and the land was then redistributed to the peasants. This action makes sense with the Communist policy, so it doesn't qualify as propaganda; however, the fact that there was a series of droughts and bad harvests in 1930, and "plenty of rice and wheat being hoarded in the cities by profiteering merchants", so the timing of land redistribution was surely helpful to winning the people over. Not so much propaganda as strategically placed execution of policy.

Source C, an excerpt from "China Conquered", argues something quite different from sources A and B, claiming that Mao primarily used terror and violence in order to scare the peasants into supporting him. According to this source, anybody who was not with the Reds was a target for Mao's "mercilessness": an example of this was the blockade of Changchun, a nationalist-held city in Manchuria in 1948 which resulted in the deaths of 120,000 civilians (by the Communists' own watered-down count). In addition, young men were drafted forcibly into the Reds' army or into "hard, dangerous labor at the front". Many peasants lost their houses to the needs of the army such as fuel for fires and "materials for building bridges". There was also class warfare evident -- anybody who did not take place in the brutal violence against the landlords was considered a dissenter and would be punished accordingly: "anyone not active in denouncing landlords will be stoned to death". This source seems to say that propaganda was not necessary, because the peasants were terrorized into doing anything that the Communists wanted.

It is hard to come to a definitive conclusion based on these sources, because each seems to give a slightly different interpretation of what happened. However, based on them I would say that Mao used violence and propaganda as his main methods of winning peasants over.