New Democracy

History

Mao Zedong set out the two-stage thesis in January 1940 in "On New Democracy." The core claim was that in colonial and semi-colonial countries the bourgeois-democratic revolution had been recategorized since the First World War and the 1917 October Revolution as part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution rather than the old bourgeois-democratic world revolution. Mao defined this as New Democracy: democracy of a new category, not the old.

With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 a system of new democracy was put into place, and from 1952 to 1956 a process of socialist transformation was carried out across agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist commerce, from which the basic system of socialism in China was established. The 1953 declaration of the general line of the transition period was the turning point beyond the New Democracy framework. New Democracy was treated as an intermediate stage and a stepping-stone to socialism, and discourse around it declined after 1953 as Mao emphasized China moving on to the socialist stage.

Examples

Democracy was first incorporated in the Chinese Communist Party constitution in 1945. The Common Program adopted by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference on 29 September 1949 defined China as a new democratic country practising a people's democratic dictatorship led by the proletariat and based on a workers-and-peasants alliance uniting all democratic classes, those opposing imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. The industrial economy of the early PRC included multiple forms of ownership, private and foreign private ownership alongside state ownership. The four-class bloc is symbolized by the PRC flag: the largest star for the Party's leadership and four smaller stars for the bloc of workers, peasants, the intelligentsia and nationally based capitalists.

The concept was adapted abroad. During the 1946 to 1951 Telangana uprising in India, communists in the movement used the model of New Democracy and envisioned a two-stage revolution.

Distinctions

Mao contrasted New Democracy with two alternatives: the old bourgeois-democratic republic under bourgeois dictatorship and the Soviet socialist republic under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Chinese context the working class, not the national bourgeoisie, leads the democratic revolution, and the Chinese experience contrasts with the Bolshevik Revolution in that it included, rather than targeted, the national bourgeoisie of a semi-colonial country.

It is also distinct from the Soviet concept of people's democracy. The CCP developed theories sharing origins with people's democracy, known as New Democracy, the people's democratic dictatorship and whole-process people's democracy; some theorists traced people's democracy back to Mao's 1940 "On New Democracy," while others pointed to Tito's 1945 speech.

There is a further difference from classical Marxism: Mao disagreed with the sequencing in which the bourgeois-democratic revolution must precede the socialist revolution, holding that the two could be combined into a single stage, which he called New Democracy. That class coalition resembles Lenin's view that the working class could lead the democratic revolution in an underdeveloped country.

Relations

The 1949 Common Program served as a provisional constitution and the 1954 Constitution was formulated on its basis, marking the shift away from the New Democracy framework. The New Democracy period itself concluded as the socialist transformation of ownership from 1953 to 1956, including the "Three Great Transformations," basically established the socialist system in its economic aspect by the end of 1956.

The homonymous Korean concept

In Korean, "신민주주의" is a widely used term whose meaning differs by country. The Korean version was advocated by the independence activist and thinker An Jae-hong, emphasizing nationalization of key industries and land and a labour-class democracy distinct from Western democracy, influencing the constitution of the Korean Provisional Government and resembling the Three Principles of Equalization. It is a distinct current of thought from Mao's concept.