Maoism as a left-wing ideology was very heterodox. Marxism traditionally put little, if any, weight on the peasantry as a useful component of revolution, and they were viewed as obsolete relics of a past age by Marx, infamous referring to them as a "sack of potatoes" in his 18th Brumaire. But Marx was under the impression that proletariat revolution would break out in the West first, the UK and US particularly, and criticized the Eastern societies for being incompatible with Marxism. This was because in most Eastern societies there was no capitalist class yet present, and the state generally held most power in conjunction with landlords. But Marx was ultimately wrong; he would not live to see it fulfilled, but the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 would usher in a period of international leftism, with the West remaining ardently capitalist and many Eastern states forming movements that opted for Leninist-influenced ideology. Some were successful (China, North Korea, North Vietnam) while other movements either dissipated or fight on to this very day (the Maoist-influenced Naxalites in India come to mind).

SO, what factors made China unique from the rest of the world when pursuing communism? By 1917 Russia had a fairly developed, albeit weak, capitalist class thanks to the efforts of Sergei Witte, but China even as late as 1949 still had yet to develop a formal capitalist class as the PRC was proclaimed that October. I will focus on the major ones below that ultimately led to a peasant-based movement that would carry out the establishment of Maoist China.

The May Fourth Movement, Chen Duxiu, and the New Youth Periodical

Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the Communist Party of China in 1921 in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement that initially began in Beijing, 1919. It is important to note the formation of the movement in northern China. While the Kuomintang was busy establishing a beachhead in Guangdong, students from Beida (Beijing University), upset with the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, spearheaded a cultural movement that would shake the foundations of Chinese society. Primarily focused with ousting the "old norms," these students would come to view Confucianism as the downfall of the Chinese state. It was these hyper-oppressive and archaic practices that kept China down and had made China vulnerable to foreign invasion. True China had been conquered by foreigners tons of times in the past, but hey, who's counting, right? This time these foreigners were from a far away and alien place and were not of the "yellow-race," a classification that would become very important for Chinese intellectuals as they began inheriting Western anthropological practices of classifying races and civilizations. These radical new ideas, influenced by Western democracy and the recent Soviet revolution, promoted sexual freedom for men and women, the destruction of traditional Confucian social structures such as husband-wife & father-son, and the establishment of a communal society focused on the self-strengthening of the Chinese state, which ultimately meant uplifting the peasantry from landlordism. These ideas were diffused through the popular New Youth magazine, which published various comics and articles from intellectuals across China promoting left-wing ideology, though it is important to note during this early pre-Mao period there was no consensus on what exactly "revolution" and "leftism" meant.

Setting to work, the men and women who would soon find themselves leading the New Culture movement established schools that were dedicated to educating women (particularly in Shanghai), gathering workers in the city and passing out leaflets encouraging the formation of trade unions and strikes targeting foreign goods, especially Japan and the UK during the May 30th Incident. Still, Chen, Li and the early leaders of the CCP such as the Moscow-educated "28 Bolsheviks" stuck with a fairly orthodox ideology of Marxism. They wanted to focus on developing their base among the urban workers in China, who were becoming more and more closely alike to the Western proletariat as China began to industrialize. The peasantry, 99% of the population, was largely ignored. Chen even wrote that he viewed an overhaul of land redistribution in rural China was unnecessary. Chen believed that a bourgeoisie class would come about from national unification, and focusing on combating them with organized workers would be the key to China's path to communism. This led to several of Mao's early publications being blocked by various CCP leaders, and Mao fleeing to his home province of Hunan to instigate rebellion in 1927, known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, which failed to achieve anything significant and dissipated quickly.