History
After recognizing that large numbers of cadres properly trained in mass line tactics were critically needed for the CCP's building of a "complete socialist order," it intensified its cadre training program in 1950-1951 to ensure that all cadres and other works would be "carefully indoctrinated in basic Marxist-Leninist mass line theory and practice."
Arthur Steiner, a professor of international relations and political science at UCLA, writes that Mao rose to pre-eminence in the CCP because he understood the requirements for effecting the strongest possible organization of the Chinese masses in unstable political circumstances. Since the days of his early activity among the peasantry of Hunan Province, he preached the doctrine that the Party must rely on the masses for its strength, that it must serve their needs, “draw inspiration” from them, and orient its political ideology and organizational tactics to their responsiveness.
Training in mass line tactics ranges in scope from propaganda to public administration, Steiner writes. Its principal focus, however, is in the "delicate area" of the CCP's dealings with the masses of Chinese people who have not yet bought into the communist program. In the early 1950s, the problem was sufficiently serious and urgent that CCP leadership temporarily deferred several important social reforms pending the completion of the cadre training program.
Mao criticized Stalin for having no faith in the peasantry and the masses of people, being mechanical in his understanding of the development of socialism, and not actively engaging the masses in the struggle for socialism. "'Politics in command' and the 'mass line' are not stressed. There is no discussion of 'walking on two legs,' and individual material interest is onesidedly emphasized. Material incentives are proclaimed and individualism is far too prominent," Mao wrote of Stalin in 1961. The Mass Line is a method of leadership that seeks ostensibly to "learn from the peasants."
Mao's slogan was "From the masses, to the masses." The process is said to include investigating the conditions of people, learning about and participating in their struggles, gathering ideas from them, and creating a plan of action based on these ideas and concerns of the people, and also based on an analysis of the objective conditions and in light of the revolutionary goal.
Some critics of Maoism consider the mass line to be a form of populism, a criticism that Lenin had leveled against the reformists in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in What Is To Be Done?.
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