During this period, both the scale and frequency of wars in China were excessive, especially when judged against international standards. But contrary to the old view, which saw all the chaos, confrontation and change of modern China as rational and justified simply because it materialised, China did not need war to survive. Rather, war needed China in order to survive.

In hindsight, internal peace and stability could have prevailed at several defining moments after 1911: if the 1915 dispute between Yuan Shikai and Sun Yat-sen had been settled peacefully; if in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek had been content with the Soviet-sponsored republican-communist alliance (in which case Japan would not have had the opportunity to invade China for a third time); and if in 1946 a power-sharing coalition been established, preventing another civil war from occurring.

Of course, peace never eventuated. And a critical question has to be asked: who in China’s society consciously opted for chaos, confrontation and change? Most Marxists will say ‘the people’ without much further explanation. But one must seriously question who these ‘people’ were and what percentage of China’s total population they represented at the time.

Evidence indicates that these ‘people’ were a tiny minority in China at any given time. Not surprisingly, only a handful of individuals converted to communism at the beginning, and this was through visible external influence — two Soviet agents, AA Ivanov and SA Polevoi, came to China in 1918 to proliferate communism. Mao was usually frank about this, saying: ‘we Chinese discovered Marxism only via the Russians’.

But very few people in China actually saw or lived with a Bolshevik or a ‘proletarian’ until 1949. A social survey in 1920, for example, documented that China did not even have social classes comparable to those in Europe — the birthplace of communism — and that the continued provision of social welfare would be enough to prevent Chinese citizens from turning to the ‘daily propaganda of Russian radicalism’.

Consequently, ignorance was widespread even inside China’s communist circles. As noted by Bao Huiseng, a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party: ‘at that time of the First Chinese Communist Congress [of 1921] we as the founding party members knew nothing about Marxism or Leninism’.

Against this backdrop, the communists in China remained a distinct minority. Mao, again, acknowledged this reality: ‘when our party was established in 1921, there were a few dozen members. We were the minority’. This situation continued. In 1958, Mao openly admitted that among China’s population of 600 million — 12 million of whom were party members — only a tiny minority really believed in communism. If this is true, the Chinese case hardly seems to substantiate the old clichés of the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ as representing the core of communism.

This in turn begs the question of why and how a tiny minority was able to create such a large degree of chaos, confrontation and change. The answer is found in the combination of violence and ignorance. This is reflected in Mao’s signature motto: ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ (qianganzi limian chu zhengquan). It was no secret that Mao commanded the gun and the gun commanded the party and the country. That was the political ‘food chain’ under Maoism.

The age-old problem of ‘who watches the watchmen’ is still crucial in China today, as there is no guarantee that the power-holder serves the majority. In fact, China’s history from 1800 to 2000 demonstrates that an unchecked state is by far the biggest threat to society.

Kent Deng is a Reader in Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is the author of China’s Political Economy in Modern Times: changes and economic consequences, 1800-2000.