On Mao Zedong’s New Democratic Revolutionary Discourse

The New Democratic revolutionary discourse is the expression of the New Democratic revolution theory,which is Mao Zedong’s systematic explanation of the nature,task,motive force and steps of Chinese revolution.This discourse was born in the historical process of seeking salvation and rejuvenation,and constituted the national rejuvenation discourse system with reform discourse,the Three People’s Principles discourse and Soviet revolutionary discourse.The construction of the New Democratic revolutionry discourse has gone through a long process of formation and perfection.In 1920 s and 1930 s,Mao Zedong’s revolutionary discourse completed the turn to the Marxism,and he also summed up a series of new concepts from his revolutionary practice,including ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’,‘sixteen words formula of guerrilla warfare’ and ‘encircling the cities from the countryside and seizing political power by armed forces’.After the debate on the Three People’s Principle between CCP and GMD in the early period of Anti Japanese War,Mao Zedong began to construct the Communist Party’s own ideological discourse.Specifically speaking,Mao explained the concepts of ‘Semi colonial and semi feudal’,‘New Democracy’,‘mass line’,‘two step forward’,‘three magic weapons’,‘Sinicization of Marxism’,‘people’s democratic dictatorship’,constructing the basic framework of the New Democratic revolution discourse.The New Democratic revolution discourse is Mao Zedong’s summary of the Chinese revolution practice.It comes directly from Marxism revolution theory,such as the continuous revolution theory,the revolution stages theory and the theory of colonial National Revolution,and absorbs some reasonable contents of the Three People’s Principles including ‘awakening public’,‘averaging land ownership’ and ‘restricting the capital’.More importantly,Mao’s new discourse realizes the conversion of western Marxism discourse to the Sinicization Marxism discourse by absorbing the discourse elements of Chinese traditional culture.To some extent,this discourse is the unity of political discourse,academic discourse and popular discourse,and is the unity of discourse construction and discourse practice as well.Through different modes of communication,the New Democratic revolution discourse has been accepted and recognized by the party members and cadres,intellectuals and the general public,which made the Communist Party obtain the discourse power and the leadership of the revolution.However,this discourse did not disappear from the history stage with the victory of the New Democratic revolution,it continued to play a very important role in the mainstream discourse construction of contemporary China.After searching the People’s Daily,we can find that the core conceptes of the New Democratic revolutionary discourse are still the high frequency vocabulary of modern political life,such as ‘Sinicization of Marxism’ and ‘mass line’.Besides,the grand narrative constructed by the New Democratic revolutionary discourse is still shaping Chinese people’s knowledge system,value system and the identities of themselves,and will continue to have an impact through the textbook system in the future.