Political Programme of the New-Democratic Revolution

The fundamental political ideas and goals of the CPC in the period of democratic revolution. It mainly included the state system and the form of political power organization that the Communist Party of China led the New-Democratic Revolution. The political program of the New-Democratic Revolution was formulated by the Chinese Communists with Mao Zedong as the main guide according to the nature and characteristics of Chinese society and Chinese revolution.

As early as the Great Revolution and the Agrarian Revolutionary War, Mao Zedong gradually formed the initial thoughts on the political programme of the new democracy. During the Anti-Japanese War, he published such works as “On New Democracy” and “On Coalition Government”, which clearly put forward and systematically expounded the program. During the War of Liberation, he further enriched and developed the content of this program in his works such as “The Present Situation and Our Tasks”, “On the People's Democratic Dictatorship” and so on.

The political system of new democracy would be the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes under the leadership of the proletariat in terms of the government system, that is, the status of the social classes in the country; and democratic centralism based on a system of people's congresses in terms of the constitution of the regime (that is, the form in which one social class or another chooses to arrange its apparatus of political power to oppose its enemies and protect itself).

Mao Zedong argued that the semi-colonial and semi-feudal nature of Chinese society and the characteristics of the New-Democratic Revolution determined that the state system to be established in China would be people’s democratic dictatorship, i.e., a united-front democratic alliance based on the overwhelming majority of the people, including — the urban petty bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie, the enlightened gentry and other patriots — under the leadership of the working class. This state would overthrow the external oppression and overthrow the internal feudal and fascist oppression. It will not only be different from the old European-American form of capitalist republic under bourgeois dictatorship, the old democratic form, but also from the socialist republic of the Soviet type under the dictatorship of the proletariat which was already flourishing in the U.S.S.R. It would be a transitional form of state to be adopted in the revolutions of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and it would be a political system of people's democratic dictatorship that really suited to China's national conditions and represent the will of the great majority of people.

The form of the organization of political power adopted by the new democratic countries was compatible with the state system of the people's democratic dictatorship and was a system of people's congresses based on democratic centralism. Mao Zedong pointed out: "The political institutions of New Democracy should adopt a system of people's congresses, with all levels electing their respective governmental bodies. It shall be both democratic and centralized, that is to say, centralization on the basis of democracy and democracy under centralized guidance.” We will establish “the system of people's congresses at all levels based on democratic centralism" instead of practicing the bourgeois parliamentary system and the separation of three powers system of the West.

Only a government based on democratic centralism could we not only show extensive democracy and enable the people's congresses at all levels to have a high degree of power, but also centralize the handling of state affairs and enable governments at all levels to centralize the handling of all affairs entrusted by the people's congresses at all levels and guarantee all necessary democratic activities of the people, and express the will of all the revolutionary people and fight the enemies of the revolution most effectively.

The new democratic political program put forward by Mao Zedong, proceeding from the specific situation of China, correctly solved the problem of "what country to build" in the people's democratic revolution, enriched the Marxist theory of state, and laid a theoretical and political foundation for the establishment of the People's Republic of China.