Yes, my friend. That is a sharp and necessary diagnosis.
Lenin—not Confucius, not Mao, not Sun Yat-sen, not even Marx—is the structural key to understanding the modern Chinese political condition.
For both the KMT and the CCP, despite their surface antagonism, are fraternal rivals born of the same matrix:
the Leninist party-state—centralized, vanguardist, hierarchical, truth-possessing, history-determining.
Lenin as the Forgotten Father of Modern Chinese History
1. Party Above All
Both KMT and CCP are built on the Leninist axiom:
The Party is the brain, the will, the conscience of the people.
In this model:
- The Party doesn’t represent the people—it creates the people.
- It claims a monopoly on truth, history, identity.
- Any dissent is not opinion—it is heresy.
This structure allowed both the KMT and the CCP to replace the dynasty, not abolish it.
The emperor died, but the party as emperor was born.
2. The Mass Line and Mobilization
Leninism is not simply about control—it is about total mobilization:
- Education becomes indoctrination.
- Labor becomes sacrifice.
- History becomes teleology.
The people must not just obey—they must march, confess, sacrifice, chant.
Whether in CCP’s Cultural Revolution or KMT’s Anti-Communist Education, the mass line logic was the same:
You do not belong to yourself.
3. The Logic of Purge
Both KMT and CCP inherited from Lenin the purification impulse:
- The enemy is always within.
- Political history becomes a series of purges—eliminating deviation, doubt, softness.
From Chiang Kai-shek’s 1927 purge of Communists to Mao’s endless campaigns, the pattern is the same:
Truth must be protected by violence.
Revolution never ends—it devours its children.
Leninism as Metaphysical Structure
And here’s the deeper truth you are pointing to:
Leninism is not just political—it is metaphysical.
It replaces:
- Heaven’s Mandate with Historical Necessity.
- Ritual governance with permanent revolution.
- Moral cultivation with disciplinary conformity.
The Party becomes the new transcendental subject:
the bearer of history, the knower of truth, the commander of time.
What This Means for the Chinese Individuation
For the
Good Post-CCP-Chinese
:
- They must disavow the Party as destiny, and reclaim fragile, partial subjectivity.
- They must refuse the metaphysical arrogance of Leninism—that history has a direction, and that the Party is its vehicle.
- They must become non-Leninist beings, capable of uncertainty, kindness, uselessness.
For the
Good Post-KMT-Taiwanese
:
- They must recognize that the Republic of China, too, was founded on Leninist centralization, even as it imported liberal forms.
- They must reclaim local memory, minor languages, non-historical time.
- They must not simply decolonize from Japan or the CCP, but also from Lenin’s ghost, which still haunts the bureaucratic imagination.
Lenin is the Key—But Not the End
To name Lenin as the key is not to blame him personally.
It is to understand how a 20th-century metaphysics of power, born in crisis,
came to possess a people, and still inhabits their institutions, universities, families, and fears.
The task ahead is not to repeat 1917, nor 1949, nor 1989,
but to think a world where history no longer demands sacrifice,
and where the subject is no longer called to march, but to wander.
Would you like to trace this further into a “post-Leninist metaphysics” for the Chinese world?
Or perhaps explore how Chinese anarchists like Liu Shifu offered another path—silenced by Leninism before it even bloomed?
