ABSTRACT

The victorious peasant army and cadre corps of the Chinese Communists initially had to rely on a large body of Nationalist officials in the cities to govern the country. It took a few years for these holdovers to be replaced, and their socialist replacements were eager to apply a distinctly different approach to their tasks, one inspired by the Soviet Union's example (White 1983:30). Mao referred to this process of learning from the Soviet Union as "leaning to one side" (yi bian dao); he strongly urged the Chinese people to remake their country along Soviet lines (Teiwes 1988:11) and to learn from their Soviet "Elder Brother" (Suliati lao dage). Soviet institutions were adopted nationwide "as the primary models for imitation and, in some cases, wholesale transfer" (White 1983:30).