People's democratic dictatorship

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People's democratic dictatorship is a phrase incorporated into the Constitution of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong. The phrase is notable for being one of the few cases in which the term "dictatorship" is used in a non-pejorative manner.

The premise of the "People's democratic dictatorship" is that the Communist Party of China and state act on behalf of the people, but can and do use dictatorial methods in order to remain in power in the face of hostile forces. Implicit in the concept of the people's democratic dictatorship is the notion that dictatorial means are a necessary evil, and that without a dictatorship, the government may collapse and create a situation which is worse than the dictatorship.

However, some critics of the concept argue that dictatorships are inherently worse than non-dictatorships.

It was most famously used on June 30, 1949, in commemoration of the 28th Anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. In his speech, entitled "On The People's Democratic Dictatorship," Mao expounded his ideas about a People's Democratic Dictatorship as well as provided some rebuttals to criticism that he anticipated he would face.

Mao claimed that after the Second World War, the only "imperialist" power remaining on the planet with any strength, the United States of America had wanted to enslave the world and used its funding of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang as evidence of such. Mao, thus, wrote off what he called "Western bourgeois civilization" and instead embraced Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the Chinese state.

Mao believed that the Communist Party of China must "arouse the masses of the people" and ally China with the Soviet Union. Mao discounts the idea of working with the British and the Americans because he believed that they were inherently imperialist nations and, thus, had territorial designs on China.

Mao fully embraced the idea of being dictatorial because it meant that only the people had the right to freedom of speech. He defined the people as being the working class (which will exercise its "hegemony", being represented by the Communist Party), peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the "national bourgeoisie". These classes, he believed, enforced their dictatorship through the Communist Party of China (CPC) over "the running dogs of capitalism" which included landlords and bureaucratic-bourgeoisie (referring to those parts of the the landlord class and bourgeoisie connected to the Kuomintang government.

In accordance with Marx's idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Mao believed that the People's Democratic Dictatorship would be necessary until the Communist Party of China withered away and left China in a socialist state of existence (defined by him, quite traditionally as the society of Great Equality - Datong 大同）.