| Summary: | The article deals with the transformation of the authoritarian collectivist regime of the PRC
into the authoritarian personalist regime of Mao Zedong. The author chose the dichotomy of rational and
irrational, mind and will as a method of understanding and explaining the two varieties of the authoritarian
regime of government as the methodological basis of the study. According to the author's understanding, the
authoritarian regime of government in the PRC, which existed from the day the state was formed until 1956,
provides an example of the struggle between two principles in the leadership of the CCP and the Chinese
state – rational, based mainly on reason, striving for orderliness, planning and taking into account regularity,
and irrational, based predominantly on the will, striving to control the elements and random. According to
the author, China owes its successful development in 1949–1956 to the collectivist regime of government
based on a rational principle, and the personalist regime of Mao Zedong, that replaced it, proved to be
a complete failure, focusing the main efforts of the Communist Party and the state not on development, but
on self-preservation. The article draws attention to the fact that an integral part of the process of transforming
the collectivist regime into a personalist one was the change of "polarity" by a number of prominent leaders
of the CCP and the state, who abandoned their commitment to the rational principle in politics in favor of the
irrational principle. History shows that there was a political mimicry with different motives. For example,
Deng Xiaoping, who served both regimes, eventually led a group of initiators to re-establish a collectivisttype government that generated successful reform policies.
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