Assessing Mao - Han and away

My overall assessment of Mao is contained in earlier posts but I’ll now refer in brief to a few recent influential views of what he and his era were all about.

I will discuss in the next post what the PRC and CCP meant specifically to ethnic minorities among the 55 minority ethnicities explicitly recognised by Mao, the Han being the official majority ethnicity, as this is an ongoing concern in the PRC and for the CCP. We only need to think of Uighur and Tibetan autonomist and even separatist movements in the last decade to know problems are evident, ethnically speaking. Why the CCP might favour the Han as the truest and best Communists of the Chinese is a very relevant issue today.

One very recent and very negative assessment of Mao personally in a biography is that of Jung Chang and her partner and now husband Jon Halliday, the scholar of Soviet history. Jung had previously written a family biography, Wild Swans, similarly critical at least of Maoism before this joint biography of Mao with Halliday published in 2005, Mao: the Unknown Story. Jung’s parents had been senior CCP cadres in the 1950s and Jung herself had briefly been a Red Guard during the CR. The fate of her family was to be tied to the many political twists and turns of the Mao era. For this couple, Mao was fairly purely a vengeful “country bumpkin” – not much more and not much less. He also “brought out the worst in [other] people” and was an “enemy of beauty” because he was ignorant of it. For Jung and Halliday he was a megalomaniac fairly purely and simply.

A better and perhaps the best biography of Mao in the view of a majority of scholars especially in the Anglophone West is probably Mao: a Life by Philip Short.

Simon Leys (again, this is a nom de plume of Pierre Ryckmans) suggests in summarising Mao's life that he was a creative but ultimately flawed dreamer. He actually, unlike Jung, sees Mao as an aesthete and notes his creative poetry and calligraphy among his other traditional artistic interests. He did partake in culture and his own art was good but it did also reflect his willingness to dispense with rules when that suited him (as in other areas). He showed in his art as in other areas a certain degree of contempt for convention and occasionally abject capriciousness as in his politics. He was in other words an idiosyncratic dreamer.

Maurice Meisner focuses more on the theory Mao propounded and its practicality or otherwise in his analysis of Mao. So Mao’s success or otherwise in achieving stated aims is the prism through which he tends to view him. He finds that, while Mao’s radically adapted Marxism-Leninism of the Yan’an period was successful in these terms, Mao’s theory and practice was unable, in the final analysis, to comprehend the issues of the modernity of the post-1949 era. Thus for Meisner, Mao is principally to be regarded as an ultimately failed theoretician.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, the CCP itself famously assessed Mao as 70% good 30% bad in 1981 (and the wrong all occurred after 1956 in this assessment). From 1957 the party suggests in fact that Mao was generally in error in what he said, wrote or did (specifically by reference to what he had said, written or done up to 1956, all of which is still officially thoroughly approved of as a model for today). That is the party’s current position.

In contrast with the view of the party (and the various views of the intelligentsia of China, who have their own generally critical views) the popular view of Mao is fairly simply that he was a national hero.

In these circles he is frequently even regarded as a kind of combined deity and patron saint of drivers. Following an alleged miraculous event attributed to Mao’s spirit that occurred many years ago now and was widely reported it is common for Chinese drivers to believe that a picture of Mao in a vehicle is capable of warding off accidents and/or injuries.

One recent survey of Chinese high school students conducted by the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) with results published in 2006 in China Women magazine suggests that when asked who her or his greatest hero is a young person is likely to think of Mao first (followed by a very Confucian “my parents”). Other heroes rounding out the top ten from this survey in order include Zhou Enlai, Lei Feng, Liu Xiang (gold-medallist in the 110 metre hurdles at the Athens Olympics), Jackie Chan, Ren Changxia (a model police chief recently immortalised in a television series after her untimely death on duty), Liu Hulan and Dong Cunrui (both revolutionary martyrs and in the case of Dong also effectively a suicide bomber) and Yang Liwei (China’s first astronaut).

I'll have more to say on Mao's perhaps surprisingly positive economic legacy in a post soon.

What did the CR era do that had a lasting impact and wasn’t all negative?

This is a fun week because I get to praise Mao (at least to some extent) not bury him. It's also a quite conflicted week for me for the same reason. First to today's post on the CR's redeeming qualities:

Mao, of course, had correctly noted a kind of creeping elitism that the CR may have well put into its place for some years (he first suggested that the problem was within the party itself in his “twenty-three articles” discussion of January 1965). This would have been a deliberate aim of the CR and a worthy achievement of it. Grassroots activism to counter it was enhanced.

Both the Mao cult and the idea of revolutionary successors in the social life also outlived Mao (and weren’t unalloyed negatives for the future).

Another feature of the CR era is so-called “proletarian culture” and specifically the proliferation of ‘revolutionary operas', folk songs and films. Mao had made clear his interest in reforming the outputs of Chinese cultural forms since at least his time in Yan’an. There he berated certain writers and other ‘cultural workers' when they didn’t conform to this vision of the revolutionary forms.

There was a long history of debating the correct way to ‘do’ revolutionary culture and 'correct content' and as I’ve noted the Anti-Rightist campaign following the short Hundred Flowers epoch was essentially directed against cultural workers. Writers were a constant target and one non-conformist poet in the early 1950s was famously targeted. The playwright who sought to defend Marshall Peng in a veiled critique of Mao in a new play has been considered by some to be something of a catalyst for Mao’s conception of the CR (formally the Great Proletarian CR) because of the very importance for Mao of this debate. The debate continued into the CR.

Mao did recognise that the forms should be popular, though, and this was the positive aspect of this cultural development. It wasn’t elitist. It certainly was driven politically and propagandistically, however. To achieve popularity, Mao sought to use popular traditional forms of culture suitably modified. There were new lyrics and themes designed to inspire devotion to the cause. The Ministry of Culture was set up to control all media, cinema, writings, music and artworks.

The model operas (they were occasionally quite balletic as well and some were also filmed) were retellings of the heroic deeds of past Chinese heroes in the revolutionary era especially. They were thus models of socialist culture for CR revolutionaries and were themselves seen as a growing up of Chinese culture into its correct socialist form. They tended to be of two fairly distinct types: either they told of a distant revolutionary past depicting the travails and struggles of workers and peasants or they told of the recent or present heroic deeds of the revolution. They modelled both how to behave as a good revolutionary citizen and how to spot a bad one.

Seven or eight were produced beginning in 1964 or 1965 and early on a number were presented in a special festival in Shanghai. Later on Jiang Qing was at the centre of encouraging their production. These operas are again in vogue in today’s nostalgic mood in China after having fallen from grace at the end of the CR era. They were well made by talented artists.

Red Brigade of Women is a noted opera set in Hainan in the 1930s and so is of the first form. It depicts a brigade of women being moulded by the CCP. Nixon was apparently shown this opera on his 1972 visit to China. Its ballet form was quite western but this was acceptable to the Chinese as it was associated firstly with Russia, at least a recent revolutionary ally. The form was also adapted with movements from the popular and traditional Chinese opera form. The women and their leaders go on to fight the reactionary GMD and landlords.

The Port is of the form depicting more recent (PRC era) events. Workers at the port are preparing to send a gift of food to their poor brothers in Africa while a manager at the port conspires to divert the shipment to the West so that he can sell it and line his own pockets. Spies and other enemies of the people are also depicted. A struggle naturally ensues. This is more a traditional style Chinese opera than the more balletic Red Brigade of Women.

Cadres actually travelled out into the field, collected folk songs and changed their words following the above pattern. Even the new national anthem was an adapted folk tune.

The revolutionary films especially were used in the training of the revolutionary successors being from a relatively modern form and so presumably most appealing to the young of all of the art forms.

A major work in the film genre was a song and dance spectacular filmed in the Great Hall of the People called the East is Red (Dong Fang Hong). It was first intended to be shown in 1959 to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the formation of the PRC. It is a revolutionary history lesson in interpretive song and dance. Zhou was involved in its writing and it commences with a lavish song and dance routine in praise of Mao. The imagery evokes a multitude of sunflowers (the dancers) bending in the direction of their sun (Mao). What then follows is the history lesson taking the audience from the times of oppressed dock workers under Japanese and European occupations with the evil flags of the Japanese, Americans and English draped on the ships in the harbour through all the revolutionary events but especially through the Long March. We see scenes of Jing gang Shan, a mountain in the Jiangxi Soviet, and Long March scenes including scenes of the famous Battle of the Bridge. Interestingly, it has a Western orchestral score throughout. It is the purest melodrama.

Another major film of the era was called Lei Feng and told the story of the eponymous ‘hero’ that I’ve referred to in an earlier post. The movie shows that (among other wonderful things about him) even on his one day off (on Sunday) Lei helped mothers with their babies and workmen to build houses (and all anonymously). And even late at night he was always apparently to be found reading the words of Chairman Mao.

Those works give a flavour of both variety of the proletarian culture of the era and also some of the sense of sameness.

The actual ‘Nuts and Bolts’ of the CR – the Schema

Mao had written many years before the official CR words to the effect that “a revolution is not a dinner party” and here he was about to prove this yet again. “Continuous Revolution” also required continuous chaos, rebellion and violence. I’m now considering the specific objectives as they were outlined and met in the fulfilment of Mao’s new CR strategy.

The first and really a proto-CR objective was the object of the PLA. It was to create the class (called “revolutionary successors”) that would meet the further objectives and it was met in the period 1963 to 1966. This involved the training of youth in the Mao cult. Maoists saw only the youth as completely trustworthy as they were considered untainted by pre-1949 society and ideas. The principal campaigns that were to inspire the ‘revolutionary successors’ were Mao’s socialist education campaign and the ‘learn from the PLA’ campaign.

Further, Maoists believed revolution must be “done” in order to be understood and so the youth would be encouraged to “do” it (as understanding revolution was deemed a good thing). They would “do” the CR and the principal first objects to have things “done” to them were revisionist backsliders within the CCP and their lackeys. Mao had no faith left in either most of the leadership of the party or the intelligentsia. Metaphorical calls were made to “bombard the headquarters” and who knew if they would ultimately have to be taken literally. With the successors now revved up, the “party” could now begin with the Red Guards as the hosts. The two clear objectives of the CR were to eliminate all revisionism and ‘smash’ the four olds and they were both to be accomplished in short order (in the period from August to December 1966). So the ‘capitalist roaders’ were to be identified, attacked and overthrown so that the real CR (the final elimination of all feudal and bourgeois cultural hangovers through ‘smashing the four olds’) could then happen unimpeded. The four olds included anything religious, traditional or Western. This was only phase one.

Next, people then had to put in to replace the deposed bureaucrats and this was essentially the next phase accomplished in 1967 and 1968. First in 1967 Red Guards and worker ‘rebels’ forcibly assumed control of all organisational and social units (mostly the factories and communes) and workers replaced the party structure with 1848 Paris Commune-style ‘workers’ and people’s committees’ that Commune having been so admired by Marx himself as a potential model. The overthrow of Shanghai city government was especially closely modelled on the history of that 'model' Commune. So admired was the Shanghai ‘coup’ that three of the people involved were later to form the Gang of Four with Mao’s wife. Workers assumed more of a role than the Red Guards here as it was their units being taken over. This was the period when Red Guards frequently began to fight each other. The final part of this phase occurred in July and August of 1968 and was carried out by the PLA. It was a reversal of the first two parts of the phase, as I’ve noted – the Red Guards and worker ‘rebels’ were finally suppressed themselves and sent down to the countryside for more education by work. This was actually the deadliest period as the PLA killed Red Guards on quite a large scale essentially because while they were much better armed and organised than the chaotic Guards forces the Guards still often refused to peacefully and meekly submit to PLA suppression.

The final phase was a kind of reversal of the first two which created power vacuums. It was about filling the vacuum and was accomplished by the PLA in August and September of 1968 and by the PLA and the CCP in 1969. The Paris Commune-like ‘mass organisations’ were replaced by PLA-dominated ‘revolutionary committees’ in 1968 that supported the rebuilding of the party and in 1969 the re-building of the party structure was then finally undertaken with the support of the PLA and the Shanghai radicals. The CR had reduced the ranks of those able to rebuild the party but the final outcomes of this phase were the decisions of the 9^th party Congress in 1969 designed to present a show of unity to the outside world or to signal an end to further disputation.