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.