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.

More on the Origins and Theory of the CR

So it officially began in the early 60s with its most intense period in the mid to late 60s and had virtually petered out with the help of the PLA by the late 60s but let’s consider it some more. The official CCP position is that it was only ended with the death of Mao in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four. Historians generally see it as lasting from around 1966 to 1969. But what was it?

The view of the party famously expressed in 1981 is that the CR was the “most severe setback” of the PRC, that “Mao was in error” in causing it and “confused the people with the enemy”. Essentially the claim is that the error was being confused about classes. The party still acknowledges the correctness of much of Mao’s original contribution to Marxism by taking the stand that his errors occurred in a finite period.

The view of the Belgian ANU Sinologist, Pierre Ryckmans (penname Simon Leys) is that it came down to a personal political conflict at the very upper echelons of the party. Harry Harding, another well known Sinologist, views it more as a struggle by Mao to be true to the revolution by seeking its continuation.

I will consider four factors that may explain its origins somewhat in some more detail: the political effects of the GLF, the political role of the PLA, the significance of how revisionism came to be defined and why it was thought that the issues of the day (essentially revisionism) needed to be and could best be dealt with by the CR. I’ll then do a bit of a brief and schematic outline of what actually happened in the next post (the form it all took).

We remember the waste of resources that the GLF involved. Exaggerations were produced in part by a general overconfidence and led (along with mild drought conditions) to shortages and a major humanitarian tragedy that was then capped off by the withdrawal of soviet support. Per capita grain production didn’t recover really until the mid to late 1970s.

Mao accepted some of the blame so that was the major political result along with the accession of Liu and Deng to relatively powerful positions and the return of soviet methods and incentivisation. Nevertheless Mao’s theory as a whole was not yet publicly rejected – his practice of the late 1950s was what was really deemed at issue – and that was an equally important political outcome to note when considering how the CR came about.

The main political role of the PLA in bringing about the CR was its contribution to the deification of Mao that I mentioned in an earlier post. Lin Biao had actually benefited directly from the ouster of Peng Dehuai (that I also noted earlier resulted from his well-meant critique of the GLF direct to Mao as a friend) as Lin took Marshall Peng’s place as Defence Minister.

One of the other things Lin produced that Mao approved was the 1963 “Learn from the PLA” campaign. A soldier called Lei Feng, who may not have actually existed, was the extremely selfless and heroic role model held up by the campaign. An alleged inspiring diary of his was ‘found’ and published after his alleged death and at least one movie was made about his alleged selfless and heroic exploits. Even martyrdom was what being a good socialist citizen called for evidently (shades of the spirit of Yan’an for those who’ve been paying attention). Lei was completely dedicated to Chairman Mao.

This was all tied in with the idea being promoted that Mao Zedong Thought (MZDT) would nurture ‘new’ people who would fit this mould and that everyone was but one tiny screw in the great socialist machine of the PRC. That was where the Mao cult, started spontaneously decades before but now enlarged and manipulated by the PLA, began to come into its own.

The ‘little red book’ was specifically edited to make Mao look infallible – traditional emperor worship was being replaced by Mao worship. Lin’s introduction lauded MZDT to the skies (“an inexhaustible source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power”). Zhou also said in 1966 that effectively MZDT equals Truth – it was “the sole criterion for truth” (although he probably secretly leaned a bit on the side of Liu and Deng in relation to what was really truer, MZDT or other thinking, when it came to running a country – he was well practiced at keeping his secret leanings secret).

Now let’s get to revisionism, an orthodox Marxist theory that revolved around the expectation of backsliding of the socialist revolution into capitalist ways of thinking, and how fear of it contributed to the CR. It was feared socialism would thus be ‘revised’ leading to a new bourgeois class within the government and the entire system – even within the party structure. Mao’s view was that Khrushchev and the soviet leadership had begun to lead the Soviet Union down the revisionist road. In Mao’s theory people such as Khrushchev were bourgeois and ‘bad’ elements that had to be fought. In addition he saw that (misguided by the ‘bad’ soviet elements) China had begun policies that had produced such elements and that since the rise of Liu and Deng they had consequently assumed the vanguard of the party. This was how Mao explained the split with the Soviet Union and argued the need for further action (even within the CCP).

As Mao was slightly more than a figurehead at this time he was permitted to begin a new campaign called the Socialist Education Movement that took place in 1962 and 1963. The aims were stated to be countering the influence of bureaucracy and revisionism within the CCP. All cadres were intended to be individually examined to determine whether they were colluding in revisionism in any way. The party limited Mao’s campaign’s scope and sent ‘work teams’ to inspect the work of local officials. This attempt at attenuation (by Liu and Deng especially in order to protect themselves or so they hoped) was thwarted by the influence of the PLA that I’ve already outlined.

Mao saw renewed class struggle as inexorable and inevitable (and not to be attenuated) and of course, he saw himself on the side of the angels in that struggle. He thought a CR was needed to eliminate the old ideas and culture that in his view had led to the revisionism. He was thus looking over a precipice preparing to jump with the hope that he would reach the far side safely. How to control the CR was the issue for Mao. He thought that the support of the PLA and the people had virtually been secured so the time was probably as ripe as it was going to be. For him, as this was something he probably truly believed in, there was no option but to root out the revisionism (and hence institute a CR). In the new socialist ‘classless society’, Mao would attempt to have class defined by attitude. He had already begun the process in his theory of the permanent revolution and he now continued it with a new theory of ‘continuous revolution’ which envisaged not mere stops and starts but actual backsliding in the progress towards Communism.