Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Chinese leader
Wade-Giles romanization Mao Tse-tung
born Dec. 26, 1893, Shaoshan, Hunan province, China
died Sept. 9, 1976, Beijing
Main
principal Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led his
nation’s communist revolution. Leader of the Chinese Communist Party
from 1935, he was chairman (chief of state) of the People’s Republic of
China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the party until his death.
When China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world’s
most populous nation and launched itself on a path of economic
development and social change, Mao Zedong occupied a critical place in
the story of the country’s resurgence. To be sure, he did not play a
dominant role throughout the whole struggle. In the early years of the
Chinese Communist Party, he was a secondary figure, though by no means a
negligible one, and even after the 1940s (except perhaps during the
Cultural Revolution) the crucial decisions were not his alone.
Nevertheless, looking at the whole period from the foundation of the
Chinese Communist Party in 1921 to Mao’s death in 1976, one can fairly
regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China.
Early years
Born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, Mao was the son of a
former peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and grain dealer. He
grew up in an environment in which education was valued only as training
for keeping records and accounts. From the age of eight he attended his
native village’s primary school, where he acquired a basic knowledge of
the Confucian Classics. At 13 he was forced to begin working full-time
on his family’s farm. Rebelling against paternal authority (which
included an arranged marriage that was forced on him and that he never
acknowledged or consummated), Mao left his family to study at a higher
primary school in a neighbouring county and then at a secondary school
in the provincial capital, Changsha. There he came in contact with new
ideas from the West, as formulated by such political and cultural
reformers as Liang Qichao and the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.
Scarcely had he begun studying revolutionary ideas when a real
revolution took place before his very eyes. On Oct. 10, 1911, fighting
against the Qing dynasty broke out in Wuchang, and within two weeks the
revolt had spread to Changsha.
Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six
months as a soldier. While he probably had not yet clearly grasped the
idea that, as he later put it, “political power grows out of the barrel
of a gun,” his first brief military experience at least confirmed his
boyhood admiration of military leaders and exploits. In primary school
days, his heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the
Chinese past but Napoleon and George Washington as well.
The spring of 1912 saw the birth of the new Chinese republic and the
end of Mao’s military service. For a year he drifted from one thing to
another, trying, in turn, a police school, a law school, and a business
school; he studied history in a secondary school and then spent some
months reading many of the classic works of the Western liberal
tradition in the provincial library. This period of groping, rather than
indicating any lack of decision in Mao’s character, was a reflection of
China’s situation at the time. The abolition of the official civil
service examination system in 1905 and the piecemeal introduction of
Western learning in so-called modern schools had left young people in a
state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western,
could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.
Mao eventually graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in
Changsha in 1918. While officially an institution of secondary level
rather than of higher education, the normal school offered a high
standard of instruction in Chinese history, literature, and philosophy
as well as in Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also acquired his
first experience in political activity by helping to establish several
student organizations. The most important of these was the New People’s
Study Society, founded in the winter of 1917–18, many of whose members
were later to join the Communist Party.
From the normal school in Changsha, Mao went to Peking University,
China’s leading intellectual centre. The half year he spent there
working as a librarian’s assistant was of disproportionate importance in
shaping his future career, for it was then that he came under the
influence of the two men who were to be the principal figures in the
foundation of the Chinese Communist Party: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu.
Moreover, he found himself at Peking University precisely during the
months leading up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was to a
considerable extent the fountainhead of all of the changes that were to
take place in China in the ensuing half century.
In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the
student demonstrations protesting against the Paris Peace Conference’s
decision to hand over former German concessions in Shandong province to
Japan instead of returning them to China. But the term also evokes a
period of rapid political and cultural change, beginning in 1915, that
resulted in the Chinese radicals’ abandonment of Western liberalism for
Marxism-Leninism as the answer to China’s problems and the subsequent
founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The shift from the
difficult and esoteric classical written language to a far more
accessible vehicle of literary expression patterned on colloquial speech
also took place during this period. At the same time, a new and very
young generation moved to the centre of the political stage. To be sure,
the demonstration on May 4 was launched by Chen Duxiu, but the students
soon realized that they themselves were the main actors. In an editorial
published in July 1919, Mao wrote:
The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not
speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?
From then onward his generation never ceased to regard itself as
responsible for the nation’s fate, and, indeed, its members remained in
power, both in Beijing and in Taipei, until the 1970s.
During the summer of 1919 Mao Zedong helped to establish in Changsha
a variety of organizations that brought the students together with the
merchants and the workers—but not yet with the peasants—in
demonstrations aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan. His
writings at the time are filled with references to the “army of the red
flag” throughout the world and to the victory of the Russian Revolution,
but it was not until January 1921 that he was finally committed to
Marxism as the philosophical basis of the revolution in China.
Mao Zedong
Mao and the Chinese Communist Party
In September 1920 he became principal of the Lin Changsha primary
school, and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth
League there. That winter he married Yang Kaihui (Yang K’ai-hui), the
daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the
First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, together with
representatives from the other communist groups in China and two
delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International). In
1923, when the young party entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s
Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Pinyin: Guomindang]), Mao was one of the
first communists to join the Nationalist Party and to work within it.
During the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two
infant sons in Shanghai, where he was a leading member of the
Nationalists’ Executive Bureau.
In the winter of 1924–25, Mao returned to his native village of
Shaoshan for a rest. There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants
stirred into political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen
Chinese by foreign police in Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly
became aware of the revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry.
Although born in a peasant household, he had, in the course of his
student years, adopted the Chinese intellectual’s traditional view of
the workers and peasants as ignorant and dirty. His conversion to
Marxism had forced him to revise his estimate of the urban proletariat,
but he continued to share Marx’s own contempt for the backward and
amorphous peasantry. Now he turned back to the rural world of his youth
as the source of China’s regeneration. Following the example of other
communists working within the Nationalist Party who had already begun to
organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of
the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations.
The communists and the Nationalists
Pursued by the military governor of Hunan, Mao was soon forced to flee
his native province once more, and he returned for another year to an
urban environment—this time to Guangzhou (Canton), the main power base
of the Nationalists. But, though he lived in Guangzhou, Mao still
focused his attention on the countryside. He became the acting head of
the propaganda department of the Nationalist Party—in which capacity he
edited its leading organ, the Political Weekly, and attended the Second
Kuomintang Congress in January 1926—but he also served at the Peasant
Movement Training Institute, set up in Guangzhou under the auspices of
the Nationalists, as principal of the sixth training session. Chiang
Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had become the leader of the Nationalists after
the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925; and, although Chiang still
declared his allegiance to the “world revolution” and wished to avail
himself of Soviet aid, he was determined to remain master in his own
house. He therefore expelled most communists from responsible posts in
the Nationalist Party in May 1926. Mao, however, stayed on at the
institute until October of that year. Most of the young peasant
activists Mao trained were shortly at work strengthening the position of
the communists.
In July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek set out on what became known as the
Northern Expedition, aiming to unify the country under his own
leadership and to overthrow the conservative government in Beijing as
well as other warlords. In November Mao once more returned to Hunan;
there, in January and February 1927, he investigated the peasant
movement and concluded that in a very short time several hundred million
peasants in China would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so
extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be
able to suppress it.” Strictly speaking, this prediction proved to be
false. Revolution in the shape of spontaneous action by hundreds of
millions of peasants did not sweep across China “in a very short time,”
or indeed at all. Chiang Kai-shek, who was bent on an alliance with the
propertied classes in the cities and in the countryside, turned against
the worker and peasant revolution, and in April he massacred the very
Shanghai workers who had delivered the city to him. Stalin’s strategy
for carrying out revolution in alliance with the Nationalists collapsed,
and the Chinese Communist Party was virtually annihilated in the cities
and decimated in the countryside. But in a broader and less literal
sense, Mao’s prophecy was justified. In October 1927 Mao led a few
hundred peasants who had survived the autumn harvest uprising in Hunan
to a base in the Jinggang Mountains, on the Jiangxi-Hunan border, and
embarked on a new type of revolutionary warfare in the countryside in
which the Red Army, rather than the unarmed masses, would play the
central role. But it was only because a large proportion of China’s
hundreds of millions of peasants sympathized with and supported this
effort that Mao Zedong was able in the course of the civil war to
encircle the cities from the countryside and thus defeat Chiang Kai-shek
and gain control of the country.
The road to power
Mao Zedong’s 22 years in the wilderness can be divided into four phases.
The first of these is the initial three years when Mao and Zhu De, the
commander in chief of the army, successfully developed the tactics of
guerrilla warfare from base areas in the countryside. These activities,
however, were regarded even by their protagonists, and still more by the
Central Committee in Shanghai (and by the Comintern in Moscow), as a
holding operation until the next upsurge of revolution in the urban
centres. In the summer of 1930 the Red Army was ordered by the Central
Committee to occupy several major cities in south-central China in the
hope of sparking a revolution by the workers. When it became evident
that persistence in this attempt could only lead to further costly
losses, Mao disobeyed orders and abandoned the battle to return to the
base in southern Jiangxi. During this year Mao’s wife was executed by
the Nationalists, and he married He Zizhen, with whom he had been living
since 1928.
The second phase (the Ziangxi period) centres on the founding in
November 1931 of the Chinese Soviet Republic in a portion of Jiangxi
province, with Mao as chairman. Since there was little support for the
revolution in the cities, the promise of ultimate victory now seemed to
reside in the gradual strengthening and expansion of the base areas. The
Soviet regime soon came to control a population of several million; the
Red Army, grown to a strength of some 200,000, easily defeated large
forces of inferior troops sent against it by Chiang Kai-shek in the
first four of the so-called encirclement and annihilation campaigns. But
it was unable to stand up against Chiang’s own elite units, and in
October 1934 the major part of the Red Army, Mao, and his pregnant wife
abandoned the base in Jiangxi and set out for the northwest of China, on
what is known as the Long March.
There is wide disagreement among specialists as to the extent of
Mao’s real power, especially in the years 1932–34, and as to which
military strategies were his or other party leaders’. The majority view
is that, in the last years of the Chinese Soviet Republic, Mao
functioned to a considerable extent as a figurehead with little control
over policy, especially in military matters. In any case, he achieved de
facto leadership over the party (though not the formal title of
chairman) only at the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 during the Long
March.
When some 8,000 troops who had survived the perils of the Long March
arrived in Shaanxi province in northwestern China in the autumn of 1935,
events were already moving toward the third phase in Mao’s rural
odyssey, which was to be characterized by a renewed united front with
the Nationalists against Japan and by the rise of Mao to unchallenged
supremacy in the party. This phase is often called the Yan’an period
(for the town in Shaanxi where the communists were based), although Mao
did not move to Yan’an until December 1936. In August 1935 the Comintern
at its Seventh Congress in Moscow proclaimed the principle of an
antifascist united front, and in May 1936 the Chinese communists for the
first time accepted the prospect that such a united front might include
Chiang Kai-shek himself, and not merely dissident elements in the
Nationalist camp. The so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936, in
which Chiang was kidnapped by military leaders from northeastern China
who wanted to fight Japan and recover their homelands rather than
participate in civil war against the communists, accelerated the
evolution toward unity. By the time the Japanese began their attempt to
subjugate all of China in July 1937, the terms of a new united front
between the communists and the Nationalists had been virtually settled,
and the formal agreement was announced in September 1937.
In the course of the anti-Japanese war, the communists broke up a
substantial portion of their army into small units and sent them behind
the enemy lines to serve as nuclei for guerrilla forces that effectively
controlled vast areas of the countryside, stretching between the cities
and communication lines occupied by the invader. As a result, they not
only expanded their military forces to somewhere between 500,000 and
1,000,000 at the time of the Japanese surrender but also established
effective grassroots political control over a population that may have
totaled as many as 90,000,000. It has been argued that the support of
the rural population was won purely by appeals to their nationalist
feeling in opposition to the Japanese. This certainly was fundamental,
but communist agrarian policies likewise played a part in securing broad
support among the peasantry.
During the years 1936–40, Mao had, for the first time since the
1920s, the leisure to devote himself to reflection and writing. It was
then that he first read in translation a certain number of Soviet
writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical
materialism, of which the best-known portions are those entitled “On
Practice” and “On Contradiction.” More important, Mao produced the major
works that synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and
his vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in the
context of the united front. On military matters there was first
Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War, written in December
1936 to sum up the lessons of the Jiangxi period (and also to justify
the correctness of his own military line at the time), and then On
Protracted War and other writings of 1938 on the tactics of the
anti-Japanese war. As to his overall view of the events of these years,
Mao adopted an extremely conciliatory attitude toward the Nationalists
in his report entitled On the New Stage (October 1938), in which he
attributed to it the leading role both in the war against Japan and in
the ensuing phase of national reconstruction. By the winter of 1939–40,
however, the situation had changed sufficiently so that he could adopt a
much firmer line, claiming leadership for the communists.
Internationally, Mao argued, the Chinese revolution was a part of the
world proletarian revolution directed against imperialism (whether it be
British, German, or Japanese); internally, the country should be ruled
by a “joint dictatorship of several parties” belonging to the
anti-Japanese united front. For the time being, Mao felt, the aims of
the Communist Party coincided with the aims of the Nationalists, and
therefore communists should not try to rush ahead to socialism and thus
disrupt the united front. But neither should they have any doubts about
the ultimate need to take power into their own hands in order to move
forward to socialism. During this period, in 1939, Mao divorced He
Zizhen and married a well-known film actress, Lan Ping (who by that time
had changed her name to Jiang Qing).
The issues of Nationalist-communist rivalry for the leadership of the
united front are related to the continuing struggle for supremacy within
the Chinese Communist Party, for Mao’s two chief rivals—Wang Ming, who
had just returned from a long stay in Moscow, and Zhang Guotao (Chang
Kuo-t’ao), who had at first refused to accept Mao’s political and
military leadership—were both accused of excessive slavishness toward
the Nationalists. But perhaps even more central in Mao’s ultimate
emergence as the acknowledged leader of the party was the question of
what he had called in October 1938 the “Sinification” of Marxism—its
adaptation not only to Chinese conditions but to the mentality and
cultural traditions of the Chinese people.
Mao could not claim the firsthand knowledge possessed by many other
leading members of the Chinese Communist Party of how communism worked
within the Soviet Union nor the ability to read Marx or Lenin in the
original, which some of them enjoyed. He could and did claim, however,
to know and understand China. The differences between him and the
Soviet-oriented faction in the party came to a head at the time of the
so-called Rectification Campaign of 1942–43. This program aimed at
giving a basic grounding in Marxist theory and Leninist principles of
party organization to the many thousands of new members who had been
drawn into the party in the course of the expansion since 1937. But a
second and equally important aspect of the movement was the elimination
of what Mao called “foreign dogmatism”—in other words, blind imitation
of Soviet experience and obedience to Soviet directives.
In March 1943 Mao achieved for the first time formal supremacy over
the party, becoming chairman of the Secretariat and of the Political
Bureau. Shortly thereafter the Rectification Campaign took, for a time,
the form of a harsh purge of elements not sufficiently loyal to Mao. The
campaign was run by Kang Sheng, who was later to be one of Mao’s key
supporters in the Cultural Revolution. Exaggerating considerably this
dimension of events, Soviet spokesmen have bitterly denounced the
Rectification Campaign as an attempt to purge the Chinese Communist
Party of all those elements genuinely imbued with “proletarian
internationalism” (i.e., devotion to Moscow). It is therefore not
surprising that, as Mao’s campaign in the countryside moved into its
fourth and last phase—that of civil war with the Nationalists—Stalin’s
lack of enthusiasm for a Chinese communist victory should have become
increasingly evident. Looking back at this period in 1962, when the
Sino-Soviet conflict had come to a head, Mao declared:
In 1945, Stalin wanted to prevent China from making revolution,
saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with
Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish. But we did
not do what he said. The revolution was victorious. After the victory of
the revolution he [Stalin] next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia,
and that I would become a second Tito.
This account of Stalin’s attitude is substantiated by a whole series
of public gestures at the time, culminating in the fact that, when the
People’s Liberation Army took Nanjing in April 1949, the Soviet
ambassador was the only foreign diplomat to accompany the retreating
Nationalist government to Guangzhou. Stalin’s motives were obviously
those described by Mao in the above passage; he did not believe in the
capacity of the Chinese communists to achieve a clear-cut victory, and
he thought they would be a nuisance if they did.
Mao Zedong
Formation of the People’s Republic of China
Nevertheless, when the communists did take power in China, both Mao and
Stalin had to make the best of the situation. In December 1949 Mao, now
chairman of the People’s Republic of China—which he had proclaimed on
October 1—traveled to Moscow, where, after two months of arduous
negotiations, he succeeded in persuading Stalin to sign a treaty of
mutual assistance accompanied by limited economic aid. Before the
Chinese had time to profit from the resources made available for
economic development, however, they found themselves dragged into the
Korean War in support of the Moscow-oriented regime in P’yŏngyang. Only
after this baptism of fire did Stalin, according to Mao, begin to have
confidence in him and believe he was not first and foremost a Chinese
nationalist.
Despite these tensions with Moscow, the policies of the People’s
Republic of China in its early years were in very many respects based,
as Mao later said, on “copying from the Soviets.” While Mao and his
comrades had experience in guerrilla warfare, in mobilization of the
peasants in the countryside, and in political administration at the
grass roots, they had no firsthand knowledge of running a state or of
large-scale economic development. In such circumstances the Soviet Union
provided the only available model. A five-year plan was therefore drawn
up under Soviet guidance; it was put into effect in 1953 and included
Soviet technical assistance and a number of complete industrial plants.
Yet, within two years, Mao had taken steps that were to lead to the
breakdown of the political and ideological alliance with Moscow.
The emergence of Mao’s road to socialism
In the spring of 1949, Mao proclaimed that, while in the past the
Chinese revolution had followed the unorthodox path of “encircling the
cities from the countryside,” it would in the future take the orthodox
road of the cities leading and guiding the countryside. In harmony with
this view, he had agreed in 1950 with Liu Shaoqi that collectivization
would be possible only when China’s heavy industry had provided the
necessary equipment for mechanization. In a report of July 1955, he
reversed this position, arguing that in China the social transformation
could run ahead of the technical transformation. Deeply impressed by the
achievements of certain cooperatives that claimed to have radically
improved their material conditions without any outside assistance, he
came to believe in the limitless capacity of the Chinese people,
especially of the rural masses, to transform at will both nature and
their own social relations when mobilized for revolutionary goals. Those
in the leadership who did not share this vision he denounced as “old
women with bound feet.” He made these criticisms before an ad hoc
gathering of provincial and local party secretaries, thus creating a
groundswell of enthusiasm for rapid collectivization such that all those
in the leadership who had expressed doubts about Mao’s ideas were soon
presented with a fait accompli. The tendency thus manifested to pursue
his own ends outside the collective decision-making processes of the
party was to continue and to be accentuated.
Even before Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s secret speech of
February 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes, Mao Zedong and his colleagues
had been discussing measures for improving the morale of the
intellectuals in order to secure their willing participation in building
a new China. At the end of April, Mao proclaimed the policy of “letting
a hundred flowers bloom”—that is, the freedom to express many diverse
ideas—designed to prevent the development in China of a repressive
political climate analogous to that in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In
the face of the disorders called forth by de-Stalinization in Poland and
Hungary, Mao did not retreat but rather pressed boldly forward with this
policy, against the advice of many of his senior colleagues, in the
belief that the contradictions that still existed in Chinese society
were mainly nonantagonistic. When the resulting “great blooming and
contending” got out of hand and called into question the axiom of party
rule, Mao savagely turned against the educated elite, which he felt had
betrayed his confidence. Henceforth he would rely primarily on the
creativity of the rank and file as the agent of modernization. As for
the specialists, if they were not yet sufficiently “red,” he would
remold them by sending them to work in the countryside.
It was against this background that Mao, during the winter of
1957–58, worked out the policies that were to characterize the Great
Leap Forward, formally launched in May 1958. While his economic strategy
was by no means so one-sided and simplistic as was commonly believed in
the 1960s and ’70s and although he still proclaimed industrialization
and a “technical revolution” as his goals, Mao displayed continuing
anxiety regarding the corrupting influence of the fruits of technical
progress and an acute nostalgia for the purity and egalitarianism that
had marked the moral and political world of the Jinggang Mountains and
Yan’an eras.
Thus it was logical that he should endorse and promote the
establishment of “people’s communes” as part of the Great Leap strategy.
As a result, the peasants, who had been organized into cooperatives in
1955–56 and then into fully socialist collectives in 1956–57, found
their world turned upside down once again in 1958. Neither the resources
nor the administrative experience necessary to operate such enormous new
social units of several thousand households were in fact available, and,
not surprisingly, the consequences of these changes were chaos and
economic disaster.
By the winter of 1958–59, Mao himself had come to recognize that some
adjustments were necessary, including decentralization of ownership to
the constituent elements of the communes and a scaling down of the
unrealistically high production targets in both industry and
agriculture. He insisted, however, that in broad outline his new Chinese
road to socialism, including the concept of the communes and the belief
that China, though “poor and blank,” could leap ahead of other
countries, was basically sound. At the Lushan meeting of the Central
Committee in July–August 1959, Peng Dehuai, the minister of defense,
denounced the excesses of the Great Leap and the economic losses they
had caused. He was immediately removed from all party and state posts
and placed in detention until his death during the Cultural Revolution.
From that time, Mao regarded any criticism of his policies as nothing
less than a crime of lèse-majesté, meriting exemplary punishment.
Retreat and counterattack
Though few spoke up at Lushan in support of Peng, a considerable number
of the top leaders sympathized with him in private. Almost immediately,
in 1960, Mao began building an alternative power base in the People’s
Liberation Army, which the new defense minister, Lin Biao, had set out
to turn into a “great school of Mao Zedong Thought.” At about the same
time, Mao began to denounce the emergence, not only in the Soviet Union
but also in China itself, of “new bourgeois elements” among the
privileged strata of the state and party bureaucracy and the technical
and artistic elite. Under these conditions, he concluded, a “protracted,
complex, and sometimes even violent class struggle” would continue
during the whole socialist stage.
The open split with the Soviet Union, which had become public and
irreparable by 1963—though it can be traced to Mao’s resentment at
Khrushchev’s failure to consult him before launching
de-Stalinization—resulted, above all, from the Soviet reaction to the
Great Leap policies. Regarding Mao’s claims for the communes as
ideologically presumptuous, Khrushchev heaped ridicule upon them; he
underlined his displeasure by withdrawing Soviet technical assistance in
1960, leaving many large plants unfinished. Khrushchev also tried to put
pressure on China in its dealings with Taiwan and India and in other
foreign-policy issues. Mao forgot neither the affront to his and China’s
dignity nor the economic damage.
As for class struggle in China itself, Mao’s fear that revisionism
might appear there was heightened by the policies pursued in the early
1960s to deal with the economic consequences of the Great Leap Forward.
The disorganization and waste created by the Great Leap, compounded by
natural disasters and by the termination of Soviet economic aid, led to
widespread famine in which, according to much later official Chinese
accounts, millions of people died. The response to this situation by Liu
Shaoqi (who had succeeded Mao as chairman of the People’s Republic in
1959), Deng Xiaoping, and the economic planners was to make use of
material incentives and to strengthen the role of individual households
in agricultural production. At first Mao agreed reluctantly that such
steps were necessary, but during the first half of 1962 he came
increasingly to perceive the methods used to promote recovery as
implying the repudiation of the whole thrust of the Great Leap strategy.
It was as a direct response to this challenge that at the 10th Plenary
Session of the Central Committee in September 1962 he issued the call,
“Never forget the class struggle!”
During the next three years Mao waged such a struggle, primarily
through the Socialist Education Movement in the countryside, and it was
over the guidelines for this campaign that the major political battles
were fought within the Chinese leadership. At the end of 1964, when Liu
Shaoqi refused to accept Mao’s demand to direct the main thrust of class
struggle against “capitalist roaders” in the party, Mao decided that
“Liu had to go.”
The Cultural Revolution
The movement that became known as the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution represented an attempt by Mao to go beyond the party
rectification campaigns, of which there had been many since 1942, and to
devise a new and more radical method for dealing with what he saw as the
bureaucratic degeneration of the party. But it also represented, beyond
any doubt or question, a deliberate effort to eliminate those in the
leadership who, over the years, had dared to cross him. The victims,
from throughout the party hierarchy, suffered more than mere political
disgrace. All were publicly humiliated and detained for varying periods,
sometimes under very harsh conditions; many were beaten and tortured,
and not a few were killed or driven to suicide. Among the casualties was
Liu, who died because he was denied proper medical attention.
The justification for these sacrifices was defined in a key slogan of
the time: “Fight selfishness, criticize revisionism.” When the Red
Guards, who constituted the first shock troops of Mao’s enterprise,
burst upon the scene in the summer of 1966 with their battle cry “To
rebel is justified!” it seemed for a time that not only the power of the
party cadres but also authority in all its forms was being questioned.
It soon became evident that Mao, who in 1956 had justified
decentralization as a means to building a “strong socialist state,”
still believed in the need for state power. When the Shanghai leftists
Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan—who were later to make up half the Gang
of Four—came to see him in February 1967, immediately after setting up
the Shanghai Commune, Mao asserted that the demand for the abolition of
“heads” (leaders), which had been heard in their city, was “extreme
anarchism” and “most reactionary”; in fact, he stated, there would
“always be heads.” Communes, he added, were “too weak when it came to
suppressing counterrevolution” and in any case required party
leadership. He therefore ordered them to dissolve theirs and to replace
it with a “revolutionary committee.”
These committees, based on an alliance of former party cadres, young
activists, and representatives of the People’s Liberation Army, were to
remain in place until two years after Mao’s death. At first they were
largely controlled by the army. The Ninth Congress of 1969 initiated the
process of rebuilding the party; and the death of Lin Biao diminished,
though it by no means eliminated, the army’s role. Thereafter it seemed
briefly, in 1971–72, that a compromise, of which Zhou Enlai was the
architect, might produce some kind of synthesis between the values of
the Cultural Revolution and the pre-1966 political and economic order.
Even before Zhou’s death in January 1976, however, this compromise
had been overturned. All recognition by Mao of the importance of
professional skills was swallowed up in an orgy of political rhetoric,
and all things foreign were regarded as counterrevolutionary. Mao’s last
decade, which had opened with manifestos in favour of the Paris Commune
model of mass democracy, closed with paeans of praise to that most
implacable of centralizing despots, Shihuangdi, the first Qin emperor.
Assessment
While the Cultural Revolution was an entirely logical culmination of
Mao’s last two decades, it was by no means the only possible outcome of
his approach to revolution, nor need a judgment of his work as a whole
be based primarily on this last phase.
Few would deny Mao Zedong the major share of credit for devising the
pattern of struggle based on guerrilla warfare in the countryside that
ultimately led to victory in the civil war and thereby to the overthrow
of the Nationalists, the distribution of land to the peasants, and the
restoration of China’s independence and sovereignty. These achievements
must be given a weight commensurate with the degree of injustice
prevailing in Chinese society before the revolution and with the
humiliation felt by the Chinese people as a result of the dismemberment
of their country by the foreign powers. “We have stood up,” Mao said in
September 1949. These words will not be forgotten.
Mao’s record after 1949 is more ambiguous. The official Chinese view,
defined in June 1981, is that his leadership was basically correct until
the summer of 1957, but from then on it was mixed at best and frequently
wrong. It cannot be disputed that Mao’s two major innovations of his
later years, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, were
ill-conceived and led to disastrous consequences. His goals of combating
bureaucracy, encouraging popular participation, and stressing China’s
self-reliance were generally laudable—and the industrialization that
began during Mao’s reign did indeed lay a foundation for China’s
development in the late 20th century—but the methods he used to pursue
them were often violent and self-defeating.
There is no single accepted measure of Mao and his long career. How
does one weigh, for example, the good fortune of peasants acquiring land
against millions of executions and deaths? How does one balance the real
economic achievements after 1949 against the starvation that came in the
wake of the Great Leap Forward or the bloody shambles of the Cultural
Revolution? It is, perhaps, possible to accept the official verdict
that, despite the “errors of his later years,” Mao’s merits outweighed
his faults, while underscoring the fact that the account is very finely
balanced.
Stuart Reynolds Schram
Encyclopaedia Britannica
