"The
Final Chapter of Mao's Legacy?" by Mark T. Fung
SAIS Review, Summer-Fall 2000.
To this day, the image of the Phoenix and the Dragon resonates strongly throughout China as a symbol of eternal rebirth, power, and potential. It is no wonder that this image has survived, for it continues to tell the country's history from the ashes of the Warring States period (475 B.C. to 221 B.C.) to the cultural and artistic majesty of the Tang Dynasty to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and the ensuing mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These themes, ensconced in bitterness and happiness, were recurring ones also in Mao's life, especially during his days as a struggling student--struggling both economically and academically--and at the apogee of power, when he earned the moniker the "Great Helmsman."
As a youth, witnessing first-hand the devastating effects of foreign intervention in China, Mao lamented that Confucian values and Chinese tradition tethered the country's political and spiritual growth. 1 Somehow, in order for China to survive and remain a nation, Mao concluded, it would have to undergo its own rebirth. But rebirth requires death, and for Mao this meant the destruction of the existing political and social order in China.
What are we to make of Mao, a man both revered and despised for his role in Chinese history? He is at once the Phoenix and the Dragon. Mao the individual became Mao the ideology, and iterations of Maoism tested the limits of the strength of the agrarian class. There are dozens of Mao biographies that attempt to tackle this complex man. A few stand out for their groundbreaking treatment of the subject and continue to inspire contemporary analysts: Stuart Schram's lucid early portrait in Mao Tse-Tung, Lucien Pye's "psychohistorical" analysis in Mao Tse-Tung: The Man in the Leader, and Ross Terrill's prescient investigation in Mao: A Biography. 2
While numerous biographies examine Mao's background and key experiences, no single work has fully revealed his psyche--and so Mao remains very much an enigma to this day. The fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China offered another opportunity for reassessing Mao's legacy. That is precisely the task Philip Short takes on in a 782-page tome entitled Mao: A Life. Along the way, Short skillfully transports the reader through the political, social, and psychological hutongs or "alleyways" that shaped Mao's beliefs and later his actions.
Short takes advantage of material released since the end of the Cultural Revolution almost a quarter of a century ago as the Chinese government has gradually permitted access to previously classified archives. In addition, he draws on oral histories that have seeped into the public domain and that fill the gaps remaining after his archival research. Armed with this new material, Short revisits some conventional Western interpretations of Mao's politics. Unfortunately, his unorthodox and confusing citations turn out to be a major weakness of his work, for they discourage independent research on the part of the reader.
For instance, Schram's 1966 classic work Mao Tse-Tung suggests that the Cultural Revolution was a "deliberate and nostalgic attempt on Mao's part to relive the cultural revolution of the 4 May period...." In line with the more recent literature, Short confirms that events during the Cultural Revolution were not so meticulously planned. In fact, Short gives us the impression that Mao's decisions were primarily made in an ad hoc manner during this period. On the basis of new but unnamed oral sources, as well as a 1988 research article circulated only in China, Short reveals a "bizarre sequence of events," in which a clash erupted between conservative and radical factions during a People's Liberation Army [PLA] dance performance. PLA "[g]irl dancers in the conservative troupe," who frequented
Mao's bed, "persuaded the Chairman of the justice of their cause." This prompted Mao and his lieutenant, Lin Biao, to clamp down on the radicals, who, Mao felt, were beginning to spin out of control. Mao was a master of unleashing and then contracting revolutionary fervor. The seemingly whimsical nature of decision-making by Mao in this period adds texture to the continuous quilt of interpretations of Mao's political life and China's post-1949 history.
Some scholars, such as Lucien Pye, have sought to understand Mao by analyzing the psychological impact of his childhood experiences. 3 Short makes the case for understanding Mao in all his manifestations and machinations--even if they seem irreconcilable. While Mao strongly advocated women's rights, for example, he constantly desired to be surrounded by young women of pulchritude, and he was quite fickle with his female paramours.
Mao biographers agree that the young Mao was heavily influenced by Confucian principles, prescriptions regulating the proper relationship, such as those between father and son, state and society, and husband and wife. Mao rebelled against tradition, or more precisely, against Confucianism because he thought it was stultifying. His disaffection with his father clearly contributed to Mao's rebellion against the Confucian ethic and its institutions. As a young adult, Mao was confounded continually by the failure of his countrymen to resist Western transgressions into China. He characterized the Chinese people in the following way: "[having] many undesirable customs, their mentality is too antiquated and their morality is extremely bad...which cannot be removed and purged without enormous force."
Short casts a wide net, weaving together Mao's foibles with his gradual successes, and manages not to lose much, if anything at all, in the process. We even learn the following detail: Mao disliked most things Western, particularly latrines with a seat and flushing mechanism. Short relates that even in the 1950s, when Mao was firmly in power and residing in Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound, he insisted on having one of his bodyguards follow him with a shovel outdoors in the event he needed to defecate. Ultimately, Zhou Enlai, the then premier, persuaded Mao to accept a customized latrine located near his bedroom.
Although Mao railed against Western contraptions, including the toilet and mattress, he occasionally found solace in books by American philosopher John Dewey, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the neo-Kantian German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. The Kantian notions of individual will and universal truth continued to resurface as Mao developed his ideology. It was Paulsen's writings in System der Ethik, which would leave an indelible mark on Mao's political thought. "[T]he need for a strong state, with centralized political power; the overriding importance of individual will; and the sometimes conflictual, sometimes complementary relationship between the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions," writes Short, would eventually become the basis of Maoism.
Short has made a more positive appraisal of the achievements of Mao than one might have expected, given the fact that we are now beginning to understand the full extent of the consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Short argues that China's landlords were "eliminated as a class (and many were killed in the process); but they were not exterminated as a people, as the Jews were in Germany." However, these euphemisms of history belie the tragedies of human terror and error that took place during the land reform and anti-rightist campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
In the end, whether history judges Mao as China's paladin, as Hunan's maniacal leader, or something in between, remains to be seen. "History," Short writes, "is laid down slowly in China. A final verdict on Mao's place in the annals of his country's past is still a very long way off." Indeed, after Mao's death, even Deng Xiaoping and the rest of China's leadership were distraught over how to publicly portray Mao's legacy as they gradually dismantled the remaining vestiges of the Cultural Revolution. The revolutionary path needed to be paved over by the capitalist road. Short recalls Politburo member Chen Yun's appropriate statement in 1979: "Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?" This observation precipitated China's leadership to neatly characterize blemishes in Mao's legacy as merely mistakes rather than crimes against the country. This would later come to be known as the seven-three formula; that is, Mao was correct 70 percent of the time and erred 30 percent. However, these rounded figures still leave an imbalance in the ledger book of China's contemporary history.
China's rising young elite will ultimately determine the assessment of Mao's debits and credits to China. Born immediately after the Cultural Revolution and possessing a greater sense of cosmopolitanism than their predecessors, the young elite in China lack the consciousness of internal struggle and turmoil that characterized China under Mao. For these inheritors, Mao's legacy is not a distant memory, but rather unsettled history.
Mark T. Fung is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Studies with a focus on China at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University --SAIS.
Notes
1. The intellectual history of China, including Confucianism, has played a significant role in understanding Mao. An outstanding analysis of the Confucian impact on Chinese society is offered in a trilogy by Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959, 1964).
2. Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-Tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966); Lucian Pye, Mao Tse-Tung: The Man in the Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980), p.3. See also, Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Stanley Karnow, Mao and China (New York: Viking Press, 1972); Robert S. Elegant, Mao's Great Revolution (New York: World Publishing Co., 1971).
3. Lucian Pye distinctly praises Lowell Dittmer's work on Mao that adapted Harold Lasswell's study of political persona. Dittmer characterized Mao as a "compulsive" character. Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch'i and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
