Anti Imperialists

"We spoke at length and We really liked Mao Zedong. A lot. He gave Us a very good impression, as Paul VI did. He is a good and very serious leader, and his people have done well to embrace him."

"Mao was strongly inclined to "total solutions." He believed in philosophy as an instrument of change and that society was always in flux between periods of stability and periods of luan, chaos. Change arose from luan. Stability was static. In a state of upheaval, progress was made and new, capable people and ideas emerged. The Mao scholar Li Zehou quotes Mao as saying after he read the history of China's Warring States, "It is a delight to read. But when it moves to the peaceful years I hate it. Not because I love chaos but because a time of peace is not good for the development of the people. It is unbearable." Whether all this underlay Mao's fatalistic decision will never be known. He kept no diary, and none of his secretaries was privy to all his thoughts. But there can be no question that Mao well understood his historic achievement in routing Chiang Kai-shek and uniting China under the Communist banner, and he also believed that the crusade ultimately called the Cultural Revolution was an even greater enterprise. It was, in his view, a revolution not only to save his revolution but to perfect it, endangered as he believed it to be by contamination, impurities, and even treason from within. It must be saved from the men who had helped to create it. In this Kang Sheng's poisoned words played a part. If Mao achieved success in his new campaign it would, he reckoned, be the ultimate deed of his career, overshadowing even the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. This, he was confident, would place his name not among the great men of China but at the head of the list, as the emperor of emperors."

"Mao's mind was philosophical and poetic. He felt at home with the Chinese classics. He knew Confucius and his follower Mencius, and he knew how the Ming and the Tang and the other dynasties had handled economics. Statistics bored him. He preferred to leave these details to subordinates. Mao's great strength in the Long March and in the Revolution was his belief in the efficacy of mass action. He was convinced that there was no problem that could not be solved if he mobilized the strength of the masses. He did not literally believe in his famous parable of the old man who moved a mountain, but he did believe he knew how to direct the strength of China's huge population. With that energy there was no goal China could not attain — whether moving a mountain or creating a steel industry or wiping out the opium habit."

"Mao's quarters were fitted to his taste. Along the north wall, so that the southern sun would flood the broad windows, was a study through which one passed into his bedchamber, the biggest of his rooms. Beside the courtyard windows stood his bed, a square wooden bed, the legs mounted on sturdy wooden blocks, bigger than the great kang, or oven-bed, in his parents' home in Shaoshan, bigger than many a room in the new flats of Beijing — not a king-sized bed, an emperor-sized bed. Mao reposed on a hill of pillows. Half his bed, as long as he lived, was piled with papers, books, the slender sheaves of the Chinese classics that he read and reread from boyhood to old age. As for the other half of the bed, it was to have many and varied occupants. A pair of brass bracket lamps were mounted on the wall behind Mao's bed, eight feet from the floor. More bracket lights were fixed between the windows. On tables beside his bed and at its head stood gooseneck lamps, flexible to adjust to his angle of sight. The walls of the bedroom and study were lined with books and document boxes filled with reports, correspondence, and possibly some items from the special library collected for Mao by the secret police specialist, Kang Sheng. The floor was covered with a Chinese carpet of apple green."

"Publicly, Mao had sailed in the face of the American threat and, in effect, thumbed his nose at Stalin's warnings as well. In 1946, when Chiang Kai-shek began preparing an all-out drive against the Communists, Stalin urged Mao to enter into a coalition with Chiang and take a secondary role. Resistance, Stalin contended, might lead to World War III. For many years Stalin had demonstrated his preference for Chiang, as Mao bitterly knew. Stalin had supported Chiang even after he turned on the Communists in the 1927 massacre at Shanghai. Only with the greatest reluctance had Stalin shifted his backing from Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai to the Communists and left-wingers. Mao had no illusions about whom Stalin preferred. As a contemporary Soviet historian commented: "Stalin favored a two-Chinas policy." Stalin felt Chiang was weak and posed no danger to Moscow. He did not trust Mao."

"Mao had worked late into the night — his custom. He awoke about 11:00 a.m., ate a bowl of rice and some Chinese pickles, and the group set off. Baggage had been sent ahead, but Mao's bodyguards had packed a few books to take along, two Chinese encyclopedic dictionaries, Lexicon of Words (Ci Hai) and Origin of Words (Ci Yuan), and two dynastic works of great distinction, studied and annotated by emperors, statesmen, and scholars for hundreds of years. One was called Records of the Historian (Shi Ji) and covered the period from the semi-mythical Yellow Emperor, China's founding father, and into the Han dynasty until about a hundred years before Christ. The other, The General Mirror for the Aid of Government (Cu Chi Tang Qian), covered thirteen hundred years of history and had been compiled in the eleventh century. It was designed as a practical handbook for the emperor, telling him how his predecessors had handled difficult questions. No text by Marx or Lenin."

"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded, not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering a high morale and cummunity propose... The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."

"On the Chinese side, change was a part of an even greater development: China’s resumption of an international and regional role appropriate to her historic stature and potential. Mao’s revolution had made China more integrated than ever before, and made significant improvements in health and education. But its economic development had been chaotic, and it had not lifted the Chinese people out of poverty."

"As for Mao Zedong, I now see him as both a brilliant leader and a scheming tyrant. He blazed the trail to the Promised Land but could not take his people there. Under his leadership, China grew united and strong, life expectancy lengthened, and hundreds of millions were rescued from pauperdom. At the same time, his wild social experimentation was responsible for the misery and deaths of millions, or possibly tens of millions. Never a true friend, he twice threw me into wrongful isolation in prison when it suited some political purpose. Mao was a thinker, philosopher, analyst, general, political leader, poet, and a connoisseur of great stature. He unified and led the revolution through unbelievable hardships, overcoming unthinkable odds, to achieve victory over the established powers in China that had the support of virtually all the world's governments. If he had died before coming to power, he would probably still be remembered as a prophet and as something close to a saint. Even so, it is still he, not Sun Yat-sen, whom most Chinese still look on as the "George Washington of China." But today I believe that Mao was a tragic figure of Aeschylean proportions. Having preached and warned for years against the corruption that usually follows power, having inveighed against arrogance and exaggeration of the role, prowess, and wisdom of any single individual, he became their victim and in turn victimized the Chinese people. With unimaginable hubris, he thought of China-and the world-as an experimental laboratory in his hands. None of the ordinary human relationships of family, community, and friendship were important to him, but only the moving of people through the motions of carrying out his own grand designs. The results was that, in the end, with his formidable powers of introspection, he saw himself gradually turn into the very embodiment of what he had despised and fought against as a young Hunanese patriot-a crabbed old despot, friendless, clueless, disenchanted."

"Mao was China's biggest idealist and dictator. His ideology encompasses both idealism and despotism. This often creates conflicts, or dualism. For example, if you aren't an enemy, you're a friend; if something is inaccurate, then it's a mistake. The best way to resolve the contradictions inherent in dualism is by protesting. But that makes people become truculent. Mao considered himself the guardian of truth, and people who thought differently from him were branded as enemies. This tendency can still be seen in modern China. Even those who criticize Mao bear traces of his thinking."

"Without a rational assessment and critique of Mao Zedong thought and culture, its cancers will be anointed along with its charms and passed down in this spirit. The effect very likely will be catastrophic. Speaking personally, such cancers are already internalized as a kind of poisonous gas deep within myself. Because of this, I must hold fast to the fundamental position of “in the process of critiquing and assessing Mao Zedong thought and culture, making a serious accounting of myself.” My students, on the other hand, believe that there is no need for their teacher to spend his days in reflection and repentance. They see a teacher with many good qualities and see these as endowed upon him by Mao Zedong. This is, indeed, in some ways true. The key reason for this generational gap rests in the fact that the challenges we face are different: my challenge remains to cast off the influence, not only historical but actual, of Mao Zedong; their challenge, lies in the fact that they are totally estranged from the Mao era; they know nothing of it, so they must start from scratch to seek out its reasonable elements. Therefore, between teacher and student there is a divergence of opinions and ideas. But, I have to say, I am most antipathetic to their “price theory.” They agree that the Mao era was replete with problems but believe that these were a price that had to be paid. Whenever I hear of this price theory, I get all fired up; do they really know what price was paid? The death of millions or even tens of millions. In my view, the death of one person is one too many, let alone tens of millions. Can we be so blasé as to use “price” to “settle this up”? They haven’t personally experienced that time and think they can look upon it objectively – “people died, so they died.” And this touches upon another key problem: the life of a person, in my view is of the utmost import. I have many haunted memories, and my students criticize me for always wallowing in my personal recollections, for being unable to break free from them. But I still want to remind these young scholars: in summing up the thought and culture of the 1980s, there is one great lesson to be learned. The attempt to directly apply Western modernity without thinking through the problems of China, to believe that China’s developmental trajectory is simply to follow the road of Western modernity, will result in immense confusion. In the same vein, we absolutely cannot directly apply an unexamined Mao Zedong thought and culture to respond to the problems of contemporary China. This would lead not only to great confusion, but to catastrophe."

"In China’s grassroots society, the deification of Mao Zedong has taken place to a staggering degree. In countless taxicabs dangle icons of Mao, warding off evil spirits. I investigated a little the question of which among China’s many emperors and generals could become deities and which could not. Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181-234) and Guan Yu 關羽 (d. 219) were deified, but Qin Shihuang 秦始皇 (259-210 BCE), Han Wudi 漢武帝 (141-87 BCE) and Liu Bei 劉備 (161-223) did not make the grade. There are two prerequisites for such a deification: one must either have preternatural wisdom, or a godlike ability to ward-off misfortune—Mao Zedong had both. Further bolstering Mao worship are those intellectuals, who, over recent years, have taken a Maoist turn. Some have, for example, proselytized the “three new traditions” 新三統 which advocate establishing a new national ideology through the aggregation of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Confucius. These intellectuals see themselves as “Imperial Tutors,” and their “three new traditions” as “Schemes for good government and security” offered to the current regime. After the recent abrupt rise of China’s economy, there is now a push to strengthen Chinese soft-power. What China has to offer in this realm, other than Confucius, is Mao Zedong. In the present statist stream of thought, Mao’s status is extremely prominent, and he also carries influence among certain groups of young people, some of whom are even intent on establishing a “Maoist Party.”"

"Even among totalitarian rulers such as Stalin, Mao sets himself apart. Such dictators usually only control the bodies of the people; dissidents, heretics, and opponents are at most sent to prison or labor camps and thus are neutralized corporeally. Mao, however, sought also to remould thought. He said once that two types of people existed in Chinese tradition: heroes and sages. Heroes were extremely talented in some areas such as politics and economics; sages existed to influence people’s thought. Mao sought to position himself as a hero, but desired even more the role of sage. He wanted to effect a spiritual control of people, to conquer the popular will, to influence and remould people’s thought, to have his dictatorship permeate into people’s minds, and he created an array of systems and methods to do so. This is both awesome and dreadful, and is without precedent."

"To govern a nation with a poet’s logic and vision can only lead to great catastrophe. In reading Mao’s works, you’ll notice they are extremely enchanting. Packed as they are with the imagination, passion, and the utopian ideals of a poet, they are endlessly moving. But as soon as such ideas are transformed into practice, they will often bring about disaster. Mao often exhibits just such a conversion: romanticism at the theoretical level mutating into despotism at the practical level."

"In Mao’s case, a number of other factors likewise explain this attitude. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, who destroyed a great and powerful Russia that prior to the October Revolution had been one of the leading world powers, Mao transformed China from a semi-colony into an independent and powerful state. He was not only a revolutionary who transformed social relations, but also a national hero who brought to fruition the mighty anti-imperialist revolution begun by Sun Yat-sen, compelling the entire world to respect the Chinese people. He united mainland China after a long period of disintegration, power struggle, and civil wars. It was during Mao’s rule that China was finally able to become one of the main geopolitical centers of the world, politically equidistant from both superpowers, and, therefore, attracting increased attention from world public opinion. Of course, during Mao’s rule the Chinese people remained poor, and the Chinese economy backward, but it was precisely during this time that Chinese began to take pride in their country’s present as well as its past. This is why the Chinese people will never forget the “Great Helmsman.” Mao brought to the Chinese not only national liberation, but social servitude. It was he and the Chinese Communist Party he directed that, through deceit and violence, imposed totalitarian socialism upon the long-suffering people of China, driving them into the abyss of bloody social experiments. The lives of hundreds of millions of people were thereby maimed, and several tens of millions perished as a result of hunger and repression. Entire generations grew up isolated from world culture. Mao’s crimes against humanity are no less terrible than the evil deeds of Stalin and other twentieth-century dictators. The scale of his crimes was even greater. Still, Mao is distinguished from the ideologists and practitioners of Russian Bolshevism even in his totalitarianism. His personality was much more complex, variegated, and multifaceted. No less suspicious or perfidious than Stalin, still he was not as merciless. Almost throughout his entire career, even during the Cultural Revolution, in intraparty struggle he followed the principle of “cure the illness to save the patient,” compelling his real or imagined opponents to confess their “guilt” but not sentencing them to death. This is precisely why the “moderate” faction, despite the repeated purge of its members, was ultimately able to stand its ground and come to power after the Chairman’s death. Mao did not cure the “illness” of Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, but neither did he eliminate them physically. He did not even order the death of Liu Shaoqi. The chairman of the PRC was hounded to his death by enraged Red Guards. Moreover, Mao did not take revenge on his former enemies. He neither killed Bo Gu, nor Zhou Enlai, nor Ren Bishi, nor Zhang Guotao, nor even Wang Ming. He tried to find a common language with all of them after forcing them to engage in self-criticism. In other words, he forced them to “lose face” but also kept them in power. In all of this, Mao was an authentically Chinese leader and ideologist who was able to combine the principles of foreign Bolshevism not only with the practice of the Chinese revolution, but also with Chinese tradition. A talented Chinese politician, an historian, a poet and philosopher, an all-powerful dictator and energetic organizer, a skillful diplomat and utopian socialist, the head of the most populous state, resting on his laurels, but at the same time an indefatigable revolutionary who sincerely attempted to refashion the way of life and consciousness of millions of people, a hero of national revolution and a bloody social reformer—this is how Mao goes down in history. The scale of his life was too grand to be reduced to a single meaning. And that is why he reposes in an imperial mausoleum in the center of China, in the square adorned with his gigantic portrait. He will be there for a long time, perhaps forever. In essence, the phenomenon of Mao reflects the entire trajectory of twentieth-century China in all its complexity and contradictions, the trajectory of a great but socially and economically backward Eastern country that made a gigantic break from the past to the present over the course of eight decades."

"We tried to avoid these shortcomings by making careful and discriminating use of a wider array of sources than any other biographer, weighing evidence carefully, and presenting sound and forceful judgments unmarred by political considerations. This dispassionate attitude allows us to present the Great Helmsman as the multifaceted figure that he was—a revolutionary and a tyrant, a poet and a despot, a philosopher and a politician, a husband and a philanderer. We show that Mao was neither a saint nor a demon, but rather a complicated figure who indeed tried his best to bring about prosperity and gain international respect for his country. Yet he made numerous errors, having trapped himself in a cul-de-sac of a political and ideological utopia, and basking in his cult of personality while surrounding himself with sycophantic courtiers. Without a doubt he was one of the greatest utopians of the twentieth century, but unlike Lenin and Stalin, he was not only a political adventurer but also a national revolutionary. Not only did he promote radical economic and social reforms, but he also brought about a national revolution in former semicolonial China and he united mainland China, which had been engulfed in a civil war. Thus it was Mao who renewed the world’s respect for China and the Chinese people, who had long been despised by the developed Western world and Japan. Yet his domestic policies produced national tragedies that cost the lives of tens of millions of Chinese."

"One communist country went through a destruction of collusions for collective action that was equivalent to the organizational destruction in Germany and Japan. This was China during the cultural revolution. For whatever reasons, Mao started a revolution against his own upper-level and middle- level subordinates—the red mandarins. He decimated the very administrators and managers on which his economy depended. Only the military was spared. The immediate result was extreme instability and administrative chaos: the economic performance of the Chinese economy during the cultural revolution was much worse than in other communist countries. A longer-run result was that, when Mao died, there were not nearly as many well-entrenched coteries of administrators as in the Soviet Union and the European communist states. So when Deng and the other pragmatists defeated Mao's widow and the rest of the "gang of four" shortly after Mao's death, there were few industries, enterprises, or coteries of administrators whose insider lobbying could undermine Deng's market-oriented reforms. Deng was presumably also helped because virtually everyone was glad to see the end of the chaos. The encompassing interest of Deng, the new pragmatic autocrat, prevailed, largely because the cultural revolution had destroyed the narrowly entrenched interests with a stake in the status quo. Deng could do what Gorbachev and the other European communist reformers could not do: win out over the countless cliques engaged in covert collective action and other insider lobbies. The lion's share of the then-poor Chinese economy—agriculture—was promptly put under an individual responsibility market system. Other market-oriented reforms followed. The result, as we know, was rapid economic growth: output has often increased at 10 percent or more per year. This difference between China and the European countries that were communist, but had no cultural revolution, is precisely consistent with the argument offered here."

"It was no longer possible to say that only the Western world could become rich through capitalism, so a new narrative took hold: although a few developing countries might be able to enter global markets from the periphery, it is only because they are very small, almost insignificant. Strangely enough, today you sometimes hear the opposite: that developing countries might make it, but only if they are very large. This is due to the transformation of two giants, China and India, which for decades were held back by, in one case, a communist despot, and in the other a democratic but strictly protectionist command economy. Therefore, people said that Chinese and Indians will be successful all over the world – except in China and India. But then, in 1976, China’s dictator Mao Zedong, as the US economist Steven Radelet put it, ‘single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one single act: he died’. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, began to accept the private enterprise that peasants and villagers secretly engaged in and extended it to the entire economy. All the restrained creativity and ambition was finally let loose and China grew at record speed. Ironically, intellectuals around the world – modern-day Max Webers – soon explained that this is itself not that strange, as Confucianism made it easy to modernize the economy."

"There is a final irony that has been implied, but not stated, in the way in which this chapter has portrayed politics portrayed Chinese politics since the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in 1928, through the victory of the Communist Party in 1949 to the present era, as a passing on of the baton in a wider, consistent, politics of modernity. For the political form of China today—a one-party state that does still allow a significant amount of individual autonomy, a powerful state with a role in the international order which is partly cooperative and partly confrontational, and a highly successful semi-capitalist economy in which the state and party still play a significant, embedded role—means that the Communist Party of today has essentially created the state sought by the progressive wing of the Nationalists in the 1930s rather than the dominant, radical Communists of the 1960s. One can imagine Chiang Kaishek’s ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision. The intellectual assumptions behind both the Nationalists and the Communists in the last century were similar in many important ways, making this seeming paradox perfectly comprehensible if examined in a somewhat longue durée that extends back before 1978 or 1949."

"It was not Mao Zedong's impatience with the pace of history alone that was responsible for this rush toward utopia in the late 1950s. Mao had come to embody the increasingly radical expectations of peasants, rural Party cadres, and a good many higher Party leaders. He was also inspired, as were many others, by the striking successes of the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1940s- and early 1950s - the stunning victory over the Guomindang, the rapid consolidation of Communist power, the successes of land reform and early industrialization, and the revolutionary fervors generated by the agricultural collectivization campaign of 1955-6. By late 1957 Mao Zedong had thrown off all conventional Marxian restraints on the revolutionary will, permitting him to embark on the tragic adventure of the Great Leap Forward. Standing above all institutions, he now became a tyrant as well as a utopian prophet, nearly oblivious to the human and social costs of his "great leap" to communism - and to the costs of the Cultural Revolution, an upheaval which in large measure grew out of the political tensions generated by the failure of the Great Leap."

"For Mao Zedong was both the Lenin and the Stalin of the Chinese Revolution, both the revolutionary founder and the post-revolutionary tyrant."

"The legacy that Mao Zedong left for his successors was thus a most ambiguous and contradictory one, marked by a deep incongruity between the Maoist regime's progressive socioeconomic accomplishments and its retrogressive political characteristics. On the one hand, Mao "created a nation," as Deng Xiaoping said, completing in the early years of the People's Republic many of the unfinished tasks of the Guomindang's abortive bourgeois revolution. The Maoist regime also established some of the preconditions for socialism. It began China's modern industrial revolution; it abolished private ownership of the means of production, a necessary if by no means sufficient condition for socialism; and it kept alive (far longer into the postrevolutionary era than might have been anticipated) a vital socialist vision of the future. On the other hand, Maoism retained essentially Stalinist methods of bureaucratic political rule; it generated its own cults, orthodoxies, and dogmas and it consistently suppressed all intellectual and political dissent. Mao Zedong, to be sure, looked upon the Communist bureaucracy as a great evil, but the only remedy he could devise to control his own creation was to rely on his personal prestige and the force of his own personality. Neither in theory nor in practice does the Maoist legacy include meaningful institutional safeguards against bureaucratic domination."

"Although it has become unfashionable to recall the accomplishments of Mao’s time, it remains the case that the Maoist regime made immense progress in bringing about China’s modern industrial transformation, and it did so under adverse internal and external conditions. Without the industrial revolution of the Mao era, the economic reformers who rose to prominence in the post-Mao era would have had little to reform. Of the Chinese people, Mao’s industrial revolution demanded hard labor and great sacrifices, as had been the case in the industrialization of Japan and Russia in earlier times. Popular consumption and living standards suffered as the Communist state appropriated ever larger shares of the surplus to finance the expansion of the modern industrial plant. The state, simply put, exploited the people it ruled, especially the peasantry in order to build a heavy industrial base and to support the growing bureaucracy that presided over it. But it is not the case, as some of the more zealous champions of the market have suggested, that the Chinese people did not materially benefit during the years of Maoist industrialization. To be sure, China’s sharply rising national income did not translate itself into corresponding increases in income for the working population, whose labor was responsible for the rise. Some of the increase was absorbed by a rapidly growing population, partly the result of the ineffectiveness of belatedly implemented birth control policies. However, most of the surplus flowed into state coffers (and from there to the modern industrial sector and its bureaucracy), leaving only enough for meager increases in popular income over the last two decades of the Maoist regime. While the income of state employees, including regular factory workers, rose significantly during the late Mao period, the income of peasants, who made up 75 percent of the laboring population, increased little, if at all, after 1957. Yet among gains not easy to quantify in economic calculations, but vital for measuring popular welfare, one must note the vast expansion of schools and educational opportunities during the Mao era, the transformation of a largely illiterate population into a mostly literate one, and the building of a relatively comprehensive health care system where none existed before. The near doubling of average life expectancy over the quarter-century of Mao’s rule – from an average of thirty-five in pre-1949 China to sixty-five in the mid-1970s – offers dramatic statistical evidence for the material and social gains that the Communist Revolution brought to the great majority of the Chinese people. Upon completing his monumental history of the Soviet Union, the great English historian E. H. Carr warned: “The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements.” Carr’s words deserve to be pondered by students of modern Chinese history as well as Russian history, for revolutions do not easily lend themselves to balanced appraisals. Great social upheavals typically arouse great and unattainable expectations, and when those high hopes are dashed long periods of disillusionment and cynicism inevitably follow, while the actual historical achievements are ignored or forgotten. It usually takes several generations, far removed from the political and ideological battles of the revolutionary epoch, to bring the historical picture back into focus. It is the blots on the Maoist record, especially the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, that are now most deeply imprinted on our political and historical consciousness. That these adventures were failures colossal in scope, and that they took an enormous human toll, cannot and should not be forgotten. But future historians, without ignoring the failures and the crimes, will surely record the Maoist era in the history of the People’s Republic (however else they may judge it) as one of the great modernizing epochs in world history, and one that brought great social and human benefits to the Chinese people."

"Among the distinguishing features of the Mao period, many observers once believed, was a unique attempt to reconcile the means of modem industrialism with the ends of socialism. That, no doubt, was Mao's aim, and it certainly was the Maoist claim. But, in the end, Mao Zedong was far more successful as an economic modernizer than as a builder of socialism. This judgment, of course, does not accord with the conventional wisdom of the day, which tells us that Mao sacrificed "modernization" to "ideological purity" and that economic development was neglected as the late Chairman embarked on a fruitless quest for a socialist spiritual utopia. The actual historical record conveys a rather different story, and it is essentially a story of rapid industrialization. The post-Mao critiques of the Maoist economic legacy, which dwell less on the accomplishments than on the deficiencies of the era, nonetheless reveal that the value of gross industrial output grew thirty-eight-fold during the Mao period, and that of heavy industry ninety-fold, albeit starting from a tiny modern industrial base whose output had been halved by the ravages of foreign invasion and civil war. But between 1952 (when industrial production was restored to its highest pre-war levels) and 1977, the output of Chinese industry increased at an average annual rate of 11.3 percent, as rapid a pace of industrialization as has ever been achieved by any country during a comparable period in modern world history.' Over the Mao era, the contribution of industry to China's net material product increased from 23 percent to over 50 percent while agriculture's share declined from 58 to 34 percent."

"What makes this so remarkable a phenomenon in the history of postrevolutionary societies is that the call for rebellion against the existing political order came from those who had built that order. It came from some among the veterans of the revolution-and Mao was certainly the most venerable and venerated of the veterans-who had created state and Party institutions they now had come to regard as obstacles to, rather than as instruments of, the revolutionary social changes they sought. But the more important question about the Cultural Revolution is not so much why Mao issued his rebellious call but rather why and how so many tens of millions of ordinary Chinese citizens responded to it."

"In the years immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution, Mao arrived at a conclusion that no other Marxist in power had hitherto been willing to entertain. A socialist society, he now believed, could generate a new class of exploiters; the main barriers to the "transition to socialism" were not the bourgeois residues of the past but rather the bureaucrats of the present, the onetime revolutionaries whom the revolution had transformed into rulers and who by virtue of their political power controlled the new society and appropriated much of the fruits of social labor in the process. On occasion Mao was quite explicit, indeed blunt, in setting forth this view; as when (in 1965) he condemned "the bureaucratic class" as a class "in sharp opposition to the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants," as those becoming "bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the workers." Nor did he hesitate to identify the site and source of these "new bourgeois elements" or their leaders. They were, he charged on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, "those people in positions of authority-within the Party who take the capitalist road." What seemed at the time to be pure ideological bombast proved to be a remarkably accurate prognosis of the future of Chinese Communist society."

"Mao Zedong's last revolutionary act was to turn into the greatest tragedy of his long revolutionary career-and one with dire consequences for the Chinese people. In 1966 into the seventy-two-year-old Mao staged his final revolutionary drama, stimulating a cataclysmic upheaval that he baptized "the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." It was his last desperate attempt to revive a revolution that he believed was dying. It was an attempt that failed, and it was a failure on a grand scale, dominating and distorting the social and political life of the People's Republic for more than a decade and tarnishing the historical image of Mao in the process. In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao proclaimed principles and ideals he could not (or would not) sustain, and unleashed social and political forces he could not control, forces which were to exact a fearsome human and social toll. Before the drama had played itself out, it consumed, physically or spiritually, virtually all of its original promoters and supporters as well as many of its intended victims along with a good number of unintended ones who would have preferred to stand on the sidelines of the battles that racked and nearly wrecked China during the last decade of the Maoist regime."

"Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and historical responsibility for the human disaster that resulted from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him. It was not Mao's intention to kill off a portion of the peasantry, as Becker and others imply. There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions, however horrible those consequences might be, and deliberate and willful genocide. The blurring of that difference does no service to the task of understanding the terrible moral ambiguities of this most genocidal of all centuries."

"Despite the prominence of the theory of New Democracy in formal Maoist theory for more than a decade, and its seeming promise of a lengthy stage of capitalist (or at least semi-capitalist) development, the bourgeois phase of China's postrevolutionary history was abruptly terminated after a scant four years. No doubt in good measure responsible for the hasty prouncement of the "transition to socialism" was Mao Zedong's longstanding populist-type hostility to all forms of capitalism and his persistent refusal to intellectually accept the Marxist thesis that socialism presupposes capitalism."

"The psychological effects of the Long March are much more intangible. For Mao, at least, the experience served to reinforce his voluntaristic faith that people with the proper will, spirit, and revolutionary consciousness could conquer all material obstacles and mold historical reality in accordance with their ideas and ideals. For those who survived the ordeal-and for those who were inspired by the story of their survival-the experience, however bitter it was at the time, gave rise to a renewed sense of hope and a deepened sense of mission. People must be able to hope before they can act; they must possess not only ideals and a sense of mission, but hope and confidence that they will be able to realize their ideals through their own actions. More than any other event in the history of Chinese Communism, it was the Long March-and the legendary tales to which it gave rise-that provided this essential feeling of hope, the confidence that determined people could prevail under even the most desperate conditions. And more than any other individual, it was Mao Zedong who radiated and inspired this faith in the future. It was a faith not only in those deemed capable of molding the future in accordance with Communist hopes but also in the values regarded as essential to the eventual realization of those hopes. The familiar Maoist virtues of unending struggle, heroic sacrifice, self-denial, diligence, courage, and unselfishness were values espoused not by Mao alone but carried and conveyed by all of the veterans of the Long March, for these were the values they had come to regard as essential to their own survival and to the survival of the revolution to which they had devoted their lives. These ascetic values lay at the core of what later came to be celebrated as "the Yan'an spirit.""

"Mao and the system that he created were directly responsible for what was, and, one hopes, will forever remain, the most murderous famine of all time, anywhere in the world. Undoubtedly it was not Mao's intention to kill so many of his compatriots. But the least one can say is that he seemed little concerned about the death of millions from hunger. Indeed, his main concern in those dark years seems to have been to deny a reality for which he could have been held responsible."

"Even if one excludes the civil war, the regime must be held accountable for a huge number of deaths. Although the estimates are quite speculative, it is clear that there were between 6 million and 10 million deaths as a direct result of the Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. In addition, tens of millions of "counterrevolutionaries" passed long periods of their lives inside the prison system, with perhaps 20 million dying there. To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward—estimates range from 20 million to 43 million dead for the years 1959–1961—all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects."

"There is more of Dewey than of Marx in all this."

"Mao oversaw the major movements in the early 1950s that spread communist rule down to the grass roots throughout China, and it was he who made the major policy decisions during the twenty-seven years that he lived after the revolution. Mao initiated the abandonment of “New Democracy” in favor of a rapid advance to socialism; after the triumph of rural collectivization, it was Mao who initiated the thaw that morphed into the relatively liberal “hundred flowers” era, and it was he who then reversed course into the Anti-Rightist Campaign. In his subsequent leftist phase, Mao conceived of the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, and, finally, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Despite these disasters, to the end of his days, nobody dared challenge Mao. For better or worse, his was the outsize personality that overawed all his colleagues, bestriding the country like a colossus to whom all Chinese citizens had been inculcated to give obedience. The signs suggest that Xi aspires to a similar Maoist role."

"Mao then rose from guerrilla chief in the late 1920s to a party leader in the mid-1930s on the Long March, the flight of the C.C.P. from the southeast to the northwest to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s attacks. This was an epic event in Communist annals because it took a year, covered some 6,000 miles and reduced the 85,000 who had set out to a mere 8,000 by the time they reached the northwest. He absorbed two lessons: All power grew out of the barrel of a gun; and most of the time peasants were very difficult to organize because they had fields to tend and families to feed. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, Mao played his tiger role. He led an increasingly strong and efficient party and army that survived the anti-Japanese war and then defeated Chiang and the K.M.T. in the civil war of the late 1940s. From 1949 until 1956, Mao presided over the installation of the Communist dictatorship in China, rooting out all opposition, real or imagined, and transforming the ownership of the means of production from private hands to socialist control. It was then that he dabbled in the monkey business for the first time. From the point of view of a dutiful C.C.P. cadre, “monkey business” could be defined as any measure that would disrupt the party’s standard operating procedures. Cadres did not appreciate it when Mao in 1956 exhorted intellectuals to “Let a hundred flowers bloom” and a year later again encouraged intellectuals to criticize the conduct of the party. As members of the ruling elite, the cadres resented being criticized, and Mao, having promised that the criticisms would only be like a light rain, quickly wound up the campaigns when they turned into a typhoon, and purged the critics. Mao truly became the monkey king by starting the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to dispel the “miasmal mist” of Soviet-style “revisionism” from the C.C.P. Now, it was the youth of China, not the peasants, who were to be his agents of destruction, as major party and government departments were trashed and their officials humiliated and purged. For Mao, the Cultural Revolution ended in 1969 with the appointment of a new, and hopefully more revolutionary, leadership. But though he had dealt the age-old bureaucratic system of China a terrible blow, he knew that it could rise again from the ashes. He always emphasized that China would have to experience regular Cultural Revolutions."

"Mao lies a-mouldring in his tomb, but his soul and his body of work will keep marching on as long as the C.C.P. remains in power. In his attempts to keep out Western ideological influences, Xi has no rival ideology to use as a shield. Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism cannot be revived. Only Mao as hero-leader and leftist ideologue can withstand the sugar-coated bullets of the foreign bourgeoisie. A pox on the criticisms of him in the 1981 resolution on party history! Xi believes that attacks on Stalin and Lenin undermined the Soviet Union well before Gorby came to power, so there will be no tolerance for attacks on Mao. His life and legacy are surer legitimators of C.C.P. power than economic success which cannot always be guaranteed."

"As he approached his death in 1976, Mao ruminated that he could claim two great victories: the conquest of China and the Cultural Revolution, though he acknowledged that some might disagree about the latter. He made no mention of socializing the country in the 1950s or masterminding China’s emergence from isolation with the Nixon visit and entry into the UN in the 1970s. Mao’s self-image was as a revolutionary, and it is that persona that connects his three great errors. He thrived on upheaval, yet after the post-1949 socialist revolutions that he had led, the prospect for Chinese nation-building was the magnification of bureaucracy and routine in an endless series of Five-Year Plans on the model of the Stalinist command economy. The great organizers of nation building, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, would be in their element. But Mao, who knew nothing about economics, would find his expertise in revolution to be a surplus to requirements. In the 1957 rectification campaign, he aimed to shake up the Party bureaucracy to prevent it from getting into the comfortable rut of ruling by fiat. He failed. Mao’s romantic concept of the Great Leap Forward was intended to unleash the revolutionary energies of China’s masses, but Liu and Zhou knew that the masses unorganized would achieve little, and the formation of the communes and the backyard steel drive owed everything to the bullying of Party cadres at all levels. Frustrated by the failures of rectification and the Leap, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in a final effort to reignite revolutionary fire under the CCP. In this way, he knew he would once more be setting the agenda. How did Mao get away with these colossal and costly errors? His senior colleagues were all revolutionaries, hardened in battle, ruthless in action. Yet when Marshal Peng criticized the Leap, few stood up beside him, and none in the top leadership. In the aftermath of the Leap, Mao briefly ceded control of the economy to his colleagues. But when he judged they were about to permit the return of family farming, he returned proclaiming the importance of class struggle, and his colleagues folded. Rural reform did not take place until after his death. And at the start of the Cultural Revolution, first one senior leader and then another was denounced and purged. Mao adapted his guerrilla tactics to political struggle, and picked off his opponents in bite-sized pieces. At no stage did any one of them dare to rally his comrades to prevent the Chairman decimating a leadership that had lasted almost unchanged for twenty years."

"The ever-growing historiography devoted to Mao does not present the clearest of pictures. Often depending on the political leanings of the authors, Mao is variously portrayed as an unredeemed monster, the new emperor of a new China, an idealist facing insuperable problems, an opportunist concerned only with preserving himself in power, a planner whose economic illiteracy proved disastrous, a wily politician and shrewd statesman who saw his country through internal and external crises and prepared it successfully for modernity; such are the conflicting images of Mao Zedong. Given his formative role in the development of China as a sovereign state and a major international power, the number of conflicting interpretations is likely to increase rather than diminish."

"One of the paradoxes in Mao as a revolutionary thinker is that despite the emphasis in his teaching on the need for realism, he was far happier dealing with abstractions, to which he could commit himself, than with the reality of the weakness and irresolution of individuals. He had the cast of mind of the revolutionary who is always more comfortable with abstract concepts, which require a grand design for their achievement, than with the reality of people as they ordinarily are. It has been a notable feature of many of the major figures in revolutionary history that they have admired ‘the people’ or the proletariat as a historical force but have been scathing and dismissive of individuals or groups who did not meet revolutionary expectations. The most fanatical of the French revolutionaries, Robespierre, was deeply depressed by the poor quality of the human material available for building the new world. Yet he was sustained by the belief that society was perfectible if its enemies were ruthlessly removed. Both Marx and Lenin rejected as worthless whole classes of people and whole cultures, but remained convinced that the will of the people made utopia not merely attainable but inevitable. The absolutism of the belief in an ultimate goal enabled revolutionaries to come to terms with the invariably destructive consequences of their policies. Individual tragedy and disaster become acceptable. The grander the design in which they believed, the easier it was to regard people as merely the instruments for fashioning the design. It was essentially a process of depersonalising. People in a collective sense were a source of inspiration, but people as individuals, with all their weaknesses, were a cause of embarrassment. This attitude of mind often began with a detestation of injustice, moved to the view that the injustice was part of a structured system, and concluded that only by destroying the system could injustice be eradicated. Thus amelioration was not enough; reform could bring only temporary respite. Destruction was not an option but a necessity. There was a teleology attaching to it which appealed to the revolutionary mind. Because the goal was certain to be realised, come what may, the reverses and partial failures along the path, no matter how severe, were always bearable."

"The adulation Mao received during his lifetime and the outpouring of national grief evoked by his death may have appeared excessive, but they were not wholly irrational. The Chinese people had good reason to look upon him with awe. At home, he had led a vast social revolution, had resisted the Japanese invader, had defeated Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, and had destroyed the vestiges of European imperialism in China. On a wider front, he had transformed his country into a world power and taken it into the nuclear age, had challenged the Soviet Union for the leadership of international socialism, and had made China a model and inspiration for emerging nations still engaged in anti-colonial struggle. By any measure, these were towering achievements. Yet beside them have to be set failures that were equally monumental. Mao’s attempt to revolutionise the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s ended in the death from starvation of 50 million people. Further millions died or suffered during the Cultural Revolution when Mao tried during the last ten years of his life to impose a binding political correctness not only on his contemporaries but on China perpetually. It has been said that Hitler killed people for what they were, Stalin for what they did, and Mao for what they thought. The charge against Mao is not that he willed those deaths but that he allowed them to happen, that he did not balance the risks, and finally acquiesced in losses that were avoidable."

"Paradoxes are found in all great men. One need think only of the contradictory principles and impulses that motivated such twentieth-century figures as Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle and Mandela. The contradictions were even more marked in Mao. As a Chinese revolutionary, he rejected Western values but made it his mission to match Western achievements; he led a revolution against the world to join the world. His driving purpose was to liberate China from decades of foreign oppression, but to realise this aim he adopted a Western political theory – Marxism. He selected it because he saw it as an essentially destructive force, and he believed that in China destruction must necessarily precede construction. He sent his young Red Guards storming through the nation in the 1960s to destroy ‘the four olds’, his term for the remnants of China’s past. Yet this was a man steeped in China’s history, whose daily reading was the Chinese classics and who took as his political and military mentors not contemporary texts but the writings of the ancient Chinese masters."

"Mao’s key idea about the need for violent rebellion to sweep away social injustice and his practical strategies to achieve this aim – party-building, mass work, protracted guerrilla warfare – have attracted the discontented across decades and territories. Educated persuaders have used these emotional ideas to galvanise insurgencies, sometimes with enormous bloodshed. But except in China, Maoist insurgencies have failed to translate into stable political power. (And even in China, the Maoist fondness for mass mobilisation has threatened to topple the regime at least twice, amid the catastrophic aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and in the first two years of the Cultural Revolution.) Mao’s promise of ‘mass democracy’ has never delivered: in practice, it has usually resulted in the triumph of those who shout the loudest, or fight and plot the hardest. A Beijing taxi driver once summed up for me, during a five-minute conversation, Maoism’s eighty-year political appeal and its limitations. ‘The good thing about China under Mao is that everyone was equal. Not like now, when people will do you over for money, and even beggars won’t leave you alone until you give them 100 yuan.’ I asked if he would therefore like to turn the clock back to Mao’s era. ‘No,’ he quickly replied. ‘I’d rather get myself some education.’ To this member of an over-worked, underprivileged economic class in China today, equality of opportunity is more attractive than forcible equalising of outcome."

"The question of how to deal with the legacy of Mao Zedong, how to separate man from myth, ranged among the most difficult tasks faced by the new CCP leadership. The close interrelation of Mao as symbol of the Chinese Revolution with CCP politics demanded a cautious treatment in order not to tarnish the party’s claim to legitimate rule. Deng Xiaoping (1904–97), who emerged as the “architect” of the process of gradual reform after December 1978, had been actively involved in repudiating the impact of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies in 1956 and thus was highly aware of the potentially disastrous consequences of debunking the CCP’s most prominent symbol. Mao Zedong’s elevated status was to be reduced. He was to become “man, not God,” as a popular Chinese biography was to put it later, but his achievements were not to be discredited by way of a thorough de-Maoization process."

"对民主人士，我们要让他们唱对台戏，放手让他们批评。如果我们不这样做，就有点象国民党了。国民党很怕批评，每次开参政会就诚惶诚恐。民主人士的批评也无非是两种：一种是错的，一种是不错的。不错的可以补足我们的短处；错的要反驳。至于梁漱溟、彭一湖、章乃器那一类人，他们有屁就让他们放，放出来有利，让大家闻一闻，是香的还是臭的，经过讨论，争取多数，使他们孤立起来。他们要闹，就让他们闹够。"

"要使几亿人中的中国人生活得好，要把我们这个经济落后、文化落后的国家，建设成为富裕的、强盛的、 具有高度文化的国家，这是一个很艰巨的任务。我们所以要整风，现在要整风，将来还要整风，要不断把我们身上的错误东西整掉，就是为了使我们能够更好地担负起这项任务，更好地同党外的一切立志改革的志士仁人共同工作。"

"世界是你们的，也是我们的，但是归根结底是你们的。你们青年人朝气蓬勃，正在兴旺时期，好像早晨八、九点钟的太阳。希望寄托在你们身上。世界是属于你们的。中国的前途是属于你们的。"

"为了同敌人作斗争，我们在一个长时间内形成了一个概念，就是说，在战略上我们要藐视一切敌人，在战术上我们要重视一切敌人。也就是说在整体上我们一定要藐视它，在一个一个的具体问题上我们一定要重视它。如果不是在整体上藐视敌人，我们就要犯机会主义的错误。马克思、恩格思只有两个人，那时他们就说全世界资本主义要被打倒。但是在具体问题上，在一个一个敌人的问题上，如果我们不重视它，我们就要犯冒险主义的错误。打仗只能一仗一仗地打，敌人只能一部分一部分地消灭。工厂只能一个一个地盖，农民犁地只能一块一块的犁，就是吃饭也是如此。我们在战略上藐视吃饭：这顿饭我们能 够吃下去。但是具体地吃，却是一口口地吃的，你不可能把一桌酒席一口吞下去。这叫做各个解决，军事书上叫做各个击破。"

"战争与和平，和平的可能性大于战争的可能性，现在争取和平的可能性比过去大．社会主义阵营的力量比过去大，和平的可能性此第二次世界大战前大。苏联强大，民族独立运动是我们强大的同盟军，西方国家不稳定，工人阶级不愿打仗，资产阶级一部分人也不愿打仗，美国人也不愿打仗，和平的可能性大于战争的可能，但也有战争的可能性，要准备有疯子。帝国主义为了摆脱经济危机现在打原子战，时间会缩短，不要四年，只三年就可以了。要准备，真正打怎么办？要讲讲这个问题，要打就打，把帝国主义扫光，然后再来建设，从此就不会有世界大战了。既有可能打世界大战，就要准备，不能睡觉。打起来也不要大惊小怪，打起仗来无非就是死人。打仗死人我们见过，人口消灭一半在中国历史上有过好几次，汉武帝时五千万人口，到三国两晋南北朝，只剩下一千多万，一打几十年，连连续续几百年，三国两晋南北朝、宋、齐、梁、陈。唐朝人口开始是两千万。以后到唐明皇时又达到五千万，安禄山反了，分为五代十国，一两百年，一直到宋朝才统一，又剩下千把万。这个道理我和×××讲过，我说现代武器不如中国关云长的大刀厉害，他不信，两次世界大战死人并不多，第一次死一千万，第二次死两千万，我们一死就是四千万。你看那些大刀破坏性多大呀。原子仗现在没经验不知要死多少。最好剩一半。次好剩三分之一。二十几亿人口剩几亿，几个五年计划就发展起来，换来了一个资本主义全部灭亡。取得永久和平，这不是坏事。"

"中国人把结婚叫红喜事，死人叫做白喜事，合起来叫红白喜事，我看很有道理。中国人是懂得辩证法的。结婚可以生小孩，母亲分裂出孩子来．是个突变，是喜事。一个母亲分数出三个、两个，一个小人出来。多子女的分裂出六个、七个，七个、八个，甚至十个，像航空母舰一样。我不是不赞成节育，我是讲辩证法，是说新事物的发生，人的生产，这是喜事，是变化，一个变两个，两个变四个。至于死亡，老百姓也叫喜事。一方面并追悼会，哭鼻子，要送葬，人之常情。另一方面是喜事。也确实是喜事。你们设想，如果孔夫子还在，也在怀仁堂开会，他二千多岁了，就很不妙。讲辩证法而又不赞成灭亡，是形而上学。有灾难，是社会现象。灾变，是宇宙根本的规律。生是突变，死也是突变。由生到死几十年的渐变。假如蒋介石死了。我们都会鼓掌。杜勒斯死了，我们没有掉眼泪。这是因为旧社会事物的灭亡是好事，大家都希望。新事物的产生是好事，新事物的灭亡当然不好。如一九零五举俄国革命的失败。南方我们根据地的丢失，等于现在的苗子被雹子和暴雨打掉，这当然不好，这就发生补苗问题。"

"绿水青山枉自多，华佗无奈小虫何！ 千村薜荔人遗矢，万户萧疏鬼唱歌。 坐地日行八万里，巡天遥看一千河。 牛郎欲问瘟神事，一样悲欢逐逝波。"