Poets From China

"Today I sat before the cliff Until the mist and rainbows disappeared I followed the emerald stream Explored a thousand tiers of green cliffs In the morning my spirit rests among white clouds At night a bright moon floats in the sky I am free of the busy world There is not a doubt in my heart or a worry to disturb my mind"

"I'm happy in the every day Way Among the mist and vines and caves The wilderness is boundless My companions are lazy white clouds There are roads but they do not reach the world My mind has come to rest and nothing can stir my thought On a bed of rock I sit alone in the night While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain"

"Cold Mountain is hidden in white clouds It's peaceful to be cut off from the busy world I use dry grass for cushions in my mountain home My only light is the round moon My bed is the rock beside the green pool Tigers and deer are my companions I delight in this happy peaceful life Forever beyond the world of men"

"I dreamed a place where I have come to dwell Cold Mountain says it all Monkeys scream, the valley fog is cold My door blends with the color of the peaks I gather leaves and thatch a hut among the pines Dig a pond and lead a trickle from the brook Long ago I left the world behind Eating ferns I pass the years in peace"

"I settled at Cold Mountain long ago Already it seems like ages Wandering free I roam the woods and streams Lingering to watch things be themselves Men don't come this far into the mountains Where white clouds gather and billow Dry grass makes a comfortable mattress The blue sky is a fine quilt Happy to pillow my head on the rock I leave heaven and earth to endless change"

"I love the joy of mountains Wandering free with no concerns Every day I find food for this old body There's leisure for thinking, nothing to do Often I carry an ancient book Sometimes I climb a rock pavilion To look down a thousand foot precipice Overhead are swirling clouds A cold moon chilly cold My body feels like a flying crane"

"Cold Mountain cold Ice freezes rock Mountains are green Snow is white Sun shines bright Every thing melt Every thing warm Warms old man"

"Once, my back wedded to the solid cliff, I sat silently, bathed in the full moon's light. I counted there ten thousand shapes, None with substance save the moon's own glow. The pristine mind is empty as the moon, I thought, and like the moon, freely shines. By what I knew of moon I knew the mind, Each mirror to each, profound as stone."

"Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams Here lives an idle man In the daytime wandering over green mountains At night coming home to sleep by the cliff Swiftly springs and autumns pass But my mind is at peace, clear and free By now I need nothing to lean on To be still as the waters of the autumn river"

"Cold Mountain Son Forever not change I live alone Beyond life death"

"There is a Precious Mountain Even the Seven Treasures cannot compare A cold moon rises through the pines Layer upon layer of bright clouds How many towering peaks? How many wandering miles? The valley streams run clear Happiness forever!"

"All the people in the Kuo-ch'ing monastery— They say, "Han-shan is an idiot." "Am I really an idiot:" I reflect. But my reflections fail to solve the question: for I myself do not know who the self is, And how can others know who I am?"

"Often sit alone happy happy Thoughts somewhat far gone gone Clouds circle mountain soft soft Wind through valley swish swish Ape in tree bounce bounce Bird in forest chirp chirp Time turns hair gray gray Winter is here sad sad"

"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."

"In Chinese and In English: Various Types of Mao Zedong's Writings"

"In Mao a politician’s grasp of the historical moment was coupled with a poet’s whimsy, and it was often through some improvised flourish that he would unveil his program. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the top brass in Beijing tried to clamp down on popular protests, Mao did not use his supreme authority as party chairman to set his colleagues straight. Instead, he employed the very same approach as the masses by writing a big-character poster of his own, entitled “Bombard the Headquarters,” protesting that “some leading comrades” had adopted “the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie … encircling and suppressing revolutionaries” and “stifling opinions different from their own.” You can imagine people’s reaction: what can it mean when the great leader Chairman Mao has gone so far as to write a big-character poster? It can mean only one thing—that Chairman Mao is in the same boat as ordinary people like themselves! No wonder, then, that the great proletarian Cultural Revolution soon engulfed China with the speed of an unquenchable wildfire. Historically, emperors have always cut the kind of figure and spoken the kind of language expected of an emperor, no matter how exalted or how humble their origins. Mao was the only exception. After he became leader, he often acted quite out of keeping with accepted norms, taking his comrades in the Communist Party leadership completely by surprise. Mao understood very well how to whip the masses into a frenzy, and by appearing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and greeting fanatical “revolutionary students” and “revolutionary masses” there, he impelled the high tide to ever greater heights."

"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."

"There were big differences between Mao during and after the revolution—I talked about this in my book The Historical Process of the Sinicization of Marxism. The most important distinction is that before the founding of the PRC, as Mao himself said, both he and the other leaders of the Communist Party were always "in a state of fear and trembling, as if treading on thin ice," fearing that the slightest misstep, or any strategic error, would send the Party into a deep abyss. This was based on Mao's principle of absolute strength, because in those days the Communist Party had too many enemies, and the situation was ever-changing, so a slight mistake could indeed cause big problems. Thus prior to 1949, Mao Zedong was always a cautious person, not very radical, not so "left." In fact it was quite the opposite, and in traditional party history, the Party had experienced three “left deviations.” At the time, everyone was left, and Mao Zedong was someone who resisted and criticized the left, and thus was more to the right. Indeed Mao was always regarded as a representative of rightist and conservative tendencies by the representatives of the Komintern and the CCP Central Committee. At the time, the basic policy of the leaders of the CCP, including the representatives of the Komintern in China, was to attack, so it was natural that there were many conflicts between the two, and it was inevitable that Mao Zedong would be under pressure. The biggest change in Mao Zedong after the founding of the PRC was that he was no longer cautious. It is not wrong to say that he was arrogant, but to be specific, what happened was that Mao Zedong's judgment of power differentials was increasingly wide of the mark."

"The feeling is shared by some older people. Amid today's chronic corruption and widening income disparity, Mao as a megalomaniac who launched the Cultural Revolution and other violent political campaigns during their youth seems very distant from China’s present-day reality. Many of China's elderly, especially those from the bottom social strata who did not benefit much from the country's economic boom, miss Mao’s reign and have become nostalgic for the Mao era, which they have romanticized as more socially fair and morally pure. Mao represents a simpler time before China became so money-obsessed and people began to believe in nothing but personal gain. In a strange twist of fate, although Mao eliminated all form of private capital in China, he now enjoys a deified status among many of the self-made rich elite because, according to one account, they admire Mao’s tenacity and his ability to turn weakness into strength. They worship Mao as a God. In a visit to Mao’s hometown, Shaoshan, in 2014, I was amazed to watch local wealthy Chinese in flashy Mercedes hire uniformed guards to march with them to lay flowers and wreaths in front of a giant copper status of Mao. Mao is not dead—his ghost continues to haunt China."

"Communism was to be China’s weapon for modernization, according to the party’s propaganda. It would make the country rich and strong. But Mao’s agenda went further than the creation of a modern, wealthy country. He wanted to transform Chinese society and people’s ways of thinking. It was “old China” that was to blame for the country’s weakness, Mao thought, more than even British, Japanese, or American imperialists. He liked to compare traditional, Confucian forms of thinking to women with bound feet, hobbling along while being disdained by others. His “new China,” on the other hand, should be youthful, progressive, and militant. Those who stood in the way were “pests” to be exterminated; landlords, priests, and capitalists were holding China back on purpose, in order to serve their own interests. They had to go, as did all those forces that blocked the new society the Communists would create. For Mao this was a millennial struggle. It was China’s last chance to redeem itself and retake its rightful position in the world."

"I often heard peasants talk about the Great Leap Forward as though it was some sort of apocalypse that they had by some miracle escaped... We walked along the village... Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children... What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents—flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man "whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime that he had committed in assassinating democracy, had launched the Great Leap Forward, and obliged thousands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real killers were Mao Zedong and his companions."

"He thus played the role of China’s Kemal Ataturk as well as her Lenin — and even, in strict truth, of her Stalin. Whereas Lenin enjoyed only a few short years of creative power after 1917, Mao followed thirty years of struggle to establish a Communist state with almost thirty years of power to build socialism in China. The challenge came less from the anti-Communists than from opponents and rivals within the Communist Party itself. Much of Mao’s energy was expended in unnecessary battles with comrades whose basic ideals he shared."

"There are many alternatives to thinking of Mao as a fiend who was China’s Hitler. One useful way to think of current assessments of Mao is a bit like American views of Andrew Jackson. Though admittedly far from perfect, the comparison is based on the fact that Jackson is remembered both as someone who played a significant role in the development of a political organization (the Democratic Party) that still has many partisans and as someone responsible for brutal policies toward Native Americans that are now often referred to as genocidal. Both men are thought of as having done terrible things, yet this does not necessarily prevent them from being used as positive symbols. And Jackson still appears on $20 bills, even though Americans now tend to view as heinous the institution of slavery, of which he was a passionate defender, and the early 19th-century military campaigns against Native Americans, in which he took part. At times Jackson, for all his flaws, is invoked as representing an egalitarian strain within the American democratic tradition, a self-made man of the people who rose to power via straight talk and was not allied with moneyed elitists. Mao stands for something roughly similar. Workers in state-owned industries who in recent years have been laid off understandably associate Mao with a time when laborers got more respect, and he is remembered by some as a Communist leader who, for all his mistakes, never forgot his roots in the countryside and never viewed himself as belonging to a caste that was superior to ordinary folk."

"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."

"Indeed, in China's historical context, modernization and the rejection of rationalization have proceeded together, and this has produced profound historical contradictions. For example, on the one hand, Mao Zedong centralized power to establish a modern state system; on the other hand, he launched the Cultural Revolution to destroy that system. On the one hand, he used People's Communes and collectives to promote China's economic development; on the other hand, he designed the social distribution system to avoid the severe social inequalities of capitalist modernization. On the one hand, he used the nationalization of the economy to subsume society under the state goal of modernization, in the process stripping individuals of all political autonomy; on the other hand, he was horrified and pained at the use of state mechanisms to suppress the autonomy of "the masses." In sum, inherent in China's socialist modernization experience is a historical antimodernity. This paradox has cultural roots, yet it is infinitely more important to search for an explanation in the dualsided historical discourse from which Chinese modernization emerged (namely, the search for modernization and reflections on the devastating consequences of Western modernization)."

"The feelings of ordinary Chinese toward Mao run the gamut from nostalgia to fury, admiration to disdain. There continue to be long lines to view his body, which remains on display in the lavish mausoleum in the center of Tiananmen Square that was built soon after his death. But not everyone who goes to look at him does so in a spirit of reverence (it has long been said that there are those who go just to make sure that the tyrant they feared is really dead, and there are many who go simply as tourists), though some definitely do go to pay homage to a man they still think of as a kind of deity. Most, no doubt, have a mindset not unlike that which citizens of today’s France might have when visiting Napoleon’s tomb, considering Mao a person of undeniable importance in their country’s past, who had his dark side and also made significant contributions to the nation, without which it would not be what it is now."

"Having defeated Japan and Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s, he went on to declare war against the earth in the 1950s and against human nature in the 1960s. He tried for the extremes — of thorough-going free speech in the Hundred Flowers, of personal collectivism in the Great Leap Forward, of integral equality between leaders and led in the Cultural Revolution. In each case he failed, because his Party would not support him, but in each case there was some residue of the experiment which survived in China and made its Communism, its national life, distinctive. The modified people’s commune is now entrenched as a vehicle for China’s agrarian development in all its aspects — political, social and economic. The person behind this achievement, however, remains inscrutable. A man of enormous energy and drive, fuelled by a consuming hatred of authority and resentment of being rejected on grounds of breeding or education, he stormed through life detached and seemingly invulnerable to its blows. He persuaded many of his closest kinfolk and friends to join his revolutionary cause, only to see them die in the cruel fight for its success. From his succession of marriages only an occasional glimpse of affection is revealed. He was loving with his children while they were infants, but cavalier and insensitive once they were adult. In the end no one gained his heart: the human emotions were for him subordinated to the lonely quest for power."

"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."

"Mao Zedong left China in a quiet crisis, an unsettled state and society very much in flux. After the arrest of the officials on whom Mao depended to launch the Cultural Revolution and fight to preserve its legacy, there was little doubt that the Cultural Revolution, and the core ideas that had inspired it, would be repudiated. There was obvious popular yearning for social and political stability and a rise in living standards. In many ways, the devastation that Mao left in his wake gave his successors the opportunity for a new start. So much of the Soviet-inherited institutions had been smashed and had yet to be rebuilt. There was great uncertainty about the direction that China should take."

"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 is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mao’s contributions to China after 1956 were unsuccessful by his own standards and destructive in ways that he surely did not imagine. During both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the destructive aspects of Mao’s initiatives far outweighed any outcomes that could be construed as positive. The Cultural Revolution succeeded in its agenda of destroying the structure of China’s party-state, and in sidelining the many officials who might have harbored inner doubts about Mao’s vision, but it created nothing lasting in its place. During the Cultural Revolution Mao tried repeatedly to put a positive face on each unexpected and unwanted development, asserting that out of disorder a greater order would eventually be born. But the public celebrations of the “great victories” of the Cultural Revolution, accompanied by the escalating intensity of the cult of Mao, all turned out to be as hollow as Mao’s earlier insistence that the accomplishments of the Great Leap were “nine fingers” and the shortcomings “one finger.” As Mao’s health failed during his final two years, he appeared to resign himself to the fact that his legacy was far from assured, and that powerful forces in the leadership and in society at large were arrayed against it."

"Today, half a century after the launch of the Cultural Revolution, Mao has been reduced to a benign cultural icon. His image is displayed on China’s national currency, replacing the workers, peasants, tractors, and steam shovels of the Mao era. His face adorns the ubiquitous badges, posters, and other artifacts produced in the hundreds of millions during the era of the Mao cult, now marketed everywhere to tourists. Theme restaurants with Cultural Revolution–era decor entertain diners with songs and dances from the Red Guards and “loyalty to Mao” era. “New left” intellectuals, dissatisfied with the corruption and inequality spawned by China’s turn toward market-oriented state capitalism, hark back to the Mao era for its positive accomplishments; ordinary citizens reflect with nostalgia on the Mao era as a simpler, less money conscious, more egalitarian, and less corrupt time. The party leadership celebrated the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth by emphasizing the positive accomplishments of his reign, seeking to solidify the party’s legitimacy, celebrate its history, and reinforce national pride. These views of Mao, and of the Mao era, are very different from the ones that prevailed in the late 1970s, as China began the long process of recovering from the damage of his misrule. They are based on highly selective historical memory and a great deal of forgetting."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Mao’s sin was less corruption than hubris, his belief that he was “alone with the masses” and had a special understanding of the needs of the revolution and the Chinese people. No one and no costs should stand in the way of his pursuit of those visions, and he could not accept responsibility when that pursuit led to disastrous consequences, which, in his view, were ultimately someone else’s fault. Mao Zedong was only able to do this because of the absolute power he had accumulated through the combination of his record of revolutionary success, the centralizing forces of the Leninist party organization that he built, and the authoritarian strain in traditional Chinese political culture."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"From early on in his career Mao was a visionary, a strategic genius, a realistic revolutionary, a nationalist, and a dedicated Marxist. From early days he also saw himself as a leader of great destiny, and he was always acutely attentive to his personal power, but it was power for great purposes. Mao could also capture the popular and elite imagination, whether for the universally approved “standing up” to foreign imperialists and national unification, or, before everything went wrong, the Great Leap’s pursuit of unprecedented economic growth. For all his talent, Mao’s successes before 1949 owed much to circumstances, notably the Japanese invasion and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. He also built successfully on Marxist ideology and the organizational backbone of a Leninist party. After 1949, Mao initially benefited from an already tested program for statebuilding based on the Soviet model. Mao’s great achievement was to enlarge upon these circumstances by developing broad-based party unity, a form of quasi-collective leadership allowing significant leadership discussion, and a pragmatic, often cautious approach to policy. Together this produced the unimaginable victory of 1949, and also sustained the party’s further successes to the mid-1950s. Paradoxically, the seeds of later disasters can be found in the victory of 1949. Most fundamentally, Mao’s power, while uncontested within the party as long as successes continued during the struggle for national power, became unchallengeable upon coming to power and would remain so for rest of his life. His emperor-like authority was unmistakable in the Gao Gang case and the handling of agricultural cooperativization, even as he maintained the semblance of collective leadership. In many senses, leadership politics under the Chairman was like the highly personalistic court politics of imperial China that could be altered into more arbitrary forms at any time of the emperor’s choosing. For much of the initial period up to 1956, Mao left alone certain areas (notably the economy) in which he recognized his limitations, but his ability to intervene was clear."