Non Fiction Authors From China

"To find positive elements in Mao Zedong's thought and action is not to deny that he was a dictator. Although he constantly warned against indiscriminate resort to imprisonment and execution, he was ruthless when he believed he had to be; the revolutionary consensus was to be protected at all costs from its enemies. Yet to assume because most dictators are paranoics or kleptocrats or closet fascists does not mean that all are. I do not see Mao as another Stalin or another Hitler. I see him more as I see Oliver Cromwell - a man of profoundly democratic instincts forced by circumstances to play the tyrant in defence of his democratic values and ill-served by his major generals."

"M ao Zedong had more power over more people for a longer time than anyone in history. He was also a mass murderer, responsible for more deaths than any leader in history. Mao developed a new form of Communism, founding his revolution on the rural poor. He established a Soviet state in a remote corner of China, then finally united the country through a devastating civil war. From the beginning, he massacred millions of opponents, but the greatest destruction followed his path to build China by making steel in its backyards, tens of millions starved in the aftermath. His Cultural Revolution followed, destroying much of China's heritage. The subject of supreme adulation, Mao died peacefully of old age."

"That was also the case for the whole experience since the foundation of the PRC, when Mao had been Stalin, Lenin, Marx and the First Emperor rolled into one, a figure from the past who was set on being a resolutely modern revolutionary with Chinese characteristics. Though unable to regain Taiwan, he had enjoyed great successes, reunifying the mainland and making it into a major, nuclear-armed global player, which punched above its real weight as it inspired would-be emulators round the world and allowed the leaders of the greatest superpower to come to pay court. Backed by the immense cult of his personality, the charismatic, narcissistic Son of Heaven, who thought himself capable of changing human nature through his mass campaigns, could demand complete loyalty to the cause of revolution as he chose to define it. Nobody and nothing could be excused from utter dedication and readiness to contribute whatever was demanded. Private life meant nothing. People were a blank sheet of paper, mere numbers to be used as the leader saw fit. Maoist autocracy reached heights of totalitarianism unparalleled by Hitler or Stalin, accompanied by massive hypocrisy as the leader who preached simplicity, morality and proletarian values had his favourite fish flown up from Wuhan, dallied with a succession of young ladies, had rarely used villas built for him at great cost, and raked in the royalties from his Little Red Book. A potent terror organization ensured obedience, a huge gulag swallowed up real or imagined opponents, and a massive propaganda machine fed the myths. Yet it is hard to argue that Mao did not inspire adulation. He was a monster, but a monster whom people revered as the symbol of a new China that would wipe away all the suffering and weakness of the hundred years before 1949 and who offered at least a promise of an ‘iron rice bowl’ of food and welfare, however much it was contradicted by his actions."

"Future historians may conclude that Mao’s role was to try to destroy the age-old bifurcation of China between a small educated ruling stratum and the vast mass of common people. We do not yet know how far he succeeded. The economy was developing, but it was left to his successors to create a new political structure."

"An outsider’s understanding of Mao requires a feat of imagination, first to recognize the nature of his supremacy. Mao had two careers, one as rebel leader, one as an updated emperor. He had gained the power of the latter but evidently retained the self-image of the former. Because authority in China came from the top down, as was recognized even in the mass line, once the CCP had taken power its leader became sacrosanct, above all the rest of mankind, not only the object of a cult of veneration but also the acknowledged superior of everyone in the organization. So much of the CCP had been put together by Mao that it could be regarded as his creation, and if he wanted to reform it, that was his privilege. Only if we regard him as a monarch in succession to scores of emperors can we imagine why the leadership of the CCP, trained to be loyal, went along with his piecemeal assault on and destruction of them."

"Mao’s sinification of Marxism may fruitfully be compared with the failure of Taiping Christianity. In the 1850s Hong’s claim to be the younger brother of Jesus soon made him anathema to the foreign source of his vision, the Western missionaries, whom he did not even deal with in his profound arrogance. In short order he made himself both a Christian heretic and within China a foreign subversive, achieving the worst of both worlds. By contrast, Mao, though eventually anathematized by Moscow, succeeded for some time in cooperating with the Comintern, and when he sinified his Marxism, he masked it in a coating of orthodox terminology. Both Hong and Mao started out with only a rudimentary grasp of the foreign doctrine, and both broke free of the domination of foreigners—Hong of the missionaries, Mao of the Comintern. But of course the differences between them far outweigh such similarities."

"The secret of Mao’s success at Yan’an was his flexibility at combining short-term and long-term goals. In the short term he espoused in 1940 the New Democracy as a united-front doctrine that would embrace all the Chinese people who would subscribe to CCP leadership. For the long term, he steadily developed the party organization, including its control over intellectuals. The Yan’an rectification movement of 1942–1944 (more fully described below) established the campaign style of mobilization, including individual isolation, terror, struggle, confession, humiliation, and subservience. Party members would come to know it well and, in time, so would the public. It was one of Mao’s achievements, with roots both in Leninism–Stalinism and in Imperial Confucianism."

"Mao Tse-tung in his turn unified the country as a hero risen from the people, like the founders of the Han and Ming. He went them one better and swam the Yangtze to encourage his people to use and overcome nature. Mao's armies in the 1940s were not a scourge upon the peasantry but avenged their wrongs. He "won the hearts of the people" sufficiently to secure food and soldiers from territorial bases. He attracted college students to staff his administration. His ideology claimed the Mandate of History, if not of Heaven. Once in power, his regime surveyed, classified, and redistributed both the land and the populace. Rising to power with barbarian help, he yet patronized Chinese culture and employed scholars to document the record of the previous regime and point the lesson of its fall. He celebrated the revolution in classical poetry, and his calligraphy adorned public places. His example mightily affected the peripheral states. In Peking in front of the great palace built by the Ming Emperors of the fifteenth century he built a great square, whither came delegations from Southeast Asia and the Western Regions to watch the great processions. Today Mao's body lies embalmed in the center of the square."

"On the verbal level Mao's homely exhortations are studded with Chinese proverb and metaphor, both classical and colloquial. He castigates neutralists who would "sit on top of a mountain to watch the tigers fight" as well as supercilious cadres who think arguing with peasants is like "playing music to a cow." No one who has skirted a pit of nightsoil covered with maggots can fail to understand Mao's abhorrence of what he calls "the deep, stinking cesspool of Chinese reaction." To quote Confucius' sage advice, "think twice," does not necessarily promote Confucianism, but it helps to fit communism into the Chinese landscape. On the level of theory, Mao continued to warp and bend Communist doctrine to fit it to local needs. Stalin had asserted that the Soviet experience which reached socialism through the "dictatorship of the proletariat" offered the only path to socialism, which must be followed by the people's democracies of eastern Europe and presumably by all others. But the CCP after 1949 set up a "people's democratic dictatorship" and claimed that a mere "hegemony of the proletariat" at the head of a united front and a coalition government representing the whole "people," a combination of all "revolutionary classes," could lead China to socialism and moreover could do it by a gradual, persuasive, nonviolent transformation, quite unlike the abrupt and violent change postulated by Lenin and Stalin."

"The simple facts of Mao's career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28 with a dozen others to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land—history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin—no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung's scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao's achievement is almost beyond our comprehension, unless we note the trends which culminated in his career: first, the new growth of Chinese mass nationalism in response to Western and then Japanese invasion; second, the movement of upper-class literati to lead the peasant masses toward a better life; third, Soviet Russia's transmission of its theory and practice of revolution, including united front tactics, through the Communist International (Comintern). Sun Yat-sen got Comintern help only at the end of his career in 1923, two years before his death. Mao and his colleagues began with it. They got started also with Kuomintang help."

"We shall presently argue that there is indeed a great deal to learn from China. For that to happen, however, it is crucial to have a clear view of the roots of Chinese triumphs and successes, and also of the sources of its troubles and failures. It is, of course, first of all necessary to distinguish between - and contrast - the different phases of the Chinese experience, in particular, before and after the economic reforms initiated in 1979. But going beyond that, it is also important to take note of the interdependence between the achievements in the different periods. We argue, in particular, that the accomplishments relating to education, health care, land reforms, and social change in the pre-reform period made significantly positive contributions to the achievements of the post-reform period. This is so in terms of their role not only in sustained high life expectancy and related achievements, but also in providing firm support for economic expansion based on market reforms. It may have been very far from Mao's own intentions to develop literacy and basic health care in ways that would help to promote market-based, internationally-oriented enterprises (though that dialectical contrariness must have some interest for a Marxist theorist). But these structural achievements in the pre-reform period have certainly served as direct and valuable inputs in fostering economic performance in post-reform China. In drawing lessons from China, these apparently contrary interconnections can be particularly important."

"One never left a meeting with him feeling indifferent... He spoke slowly and quietly, weighing each word. He never said anything foolish. There was something sad in him, and he often behaved strangely. Once he arrived unexpect­edly and he told me that Buddhism was a good religion; that though he was a prince, Buddha had done much to improve the lot of the poor. Then, as suddenly as he had arrived, he left. He was always very affectionate with me. [Oriana Fallaci: You're unable to see him as an enemy, isn't that true, Holiness?] Yes. Speaking as a Buddhist, I cannot accept the word enemy. ... Mao Tse-tung is neither cunning nor diplomatic. I told him what his generals were doing in Tibet, and he understood. Perhaps he couldn't stop them. Or perhaps he has changed. I am unable to reconcile the Mao Tse-tung I knew with the Mao Tse-tung of today. He must be in the grip of some madness or some infirmity. The cultural revolution, for example. The name is lovely, but there is no substance: it's the dementia of an old man. I cannot see him in this dementia."

"I suppose some people will say on balance Mao did more good than harm."

"In his enhanced identification with revolutionary youth, Mao no longer found the Party's standard" from the top down" approach to mass mobilization acceptable, and in spontaneously rebuking Liu and Deng and ordering the work teams withdrawn, he authorized a momentous departure from previous traditions of Party-mass linkage. Having ventured this innovation, however, he found it impossible either to allow the rebels to consummate their victory or to permit the entire experiment in spontaneous mobilization to be negated. Instead, from 1968 through 1976 he vacillated, sometimes permitting repression of the "revolutionary masses," sometimes kicking over the traces and permitting the masses to rise in relatively untrammeled anarchy (up to a point); as a result, mass mobilization became devalued either as a mechanism for elite implementation of policy or for the purpose of popular monitoring of deviant elites. Similarly, it was his prescient recognition of the problem of his own aging and debility that led Mao to attempt to designate his own heir apparent well in advance and to encourage the rise of revolutionary successors in a generational sense, but having undertaken such preparations he found them in direct conflict with his own fierce will to live, and thus repeatedly reversed them. On the issues of both mobilization and succession, we have argued that although part of the reason for Mao's oscillatory tendencies has to do with the constraints of a complex political reality, basically he was afflicted by his own crippling ambivalence. The result was an unusually protracted and debilitating crisis of succession."

"Mao's impact on Chinese politics will probably be reinterpreted for as long as that impact is politically significant - and it remains considerable ten years after his death, both among reformers who have redacted their own 'new text' and among the 'leftists' who resist this construal. To Deng Xiaoping and his 'practice faction', the 'living soul' of Mao Zedong Thought consists of the mass line, 'seeking truth from facts', and independence - of class struggle, Mao's 'key link', the less said the better. Mao's notions of a regenerative bourgeoisie, of 'struggle between the two lines' within the Party, of 'continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat', have been essentially repudiated, thereby removing this source of theoretical embarrassment and political anarchism. Mao's deep concern with distributive justice, as translated into economic egalitarianism and a smothering ideological conformity, has likewise gone by the board. The posthumous interpretation of what Mao was wont to call 'self-reliance' (zili gengsheng) thoroughly discounts the old economic indices therefore (eschewal of loans, investment, or very much trade) in favour of 'opening to the outside world', compensating with a more heavy-handed appeal to Chinese nationalism. The post-Mao leadership has thus in effect sought to preserve only those aspects of Mao's legacy which are utterly flexible, while dismissing those to which he attributed immortal importance."

"Mao set about ensnaring his enemies with the precision of a trapper. But once the stage was set and the Cultural Revolution erupted in the summer of 1966, it took on a life of its own, with unintended consequences that even the most consummate strategist could not have anticipated. Mao wished to purge the higher echelons of power, so he could hardly rely on the party machine to get the job done. He turned to young, radical students instead, some of them no older than fourteen, giving them licence to denounce all authority and ‘bombard the headquarters’. But party officials had honed their survival skills during decades of political infighting, and few were about to be outflanked by a group of screaming, self-righteous Red Guards. Many deflected the violence away from themselves by encouraging the youngsters to raid the homes of class enemies, stigmatised as social outcasts. Some cadres even managed to organise their own Red Guards, all in the name of Mao Zedong Thought and the Cultural Revolution. In the parlance of the time, they ‘raised the red flag in order to fight the red flag’. The Red Guards started fighting each other, divided over who the true ‘capitalist roaders’ inside the party were. In some places, party activists and factory workers rallied in support of their besieged leaders. In response, the Chairman urged the population at large to join the revolution, calling on all to ‘seize power’ and overthrow the ‘bourgeois power holders’. The result was a social explosion on an unprecedented scale, as every pent-up frustration caused by years of communist rule was released. There was no lack of people who harboured grievances against party officials. But the ‘revolutionary masses’, instead of neatly sweeping away all followers of the ‘bourgeois reactionary line’, also became divided, as different factions jostled for power and started fighting each other. Mao used the people during the Cultural Revolution; but, equally, many people manipulated the campaign to pursue their own goals. By January 1967 the chaos was such that the army intervened, seeking to push through the revolution and bring the situation under control by supporting the ‘true proletarian left’. As different military leaders supported different factions, all of them equally certain they represented the true voice of Mao Zedong, the country slid into civil war. Still, the Chairman prevailed. He was cold and calculating, but also erratic, whimsical and fitful, thriving in willed chaos. He improvised, bending and breaking millions along the way. He may not have been in control, but he was always in charge, relishing a game in which he could constantly rewrite the rules. Periodically he stepped in to rescue a loyal follower or, contrariwise, to throw a close colleague to the wolves. A mere utterance of his decided the fates of countless people, as he declared one or another faction to be ‘counter-revolutionary’. His verdict could change overnight, feeding a seemingly endless cycle of violence in which people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the Chairman."

"We know that Mao was the key architect of the Great Leap Forward, and thus bears the main responsibility for the catastrophe that followed. He had to work hard to push through his vision, bargaining, cajoling, goading, occasionally tormenting or persecuting his colleagues. Unlike Stalin, he did not drag his rivals into a dungeon to have them executed, but he did have the power to remove them from office, terminating their careers – and the many privileges which came with a top position in the party. The campaign to overtake Britain started with Chairman Mao, and it ended when he grudgingly allowed his colleagues to return to a more gradual approach in economic planning a few years later. But he would never have been able to prevail if Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, the next two most powerful party leaders, had acted against him. They, in turn, whipped up support from other senior colleagues, as chains of interests and alliances extended all the way down to the village – as is documented here for the first time. Ferocious purges were carried out, as lacklustre cadres were replaced with hard, unscrupulous men who trimmed their sails to benefit from the radical winds blowing from Beijing."

"I should remind you that Chairman Mao dedicated most of his life to China, that he saved the party and the revolution in their most critical moments, that, in short, his contribution was so great that, without him, the Chinese people would have had a much harder time finding the right path out of the darkness. We also shouldn't forget that it was Chairman Mao who combined the teachings of Marx and Lenin with the realities of Chinese history—that it was he who applied those principles, creatively, not only to politics but to philosophy, art, literature, and military strategy. Yes, before the 1960s—or, better, up until the late 1950s—some of Chairman Mao's ideas were, for the most part, correct. Furthermore, many of his principles brought us victory and allowed us to gain power. Then, unfortunately, in the last few years of his life, he committed many grave errors—the Cultural Revolution, above all. And much disgrace was brought upon the party, the country, the people."

"The consequences of Mao’s actions were inevitably in proportion to the prodigious power he exercised, and the enormous population he ruled over. As a unifier and modernizer his achievements were immense, but his errors caused appalling suffering on a scale that is difficult to grasp. His utopian dreams, his periodic refusal to engage with reality, his ruthlessness, and his determination to win imposed terrible suffering on the Chinese people and cost millions of them their lives. He was ready to accept huge costs because he believed that suffering and death were inevitable in the pursuit of his cause. Mao’s revolution improved life for those who survived it, bringing the economic development, education, and modernization on which subsequent progress was built. It also reunified China and made the country a force to be reckoned with in the world. He left an indelible mark on history."

"Mao’s life and his character are difficult to sum up because he was a complex man who behaved in contradictory ways. He embraced an imported modernizing ideology yet remained profoundly Chinese in his outlook. He was an idealist who produced inspirational writings but was prepared to accept suffering and death on an unimaginable scale to achieve his aims. He was a despot who proclaimed that ‘it is right to rebel’. He was an ideologue who wrote poetry. Mao recognized the contradictory nature of his own character when he wrote he combined a ‘kingly’ disposition demanding to dominate and suborn, with a ‘monkey spirit’ that urged him to run riot and throw all into disorder. Henry Kissinger saw the kingly Mao, observing that he ‘distilled raw concentrated willpower’ and ‘exuded in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail’. These qualities contributed to the survival of the communist forces during the period of armed struggle and their remarkable victory. Once China was united, however, they were often harmful. Mao used his immense prestige to intimidate his colleagues and get his own way. He became increasingly autocratic, refused to listen to those who disagreed with him, and stubbornly enforced bad decisions. He bears responsibility for the horrors of the famine brought about by the Great Leap Forward, and for the tardy response to it which produced a death toll of tens of millions. His increasing tendency to interpret any criticism as a challenge to his leadership so intimidated his colleagues that in his last years many feared to express opinions at all. His Cultural Revolution caused immense suffering and social and economic disruption, yet until his death all leaders had to pay tribute to its achievements."