Anti Fascists

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"Mao's socialism is both an ideology of modernization and a critique of Euro-American capitalist modernization. But this critique is not a critique of modernization itself. Quite the contrary-it is a standpoint based on a revolutionary ideology and nationalism that produced a critique of the capitalist form or stage of modernization. For this reason, on the level of values and history, Mao Zedong's socialism is a type of modern anticapitalist modernization theory. From the perspective of its impact on the state, Mao's elimination of the "three differences" in actual social praxis eliminated the possibility of the existence of the autonomous categories of the individual and the state, from which arose an unprecedentedly hegemonic bureaucratic state."

"The things that Mao stood against—a leadership that is concerned with stability, with economic development, with security, with improving the standards of living of the Chinese people… those are the ultimate values for the leadership today, and Mao denigrated those ideas throughout his life. He did not want stability. He thought that if China was left to develop under stable dictatorship of the party, the party members would set themselves apart from ordinary people, would have a better lifestyle, would grasp privileges for themselves. He saw this happening in the Soviet Union, and he called this “revisionism.” He had this strange idea that it was capitalism or reversion to capitalism; it actually was the opposite of capitalism. What he foresaw as a future of China that he disapproved of was a bureaucratic dictatorship based on total state control and the privileges that inevitably came from that. If you understand in a clear-eyed fashion what Mao stood for and what he tried to fight for in his life, you realize that China’s leaders today—whatever their reverential attitude towards him is—they are doing everything that he fought against during his life. I think people in China are very fortunate that that is the case. In many ways, the polite and semi-worshipful attitude towards Mao by the current leadership really glosses over absolutely fundamental differences between China in that period and the leaders today. Another way in which it helps us to understand China today—and this is related to the campaign against corruption and all the similar things that people write about, things that have gone wrong in China under its market reforms—is that party officials (and I said this in the first few minutes) were under extraordinary scrutiny. They were under constant threat of being removed from power, criticized, even being put in prison for disobeying party policy. After Mao’s death, the party relaxed this kind of super-aggressive, almost punitive attitude towards party officials, and gave them a great deal more space to do what they wanted. One of the results, in the context of a market economy, is that they’ve enriched themselves. What’s interesting is this is more like capitalism, but it’s very different from what Mao said was capitalism back in the 1960s and ’70s. Another way in which it helps us to understand China today is that the relaxation of the control over party officials, the relaxation of the campaigns that were so damaging and bloody in China in that period, has led to an exacerbation of the abuse of power and the use of people’s positions to enrich themselves. As much as Mao was worried about this in his life, that was almost absent. People today look back on the Mao period, I think with some justification, as one where party officials were not as corrupt as they are today. They may have abused their power somewhat, but they led very simple, even spartan lives. No one amassed fortunes. Party officials today can travel abroad; they fill up the business and first class cabins of international air flights; they come here and they buy real estate. They’re part of the international jet set, the international elite. There was nothing like this when Mao was alive, and I don’t think he could even have imagined that this was a possibility."

"Most of what Mao tried to do backfired on him. The central organizing theme of the book, starting with chapter 7 and going through the very end, is that each time Mao tried a bold initiative, it had outcomes that must have surprised him—certainly [that] he did not welcome—and he repeatedly changed his tactics and ran into new problems. In the end—although this isn’t explicitly argued—I think you could probably draw the conclusion from the story that Mao lost his way in the end and ended up doing things that did enormous harm to China. He became so fixated on maintaining his vision that he lost sight of the damage that it was causing the country. What’s remarkable about him as a leader of a communist country is that he’s the only one who ever fomented rebellion against the state that he’d set up. If he had only wanted to get rid of officials who disagreed with him, he didn’t need to do that. I think that’s the thing that is really most remarkable about Mao as a leader. The other thing that I think people should walk away [with] after reading the book is that the period from 1949 through 1976 was really the core of the Chinese revolution. We tend to think of revolutions as being over when a new government takes power. But in China, that was just the beginning. China had not changed very much in 1949. The party had only controlled limited areas of the countryside. It ran no cities. It had this extremely rapid military conquest of China. The revolution in China was not one where ordinary people rose up under the leadership of guerrilla forces and took power in the cities. The Communist Party was able in the late 1940s to create a large modern army in Manchuria, and it basically rolled south and then west across China. It was a military conquest. So basically, the transformation of China that took place—the revolution—really began in 1949 and ’50, after this army took power."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Mao left a China that was badly broken, and it would take an enormous effort to fix it. The devastation and backwardness that he left in his wake prompted his successors to rethink the nation’s trajectory—indeed, it was a historic opportunity. When they finally seized this opportunity, they rejected Mao’s core ideas and even the antipathy to market mechanisms and private enterprise at the core of the Soviet economic system that had been sacrosanct in China since the 1950s. When the dust finally cleared, the new model would be the export-oriented developmental states of East Asia, whose features would be grafted onto the stock of a rebuilt and revitalized Communist Party. A reform of this magnitude could only gain traction if leaders were forced to admit that something in China had gone seriously wrong. This was not the legacy that Mao had hoped to leave. It was in fact the opposite of what he intended."

"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."

"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."

"What explains the obedience Mao received from the elite during the last years of his life, an obedience that extended beyond carrying out explicit orders inimical to elite interests to shaping positions according to expectations of the Chairman’s wishes, and holding sacrosanct his “line” even as he slipped into a coma? The answer lies in a combination of fear, belief, and moral authority, with both fear and belief basically reflecting moral authority. Fear was at root a fear of being off side with Mao, with possible consequences, varying by period, of loss of influence and position, or of mortal threat under the most dire circumstances, as well as of personal inadequacy in not being able to keep up with the Chairman’s thinking."

"In critical respects, this Mao-dominated universe can be considered the Chairman’s extended family. Mao’s patriarchal approach to rule was, of course, reflective of a deeply patriarchal society, but it was even more fundamentally a consequence of a long and successful revolutionary struggle. As with all other founders of indigenous communist regimes, after achieving power Mao’s position was unchallengeable until his death: he was truly the father of his country in the eyes of his followers."

"Power corrupts, and, in many cases, absolute power makes you really horny. Clinton, Chirac, Mao, Mitterrand."

"Mao's beginnings were commonplace, his education episodic, his talents unexceptional: yet he possessed a relentless energy and a ruthless self-confidence that led him to become one of the world's most powerful rulers. He was one of the toughest and strangest in China's long tradition of formidable rulers who wielded extraordinary powers neither wisely nor well, and yet were able to silence effective criticism for years or even decades by the force of their own character and the strength of their acolytes and guards. Mao need not have done what he did, and it was he alone who ensured that his visions of social and economic change became hopelessly enmeshed with violence and fear. It was his rhetoric and his inflexible will that led to the mobilization of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, who - even when they wished to - could find no way to halt the cataract of energy swirling around them."

"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

"After a moment of silence Mao said that he had, as I knew, begun life as a primary school teacher. He had then had no thought of fighting wars. Neither had he thought of becoming a Communist. He was more or less a democratic personage such as myself. Later on, he sometimes wondered by what chance combination of reasons he had become interested in founding the Chinese Communist Party. Anyway, events did not move in accordance with the individual human will. What mattered was that China had been oppressed by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. “Man makes his own history, but he makes it in accordance with his environment,” I quoted. “You have fundamentally changed the environment in China. Many wonder what the younger generation bred under easier conditions will do. What do you think about it.” He also could not know, he said. He doubted that anyone could be sure. There were two possibilities. There could be continued development of the revolution toward Communism, the other possibility was that youth could negate the revolution, and give a poor performance: make peace with imperialism, bring the remnants of the Chiang Kai-shek clique back to the mainland, and take a stand beside the small percentage of counter-revolutionaries still in the country. Of course he did not hope for counter-revolution. But future events would be decided by future generations, and in accordance with conditions we could not foresee. Mao Tse-tung walked me through the doorway and, despite my protests, saw me to my car, where he stood alone for a moment, coatless in the sub-zero Peking night, to wave me farewell in the traditional manner of that ancient cultured city. I saw no security guards around the entrance, nor can I now recall having seen even one armed bodyguard in our vicinity all evening. As the car drove away I looked back and watched Mao brace his shoulders and slowly retrace his steps, leaning heavily on the arm of an aide, into the Great Hall of the People."

"I think my first impression – dominantly one of native shrewdness – was probably correct. And yet Mao was an accomplished scholar of Classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy, and military and political strategist of considerable genius."

"[visiting Mao Zedong's mausoleum and seeing Mao's embalmed corpse] Aww... Look at him sleeping... He's like a little angel, that killed 50 million people. [to Mao (while speaking in a baby voice)] Yes you are! Yes you are!"

"Mao ruled for twenty-seven years. If the past, as he believed, is indeed a mirror for the present, will the twenty-first century see a third Chinese golden age, for which the Maoist dictatorship will have opened the way? Or will it be his fate to be remembered as a flawed colossus, who brought fundamental change to China on a scale that only a handful of others have achieved in the past several millennia, but at a terrible price, and then failed to follow through? History is laid down slowly in China. One day, perhaps, Mao's shadow will loom less large. His name will recede into a more distant, less threatening past, to join the shades of other founding statesmen: Peter the Great, the tyrant who laid the foundations of modern Russia; George Washington, slave-owner and humanist; Napoleon, ‘the greatest criminal in French history’, as one French intellectual put it; Oliver Cromwell, iconoclast and regicide; a handful of others. But the regime Mao founded may well last longer than most Westerners wish to think. In Asia, elements of a market economy have coexisted for thousands of years with authoritarian rule. Certainly China will change, but not necessarily as the rest of the world expects."

"Stalin cared about what his subjects did (or might do); Hitler, about who they were. Mao cared about what they thought. China's landlords were eliminated as a class (and many of them were killed in the process); but they were not exterminated as a people, as the Jews were in Germany. Even as his policies caused the deaths of millions, Mao never entirely lost his belief in the efficacy of thought reform and the possibility of redemption. ‘Heads are not like chives’, he said. ‘They do not grow back again.’ What was achieved at the cost of such bloodshed and pain? Mao's own judgement, that his two major accomplishments were his victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the launching of the Cultural Revolution, offers a partial answer, though not quite in the sense he had intended. The one reunified China after a century of division and restored its sovereignty; the other gave the Chinese people such an overdose of ideological fervour as to immunise them for generations to come. Mao's tragedy and his grandeur were that he remained to the end in thrall to his own revolutionary dreams. Where Confucius had taught harmony – the doctrine of the mean – Mao preached endless class struggle, until it became a cage from which neither he nor the Chinese people could escape. He freed China from the straitjacket of its Confucian past. But the bright Red future he promised turned out to be a sterile purgatory."

"The achievements of Mao's great contemporaries, Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle, are measured against those of their peers. Even Stalin built on Lenin's accomplishments. Mao's life was played out on an altogether vaster canvas. He was unquestioned leader of almost a quarter of mankind, inhabiting an area the size of Europe as far as the Urals. He wielded powers equalled only by the most awesome of Chinese emperors in an era when China's history was so compressed that changes which, in the West, had taken centuries to accomplish, occurred in a single generation. In Mao's lifetime, China made the leap from semi-colony to Great Power; from millennial autarky to socialist state; from despoiled victim of imperialist plunder to Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, complete with H-bombs, surveillance satellites and ICBMS. Mao had an extraordinary mix of talents: he was visionary, statesman, political and military strategist of genius, philosopher and poet. Foreigners might sniff. In a memorable put-down, Arthur Waley, the great translator of Tang dynasty poetry, described Mao's poems as ‘not as bad as Hitler's paintings, but not as good as Churchill's’. In the judgement of another Western art historian, his calligraphy, while ‘strikingly original, betraying a flamboyant egotism, to the point of arrogance, if not extravagance … [and] a total disregard for the formal discipline of the brush’, was ‘essentially inarticulate’. Most Chinese scholars disagree. Mao's poems, like his brushwork, seized the tormented, restless spirit of his age. To these gifts, he brought a subtle, dogged mind, awe-inspiring charisma and fiendish cleverness."

"Even to his closest comrades, Mao was hard to fathom. His spirit, in Smedley's words, ‘dwelt within itself, isolating him’. His personality inspired loyalty, not affection. He combined a fierce temper and infinite patience; vision, and an almost pedantic attention to detail; an inflexible will, and extreme subtlety; public charisma, and private intrigue."

"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."

"The Chinese revolution is indisputably one of the most important events of twentieth-century history, and its doctrine, known as Maoism, has accordingly become one of the chief elements in the contemporary war of ideas, irrespective of its intellectual value. Measured by European standards the ideological documents of Maoism, and especially the theoretical writings of Mao himself, appear in fact extremely primitive and clumsy, sometimes even childish; in comparison, even Stalin gives the impression of a powerful theorist. However, judgements of this kind must be made with some caution. Those who, like the present writer, do not know Chinese and have only a scanty and superficial knowledge of China's history and culture doubtless cannot grasp the full meaning of these texts, the various associations and allusions perceptible to a reader acquainted with Chinese thought; in this respect one must rely on the views of experts, who, however, do not always agree."

"The Cultural Revolution that broke out in 1966 is significant in the context of a discussion of Mao’s thought for several reasons. First (and as with the theory and practice of the Hundred Flowers movement), Mao indicated his willingness to depart from a central principle of Leninism by not only bunching an attack on the Party but by mobilizing non-Party elements as the spearhead of that attack. For Lenin, a communist party represented the vanguard of the working class, its most advanced and politically conscious section. In the Leninist conception, there is no suggestion that the vanguard party might itself become an agent of retrogressive ideas, policies, and actions that could threaten the attainment of the revolutionary goals of the working class. Mao, however, made no assumption that the Party was above and beyond the struggles within society; contradictions and ideologies of a class nature were inevitably reflected within the Party, and it could thus be inhabited by negative and counter-revolutionary elements. Such elements had to be struggled against, and if their position within the Party was so powerful that they could not be dislodged by an intra-party struggle, then it would be necessary to mobilize progressive forces from the wider community to defeat them. During the years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao led a coalition of nonparty elements (students, youth, the military, sections of the working class) in his attack on those within the Party deemed to have taken “the capitalist road.” However, while Mao demonstrated a rather different appreciation of the vanguard status of the communist patty than had Lenin, he would not, despite its widespread failings, permit its complete destruction."

"It is clear that Mao regarded a sinified Marxism as a union between Marxism’s universal laws and the particular “laws” that described the characterizing regularities of the Chinese context. How did he perceive this theoretical system as a “guide to action”? It must be stressed that Mao did not regard it as incorporating the formulae for automatic and necessarily correct policy responses to the various political, economic, and military contingencies that might arise in the course of revolution. The function of a sinified Marxism was to facilitate as accurate an interpretation of the Chinese context as possible. With this information, the CCP’s leaders would be in a position to formulate strategies and tactics commensurate with the objective possibilities and limitations of the concrete situation. Such strategies and tactics could only be regarded as appropriate in their conception rather than as necessarily correct. Having a clear and hopefully accurate picture of the historical situation would act as a guide to action by ruling out inappropriate policy responses and presenting certain strategies and tactics as preferable or even obvious. Here again, the influence of the inductive method is revealed in Mao’s method of formulating policies: Under no circumstances could one arbitrarily formulate strategies or tactics a priori, but only via a careful analysis of the characteristics of a historically specific situation."

"Mao thus perceived “politics” as a vitally important factor in the unfolding of history and the realization of historical goals. However, he did not perceive “politics” as autonomous from other historically generative elements within the “economic” realm of society’s “basis” (the forces and relations of production); rather, the effectivity of “politics” to accelerate the historical process was circumscribed by the “economic” realm, just as the further development of the “economic” realm was dependent on developments in the political realm. This mutual interdependence within the “basis” of society indicated the importance of political organization and action, but indicated also the objective limitations interdependence created. Guided by this framework, Mao was prepared to exploit the possibility for political action to its limit but was, during the Yan’an period, very mindful of not rushing ahead of the constraints of the objective situation. It was, nevertheless, on the possibility of exploiting the potential of “politics” to achieve short-term historical goals that Mao premised his confidence in the realization of “inevitable” long-term historical goals."

"Mao was thus not content to lead a purely rural revolution, and he strove where possible to alter the sociological composition of the Party and military in favor of the working class and during the period of the Jiangxi Soviet to construct its embryonic state institutions in ways that expressed the power of the working class. While he put great store in the peasants as the “main force" of the Chinese Revolution, he was adamant that it would not be their consciousness which dictated the long-term direction of the revolution, for this could only serve to reinforce economic, political, and cultural impediments to the modernist transformation of China's society. Mao’s frequent references from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s to the necessity of working class leadership of the Chinese Revolution are therefore signposts indicating not only his conception of the future course and strategy of the revolution but the future of China itself. These signposts are more than sufficient to problematize the conventional accounts of Mao’s approach to China’s revolution and the orthodoxy of that approach. It remains to be seen, however, whether those who have constructed the spurious image of Mao as peasant revolutionary will choose to notice them and rethink this central dimension of Mao’s thought."

"Mao’s understanding of the Marxist theory of social change has frequently been misrepresented. It is often suggested that Mao turned his back on the materialist philosophy of Marxism, glorifying rather the capacity of ideas to transform society. He is thus depicted as an “idealist” or “voluntarist,” one who regarded the ideological-political superstructure of society and struggles within it as the primary source of social change; the economic base, which Marx had attributed with this role, became in Mao’s mind pliantly malleable to pressures for change from the superstructure. Yet, a careful exploration of this dimension of his thought does not bear out this interpretation. While his views on the capacity of politics, ideology, and culture to contribute to social change did go beyond that of a mechanical and reductionist materialism and did vary, his general perspective remained an economists one; he continued to regard the economic foundation of society—forces and relations of production—as the ultimately determining factor in history."