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Great Disorder Under Heaven: Two China scholars chronicle the Cultural Revolution, a spasm of terrifying violence. (Orville Schell - The Washington Post)
October 30, 2006 3:53 PM
Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, October 29, 2006; BW10
MAO’S LAST REVOLUTION
By Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap/Harvard Univ. 693 pp. $35
It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s exhaustively researched new book on China’s Cultural Revolution — a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong’s China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China’s odyssey through those tumultuous times.
But what happened is still not easy to explain completely. For complex reasons that involved Mao’s political beliefs as well as his own psychological pathologies, the communist leader felt compelled to goad China into an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness that ran from 1966 to 1976. Both to protect his own political supremacy and to wrench China out of its “feudal” past, he made politics and “class struggle” the currency of his revolutionary realm. In his own words, he created “great disorder under heaven.” Proclaiming that “to rebel is justified,” he called on students to “bombard the headquarters” of the Communist Party and thus set in motion one of the most unprecedented upheavals of the 20th century.
“You ask us how to do it,” President Liu Shaoqi, who later died as a political enemy in one of Mao’s prisons, told students as the leftist surge gathered momentum. “I tell you honestly, I don’t know either. We’re mainly going to be relying on you to make this revolution.”
In the name of wiping out “capitalist roaders” (a euphemism for anyone seemingly opposed to Mao’s revolutionary line) and “bourgeois revisionism,” tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed. “Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought — no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be,” proclaimed one Red Guard poster.
“Whereas party violence had normally been carefully controlled and calibrated, now the rules had been suspended,” note the authors. “Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted. The result was the juvenile state of nature, nationwide, foreshadowed in microcosm by Nobel Prize-winner William Golding in Lord of the Flies .”
A few of China’s more pragmatic leaders did shrink from Mao’s cataclysmic vision of revolutionary extremism. But Mao’s Last Revolution suggests how easy it can be for a mercurial “Big Leader,” operating within a totalitarian system, to throw doubters so far off balance that none was able to organize resistance. And if there is one thing that Marxist-Leninist states do well, it is defoliating the political landscape of checks and balances, as well as watchdog institutions like the press. This is especially true when the media fall into the hands of one faction so that any sense of the actual variety of contending viewpoints is eclipsed, making it impossible for an outsider to discern how different factions were actually struggling against each other behind the scenes.
Mao was a master of keeping all comers in a state of paralyzing uncertainty. He garnered enormous power from his imperial opaqueness: While almost everyone wished “to work toward” Mao and his policies in order to please him, they could never be quite sure whether they were measuring up. Mao was the embodiment par excellence of the advice implicitly given by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov when he chastises Jesus for failing to compel belief by ruling by “miracle, mystery and authority.”
By frequently absenting himself from the everyday sordidness of Beijing politics, Mao conjured up an almost otherworldly authority. And by making conflicting pronouncements that were impossible to factor together, he maintained both deniability and an ambiguity that kept his subordinates “transfixed like rabbits in front of a cobra,” as the authors put it.
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