feed is available 
Mao Now (Ross Terrill - The Wilson Quarterly)
January 22, 2007 1:24 PM
In the early 1990s, a story circulated among Chinese taxi drivers about an �eight-�car traffic accident in Guangzhou that resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The story fueled Mao fever (Mao re) in China, with shopkeepers offering busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks with Red Guards waving Mao�s little red book at each tick of the clock. Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. Transmuted uses of Mao continue today. Nightclub singers in Beijing croon songs that cite Mao�s words. Youths dine in �Cultural �Revolution-�style� caf�s off �rough-�hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock �market.
This nonpolitical treatment of Mao Zedong (1893�1976) is an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangzi valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous. Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of �faith.
But where is Mao the totalitarian? Each of the major nations that experienced an authoritarian regime in the 20th century emerged in its own way from the trauma. Japan, Germany, Italy, even Russia departed politically from systems that brought massive war and repression. China, still ruled by a communist party, has been ambiguous about Mao. Although Mao�s portrait and tomb dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, Mao �himself��unlike Stalin in Russia or Hitler in �Germany��has floated benignly into a nether zone as if somehow he was not a political figure at all, let alone the architect of China�s communist �state.
The cab drivers, farmers, pop singers, and shopkeepers are really only following the lead of the Chinese Communist Party, which does not quite know how to handle Mao�s legacy. New history textbooks approved for initial use in Shanghai have largely brushed Mao out of China�s 20th-century story. China has abandoned Mao�s policies but not faced the structural and philosophical issues involved in �Maoism��and probably won�t until the Party�s monopoly on political power comes to an end. Yet unless China gets the Mao story correct, it may not have a happy political �future.
The moral compass of the Mao era has gone, unregretted. But �money�making, national glory, and a veil over the past in the name of �good feelings� are not enough to replace it. Can a society that lived by the ideas of Confucianism for two millennia, and later by Mao�s political athleticism, be content with amnesia about the Mao era and the absence of a believed public �philosophy?
In a recent biography, Mao: The Unknown Story (2006), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday pile up evidence that Mao was a monster to eclipse Stalin and probably Hitler and Lenin as well. �Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao�s outlook� from his teens to his dotage, say the authors. In a second influential volume, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995), Mao�s physician Li Zhisui portrays the Chairman as exceedingly selfish, jealous, and promiscuous. Soon after his book came out, Dr. Li came to speak at Harvard, and I showed him around the campus. �Three words did not exist for Mao,� the gentle doctor remarked as we strolled. �Regret, love, mercy.� These two �books��both written from outside �China��explain the Mao era in China as essentially the consequence of having an evil man at the �helm.
Certainly Mao�s rule was destructive. Tens of millions of Chinese died in the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward of 1958�59, victims of Mao�s willful utopianism and cruelty. Millions more died, and tens of millions had their lives ruined, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Practicing brinkmanship toward India, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union, Mao declared that a loss of hundreds of millions of Chinese in a nuclear war would be a setback China could readily �digest.
Yet �bad man� does not adequately sum up Mao and his legacy. To believe so would be to embrace the moral absolutism of communism itself, with its quick verdicts (�enemy of the people,� �hero of the proletariat�), and to repeat the manipulations of official Chinese imperial history, in which even a flood or earthquake �proved� the evil character of the emperor. Were the �good men� around bad man Mao blind to his failings for so many decades? Were the hundreds of millions of Chinese who bowed before Mao�s portrait and wept at the sight of him out of their �minds?
Mao made history; at the same time, history made Mao. In addition to looking at Mao�s failings as a human being, we must look at the structures and pressures that turned whim into tyranny. At the ideas Mao wielded. At the �evaporation��in Mao�s case, as in that of several other �dictators��of youthful idealism and exactitude. Above all, at the seduction of a �freedom� bestowed from above by a �party-�state that believed it knew what was best for the �citizenry.
In a Jesus was dismembered for speaking out… . He who speaks out does not necessarily transgress, and even if he does transgress, this is but a small matter to a wise man.� Immediately we face a puzzle: Young Mao was an ardent individualist. In his years at the teachers� training college he attended in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, Mao�s credo became the �self-�realization of the individual. �Wherever there is repression of the individual,� he wrote in the margin of a translation of Friedrich Paulsen�s System of Ethics (1889), �wherever there are acts contrary to the nature of the individual, there can be no greater crime.� His first published newspaper work, written in 1919, was a plea for the liberation of women, a passionate �nine-�part commentary on the suicide of a young woman in Changsha moments before her arranged �marriage.
Mao at 24 saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an outbreak of freedom for the individual that lit the way for China. A young female friend objected, �It�s all very well to say establish communism, but lots of heads are going to fall.� Mao, who had recently read Marx and Engel�s Communist Manifesto, retorted, �Heads will fall, heads will be chopped off, of course. But just think how good communism is! The state won�t bother us anymore, you women will be free, marriage problems won�t plague you anymore.� Although these words hint at Mao�s later callousness about human life, it is striking that he viewed Lenin�s revolution in terms of the �marriage problems� of individual �women.
The anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid (1902), had a strong hold on Mao until he was nearly 30. A great virtue of the Russian anarchist, Mao felt, was that �he begins by understanding the common people.� Anarchism in Mao�s perception was linked with Prometheanism; Friedrich Nietzsche was also among his early enthusiasms. The Promethean individual would prepare for his heroic role by taking cold baths, running up mountains, and studying books in the noisiest possible places. This prefigures the fascism to come in Mao�s Cultural Revolution, just as fascism in Europe owed a debt to Nietzsche. At the time, however, Mao�s individualism was nurtured by the influence of a Chinese professor at Changsha who had imbibed the idealist liberalism of T. H. Green, the late-19th-century British �philosopher.
Mao was a rebel before becoming a communist. The psychological root of his rebelliousness was hostility to his father, and, by extension, to other authority figures. The political root was dismay at China�s weakness and disarray in the face of foreign encroachment, shared by most informed Chinese of the period. Mao�s chief use for the steeled individual was as a fighter for justice and China�s salvation. �The principal aim of physical education,� he wrote in 1917 in New Youth magazine, �is military heroism.� The authoritarian strain in Mao�s individualism was already �present.
Eventually, Mao�s respect for individual freedom collapsed. There were four causes. One was the powerful current of nationalism in early-20th-century China; the cry to rescue the nation eclipsed the cry for the �self-�realization of the individual. A second was the large role of war in China from the 1920s to the �40s. Pervasive violence made political debate a luxury and favored repression. A third was Mao�s embrace of Marxist ideas of class, central economic planning, and communist party organization. Fourth was the hangover in Mao�s mind and Chinese society generally of a paternalistic imperial �mentality.
In the end, Mao Zedong, facilitated by Stalin, put the population of the world�s largest nation under a regimen that combined Leninism, the paternalism of early Chinese �sage-�rulers, and, by the 1960s, a hysteria and military romanticism that amounted to fascism Chinese-�style.
The imperative of national salvation was the first factor working against Mao�s attraction to freedom. Mao was mildly attracted to a movement comparable in spirit to Europe�s Enlightenment that sprang into existence in China in 1919. Named May Fourth (after the date of an initial student demonstration), it aimed at modernizing China by embracing �quasi-�Western ideas of individualism, democracy, and science. Liberated individuals would rescue China. But May Fourth soon split in two, a left wing jumping to Marxist collectivism and a right wing sticking with individualism. Leftists, including the 27-�year-�old Mao, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in �1921.
Bolshevism helped Mao be progressive and �anti-�Western at the same time. Opposition to the West was necessary to many young Chinese leftists, despite the appeal of Western ideas, because of British and other foreign bullying of China since the Opium War of 1839�42. From Lenin, Mao learned that social justice and national salvation could come as one package. �Leninism��and to a lesser degree �Marxism��joined anarchism, nationalism, and individualism in the �rag�bag of Mao�s political ideas. It was Lenin who showed Mao his road to power. �Anti-�imperialism was going to be for Mao, as it was for Lenin, the framework for revolution. But this �anti-�imperialist��soon �anti-�Japanese��nation�alism that Mao injected into the Chinese Revolution negated individual �freedom.
In the 1930s, Mao argued to the �semi�criminal secret society Gelaohui (Elder Brother Club) that its principles and the CCP�s were �quite �close��especially as regards our enemies and the road to salvation.� Of course, the threat of enemies was the central point. In his appeal to �non-�Han �minority� peoples during the Long March of 1935�36, when Mao emerged as the CCP�s top leader as the Communists retreated before Chiang �Kai-�shek�s Nationalist forces, Mao challenged Mon�golians to �preserve the glory of the era of Genghis Khan� by cooperating with the Communists. Pressing the Muslims to support him, he told them that this would ensure the �national revival of the Turks.� Of course, Chinese nationalism had turned Mao into a trickster. After the wars with Japan and Chiang �Kai-�shek were over, there would be no common cause with the Gelaohui, no freedom for the Mongolians or the Muslims of �Xinjiang.
The violence that continually rippled through China was another force militating against individual freedom. After the death in 1925 of Sun �Yat-�sen, a leader in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and a founder of the Nationalist movement, the gun was prominent in Chinese public life. Sun�s wavering leadership gave way to warlordism, a violent rupture of the tenuous coalition of Nationalists and Communists in 1927, and growing incursions by Japan beginning in 1931. Guns were to freedom as a cat is to mice. From the time Mao used force to confiscate the holdings of Hunan landowners in 1925, when he was just one of many CCP leaders, his political life cannot be understood aside from violence, both the wars he waged and those waged against him. As he sought to organize farmers in a remote mountain region, he remarked, �The struggle in the border area is exclusively military. The Party and the masses have to be placed on a war footing.� Mao spoke of �criticizing the Nationalists by means of a machine gun.�
A third enemy of freedom was the class, organizational, and economic theory Mao drew from Marx and Lenin. Here Mao�s story is similar to that of Stalin, Castro, and others. Class theory has intrinsic distortions; people often do not act as members of an economic class. Class labeling became especially inimical to freedom when Mao was forced to rely on farmers rather than workers as the key class in
Copyright The Wilson Quarterly
China�s revolution. Anyone who pointed out this departure from Marx�s theory of proletarian revolution was stamped out as a �renegade.
Eventually, class became little more than a convenient way to demarcate friends and enemies of the moment. Hence, longtime colleague and expected successor Liu Shaoqi was �discovered� by Mao in the 1960s to be a �bourgeois� who had �sneaked into the Party.� Never mind that Mao and Liu had worked together as leftist organizers on and off since �1922.
For the complete article please click the link below.
Posted at 1:24 PM