At the time of Mao’s birth in the last years of the 19th century, China was poor and weak. The Qing dynasty had been repeatedly discredited by its inability to defend the country against incursions on its sovereignty by Western and Japanese imperialism. Anti-imperialist nationalism developed as an important political force in China, informing the ideas of generations of young radicals.
He recollected a quarrel in which he had cursed his father in front of many guests and stormed off, threatening to drown himself in a pond. His mother tried to persuade him to return but his father demanded an apology and a kowtow as a sign of submission. In the end, Mao agreed to give a one-kneed knowtow if his father would promise not to beat him. From this he claimed he had learnt that if he defended his rights by open rebellion his father would relent.
On the outbreak of the 1911 revolution, Mao joined the army which was in revolt against the Qing dynasty. He gained little military experience; instead he spent his time drilling, cooking, and reading newspapers. One thing showed quickly he had absorbed traditional ideas of the scholar elite. Although he had so recently laboured in his father’s fields, he now felt it would not befit his status as a student to carry his own water back to the barracks as his fellow soldiers did.
In his search for a future, Mao drifted in and out of schools for soap making, police training, law, and commerce, apparently easily swayed by advertisements of the recommendations of friends. His longest stay was six months at the First Provincial Middle School where he did some serious study of traditional Chinese ideas of governance.
On Yang Changji’s recommendation, Mao read a Chinese translation of A System of Ethics by Friedrich Paulsen. This inspired Mao to write an essay, for which he received a mark of 100. The essay no longer exists but Mao’s copy of the book does. His marginal notes amount to more than 12,000 Chinese characters, showing how seriously he took it. Mao made many comparisons between western and Chinese thought, seeing both similarities and differences. Paulsen’s discussion of the nature of man, and of altruism and egotism, drew his attention. He was also interested in Paulsen’s assertions about the relationship between the free will, the influence of the society, and moulding or self-cultivation. Mao’s notes reflect his lasting preoccupation with change:
“It is the time when things are constantly changing and numerous men of talent are emerging, that people like to read about. When they come to periods of peace, they are bored and put the book aside. It is not that we like chaos, but simply that the reign of peace cannot last long, it is unendurable to human beings, and that human nature is delighted by sudden change.”
Steeped in Confucian discipline, Mao, like his teachers, was attracted by Paulsen’s idea of self-cultivation through self-discipline. He had already applied these ideas to his own life, studying hard, dressing simply, and exercising regularly. Decades later, the idea that hardship and austere living were good for the character, and for the development of “political consciousness,” was discernible in the way people were exhorted to live in revolutionary China.
The article also reflected Mao’s preoccupation with the cultivation of a strong will without which, he said, nothing could be achieved.
Mao began to realize the value of organizations in his student years.
With a post at China’s leading university, associating with the most brilliant radical scholars, and in love with Yang Changji’s daughter, Yang Kaihui, Mao seemed to have found the life he wanted. But all was not what it seemed and he was disappointed. His stipend was tiny, his living conditions miserable, and worst of all, when he tried to engage the famous radicals he so admired in conversation on political and cultural subjects, the busy men had no time for an assistant librarian speaking a southern dialect. There has been speculation that Mao’s later harshness towards intellectuals may have been due to his resentment of this treatment.
Immediately, the tensions that would characterize Sino-Soviet relations for years to come began to appear. First, Moscow was trying to assert leadership over the international communist movement through the Comintern. The Chinese communists resented the Comintern’s assumption of supremacy. Secondly, Moscow was ambivalent about the potential of communist movements in underdeveloped countries.
The Comintern line was that communist parties in “backward” countries could survive only by cooperating closely with nationalist movements. The CCP however required its members to break all ties with all other political organizations.
Rebuking those who feared the violence of the peasant movement and thought that it was going too far he wrote:
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows the power of another.
The report also reflected Mao’s concern for the position of women. He observed that like men in rural Chinese society, women suffered under three forms of authority — political, clan, and religious — but they also had to endure a fourth, the authority of men.
Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations. We can also created cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yan’an has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power.
Mao, able to prevaricate over this order partly because communications with the Party Centre were so poor, remained in Jiangxi trying to consolidate his base. He argued that because China was a semi-colonial country in which the imperialist powers could be played off against one another, and because it was made up of many localized agricultural economies, it was possible for “red power” to exist in scattered bases if the army was sufficiently strong. This would be his strategy for the next twenty years.
In Changsha, Mao’s wife Yang Kaihui was among the civilians executed. She refused to save her life by denouncing her husband.
He famously remarked that the Japanese were a disease of the skin, while the communists were a disease of the heart.
Even in these theoretical pieces, however, Mao insists on the primacy of experience over book-learning, advancing one of his basic positions that “All genuine knowledge originates in experience” and that one must “discover truth through practice and through practice again verify the truth.”
A core document was Mao’s essay “Reform our Study” in which he attacked what he called subjectivism, sectarianism, and dogmatism and accused some Party members of “studying the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin in the abstract, without any aim, and without considering their relevance to the Chinese revolution.” Another lively essay argues in Mao’s earthy style that shit is more useful than dogma.
Death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.
He had always liked to rise late and read far into the night and to see people by sending for them at short notice. In his later years he would summon colleagues, journalists, and even foreign statesmen late in the evening or after they had gone to bed, a practice that emphasized his authority and put visitors at a psychological disadvantage.
Some Chinese leaders were reluctant to become embroiled in another war, but Mao feared that the USA might otherwise take the opportunity to attack the infant People’s Republic, not least because China’s main industries lay just north of the Yalu River that formed the Korean border. He also believed that participation would bring China prestige within the socialist camp and confer on the CCP the leading role in revolutionary Asia that the Soviet Party had in Eastern Europe.
The movement was intended to harness their energy and enthusiasm. When the intellectuals, mindful of the fate of Hu Feng and others, showed a very natural caution, Mao himself urged them to overcome their nervousness. He even attacked Party leaders who did not accept the Hundred Flowers. “Shit or get off the pot” he shouted at the editor of the People’s Daily who had been slow to publish one of the key documents of the new policy.
Encouraged by what appeared to be a sustained relaxation, intellectuals, academics, scientists, technical experts, and managers began to attack the Party and its authoritarian role. They complained of narrow repressiveness and of inappropriate political interference in many spheres of life including education, research, industrial management, and construction. They also protested against low standards of living, political repression, and the slavish imitation of the Soviet Union. Mao’s colleagues became more alarmed than ever, and Mao himself seems to have been at first taken aback, and then angered by this crescendo of resentful voices.
Mao had pushed for the Hundred Flowers thaw in a mood of utopian optimism against considerable opposition. He believed that it would enable the Party to cooperate more fruitfully with the educated people whose skills it needed in order to speed the industrialization programme. The anti-rightist crackdown represented a defeat for this optimism and struck a blow to his prestige both with his colleagues, to whom his behavior seemed rash and ill judged, and with the intellectuals, who felt it had been treacherous. Educated Chinese now knew that expressing independent opinions honestly was dangerous, whereas sycophancy and conformity brought rewards. Mao’s attitude to the intellectuals, always ambivalent, also seems to have become more firmly negative.
The Chinese position reflected an ongoing feeling of vulnerability. Much of the new industrial development in China had been sited at great expense far in the interior to put it beyond the reach, it was hoped, of US bombs.
Mao bears responsibility for the rhetoric of the Great Leap which invoked the importance of human will, enthusiasm, and dedication, and tended to condemn expert opinion as dogmatism. His desire to win over planners and managers manifested int he Hundred Flowers movement disappeared; now he urged that people should not “fear professors.”
Mao no longer believed that a socialist revolution guaranteed a continuous advance toward communism. Rather he argued that class struggle must continue under socialism as the only protection against the restoration of capitalism. He came to regard the Soviet Party as a revisionist force engaged in just such a restoration and he increasingly feared that the same fate could befall the Chinese Party if steps were not taken to avoid it. The spectacle of the Kremlin coup may also have increased Mao’s paranoia about his own position and his relationships with senior colleagues.
In 1965 Edgar Snow asked Mao if a cult of personality was being fostered in China. Having admitted that there was some basis for saying so, Mao suggested that Khrushchev had fallen because he had no cult of personality at all. The implication was that Mao regarded his cult as a protection.
For the first time, instead of trying to unite a majority of the Party leadership around his ideas, he would strike at the Party itself. To do this he would rely mainly on the support of young people brought up to consider him infallible. The new campaign would claim as its victims almost all Mao’s old comrades and would thus leave him ever more heavily dependent on sycophants who drew their authority from their relationship with him.
Stalin’s fate made clear that a leader’s legacy could be rejected once he was dead, but Khrushchev’s overthrow showed that this could happen to a living leader. As the different strands of his unease came together, Mao seems to have concluded that the idea of his withdrawal to the second line had been a mistake. He decided to initiate one last campaign to safeguard his revolutionary legacy.
The radicals kept control of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. On the other hand, against the advice of the radicals, Mao retained some of the old moderates on the Central Committee and even on the Politburo. He also made two military commanders new members of the Politburo. He knew that if the Party was now to be rebuilt and the economy restored, the army had to be kept on side, a coalition of interests constructed, and competent people put in control.
Intriguingly, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution remain better known than those of the Great Leap Forward and are often made more of in critiques of Mao’s record, yet if the two are compared, the Leap with its incomparably higher death toll was the greater human catastrophe. The difference is that the majority of those who died in the famine were peasants and quickly forgotten in the world outside their villages. The victims of the Cultural Revolution by contrast were educated people, intellectuals, officials, and Party leaders. Their sufferings were more visible, even at the time, and a number of the survivors would later write moving memoirs.
Mao had long been concerned about the problem of the revolutionary succession. Now perhaps he despaired. He had destroyed his relationships with all his old comrades but appeared to have little respect for his new associates. He had abandoned the idea of relinquishing the reins of power in his lifetime. As an individual he himself was more isolated than ever. He lived separately from his wife with whom he was quarrelling again. His children were no longer at home. For company, he was more than ever dependent on his bodyguards, his medical team, and the attractive young women who as secretaries, nurses, and attendants supplied him with care and sexual services in his final years.
A huge tunnel network was constructed in Beijing, designed to shelter half the population. (It would much later be recycled into metro lines, underground shopping centers, parking, cheap housing, and an underground city museum.)
For all that he had wished to be rid of his heir, Mao’s health was affected by the shock of Lin Bao’s flight. He became depressed and stayed in bed for days. His blood pressure shot up, his legs became puffy, and he developed the shuffle characteristic of his last years. Anxious not to seem too enfeebled, he practised standing up and sitting down for weeks before Nixon’s visit.
Hua might arrest Mao’s wife, but he still had to uphold Mao’s reputation and continue the cult because his own legitimacy was based on his claim to have been selected by the Chairman. Ignoring the Chinese leaders’ agreement (originally proposed by Mao) that they should eschew the Soviet practice of preserving the body and instead be cremated, the Politburo decided to have Mao embalmed.
Deng was ready to dump Mao’s economic and social vision and wanted a complete disavowal of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, he would not countenance a total rejection of Mao’s legacy, indeed he insisted, “We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin.” Mao’s own assessment of Stalin had been 70 percent merit, 30 percent error. According to Deng, Mao once said that he would have been happy if such an evaluation had been made of his own work and indeed the 70/30 ratio is sometimes used in Chinese discussions of Mao’s record.
Had Mao died in 1956, there would be no doubt that he was a great leader of the Chinese people. Had he died in 1966, his meritorious achievements would have been somewhat tarnished, but his overall record still very good. Since he actually died in 1976, there is nothing we can do.
Yet despite his obsession with the revolutionary succession and protecting the revolution from reversal, at some level Mao perhaps understood the absurdity of believing that he could influence the future, or even imagine what it would be like. In 1970, he told Edgar Snow that “future events would be decided by future generations and in accordance with conditions we could not foresee… The youth of today would assess the work of the revolution in accordance with values of their own. A thousand years from now, all of us, even Marx, Engels and Lenin would probably appear rather ridiculous”.
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.