by Philip Short
That, of course, is not how Mao imagined his country's future. He saw China exercising its leading role in the region, and ultimately beyond, by the force of ideological example. His successors, as he had feared, embraced capitalism instead. But although the form changed, the goal remained the same. China's destiny, for Xi as for Mao, is to lead Asia and help shape the world's future. Whether it does so as an ideological flagship or an economic juggernaut is beside the point.
In the months immediately following Mao's death in 1976, no one could have imagined in their wildest dreams the extraordinary renaissance – unequalled in rapidity and extent at any time in human history – which China would undergo in the next four decades.2
If today it has become the world's factory and its second-largest economy, with commensurate political ambitions, it is because Mao's successors gambled that the freeing of market forces, the subsequent growth of private industry and commerce, and integration into the world economy, all under the political management of a Communist Party determined to conserve its monopoly of power, would transform the lives of its people. Rulers and ruled have been linked ever since by an unspoken social contract: so long as China's people refrain from challenging the Party's hold on power, they are largely free to live as they wish. Chinese families in the country's main cities today, so long as they have the money, can own their own homes, travel abroad, send their children to foreign universities, buy whatever consumer goods they like, choose where they want to work and to live, read foreign books and watch foreign films (often on sale in pirated copies before they even reach the screen in the West) – in other words, in ways that would have been inconceivable a generation before, their lives are not so different from those of people in the rest of the developed world.
Lest that picture appear too glowing, there is of course a downside. Freedom of public expression is severely curtailed. There is no rule of law. Corruption is rampant. In many rural areas, local officials ride roughshod over the peasants whom they exploit as shamelessly as the cadres of Mao's day or their long-ago imperial predecessors. Those who wish to change the system, whether intellectuals in the cities or peasant activists in the hinterlands, risk imprisonment or worse. In Tibet and Xinjiang, the slightest sign of separatism is ruthlessly repressed.
Yet overall the balance is positive. For the first time in well over a century, a fifth of the world's population is at peace, in a stable environment, where life today is usually better than yesterday and it is possible to plan for the morrow without having to fear another war or political convulsion in which everything might yet again be lost. These are things which in the West are taken for granted. In China they are new.
Where does that leave Mao – the founder of the regime?
His picture still gazes down from Tiananmen across the vast empty square laid out before the Forbidden City, at whose southern end, each morning, Chinese from the provinces queue to pay their respects to his embalmed remains in the present-day equivalent of an imperial mausoleum.
His portrait adorns the banknotes which are the lifeblood of the capitalist economy that he fought all his life to prevent, now serving as an international reserve currency, on a par with the dollar, the euro, the pound sterling and the yen. His birthplace in the village of Shaoshan, amid the ricefields of central Hunan, almost a thousand miles south of Beijing, has become a place of pilgrimage, or ‘red tourism’ as the government prefers to call it, where Chinese visitors light incense before Mao's parents’ grave, bow before his statue and buy the same kinds of kitschy souvenirs – plastic water-bottles and gilded plaster busts – that provide the shopkeepers of Lourdes with an income from devout Roman Catholics. Other sites have been developed to the same purpose: the mountain fastness of Jinggangshan, further south, where Mao's career as a guerrilla leader began; Zunyi, in the south-west, where, after numerous false starts, his political career began to take off; Yan'an, in the north-west, where the communists made their headquarters during the Pacific War; and Xibaipo, south of Beijing, where Mao masterminded, usually though not always correctly, the final battles with the nationalist armies which brought the communists to power.
His image in China today – at least as framed by the Party, which expects everyone else to follow – is as mummified as the corpse lying in his mausoleum. In death he is a ‘national treasure’, as the Japanese would put it, which the Chinese people may contemplate but not touch.
The prevailing orthodoxy on the Maoist period, to which, in theory, all Chinese writers must conform, was set out in the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic’, approved by the 6th Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in June 1981. It runs to more than fifty pages, of which nearly three quarters are devoted to a glowing account of the Party's ‘brilliant successes … achievements [and] correct line’ and of Mao's leading role in them. The remainder addresses his errors, but in such a way as to minimise their import. The anti-Rightist struggle of 1957, while ‘entirely correct and necessary’, was made ‘far too broad … with unfortunate consequences’. The Great Leap Forward, which began a year later, was due to ‘lack of experience … and inadequate understanding of the laws of economic development’ and ‘arbitrary directions, boastfulness and … the fact that Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades … had become smug about their successes [and] were impatient for quick results’. The outcome, it acknowledged, was ‘economic difficulties [and] serious losses to our country and people’ – a considerable euphemism for the worst famine in recorded history in which, between 1958 and 1962, several tens of millions of Chinese died. Even then, the resolution maintained, throughout this period the Party's successes were ‘dominant’, its errors secondary:
It is impermissible to overlook or whitewash mistakes, which in itself would be a mistake and would give rise to more and worse mistakes. But after all, our achievements … are the main thing. It would be a no less serious error to overlook or deny [these] achievements.
The resolution's harshest condemnation was reserved for the Cultural Revolution – a ‘comprehensive, long drawn-out and grave blunder’ – which lasted from 1966 to 1969 but in Chinese historiography is held to have continued until 1976 in order that the whole of the last ten years of Mao's life may be written off as a regrettable but temporary aberration. ‘Launched and initiated’ by Mao on the basis of ‘erroneous theses’, it declared, the Cultural Revolution caused ‘the most severe setback and the heaviest losses since the founding of the People's Republic’ – an extraordinary statement in view of the death toll in the Great Leap, reflecting the fact that the men who drafted the resolution suffered grievously from the one while surviving unscathed the other, which, moreover, they themselves had led.
Much space is then devoted to showing that Mao's leftist ideas during the last years of his life had no connection whatever with Mao Zedong Thought, with which they were ‘obviously inconsistent’ and which remained the Party's ‘valuable spiritual asset [and] guiding ideology’. The Chairman, the resolution said, had been ‘labouring under a misapprehension’ which had been exploited by the ‘counter-revolutionary cliques’ headed by his wife Jiang Qing and his anointed successor, Lin Biao. ‘Chief responsibility’ for the great upheaval, it concluded, ‘does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong. But it was, after all, the error of a great proletarian revolutionary … The Chinese people have always regarded Comrade Mao Zedong as their beloved great leader and teacher.’
Thirty-five years later, that remains China's official stance.
Today the convoluted arguments and double-think appear even more blatant than at the time. But in 1981, they represented a delicate balancing act. Communists are orderly people: they like to put history in boxes (a habit unfortunately shared by some academics). For the country's new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, it was essential to achieve ‘a unified view’ of the Maoist past in order to turn the page and look towards the future, just as it had been essential for Mao in 1945, afte
r his consecration as Chairman of the Central Committee, to ensure the passage of a similar ‘Resolution on Party History’, summing up the struggles which had won him supreme leadership. Between them, the two resolutions book-end the entire period that Mao was in power. Each was intended to reconcile opposing factions: in 1945, the winners and losers in the protracted intra-Party conflict from which Mao emerged triumphant; and in 1981, those who had been close to Mao and wished to spare his memory (Deng himself among them) and those who sought a more sweeping repudiation of his errors.
In the latter case, moreover, another, much more frightening consideration had weighed on the debate: the risk that the pendulum would swing too far, and that instead of rejecting Mao's errors, the country would rise up against the system he had created and overthrow the Party's rule.
Two years earlier, during the so-called Beijing Spring of 1979, a former Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng, the son of a middle-ranking official in the State Capital Construction Bureau, had put up a wall-poster called ‘Democracy, the Fifth Modernisation’. Wei did not pull his punches. He denounced Mao as a ‘bragging despot’ and Deng as a ‘political swindler’, while the Chinese people were ‘old yellow oxen’, who, rather than being the masters of the country, as the Party's propaganda maintained, were in fact no more than slaves:
There are two old Chinese sayings, ‘To draw a cake to satisfy one's hunger’ and ‘To look at plums to quench one's thirst’. Even in ancient times, people could satirise these fallacies … Yet for several decades the Chinese people, following their Great Helmsman, took the ideals of communism as ‘the drawing of a cake’ and the [Party line] as ‘the sight of plums’, always tightening their belts and going forward. Thirty years passed like a day and left us this lesson: the people have been like the monkey, fishing for the moon in a pond and not realizing there is nothing there … The Marxist socialist experiment of using dictatorship to achieve the equal rights of man has been going on for decades. The facts have shown time and again that it simply won't work. A ‘dictatorship of the majority’ is simply a utopian dream. A dictatorship is a dictatorship. A concentration of powers is bound to fall into the hands of the few.
How many of Wei's generation of disillusioned former Red Guards and the sons and daughters of Mao's victims shared such views, there is no way of telling. Certainly they were a very small minority. But the Party leaders had grown up with the idea that, as Mao once put it, ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’, and many of them had seen that happen in the May Fourth movement in 1919, which had challenged the then ruling orthodoxy, Confucianism. Half a century later, another youth movement, manipulated this time from on high, had plunged China into chaos in the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, the chances of a repetition were infinitesimal. The Chinese people had had enough turmoil to last them a lifetime. But the leaders’ fears were not entirely misplaced, as was shown when some of Wei's arguments resurfaced in the movement which met its end in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. In any case, none of them was prepared to take that risk. While Wei and other dissidents were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, the 1981 resolution battened down the ideological hatches. From then on no one would have an excuse for not knowing the permissible limits of criticism.
In China, however, nothing remains set in concrete for very long.
The resolution, while continuing to represent the Party's immutable truth about the recent past, was quietly re-interpreted. Instead of being ‘70 per cent correct and 30 per cent mistaken’, as Deng Xiaoping had proposed in a secret speech to the Central Committee's Third Plenum in December 1978, Mao was increasingly portrayed on Chinese television and in the cinema as 99 per cent correct and, at most, one per cent mistaken. Hagiographic series were broadcast about his youth, the Long March and the War of Liberation, in which Mao and his companions were depicted as a Chinese brotherhood of Knights of the Round Table whose chivalry exceeded the Arthurian legend. The ‘twists and turns’ after 1949 were ignored or, better, written out of the script altogether. In this mass-media version of Chinese history, the anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution never happened: they have disappeared down a memory hole. Today they are not taught in university history courses, let alone at high school, nor are they often discussed at home, even in families which suffered in those movements. Deng Xiaoping argued that priority should be given to building a prosperous future rather than delving into the horrors of the past. Most Chinese – certainly most older Chinese – agree: what happened, happened; nothing can be done to change it, so why look back when the present already offers a vastly better life?
However, no system of control is foolproof, least of all in a country as large and as rebellious as China, where a tradition of independent thought and of upright scholars memorialising the throne undeterred by the risk to their lives stretches back thousands of years. Alongside the memory hole are discreet wormholes through which forbidden knowledge seeps out.
These can take various forms. Amid China's shifting political winds, there are brief moments of greater openness. During one such window of opportunity, in 2004, the Contemporary China Institute, headed by Zhu Jiamu, formerly the secretary of Chen Yun, a veteran Party leader second only to Deng in the post-Mao hierarchy, agreed that I might interview the surviving members of Mao's inner circle for a documentary series for the Franco-German television channel Arte. They included Liu Songlin, the widow of Mao's son, Anying; his grandchildren, Kong Dongmei and Mao Xinyu; members of the families of Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi; and many of Mao's personal staff, including his bodyguards, valet, nurse and doctor. Among the archive materials we used was unique footage from the Cultural Revolution, showing, among other things, Mao's erstwhile Politburo colleagues being humiliated and beaten by Red Guards at public ‘struggle meetings’. On the basis of the 1981 resolution, such images should have been acceptable. Two decades later, that was no longer the case. Senior Chinese cultural officials expressed shock and dismay. The head of the Chinese television group which had collaborated with Arte retired to hospital on sick leave for six weeks in the hope that that would protect him from the inevitable fallout when the programmes were aired.
What happened next was revealing. There was no fallout.
Instead, one of the most senior of the men who had been called in to view the offending programmes, whom I encountered at a seminar a few months later, took me aside to say that he and his colleagues understood perfectly well why I had told the story as I had and that they had no problem with the historical interpretation; unfortunately, as I would surely understand, they were not in a position to say so. Shortly afterwards a pirated DVD of the programmes, with Chinese narration, appeared in the shops in Beijing. It evidently did well, because, ten years later, it is still selling. Neither the Propaganda Department nor the police have raised an eyebrow.
Outside China the reaction was instructive, too. In an internet forum after the final programme was shown, hundreds of young Chinese, studying at universities in France and Germany, went online to discuss a past which most of them did not know existed. One young woman wrote:
As a Chinese, born after Mao's death, there are so many things we don't talk about and the result is we don't know our own history. What our parents had to live through they don't speak about. It's a past which is deliberately forgotten. I am totally shattered by these films because it's the first time that I have seen face to face all these personalities who are my grandparents’ age, or just a bit older, and some of them are still alive. For me it's incredible. I hope that one day our Chinese people can see it just as I have today.
If I have recounted this episode at some length, it is because it encapsulates the Chinese authorities’ dilemma over how Mao's legacy should be treated. The 1981 resolution turned out to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the mass media were required to eulogise the Chairman, with the result that, for most Chinese born after the mid-1970s, the Maoist turmoil of their parents’ generation is a closed
book, just as today's twenty-somethings know next to nothing about the shooting of student protesters around Tiananmen in 1989. They have become non-issues and the Chinese government wants to keep them that way. On the other, the resolution legitimised historical research on the period – which in Mao's lifetime had been effectively forbidden – and as a result whatever could fly under the radar, whether pirated DVDs of foreign documentaries, research works by Chinese scholars or Cultural Revolution relics sold in flea markets, was usually permitted.
The twenty years following Mao's death saw a flood of memoirs, of collections of his speeches and Central Committee documents, and of research by Chinese historians on the major episodes of the Chinese revolution, the most sensitive reserved for internal distribution within the Party elite, but much of the rest for public circulation. That newly available material formed the basis for this book when it was first published in 1999. Since then the flood has continued. The Central Archives remain closed to all except a select few among the Party's own researchers – and significant parts even to them – but provincial, municipal and local archives have begun opening their doors, albeit cautiously, to both Chinese and foreign historians.