Mao

by Philip Short

  The contrast between the simplistic image of the past purveyed by the Chinese mass media, under strict Party control, and the meticulous accounts to be found in Chinese books and scholarly journals, is flagrant.

  It is true that the latter are largely confined to publications with limited print runs, which are not stocked in high-street stores but have to be sought out in specialist book shops. It is true, too, that they often confine themselves to a factual recital, leaving it to the reader to tease out the interpretation concealed between the lines. None the less, the wealth of information now available, which not long ago would have been considered top secret and whose disclosure would have landed an author in jail, is truly remarkable. Part of the reason is the passage of time: historical details which, thirty or forty years ago, might have been used as weapons in intra-Party intrigue, become much less sensitive when most of the potential rivals are dead. Now it is a question of preserving, or rehabilitating, the reputations of the protagonists and their followers. Regional political figures demand that local heroes get their fair share of credit for revolutionary successes, rather than the whole story being centred on Mao; local historians, working from local archives, write regional histories – both to please their patrons and to advance their own standing in Party history circles – and provincial presses publish their work without, in most cases, needing to refer upward to Beijing.

  In one sense, this is simply a reflection of the changed nature of the regime. Deng Xiaoping's rallying cry, which he used to repudiate the ideological excesses of Mao's closest followers, was: ‘Seek truth from facts!’ Even in the world of Party double-speak, it would have been hard to promote that slogan and at the same time prevent Chinese historians from trying to carry it out. But there was another, deeper reason. For more than 2,000 years, ever since the great Han dynasty scholar Sima Qian wrote the first comprehensive Chinese history in the second century BC – suffering imprisonment and castration for his pains – Chinese historians have viewed the past as a mirror to throw light on the present and provide guidance for the future. The 1981 resolution itself reaffirmed that principle. Small wonder, then, that the moment the powers-that-be acknowledged the legitimacy of research into the period of Mao's rule, historians both within the Party and outside it swarmed through the breach. Ever since, Chinese scholars have been steadily pushing the boundaries, and although there remain some ‘no-go areas’, such as the role of Premier Zhou Enlai as the Chairman's echo-chamber and enforcer; Deng's excesses in the political campaigns of the 1950s; and the complicity between Mao and his cantankerous wife, Jiang Qing, they are becoming the exceptions to the rule.

  But why, in that case, is this openness confined to the elite? Why does the Chinese State continue to insist that Mao's image, for the great mass of the Chinese people, remain sacred and untouchable?

  The answer is to be found in the nature of the Chinese polity since Mao's death. Since the 1990s, if not earlier, the Chinese Communist Party has been communist in name only. On what, then, does it base its claim to a monopoly of power? After all, absent the Marxist-Leninist assertion that ‘socialism [for which read, communism] and socialism alone can save China’, as the 1981 resolution phrased it, what possible justification can there be for maintaining a one-party system?

  To the extent that the Party responds to such heretical ideas, it justifies its hold on power firstly by its ability to deliver rising living standards, not only along the developed seaboard but also in the interior; and secondly by its history. The communists, under Mao's leadership, it argues, gained the right to rule China in 1949 by bringing to an end more than a century of turmoil and humiliation and restoring to the Chinese people their national pride – a discreet allusion to the nationalism which, since Mao's death, has provided the glue to hold the country together in an era when ideology has lost its appeal. These three pillars – prosperity, nationalism and the legend of Mao's revolution – are the foundations on which Chinese political power is based. Thus far, the government's record in resisting economic shocks – in other words, preserving prosperity – has been remarkably good: China took in its stride both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the ‘Great Recession’ a decade later. The transition from export-led growth to consumption may prove trickier to manage, but there is no reason to think that the Chinese will be less successful than other nations before them. Nationalism always carries a risk that it will spin out of control, as China's rhetoric against Japan has shown, but thus far it has been kept within bounds. The founding legend, however, is a very different matter. Tampering with that could open a Pandora's box with unforeseeable consequences which would bring no possible benefit to those who now hold power.

  The Chinese leaders are all the more alive to this danger – perhaps, indeed, excessively so – because both Mao, at Yan'an in 1945, and Deng, in 1981, began by repudiating those of their predecessors’ policies which contradicted their own vision of the future. In China, the past is bound up so intimately with the present that it serves not only as a mirror but as a political weapon. Moreover this cuts both ways. Xiao Yanzhong,3 Professor of Political Science at East China Normal University in Shanghai, has described Mao studies in China as ‘a bellwether that can indicate changes in China's politics, economy, and society, as well as the states of mind of the Chinese people.’ More or less openness about the past goes in tandem with the leadership's willingness, or refusal, to contemplate economic and political reform in the present.

  The regime's nervousness about such matters is striking. For more than ten years, attempts have been underway to persuade the Chinese authorities to permit the making of a Western-financed big-screen movie about Mao along the lines of Richard Attenborough's classic, Gandhi. It would focus on Mao's rise to power and the epic struggle against Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists, and end with the communist victory in 1949. The ‘Big Events Group’ of the China Film Co-production Corporation was enthusiastic. But when it came to approving the project, there was silence. No one was willing to take responsibility. When the question was referred upward, the response was the same. Even at the highest levels – and even though the script avoided the contentious episodes of Mao's later years – no one saw any interest in risking the kind of controversy that such a project was bound to generate.

  Hence the curious compromise that governs the study of Mao in China today: scholars are given – within limits – generous latitude to pursue their researches; but for the general public, the ‘masses’, as they were called in Mao's day, the lid is clamped hermetically shut.

  Not touching Mao's image is one thing, however; not using it is another.

  In 1979, after the wall-poster attacks of Wei Jingsheng and others, calling for an end to Communist Party rule and the introduction of a multi-party system, and challenges to Party orthodoxy in art and literature, Deng Xiaoping proclaimed the ‘four cardinal principles’ to which the Chinese are expected to adhere – ‘the socialist road; the people's democratic dictatorship; the leadership of the Communist Party; and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought’ – in a deliberate reassertion of pre-Cultural Revolution Maoist values. Four years later, Deng called again for ‘enhancing Mao Zedong Thought’, this time in a campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, which was equated with ‘disseminating corrupt and decadent bourgeois ideology … and sentiments of distrust towards … the Communist Party leadership’.

  Thereafter the scarecrow of ‘Maoism’ was dusted off and given a ritual shake every time it was felt necessary to crack down on liberal excesses. The next occasion, in 1987, was a campaign against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, associated with Hu Yaobang, whose death in May 1989 triggered the student contestation which ended on June 4 in the carnage of Tiananmen. Then, in the 1990s, Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, revived a movement, originally launched a decade earlier, for ‘a new, socialist spiritual civilisation’. Maoist role models from the 1960s, like the soldier Lei Feng, who considered himself ‘a rustless screw’ in the Chairman's scheme of things, were
exhumed and put on show for a new generation of young Chinese to emulate. By then, enough time had passed since Mao's death for nostalgia to set in. The original personality cult had been dismantled, but in some cities, including Chengdu and Shenyang (and in Kashgar, to remind restive Uighurs of the revolutionary past), huge statues of Mao, many times life-size, still stood – and still stand today – in central squares, a gigantic arm outstretched as though to point the way ahead. Taxi-drivers hung amulets with Mao's portrait on their windscreens to ward off accidents, and stories circulated in Beijing of miraculous escapes thanks to the protection they conferred. In the Chairman's home province of Hunan, local officials recounted how flowers had come into bloom in mid-winter at the anniversary of his birth.

  Artists like Shi Xinning, who paints Mao in imaginary, hyper-realist settings – at Che Guevara's funeral, for instance, or with the Big Three at Yalta in 1945, in place of Chiang Kai-shek – and whose works have been collected by, among others, Mao's daughter, Li Min; and Sui Jianguo, whose monumental headless Mao jackets are in collections all over the world, took over where Andy Warhol left off, reworking Mao's image in ways which, with irony and black humour, transformed him into a twenty-first-century icon. Groups of citizens, young people as well as old, gathered spontaneously in parks at weekends to sing rousing revolutionary songs with the fervour of boy scouts around a camp fire. The words were an antidote to the materialistic money-grubbing reality around them, and the familiar, lilting melodies conjured up memories of simpler, more egalitarian times, when corruption was political rather than financial, people could have as many children as they wished and education and health care, limited though they might be, were free.

  One Chinese leader, aspiring to yet higher office, sought to co-opt this movement for political ends. Bo Xilai was the son of Bo Yibo, who, when he died in 2007 at the age of 98, was the last survivor of the ‘Eight Immortals’, a group of conservative party elders led by Deng who had been together since the Long March. The family had a reputation for nepotism and ruthlessness. But the younger Bo, with his father's help, had been able to exploit the patronage network of the then Party leader, Jiang Zemin, to become First Secretary of Chongqing, the biggest of China's mega-cities with a population, including the suburbs, of some 30 million people, which he hoped to use as a springboard to membership of the Politburo's nine- (now seven-) member Standing Committee, the supreme organ of power.

  Bo was not the inventor of what became known as the ‘red culture movement’ associated with his name: rather he seized on a phenomenon that had begun some years earlier and bent it to his own purposes. In Chongqing, the promotion of ‘revolutionary singing groups’ became a key official policy. Cadres came under intense pressure to foster a Maoist revival. In 2009, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party, Bo arranged for SMSs of Mao's quotations, taken from the ‘Little Red Book’, the Maoist breviary of the Cultural Revolution, to be sent to all 13 million cell-phone owners in the city. New statues of Mao were erected. Theatres revived Cultural Revolution operas and ballets.

  Throughout China there was a veritable explosion of films and television programmes glorifying Mao's contributions, which reached a peak two years later on the 90th anniversary of the founding of the CCP.4 The centenary, in 2021, can be expected to produce an even greater outpouring of adulation for the founder of the regime. Nor should that be surprising. Half a century ago, the psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton wrote presciently: ‘One cannot predict future attitudes of Chinese leaders towards the Maoist image, but there is good reason to believe that for some time at least they will continue to hold [it] on high, even as they retreat from its excesses … it would be very rash to assume that a regime which has so recently commanded so much psychic power would suddenly cease to possess any at all.’5

  Bo Xilai's exploitation of the Maoist myth was not all froth. In Chongqing he promoted egalitarianism and tried to reduce the gulf between urban and rural life, epitomised by the hukou system of residence permits. Instead of repressing protests, he organised round-table discussions. He launched a massive programme to build cheap housing and promote social welfare and a relentless campaign against crime. But his methods were controversial and sometimes illegal and, like many other Chinese leaders, he was deeply corrupt. More important to his peers, his outsize ego, charismatic personality and disdain for collective decision-making made him a potential threat to their own power. In 2012, a bizarre case involving the poisoning of a British businessman who had worked for him and a request by his police chief for asylum at the nearest American consulate became the pretext for his undoing. Xi Jinping marshalled support in the Standing Committee and, eleven days before Xi's appointment as Party leader, Bo was expelled from the Party. In 2013 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Qincheng prison, where Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, had languished before her suicide in 1991. Caught up in Bo's fall was his mentor, Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Standing Committee, who became the first leader at that level to be purged since the arrests of Jiang's colleagues, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao, during the campaign against the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ almost forty years earlier. Zhou, too, was expelled from the Party and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  But it did not end there. In China, it rarely does.

  After Bo's imprisonment, Xi proceeded to steal his challenger's clothes, approving extravagant ceremonies to mark the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth that winter; resurrecting Mao's guidelines on literature and art, laid down at Yan'an seventy years earlier; and initiating a comprehensive campaign against ideological laxity. In November 2013 a Central Committee directive entitled ‘The Current State of the Ideological Sphere’6 listed seven deadly sins which Party members were required to flee like the plague. Five dealt with ideas imported from the West – constitutional democracy; human rights; civil society; economic neo-liberalism; and a free press – and the sixth was aimed at neo-Maoists who resisted the Party's policies of ‘reform and opening up’. The seventh ‘false ideological trend’ was described as historical nihilism, which meant seeking to undermine the historical legitimacy of the CCP by emphasising Mao's mistakes. To Xi, as to Mao himself, the erosion of the Soviet Communist Party's strength – which would lead to its collapse and the break-up of the Soviet Union – began in 1956 with Khrushchev's secret speech which exposed Stalin's crimes. Mao was not only the Stalin but the Lenin of the Chinese Revolution and, at a still deeper level, the founding emperor of the dynasty which Xi now heads. Chip away at Mao's image and the whole system might come crashing down. That is not a risk which either Xi himself or any of his colleagues is prepared to take.

  There is another reason for Xi to preserve Mao’s memory: not everyone in the Chinese Party, or in the country at large, is bowled over by what critics deride as ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ – the programme of economic reforms launched by Deng in 1978, which Xi is now continuing. To leftists in the Party, the reforms, and the corruption they have engendered, are a betrayal of everything Mao stood for. Such people applaud Xi's frequent warnings that, unless corrupt behaviour can be brought under control, the Party will eventually lose power, but complain that he is attacking the symptoms, not the root of the disease: the abandonment of socialist policies. Although today the leftists have less influence than in the 1980s and 1990s, it is not inconceivable that, should China encounter serious turbulence in the years ahead, the charge of jettisoning the Party's founding principles, inherited from Mao, could furnish a pretext for mobilising opposition to Xi's leadership. In this context, Mao's image is a talisman, to be burnished constantly for the protection it provides.

  At the same time Xi has begun dismantling the modest checks and balances which Deng installed after 1980 to prevent any Chinese leader ever again acquiring the late Chairman's awesome powers. The old revolutionary had written in the People's Daily that year: ‘If systems [of governance] are sound, they can place restraints on the actions of bad people; if they are unsound, they may h
amper the efforts of good people or indeed, in certain cases, may push them in the wrong direction.’ His answer was to separate the Party from the State; to keep the army out of politics; and, eventually, to give more power for the judiciary. The last principle was honoured in the breach, and in his later years, Deng himself was given the right – like Mao after 1943 – to approve or negate whatever decisions the Standing Committee might take. None the less, collective leadership was the lodestar and under Deng's successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, it was largely observed.

  Xi's approach has been very different. His audacity in meeting Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore, thereby opening a door to eventual reconciliation which not even Deng had attempted, was the clearest sign of that. Although in a very different context, it has echoes of Mao's decision to overrule opposition and invite the US ping-pong team to China in 1971. Xi has promoted strong centralised internal controls, creating ‘super-committees’, under his own leadership, responsible for security and for economic reform in all three branches – party, government and military – and inaugurating the biggest shake-up of the armed forces since 1949, ensuring that ‘the gun’, from which, as Mao noted, ‘all political power grows’, remains loyal not merely to the Party but to himself. In so far as that too is a throwback to Mao's methods, it offers another compelling reason for leaving the Great Helmsman's image intact.

  Prologue

  Few people today, even in China, have heard of the little market town of Tongdao. It extends for about a mile along the left bank of the Shuangjiang, squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the wide, brown river and a range of terraced hills. Tongdao is the centre of a small non-Han minority area where the three provinces of Guangxi, Guizhou and Hunan meet. It is a scruffy, run-down place, with one long, muddy main street, few shops and fewer modern buildings, where even the locals say resignedly that nothing of interest ever happens. Yet once something did happen there. On December 12, 1934,1 the Red Army leadership gathered in Tongdao for a meeting which was to mark the beginning of Mao Zedong's rise to supreme power.