by Philip Short
So culminated a process of national disillusionment that had begun at the time of Mao's birth, when nineteenth-century reformers, responding to the clash with the West, for the first time challenged the beliefs that had kept the Chinese system frozen in immobility for the previous 2,000 years.
After Mao, there was no new emperor – merely a succession of fallible leaders, not better and not worse than in any other country. Blind faith and ideology died. People began thinking for themselves. The old world had been smashed; the new had been found wanting. After a century of turmoil, China was ready to make a fresh start.
Revolution has more to do with tearing down the old than with painstakingly constructing the new. Mao's legacy was to clear the way for less visionary, more practical men to build the shining future that he could never achieve.
Twice before in Chinese history, radical despotisms have ushered in long periods of peace and prosperity. The First Emperor of Qin unified the feudal princedoms in the third century bc but his dynasty survived for only fifteen years. He paved the way for the Han, the first Golden Age of Chinese antiquity, which endured four centuries. In the sixth and early seventh centuries ad, the Sui, who reunified China after a time of division and instability known as the Six Dynasties and the Three Kingdoms, ruled for thirty-nine years. They were followed by the Tang, the second Golden Age, which lasted for three centuries.
Mao ruled for twenty-seven years. If the past, as he believed, is indeed a mirror for the present, will the twenty-first century see a third Chinese golden age, for which the Maoist dictatorship will have opened the way?
Or will it be his fate to be remembered as a flawed colossus, who brought fundamental change to China on a scale that only a handful of others have achieved in the past several millennia, but at a terrible price, and then failed to follow through?
History is laid down slowly in China. One day, perhaps, Mao's shadow will loom less large. His name will recede into a more distant, less threatening past, to join the shades of other founding statesmen: Peter the Great, the tyrant who laid the foundations of modern Russia; George Washington, slave-owner and humanist; Napoleon, ‘the greatest criminal in French history’, as one French intellectual put it; Oliver Cromwell, iconoclast and regicide; a handful of others. But the regime Mao founded may well last longer than most Westerners wish to think. In Asia, elements of a market economy have coexisted for thousands of years with authoritarian rule. Certainly China will change, but not necessarily as the rest of the world expects.
* Mao's direct involvement in the hunting down and execution of presumed opponents was limited to the period from 1930–1 in the Jiangxi base area. In the Yan'an Rectification Campaign, he gave instructions that ‘no cadre is to be killed’, but, in practice, allowed Kang Sheng to drive Party dissidents to suicide. This pattern was repeated throughout his leadership of the People's Republic.
AFTERWORD
Mao – Western Judgements
For the first decade after Mao's death, the China which he had bequeathed to his successors and hence, by implication, his own record, were on the whole viewed favourably in the West. Under Deng Xiaoping, the country began tentatively to embrace a liberal economic system and, although political control remained tight – in 1979, the ‘Democracy Wall’ movement was crushed and Wei Jingsheng and other dissidents were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment – there was a broad, if misplaced, Western consensus that in the foreseeable future China would become a more democratic state.
Misplaced but not entirely wrong. For the last forty years, the Chinese people have had more freedom and more possibilities for fulfilment than at any time in the country's history. After Deng Xiaoping opened the country's doors to foreign tourism, Westerners visited China in their millions and for the most part were entranced by what they saw. But, as so often, Western governments and public opinion placed the bar too high. The idea that China, which had never, in its 5,000 years of recorded history, experienced anything remotely resembling a democratic system, would suddenly, in the space of a few decades, leap through changes which in Europe had taken many centuries to achieve, required a suspension of disbelief, even in the age of globalisation and the internet. The ancient dictum, ‘Win and become a high official, lose and be boiled alive’ still guides political struggle at the summit of the Chinese Party and State – as witness the recent cases of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang – though thankfully today it applies metaphorically, not literally.
On June 4, 1989, reality returned. On Deng's orders, the Chinese army crushed a student-led insurrection, with hundreds or thousands of deaths in or near Tiananmen Square (the details are in dispute; the massacre is not). The West reacted with shock and dismay, but by then China was too important to ostracise for long. Two years later, Deng ramped up the movement towards a market economy and Western governments breathed a collective sigh of relief: if China was adopting a free-market system, which according to Marx would eventually engender a bourgeois middle class and bourgeois political institutions – in other words, democracy – it was a country the West could legitimately do business with.
However, that was not how things worked out. A Chinese middle class emerged, but bourgeois institutions did not. Instead, the Communist Party maintained iron control over political life and ideas. A decade after Tiananmen, when another challenge arose to the Communist Party's monopoly of power – this time in the shape of a group calling itself Falun Gong, a traditional secret society dressed up as a religious sect – it, too, was ruthlessly repressed.
Small wonder that by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Western opinion – particularly in the United States – was becoming disabused. The extent of the change was brought home to me when, during a visit to New York in the spring of 2005, Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC's nightly news, told me he wanted to make a film about China. He intended to call it ‘The Enemy’, he said. I winced. Surely, I suggested, ‘The Challenger’ or ‘The Rival’ would be more appropriate? No, Peter insisted: ‘The Enemy’ was how Americans were beginning to view China. He was right. That year, an opinion poll found that 35 per cent of Americans regarded China as a potentially hostile power. Ten years later the figure was 54 per cent. John Pomfret, who studied in China and spent five years as Beijing correspondent of the Washington Post, watched American attitudes sour and become increasingly hard-boiled. ‘The bloom’, he wrote, ‘was clearly off the Chinese rose.’1 The Chinese noticed too. Colonel Liu Mingfu, a PLA hawk, whose 2010 book, The China Dream, provided Xi Jinping with the catchphrase for his leadership, responded: ‘Washington sees 1.3 billion people as enemies. Washington sees China as an adversary, and as a result that will push China to become an enemy of the United States.’2 Six years later, Francesco Sisci, a veteran Italian commentator on Chinese affairs who lectures at Renmin Daxue in Beijing, wrote: ‘There is a change of mood in Beijing… 30 years ago, [China's] leaders believed the US had an interest in helping China as a piece of its grand anti-Soviet strategy; now many of those leaders think the US has an interest in stopping or slowing down China's growth as this could challenge American “world dominance”. [This] feeds, and is fed by, self-fulfilling rhetoric that moves back and forth on both sides of the Pacific.’3 President Obama's ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2012 reflected this new mood. The moment could have been better chosen, coinciding as it did with the resurgence of Russia and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, but in the long term there is no doubt that the continuation, or not, of America's post-World War II role as global hegemon will be determined primarily in Asia, above all by its future relationship with China.
It is a truism that the writing of history is influenced by the social and political context of the time in which it takes place.
In the early post-war period, US attitudes to China were poisoned by the McCarthyite ‘Who lost China’ debate (as though China had been America's to lose), and by the invective generated by the Korean War. The historical narrative was fashioned ac
cordingly: Chiang Kai-shek was a good man; Mao Zedong and his colleagues were bad. Americans were forbidden to travel to China and few American historians took an interest in the communists’ rise to power. One who did was Benjamin Schwartz, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard, published in 1951 as Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, argued that Mao had created a distinctive version of Marxism-Leninism relying on the peasantry rather than the proletariat. Ten years later Chalmers Johnson enlarged on those ideas in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power. But they were the exceptions. Most research on Chinese communism in the 1950s and early 1960s was carried out in Europe, where the ideological winds of the Cold War blew less strongly. In London in 1963, another American, Stuart Schram, published the first selection of original texts of Mao's works, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, followed, three years later, by a ground-breaking biography of Mao which is still being read half a century later. By then the political context was beginning to change. The Sino–Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution generated a surge of interest in ‘Red China’, which coincided throughout the West with a new intellectual climate, prompted by the coming of age of the post-war baby-boomers, whose values and aspirations were very different from those of their parents. In America the new radicalism was linked to the Vietnam War, which set the stage for an explosion of studies comparing and contrasting the war against the Vietcong with Mao's guerrilla war in the 1930s and 1940s.4 Then the deaths, a year apart, of Chiang Kai-shek and of Mao, the subsequent flood of memoir literature, the gradual unlocking of the archives and the easing of political constraints on historical research in both mainland China and Taiwan, allowed the emergence of a widely shared view, among Chinese and Western scholars alike, that Mao's rule, although deeply flawed, had been globally beneficial, laying a solid foundation for economic development and making the country once again a major player on the world stage.
Into this cosy consensus, in 2005, two British writers, Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, lobbed a depth charge. Their book, Mao: The Unknown Story, set out to debunk all previous writing on the subject.
The timing was inspired. China was no longer a distant, exotic land, a ‘flowery kingdom’ of Red Guards and mandarins, but an economic powerhouse challenging the United States for global dominance. What better moment to overturn the myth of the man who created modern China and whose legacy, albeit backhandedly, the Chinese leadership continued to uphold? ‘Our story is completely different,’ Chang told interviewers. ‘Nobody has explained Mao like us … People looked but they didn't see.’ Earlier scholars, she and Halliday argued, had failed to understand the true nature of Mao and his system of rule.
Chang had become an international celebrity as a result of her previous book, Wild Swans, an autobiographical account of the experiences of her family during the Chinese revolution. An exquisite panorama of Chinese society from the 1920s until Mao's death, it deservedly became a worldwide best seller. More perhaps than any other book since Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China in 1937, it made China instantly accessible and fascinating to a mass readership in the West. Chinese who read it were less impressed. Chang's father, they noted, had been a senior Communist Party official in the Sichuan Provincial Committee's Propaganda Department (which in the book is coyly renamed the ‘Public Affairs Department’), responsible for ensuring that the provincial media promoted Mao's policies during the Great Leap Forward, when some eight million Sichuanese peasants starved to death, the second-highest death rate in the country, and then for censoring the appalling results. Later, like many other high officials, he was severely maltreated and died during the Cultural Revolution. Jung Chang blamed Mao for his death.
The phenomenal success of Wild Swans – more than 12 million copies sold in 37 languages – served as the launch pad for Mao: The Unknown Story. Jung Chang's celebrity, combined with a bandwagon effect generated by a brilliantly orchestrated marketing campaign, which led non-specialist reviewers to outdo each other in praise, made Mao: The Unknown Story an instant triumph. Critics hailed it as ‘a bombshell of a book’, ‘the most powerful, compelling, and revealing political biography of modern times’, ‘a mesmerising portrait’ which would change forever the way the history of China would be viewed.
The superlatives were correct in one sense. The book's impact over the past decade, and the fierceness of the debate that it triggered, are hard to overstate. There has not been as vigorous a sinological controversy since the mid-nineteenth century, when the French savants, Stanislas Julien and Guillaume Pauthier, spent decades excoriating each other for ‘odiously distorting’ this or that aspect of the Chinese classics. But as a work of scholarship, Mao: The Unknown Story falls short. It is a highly significant book, but not for the reasons Jung Chang's admirers think.
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that there are times when one's first duty is ‘to say that two plus two makes four’. That is often harder than it sounds. In the case of Jung Chang and her husband, the difficulty is compounded because Wild Swans gave great pleasure to millions of people. But the virtues of one book should not mask the faults of another. Where Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China in 1936 to promote Mao's cause, Chang and Halliday wrote The Unknown Story to demonise him.
For a number of reasons, not limited to the renown of Jung Chang, the subject is a minefield, as others who ventured into it before me have discovered. The China Journal, one of the two leading academic journals in the field, devoted a special issue in 2007 to a scholarly (and largely negative) assessment of The Unknown Story. Gregor Benton, the leading Western historian of the Red base areas, co-edited a collection of essays in 2010 entitled Was Mao Really a Monster?, which brought together the views of specialists all over the world: they, too, were critical. Benton wrote that Jung Chang and her husband had ‘merely inverted the error of the Mao-worshippers’ – those on the far left in the 1960s and 1970s (of whom, ironically, Jon Halliday was one).5 Half a century later, the pendulum has swung back. Adulation has given place to obloquy.
In this Manichean reading of history, Mao was the incarnation of evil from the day he was born to the day he died. Jung Chang herself has written that in all her research, she found ‘not one single thing’ that was positive about him. On that basis she proceeded, as the Chinese saying has it, ‘to cut the feet to fit the shoes’.
If her book were just another of the innumerable diatribes published over the years in small editions by left- and right-wing ideologues promoting their particular take on communist China, that might not matter very much. But Mao: The Unknown Story has become for many readers in the English-speaking world the definitive account of the founder of modern China, influencing popular and, to some extent, political perceptions of one of the world's two major powers, destined to play an ever growing global role in the century ahead. Right-wingers everywhere, especially in the United States, welcomed it as proof that all revolutionary movements lead to bloody dictatorship. Soviet communism had been discredited by Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn and finally Gorbachev; now it was the turn of the Chinese version. President George W. Bush made Jung Chang's book his bedtime reading and commented appreciatively that it had shown him ‘how brutal a tyrant Mao was … he killed millions and millions of people’ – something which apparently he had not registered before. With the Cold War now over, the threat to American power, economic this time, came from the People's Republic, the country which Mao had founded and which continues to bear his imprint today. Jung Chang's book meshed perfectly with the new narrative of a potentially hostile juggernaut emerging to challenge America's dominance in Asia.
Let there be no mistake: Mao was a tyrant – ruthless, cruel, despotic and driven by an almost superhuman will to prevail. That needs to be said. It can be said, as I hope the present volume has shown, without traducing the facts. It also needs to be said that many early Western accounts glossed over the dark side of his regime. But Mao was not just a tyrant. As Elizabeth Perry has written, ‘Were that the whole story, how do we explain Mao's rema
rkable ability to convince millions of his countrymen to sacrifice for his revolutionary crusade long before he possessed the coercive means to enforce compliance? And how do we account for the outpouring of nostalgia for Chairman Mao and his accomplishments so evident among many ordinary Chinese (especially the disadvantaged) even today, more than three decades after his death? Mao's charismatic appeal … is part of a larger revolutionary tradition that continues to reverberate in significant and sometimes surprising ways.’6
Looking back, ten years after Jung Chang's book appeared, it is hard to understand why the pundits who acclaimed Mao: The Unknown Story could not see any of that. One does not have to be an expert to sense that something is wrong when a book purports to know always what its subject is thinking, paints him as a villain without redeeming qualities and offers no explanation for his undeniable success. Claims that the radicalism of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, was the result of sexual frustration, and statements such as, ‘It was, it seems, a good day if the boss waived a few million deaths’, would appear to discredit themselves without any need for specialist knowledge.7 Yet even those who acknowledged that there were problems with Jung Chang's approach hastened to say they were minor compared with the book's merits.
In fact Mao: The Unknown Story was much more deeply flawed.
Gregor Benton has described the modus operandi: ‘The concrete charges … are invented and all are in some way faulty … They try to strip him of all credit by finding errors everywhere and explaining them as the systemic product of a wrong line.’ It was a method, Benton noted, that was imported into China after the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.8
The Roman orator, Cicero, wrote more than 2000 years ago: Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat historia [‘History may admit no falsehood, nor fail to mention any truth’]. This is not the place to give a detailed account of the omissions or ‘misstatements’, to use a neutral term, in Chang and Halliday's book: most are already well-documented and in any case a catalogue would make exceedingly tedious reading. None the less, a few examples may be helpful to illustrate the problems involved.