Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  Like his colleagues in the Communist Party, Mao’s rise to power was against a background of instability, violence and misery. Before he was out of his teens he had taken part in a revolution and seen headless bodies lying in the streets. He had seen pitched battles between reformers and conservatives trying to restore the old order. He had seen soldiers terrorizing the local population, mass arrests and executions. By the time he was thirty, he was a hardened revolutionary. He had experienced treachery, cruelty and betrayal, and inflicted the same things on others. He had already lost many friends and comrades, and his wife and two brothers had been executed by the Guomindang. He himself had fled into a precarious refuge in the hills of south-central China. He had learned, through it all, to understand power and to trust no one. He had also learned how to survive in the savage internal struggles of the Chinese Communist Party, playing off one faction against the other and quietly undermining his rivals. In 1971, as Mao was turning his anger on Lin Biao, his Defence Minister, Lin’s son said ruefully: ‘Today [he] uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes.’4

  Like many other rebels in China’s long history, Mao came from the countryside. His province, Hunan, had a long history of providing grand civil servants and also bandits who took advantage of its rivers and mountains. The Hunanese, who loved hot red peppers, were always said to have a temperament to match their cooking. They were stubborn and deeply suspicious of outsiders, whether they were Manchu rulers or the foreign missionaries who started to appear in the nineteenth century. ‘China can only be conquered’, a proverb had it, ‘when all the Hunanese are dead.’5

  Mao was born a peasant, into a small village where life went on as it had for centuries. Only a few rumours of the outside world drifted in: of the upheavals of the Taiping Rebellion which convulsed so much of China in the mid-nineteenth century, and then the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the century which brought Western troops into the capital itself. Like Nixon, Mao later exaggerated his humble beginnings. His hardworking and thrifty father had grown more prosperous than many of his neighbours, partly through moneylending. He was able as a result to educate his sons, a move which, in a society that valued education highly, was the usual route out of the peasant class.

  Mao went to a traditional village school where the pupils memorized the old characters and some of the classics of Chinese civilization. He also learned to write poetry in the classical forms, as Chinese scholars had done for centuries. By the time he was ten, he began to understand some of the key ideas of Confucianism, that legacy which underpinned so much of traditional Chinese culture. The Confucian ideas of individual virtue and of the need for leaders to be virtuous and Confucianism’s faith that humans could be improved later mingled with his Marxism to produce Mao’s beliefs that China needed the moral leadership of the Communist Party and that human nature was infinitely malleable. And, as Chinese had done for centuries, he looked to history for lessons and guidance. By the time Mao was in his teens, though, the changes in China and the wider world were starting to press in on even his small village. He came across a pamphlet which warned that China was going to be divided up by the outside powers. ‘After I read this,’ he remembered, ‘I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realise it was the duty of all the people to help save it.’6

  As a young man, he also read the great novels with their upright heroes who defied corrupt and incompetent officials. Mao’s favourite, The Water Margin, is a Chinese Robin Hood, with a brotherhood of bandits and rebels who swear to each other to protect the poor and avenge injustice. Within his own family, he practised rebellion by defying his father. (Like Nixon, he loved his mother deeply.) When his mother, a gentle Buddhist, tried to make peace between them, Mao, according to his own later account, was immoveable. ‘I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained weak and submissive, he only beat me more.’7

  When his father pulled him out of school to work on the farm, Mao dawdled in the fields and spent as much time as he could reading. A year later, when Mao was fourteen, his family, as was the custom, found a wife for him. Mao refused to accept the girl and left home. ‘My father was bad,’ he said many years later during the Cultural Revolution. ‘If he were alive today, he should be “jetplaned” [a favourite torture of the Red Guards where the victim’s arms were yanked up behind his head].’8 While Mao may have been bolder than other young men his age, such conflicts between the generations were not unusual and are not sufficient to explain the man he became. His father, moreover, continued to support him when he resumed his education, trying first one school and then another.

  At sixteen, Mao left the countryside behind – as it turned out, forever. His father, with some reluctance, agreed that he should go to school in a nearby town. Some of the characteristics of the later Mao were becoming apparent by this stage. Among his new classmates he stood out as arrogant, stubborn and also sensitive to slights. ‘Many of the richer students despised me’, he told Edgar Snow, ‘because usually I was wearing my ragged coat and trousers.’9 Two years later, he moved on to another school in the provincial capital of Changsha, just in time for the revolution of 1911, when China became a republic. Mao, like Chou and many other Chinese, cut off his pigtail as a sign that the world had changed. When some of his fellow students proved reluctant to follow his example, he and his friends seized them by force and chopped theirs off as well.

  In those early years, he was finding his heroes: among them the tyrannical Qin Emperor who first united China in 221 bc and who burned books and buried scholars alive to make sure that nothing or no one could challenge his version of reality. He also admired Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism, and George Washington, who outlasted the British to win independence for the Thirteen Colonies. He even defended an unlikely figure, ‘Butcher’ Tang, the general who imposed a harsh rule on Changsha in the years after 1911. Although Tang closed schools, banned newspapers and executed 5,000 people in his three years in power, often in the most brutal ways, Mao approved of his strong government. ‘Without such behaviour, the goal of protecting the nation would be unattainable. Those who consider these things to be crimes do not comprehend the overall plan.’10 The belief that firm, even harsh, government was necessary for the Chinese people was to stay with Mao all his life.

  In the years after 1911, Mao drifted from one thing to another. He served briefly in one of the new revolutionary armies, then decided to go back to school again. His long-suffering father agreed to pay his fees. He toyed with the idea of police school. Then he decided he would rather learn to make soap or perhaps how to be a lawyer. Then it was a business school. He finally ended up in a normal school, for training future teachers. All the while, however, he was reading and learning. By this time, he was encountering some of the new ideas and knowledge that were challenging the traditional learning. He read Western thinkers, such as Adam Smith and Rousseau, in translation. Like others of his generation, he turned away with contempt from traditional Chinese learning. Centuries of tradition, he told a friend, had made the Chinese people slavish and narrow-minded. ‘Their mentality is too antiquated and their morality is extremely bad.’ The old ways of thought could be removed only ‘with tremendous force’.11 Unlike others of his generation, however, Mao never entirely repudiated the past. He continued throughout his life to refer to the classics in his writings and his conversation.

  Mao also never thought that China should blindly imitate other civilizations. Like the passionate Chinese nationalist he was, he always had a mixed reaction to the outside world. He recognized that China needed to learn, at the very least, modern technology from the West, but he also resented that fact. He once told a friend to stop wearing Western-style clothes. Mao hated what he saw as a fawning admiration of all things foreign. ‘If one of our
foreign masters farts,’ he wrote in 1923, ‘it is a lovely perfume.’12 On the other hand, like many other young Chinese nationalists, including Chou En-lai far to the north, he was impressed by Japan and by its rapid success in modernizing. He also shared their despair at the ineptitude of the new republic and the continued pressures from foreign powers.

  By now he was also developing his own ideas. He kept a journal for a time and started to write articles. Like many of his contemporaries he was impressed by the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest which held out both promise and threat for China. In 1917, in his first published article, he urged his fellow countrymen to take physical education seriously lest China would grow even weaker. ‘Our nation is wanting in strength. The military spirit has not been encouraged.’13 The importance of military power was something that was to remain with Mao for the rest of his life.

  Mao always prided himself on his toughness. As students, he and his friends would go on long walks in the winter, wading through icy streams. When he became ruler of China, he made highly publicized swims to demonstrate how fit he was and how self-controlled. In that same early article, he struck what was to become another favourite theme: that physical education helped to bring the emotions under control and strengthen the will. As he told his staff when he was ruler of China, ‘Sometimes I am so angry I feel my lungs are bursting. But I know I must control myself and not show anything.’ The Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who had a number of difficult conversations with Mao, compared him to a calm, slow-moving bear. ‘He would look at you for a long time, then lower his eyes and begin talking in a relaxed, quiet voice.’14

  As Mao was to write later in an essay that became compulsory reading for the Chinese, the individual, if his will was strong enough, could move mountains. And for morality, he believed, the individual need refer only to himself. ‘Every act in life is for the purpose of fulfilling the individual,’ he wrote as a young man, ‘and all morality serves [that end].’ Although he later proclaimed himself a Marxist, subject therefore to the laws of history, he never gave up that belief, at least where he himself was concerned. He also discovered his own attraction to sheer power. In another article, written in 1917, he talked about the hero whose actions were entirely the expression of his own impulses. ‘His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one’s lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped.’15

  By the summer of 1918, Mao had finished at the normal school and qualified as a teacher. He was not yet ready to settle down, however, and spent much of the next year drifting between Beijing, Shanghai and Changsha. It was an important period both for Mao and for China, a time of radical change and intellectual ferment. Mao shared the disgust that other young Chinese such as Chou En-lai felt when the victorious powers assembled in Paris decided to award what had been German concessions in China to Japan. Chinese nationalists were appalled and deeply angry at what they saw as betrayal by the Western democracies. Some concluded that democracy itself was flawed and wrong for China and that the West would never be China’s friend. By now they had an alternative: Marxist ideas were already circulating in intellectual circles in China, and, to the north, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and appeared to be putting those ideas into action. When, in the spring of 1920, the new Communist regime in Russia repudiated the old unequal treaties made between China and Russia and made statements (which in the end amounted to little but empty words) about handing back territory seized from China in tsarist days, Chinese nationalists were deeply impressed. Russia was, Mao said at the time, ‘the number-one civilised country in the world’.16 Many Chinese radicals were to move towards Marxism and, after it was established in 1920, the Chinese Communist Party.

  Mao was among them, and luck and perhaps his own talents brought him into contact with men who could help him. In Beijing, a young unknown man from the provinces, he found a friend in a former professor who helped him get a modest job as an assistant in the library of Beijing University. There his superior was Li Dachao, one of the most prominent of China’s early Marxists and the founding co-chairman of the Communist Party. Mao met other Marxists and gradually started to read some of Marx’s works which had been translated into Chinese. By 1920, although he had toyed briefly with anarchism, he had decided that he too was a Marxist. By the autumn of that year, he had a job as principal of a primary school in Changsha, but, like Chou, he was spending much of his time and energy on radical politics.

  In his personal life, Mao was experiencing much change as well. His much-loved mother fell ill and finally died in the autumn of 1919. Although he had sent her medicine, he had not gone near her in the last months. ‘I told her’, he confided to one of his staff years later, ‘I could not bear to see her looking in agony. I wanted to keep a beautiful image of her, and told her I wanted to stay away for a while.’ The death of his father a few months afterwards does not seem to have caused him much grief17

  At the start of 1921, he got married, this time to a bride of his own choosing. Yang Kaihui was the daughter of his old professor and patron. She was educated and, in the context of the day, something of a radical feminist. The marriage involved love on both sides, but Mao was not an easy husband. Increasingly politics took first place and there were always other women.18 In the early 1920s, as the fortunes of the Communist Party rose, those of Mao rose with them. Following the advice of the Soviet Union, as Russia had become, the Chinese Communists formed a tactical alliance with the major nationalist party, the Guomindang, to unite China and expel the foreign powers. Mao enthusiastically supported the alliance, a fact ignored in the official biographies, and spent much time away from home working for the United Front.

  The alliance led not as promised by the Chinese Communists’ Soviet mentors and paymasters to a Communist revolution but to a Guomindang supremacy under Chiang Kai-shek. The Guomindang at once turned on its former allies, and by the end of 1927 the Communist Party was largely destroyed in the big cities and Communists were either dead, underground like Chou or, like Mao, on the run in the countryside. Mao made his way into the mountains of south-central China and began, with others, to rebuild Communist strength.

  In the next few years, as the Communists gradually developed armed forces and learned how to live among and use the peasants, Mao slowly climbed upwards in the hierarchy. He was helped by an alliance with Zhu De, the Communists’ leading military commander, and by the fact that Moscow, which provided so much of the funding and weapons for the Chinese Communists, had spotted him as someone worth promoting. In what are still murky inner-party struggles, Mao picked off his rivals one by one. In 1935, he gained a key ally when Chou En-lai decided to accept his leadership.

  By this time, the Communists had been forced to abandon their base in south-central China and were desperately searching for safety from the Guomindang. This, although they did not realize it at the time, was the start of the Long March, that epic event in Communist mythology. Many of the legends that surround the March are just that. Mao for example rarely marched but was carried on a litter, reading. Communist soldiers, according to a recent history, did not swing heroically arm over arm along the chains of a crucial bridge; they strolled over unopposed. Nevertheless, the Long March was key to the rise of Mao and the later success of the Communists. By the time it ended, in the autumn of 1936, the Communists were in the northwest, much closer to Soviet aid and farther from the Guomindang, and Mao was firmly entrenched in power.19

  In 1937, the Japanese, who had already seized Manchuria, swept down into China. Although the Guomindang resisted, it was driven from one big city after another, finally retreating far up the Yangtze River to Qongqing. The invasion, which brought destruction and misery to much of China, weakened the Guomindang – as it turned out, mortally. The Guomindang lost its main tax base and much of its popular support. Its armies rotted from within, and the party and its bureaucracy grew increasingly corrupt. The Communists, b
y contrast, appeared as dedicated, clean-living patriots. Whether or not that was true, and there are still many questions about what they actually did in the war against the Japanese, outsiders and the Chinese themselves came to believe it. China’s war, which had been caught up in the much wider world war, ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945.

  The Communists now had an army of over 1,000,000 men and controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze. And within the party Mao was now absolute ruler. If his colleagues disagreed, he was to have the final word. In 1945, delegates at a Party Congress confirmed his special status. A huge sign proclaimed ‘March Forward under the Banner of Mao Tse-tung!’ Those who had known him for some years found that he was becoming more remote and godlike. Chou En-lai was still a comrade, said an American fellow traveller. ‘With Mao, I felt I was sitting next to history.’20