Mao

by Philip Short

  Mao had an extraordinary ability to create myths about the communist past at the same time as he fired his supporters with visions of the future.8 The myth of ‘the Yan'an Way’ – the distinctive brand of communism which Mao developed during the ten-year interval between the end of the first Chinese civil war and the beginning of the second – would join the legend of the Long March as one of the most enduring emblems of the system he was to create.

  Before that could happen, however, he first had to achieve the two long-term goals that he had been consciously striving for ever since his arrival in Shaanxi, two years before: the consolidation of his political power, and the elaboration of a body of Marxist theory bearing his personal stamp.

  They were intimately linked. Every communist leader, from Lenin onwards, had based his authority on his theoretical contributions to Marxist doctrine. This was the weakest link in Mao's armour. While his Party rivals, the Returned Students and their leader, Wang Ming, had been soaking up Leninist orthodoxy at Russian universities, he had been away in the wilderness, fighting a guerilla war. Yet there was one way, Mao realised, in which that weakness could be turned into a strength. Ten years earlier, in the winter of 1925, he had called for ‘an ideology produced in Chinese conditions’. In China, for 2,000 years every regime had had its orthodoxy. The communists, too, needed their own distinctive, Chinese form of Marxism. It would enable the Party to tap into the deep vein of Chinese nationalism; erode the influence of Mao's Russian-trained rivals and formidably buttress his own leadership claims.

  He made his first move at Wayaobu, in December 1935.

  There, at his urging, the Politburo endorsed the view that Marxism should be applied flexibly to ‘specific, concrete Chinese conditions’, and condemned ‘leftist dogmatism’, meaning slavish adherence to Moscow's ideas.

  Three months later he was arguing that the Chinese Party should ‘run things by itself, and have faith in its own abilities’; the Soviet Union was a friend, but its help was secondary. Soviet and Chinese policies coincided, he declared, ‘only where the interests of the Chinese masses coincide with the interests of the Russian masses’.9

  In June, 1936, the Red Army University was inaugurated in Wayaobu, in a tiny, one-roomed Daoist temple, to serve as a forum where Mao could lecture on political and military affairs.10 His timing was poor, for the town was abandoned to the nationalists three weeks later. But, following the move to Bao'an, the ‘university’ was re-established, with Lin Biao as its president, in equally humble surroundings – a natural cave, where the Red Army's top commanders squatted on improvised stone stools, taking notes with the aid of a stylus on ‘notepads’ of soft stone.11 That autumn, Mao gave a series of talks there, entitled ‘Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War,’ in which he developed for the first time the notion of China's distinctiveness, ostensibly in the context of military affairs but actually in a broader sense as well:

  China's revolutionary war … is waged in the specific environment of China and so has its own specific circumstances and nature [and] … specific laws of its own … Some people … say that it is enough merely to study the experience of revolutionary war in Russia … and the military manuals published by Soviet military organisations. They do not see that these … manuals embody the specific characteristics of the … Soviet Union, and that if we copy and apply them mechanically without allowing any change, we shall … be ‘cutting the feet to fit the shoes’, and will be defeated … Although we must value Soviet experience … we must value even more the experience of China's revolutionary war, because there are many factors specific to the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Red Army.12

  By emphasising the differences between the Soviet Union and China, and affirming the primacy of indigenous experience, ‘acquired at the cost of our own blood’, Mao was consciously laying the groundwork for the idea of Marxism in a national form. To underline the message, he launched a comprehensive critique of the ‘left opportunists of 1931–34’ – the Returned Student leadership – whom he accused of behaving like ‘hotheads and ignoramuses’ and pursuing ‘theories and practices [which] did not have the slightest flavour of Marxism about them; indeed, they were anti-Marxist.’

  Mao was able to get away with such language because he did not name names, and his remarks were not made in public but to a select audience of the military elite. None the less, he was pushing at the limits of what his colleagues would accept. In February 1937, when his old protégé from Anyuan, Liu Shaoqi, now responsible for the Party's underground work in north China, argued that the whole of the past decade had been a period of ‘leftist adventurism’, the rest of the leadership cried foul. By the summer, however, the wind had shifted, and when Liu repeated his charges Mao came out openly in his support. ‘Shaoqi's report is basically correct,’ he told the Politburo. ‘He is like a doctor diagnosing our ailments, pointing out systematically the problems we had before.’ Although the Party had great achievements to its credit, Mao said, it still suffered from a ‘mistaken leftist tradition’. Much more would have to be done if it were to be overcome. The episode marked the start of Liu's rise to become, in the course of the next five years, Mao's most trusted colleague.13

  While the debate over leftism simmered, Mao resumed his study of Marxism. He had not worked exegetically with philosophical texts since he had been a student, twenty years earlier, and found the prospect intimidating. That winter and the following spring he annotated works by two leading Soviet theoreticians, Ivan Shirokov and Mark Mitin, and by their Chinese translators, Li Da, who had been a member of the Shanghai ‘communist group’ which predated the CCP, and Ai Siqi, the leading figure among the younger generation of academic Marxist theorists.14 In the summer he began a twice-weekly lecture course, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, on dialectical materialism.15

  It was not a success.

  His opening talks, tracing the evolution of European philosophy as a struggle between materialism and idealism, first in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then in Germany in the nineteenth, were dreary in the extreme.16 Mao himself warned his audience, ‘These talks of mine are far from adequate, since I have myself only just begun to study dialectics.’ In the mid-1960s, he was so mortified at the memory of them that he denied authorship altogether.17 He did break new ground at one point, by arguing that the particular and the general were ‘interconnected and inseparable’, which later provided a theoretical basis for contending that general Marxist principles must always exist in a particular national form.18 But for the most part he came across as a neophyte, bogged down in a topic he was still struggling to understand.

  The next two series were rather better, partly because they were grounded more solidly in Mao's own experience. ‘On Practice’ developed themes from an essay which he had written during his rural investigations in 1930 in Jiangxi, entitled, ‘Oppose Book-worship!’

  If you have not investigated a certain problem, you will lose your right to speak on it. Isn't this too brutal? Not in the least. Since you have investigated neither the actual situation nor the historical circumstances of this problem, and have no detailed knowledge of it, anything you say about it could only be nonsense … There are also people who say: ‘Show me where it is written in a book’ … This book-worshipping method of conducting research [is] dangerous … We must study Marxist ‘books’, but they must be integrated with our actual situation. We need ‘books’, but we must definitely correct book-worship that departs from reality. How can we correct book-worship? Only by investigating the actual situation.19

  In ‘On Practice’, this was summed up in the aphorism, ‘Practice is the criterion of truth’:

  The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending, and so is man's cognition of truth through practice. Marxism has in no way exhausted truth, but ceaselessly opens up [new] roads to [its] knowledge … Practice, knowledge, again practice and again knowledge. The pattern repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycl
e the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level … Such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.20

  ‘On Contradiction’ had antecedents in Mao's student days. The unity of opposites, which had prompted, in his notes on Paulsen, the passage – ‘Life is death and death is life, up is down, dirty is clean, male is female and thick is thin. In essence the many are one and change is permanence’21 – he now discovered, like Lenin before him, to be ‘the basic law of dialectics … the most important theoretical base of the proletarian revolution … the fundamental law of the universe and the fundamental law of ideological method’. To formulate correct policies, Mao argued, it was necessary in any given situation to determine what was the principal contradiction, and which was its principal aspect.22

  Later commentators would claim that he had succeeded in imbuing Marxism-Leninism with ‘Chinese national characteristics’, by incorporating elements of ancient Chinese thought.23 Of more immediate importance, he had begun to put in place a theoretical justification for the Chinese Party to seek its own, independent path to communism.

  In another important respect, too, Mao cut loose from Stalinist orthodoxy.

  Marxism holds that the economic base and the productive forces that operate within it determine the political and cultural superstructure of society. At times, Mao now argued, this relationship could be reversed. ‘When the superstructure obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive … In general, the material determines the mental. [But] we also, and indeed must, recognise the operation of mental on material things.’24 Here, in Marxist language, was the belief that he had nurtured since childhood in the power of the human will. Decades later, it would provide the ideological underpinning for his two disastrous attempts to transform China by mobilising its spirit – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

  In August 1937, the lecture series came to an abrupt end, as the Japanese advance on Shanghai forced Mao to turn his attention back to more immediate practical issues.25

  This did not mean he put aside philosophy. That autumn, at his urging, Ai Siqi came to Yan'an to start a weekly study circle. One of Ai's followers, Chen Boda, a short, agitated man with an incomprehensible Fujianese accent, made worse by a pronounced stammer, became Mao's political secretary. For the next few years Mao read voraciously every Marxist text he could find – even, in another echo of his schooldays, starting a ‘reading diary’ in which he noted which books he had read.26

  Later in life Mao developed a genuine delight in philosophical speculation, and his conversation, whether in private or political discussion, became so studded with arcane analogy and enigmatic references to abstruse debating points that even his Politburo colleagues often scrambled to keep up with him. None the less, it is hard to avoid the impression that philosophy was, for Mao, essentially a point of departure – a springboard into the realm of ideas, rather than intrinsically fascinating in itself. ‘On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’ were important in establishing his credentials as a theorist, and thus strengthening his claim to Party leadership, but he plainly found them hard work.27 The writing was pedestrian, lacking his usual trenchancy and flair. Pure theory was a means to an end, not a subject Mao took much joy in.

  On November 29, 1937, as the Japanese Kwantung Army rolled relentlessly southward across the north China plains, an aircraft appeared in the skies over Yan'an and began to circle the primitive airfield. At first, the look-outs thought it was Japanese, on a periodic bombing mission. But then they made out its Soviet markings, and Mao and the rest of the Politburo hurried to the landing-strip. Out of the plane stepped Wang Ming, the owlish, slightly overweight chief of ‘Stalin's China Section’ – the Returned Student group which had dominated the Party before the Long March – whom the Soviet leader was now sending back to stiffen the Chinese Party's commitment to the united front with Chiang Kai-shek. He was followed by a slightly built, scholarly-looking man named Kang Sheng, who specialised in secret police work; and by Chen Yun, who had travelled to Moscow two-and-a-half years earlier to inform the Russians of the decisions taken at Zunyi.28

  Mao had been forewarned by radio of Wang's imminent return, but the journey, by way of Xinjiang, had taken two weeks, and there had been no way of knowing exactly when he would arrive.

  That night, the Red Army cooks prepared a banquet. In the speeches of welcome, Mao hailed Wang's coming as a ‘blessing from the sky’, while Zhang Wentian praised his achievements in the Comintern, where he had headed the Chinese delegation. Then the jockeying for position began. Wang was too astute openly to contest Mao's dominance, but he did take issue with him on matters of policy where, he let it be inferred, he had Moscow's support. The crux of their differences, which were given a comprehensive airing at a six-day Politburo meeting starting on December 9, was the united front with the Guomindang.29

  Mao had set out his strategy three-and-a-half months earlier at a leadership conference in the town of Luochuan, sixty miles south of Yan'an.30 If China was to defeat Japan, he argued, it was essential to unite all anti-Japanese forces. But within this united front, ‘the CCP must be independent, and we must keep the initiative in our own hands’. Politically, that meant the Party should strive both to play the ‘leading role’ in the war effort; and to expand its own ranks. It must maintain ‘a high degree of vigilance’ towards the Guomindang, understanding that, alongside unity, there would continue to be rivalry and struggle. Militarily, it meant preparing for a protracted war, in which the Eighth Route Army would rely heavily on guerrilla tactics and avoid positional warfare. ‘The basis of guerrilla war’, Mao reminded them, ‘is to spread out and arouse the masses [to join in the struggle], and concentrate regular forces [only] when you can destroy the enemy. Fight when you know you can win. Don't fight battles you may lose!’ The communist main forces, he insisted, must be deployed prudently ‘in the light of the actual situation’ with a view to preserving their strength.

  As the autumn wore on, Mao felt events bore out the wisdom of this policy. Chiang Kai-shek, he feared, would try to force the Red Army to bear the brunt of the fighting. No more than half, or at most two-thirds, of communist forces should be committed to the struggle against Japan; the remainder should stay behind to defend the Red base areas, lest Chiang try to double-cross them.31 Party commissars were repeatedly warned to defend the CCP's interests and not blindly carry out the GMD's bidding. In telegrams to the Red Army commanders, Mao hammered home the message that guerrilla warfare must be ‘the sole orientation’; fighting set-piece battles would be ‘totally fruitless’.32 When, in late September, Lin Biao's forces ambushed a Japanese column at Pingxingguan, in northern Shanxi, wiping out a thousand enemy troops, he was torn between elation at the first Chinese victory of the war, which raised the Red Army's prestige and caused a surge of rejoicing throughout China, and anger lest Lin, and others, allow their forces to become dangerously exposed.33 ‘The essence of the contradiction,’ he wrote, ‘is that those sitting on the privy can't shit, and the rest of the country, which is dying to crap, doesn't have a privy to shit in’ – by which he meant that the nationalist army alone could not defeat the Japanese, while the mass of the peasantry, who were eager to fight as guerrillas, were being discouraged from doing so lest they develop into a rival military force.34 A few days later, a GMD campaign to concentrate (and thereby, control) the surviving communist guerrilla forces in south China triggered fresh unease about Chiang's intentions.35 Then came worrying signs, as one north Chinese city after another yielded before the Japanese onslaught, that the GMD might be showing renewed interest in a separate peace with Tokyo. Mao became more convinced than ever that the CCP must keep its own counsel, and ‘reject, criticise and struggle against’ the Guomindang's ‘mistaken policies’.36

  Wang Ming, fresh from Moscow, took a very different line. Stalin viewed the GMD as an indispensable partner to keep the Japanese at bay (and prevent
them turning their attention to Siberia). The Chinese Party, as a loyal member of the Comintern, should therefore do everything possible to further the Soviet–GMD alliance. The key issue, Wang argued, was ‘to consolidate and expand the unity between the GMD and the CCP’ on a basis not of ‘mutual competition’ but of ‘mutual respect, trust, help and supervision’. Such matters as ‘keeping the initiative in our own hands’, and which party should play the leading role, were secondary. The guiding principle must be: ‘Resisting Japan takes precedence over everything, and everything must be subordinated to resistance to Japan. Everything is subordinate to the united front, and everything must be channelled through the united front.’37

  When Wang made these points at the December Politburo meeting, Mao retorted that the strategy elaborated at Luochuan was correct. The CCP had to maintain its independence, otherwise it would be reduced to the status of a GMD auxiliary. Unity and struggle were complementary, he went on, reaching into his newly acquired stock of Marxist dialectics. In the context of the united front, there could not be one without the other.38

  To Zhou Enlai, up to then the chief negotiator with the GMD, and to some of the military commanders, itching for a full-scale anti-Japanese offensive, Wang Ming's argument of ‘all hands to the mill’ had definite attractions, especially since it plainly had Soviet backing.39 Mao is said to have commented later, with the slightly self-pitying melodrama he affected on such occasions, that after Wang Ming's return, ‘my authority did not extend beyond my cave’.40 In fact, he had enough support to block Wang's proposals, and as neither side was ready to force the issue, the meeting ended in stalemate.

  Wang's efforts to strengthen his Party base likewise met with mixed success. He, Chen Yun and Kang Sheng, all full members of the Politburo, joined Mao and Zhang Wentian in the Secretariat. But the post of ‘acting Party leader’, which Zhang had held since early 1935, was allowed to lapse (which prevented Wang seeking it for himself) and, in the interests of ‘collective leadership’ (another device to restrict Wang's influence), it was agreed that no major CCP document might be issued without the approval of at least half of the membership of the Secretariat or the Politburo. Since Wang left shortly afterwards for Wuhan, where he became Secretary of the Party's Yangtse Bureau and head of the CCP Delegation to the Guomindang, these arrangements meant that Mao and Zhang Wentian remained in effective control of day-to-day decision-making. The Politburo also decided, at the Comintern's urging, to begin preparations for the Party's long-delayed Seventh Congress – a move from which, in theory, Wang stood to gain, for he might reasonably expect it to confirm him at least as second-ranking Party leader. But in practice that did not help him either, for Mao was appointed Chairman of the Preparatory Committee and proceeded to hurry slowly.41