by Philip Short
It is true that Mao's comments in Shanghai – which were designated ‘top secret’ and distributed to the thirty or so conference participants in a document which was marked ‘to be returned after the meeting’ – soon leaked out and led some provincial and grass-roots leaders to argue that deaths were inevitable in any struggle and must therefore be accepted.50 It is true too that Mao engaged in massive self-deception, deluding himself that his diatribes against ‘right deviationism’ were unconnected with the excesses which followed. But that does not mean that Mao accepted, still less welcomed, the prospect of mass starvation. Every available piece of evidence, including those from the areas where people suffered most, affirms the contrary.
I have written at length about Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, and the works of Frank Dikötter, especially Mao's Great Famine, because of the exceptional influence their books have had. It may be argued that is unfair to lump the two together. Dikötter's writing contains much new information; Mao: The Unknown Story is essentially a polemic. What they have in common is that both set out to make the case for the prosecution, rather than providing balanced accounts of the periods they describe.
Most of the new research which has appeared since the first edition of this book was published in 1999 is more conventional: scholarly academic studies, grounded in contemporary documents, which fill in many – though not yet all – of the gaps in our knowledge of the Chinese revolution and of Mao's role in it. They do not change the overall picture but permit a vast amount of fine-tuning. Details have been provided and historical errors corrected, just as, in the restoration of an old portrait, the removal of dust and grime and of later additions turns up unsuspected lineaments but leaves the original outline untouched. In this revised edition, I have incorporated the new material wherever it casts fresh light on Mao's actions, while endeavouring not to lengthen beyond measure what is already an epic tale.
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution loom especially large in both Chinese and Western research over the past two decades.
On the former, Yang Jisheng's Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi, whether in the original two-volume Chinese edition, published in Hong Kong in 2008, or in the revised and abridged English-language version, Tombstone, four years later, is unsurpassed. Yang has justly been compared with Solzhenitsyn, for he allows his readers to glimpse what they might have had to endure had they and their families been among the millions whose lives were destroyed, often with unspeakable cruelty, by the horror which Mao unleashed. Few other writers, Chinese or Western, have come close to doing that.
Unlike Dikötter, who rather ungenerously dismisses Yang's book as ‘a hotchpotch, which simply strings together large chunks of text, [mixing] invaluable documents … with irrelevant anecdotes’,51 Yang is at pains to decipher the chain of responsibility, all the way down from Mao at the apex to the work group leaders at the grass roots, which linked the various actors who caused the tragedy, and the mixture of motives – visionary, self-serving, cynical and terrified – which led them to behave as they did. As a result we understand not only what happened but why it happened. He is not the first to do this. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, in their path-breaking book, The Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward, 1955–1959 (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1999); and Alfred Chan, in Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward (Oxford University Press, 2001), focusing on the first year of the Leap, 1958, have also explored Mao's personal responsibility relative to that of other leaders. But Yang's net is spread wider, combining political analysis with an almost unbearably vivid personal account of what the famine did to those who lived through it and to the tens of millions who died.
In certain respects, Yang's early life resembled that of Jung Chang. Both their fathers died under Mao's rule; both were initially enthusiastic supporters of the regime before becoming disabused. In Yang's case, his foster father, the uncle who had raised him from the time he was three months old, starved to death in Hubei province in April 1959.
But there the similarities end. Yang is not out for revenge. As he states in the preface to Tombstone, his aim is ‘to restore historical truth for others who [like myself] had been deceived’.52 He attributes the catastrophe first and foremost to the totalitarianism of the Chinese regime, a system in which Leninism was grafted on to imperial rule. ‘Mao Zedong was the creator of this mould,’ he writes, ‘[or] strictly speaking, he was [its] successor and developer … [But] he himself was to some extent [its] creature … Within the framework of this system, Mao's own actions were to a certain extent also beyond his control. No one had the power to resist such a system, not even Mao.’ In Yang's judgement, the ruled share part of the blame with the rulers. Locked into a millennial tradition of ‘imperial thinking’, they ‘worshipped their leaders, venerated authority and resigned themselves to adversity’. ‘In all fairness,’ he writes, we should acknowledge that ‘the people's genuine aspirations lay behind much of the folly of the Great Leap Forward’.53
Precisely because he acknowledges human frailties, misguided loyalties and the genuineness of Mao's flawed vision, his indictment of the Chinese Communist Party, its leaders and the system it established is all the more powerful. For Dikötter, Mao's China is reduced to a relentless inventory of horror, in which everyone behaves appallingly and everything is black. Yang notes that upright officials, like Wang Yongcheng, the Party secretary of a county in Shandong, one of the worst-hit provinces, were able to ensure that no one in their areas starved by deflecting orders from above and allowing the peasants to grow food themselves.54 Dikötter enumerates the victims of the famine; Yang writes of the ‘blood-drenched human dramas’ that lie behind the figures.55
Part of the explanation for this difference in approach is that Dikötter and, ironically, Jung Chang as well, write from a Western standpoint. Indeed, that may be one reason that their books have been so popular. They try to make sense of that ‘awful, complicated mess’ of history in ways that speak to the Western mind.
Yang writes as a Chinese, who lived through the abominations he describes, who understands why those caught up in them reasoned as they did, yet who rejects the self-serving official disculpations. Although his book – like Dikötter's and Jung Chang's – is banned in China, it reflects fundamentally Chinese, not Western, attitudes to past suffering.
Liu Zhenyun, the novelist whose grandmother remembered starvation under Chiang Kai-shek as an everyday occurrence, found that ‘the surviving famine victims and their descendants have relegated all their memories … to oblivion … After enduring so many hardships over the centuries, Chinese have learnt that [black] humour and a large helping of amnesia are the secrets to facing tragedy.’56 Deng Xiaoping adopted that approach in 1981 when he argued that priority should be given to building a prosperous future rather than delving into the horrors of the past. For him, it was politically expedient: better to look ahead than to start unpicking the communists’ record with unforeseeable consequences.
At this point perhaps I may be permitted an ‘irrelevant anecdote’ of my own. My son's Chinese grandmother spent the last decades of her life in a courtyard in Beijing, surrounded by neighbours who, during the Cultural Revolution, had vilified her and her children as ‘black category people’. Her husband had been designated a Rightist in 1957 and sent to the countryside to work as a peasant, remaining there until after Mao's death. Two years later, during the famine accompanying the Great Leap, her second son, then a schoolboy, was arrested for complaining of hunger and spent the next 25 years in a labour camp. In 1975 her fourth son was executed as a counter-revolutionary. She herself attempted suicide but lived. Today all those subjects are taboo: by family consensus, no one mentions them. Why reopen old wounds? In any case, similar experiences befell millions of others. What is the point of raking up what can no longer be changed? At most the former victims permit themselves a certai
n discreet satisfaction that, in the new China that emerged after Mao's death, they have done rather better than those who persecuted them all those years ago.
That brings us to the second major episode of Mao's years in power: the ten years of ultra-left policies, and the rather shorter period of ‘great chaos’, which he inaugurated in 1966.
Like the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution has been the subject of much new research over the last fifteen years. In Hong Kong, Song Yongyi and his colleagues have compiled a vast database of Cultural Revolution documentation (as well as similar, though smaller, databases on the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward). In China itself, the authorities would clearly prefer that the whole period simply be forgotten: as early as 1991, the Party demanded an end to what it called ‘public reassessments’.57 Most of the new studies by mainland historians have therefore been published abroad. In the West, four books have appeared to which the much overworked word ‘seminal’ may be applied, in the sense that all future writing on the subject will have to take them into account. (Here I have limited myself to those which deal directly with Mao's role – not those, in many cases no less interesting, which explore other aspects of that great upheaval).
Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Harvard University Press, 2006), is likely to remain for the foreseeable future the definitive overview of the period. Balanced and meticulously researched, it is the fruit of many decades of observation and reflection, leavened, in Schoenhals's case, by rooting around in the Beijing and Shanghai flea markets for discarded police files and Red Guard documents. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, in The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 2007), focus on the last four years of Mao's life, one of the least understood periods of his rule, when the triangular contest between the ultra-leftists led by Jiang Qing, the pragmatists under Deng, and the middle-of-the-road Cultural Revolution beneficiaries, headed by Hua Guofeng, played out under Mao's watchful eye even as his strength, though not his will, faltered. They despatch many of the myths that have grown up around that Byzantine struggle, and within the limits of the still fragmentary documentation available, make sense of an extraordinarily convoluted time. Their use of archival sources is exemplary: there could be no greater contrast to Jung Chang and Halliday or even Dikötter. Jin Qiu's The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution (Stanford University Press, 1999) deals with an even shorter period: from the 9th Party Congress in 1969 to Lin's flight two years later. Jin is Wu Faxian's daughter and the title of her book, based on her PhD thesis, is well-chosen. Apart from giving by far the best account to date of the mysterious events that led to Lin Biao's death in September 1971, she offers an insider's insights into the personal feuds and relationships among the dozen or so families at the very summit of Chinese power. (Jean-Luc Domenach, in Mao, sa cour et ses complots [Mao, his court and its conspirations] (Fayard, Paris, 2012), also explores the role of these personal-political alliances and the conflicts they engendered, but casts his net more widely, examining relations among the several hundred high-ranking Chinese officials who made up the ruling elite at the level just below the summit from 1949 until Mao's death.)
A fourth book on the Cultural Revolution, which had a considerable impact when it appeared, Gao Wenqian's Wannian Zhou Enlai [Zhou Enlai's Later Years] (Mirror Books, Hong Kong 2003), is harder to evaluate. An English-language adaptation followed under the sardonic title, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Public Affairs, 2007). Gao spent fourteen years as a researcher attached to the Central Archives, ending up as Deputy Head of the Zhou Enlai Studies Small Group. Before moving to America in 1993, he smuggled out his notes on the documents he had been allowed to see. His book's importance is that it was the first to dissect in detail Zhou's elusive and enigmatic, Janus-like personality – his immense charm and utter ruthlessness; his capacity for self-abasement, which towards the end of his life became an obsession; his great qualities of leadership; and his extraordinarily complicated relationship with Mao, in which he played the role of valet to master, chief eunuch to emperor. The original Chinese edition contains a great deal of new material, but is also riddled with errors. Unfortunately the abridged English version is inserted into an overview of Zhou's early career and of the Cultural Revolution which appears to have been written for particularly dim-witted high school students. The translators’ use of American colloquial does not help. The Cultural Revolution, the reader is told, was ‘little more than a mom and pop show run by Jiang [Qing] and Mao’, and Mao himself is made to sound like Al Capone: ‘This guy [Zhang Chunqiao]’, he supposedly tells Lin Biao in 1970, ‘needs two more years of observation … After two years I'll quit and you can take over and handle the work.’58 Apart from being idiotic, this devalues a book which, as Jonathan Spence has observed, in many respects breaks new ground and of which important parts ring true.59 Gao's depiction of Zhou amending minutes of key meetings to advance his political agenda could only come from someone with intimate knowledge of the original archival texts. His account of Deng Yingchao's pregnancy, since confirmed by other sources, touches on matters known only to a very small number of people in Zhou's immediate circle,60 and the final chapter, dealing with the Premier's illness and death, is both moving and packed with detail conveying the murderous unpredictability of life at Mao's court in the final years of his reign. Yet other parts of the text – notably those dealing with the 1970 Lushan plenum and Lin Biao's demise – are muddled, contradictory or just plain wrong. Whatever the reason, Gao has been less forthright than he might have been. In private some of those in Mao's inner circle, notably Wang Dongxing, have been far more critical of Zhou's self-serving behaviour,61 which may be the true explanation of why Mao treated him as contemptuously as he did. Gao's book is intriguing but it could, and should, have been much better than it is.
The past decade has also seen three significant new biographies of Mao, all (originally at least) in languages other than English. Mao: The Real Story, by Alexander Pantsov, was first published in Russian in 2007 and subsequently translated and re-edited by Steven Levine (Simon and Schuster, 2012). It is, as the title implies, a riposte to Chang and Halliday's The Unknown Story – even the dust jacket has the same format as theirs, but with a red background instead of bilious green and a photograph of a benign looking Mao in place of a sinister caricature. The opening sentence sets the tone: ‘Historical figures merit objective biographies.’62 Apart from incorporating new Chinese research about Mao's early life, its great strength lies in Pantsov's access to the Chinese Section of the Russian State Archives, which contain documents relating to the CCP held by the Soviet Communist Party (the CPSU) and the Comintern, including voluminous personal files on Mao and other Chinese leaders. The result is an illuminating and distinctively Russian perspective – with all the pluses and minuses that that implies – on the key episodes of Mao's rise to power and on relationships within the Chinese leadership.63 Alain Roux's magisterial work, Le Singe et le Tigre: Mao, un destin chinois [The Monkey and the Tiger: Mao, a Chinese Destiny] (Larousse, Paris, 2009) is among the most balanced and comprehensive accounts of Mao's life in any Western language. Erudite and extremely readable, it offers a finely judged appreciation of Mao and the times in which he lived – constructed, in the best French sinological tradition, from a vast range of Chinese sources, official and unofficial, academic and scurrilous, which have been painstakingly collated and cross-checked to give each its proper weight. The notes alone, which take up the last 200 pages of an 1,100-page volume, make the book worthwhile. Sadly, it has not been translated into English, perhaps because of its length. Even longer and, until now, still less accessible to most Western readers is the definitive multi-volume Chinese-language biography of Mao, which runs to some 3,000 pages, published by two leading Party historians, Jin Chongji and his colleague, Pang Xianzhi, who was in charge of Mao's private library unt
il his purge during the Cultural Revolution (Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949), Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, Beijing, 1996; and Jin Chongji and Pang Xianzhi, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976), from the same publisher in 2004). While constrained by the need to adhere to the official interpretation of Mao's overall role – discussed in the preface to this book – their account provides a wealth of new information, including substantial extracts from many previously unpublished documents in the Central Archives, and, despite certain omissions, they manage between the lines, if not always explicitly, to convey an extremely detailed, reliable and sometimes critical portrayal of Mao's political career. In the process they offer valuable insights into what may and may not be written about Mao in China today. Although the full text will not be translated, an abridged two-volume English version is to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
