by Philip Short
Though not strictly speaking a biographical work, mention must also be made of Stuart Schram's monumental series of translations of Mao's writings before 1949, Mao's Road to Power (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY), referred to earlier. When the first edition of this book was published, four volumes had appeared, covering the period 1912–34. Schram, then the doyen of Mao scholars, did not live to see the project completed. Four further volumes have followed, taking the story up to the Seventh Congress in 1945, and two more are yet to appear. The introductory articles alone, by Schram himself and other scholars including the late Stephen Averill, Lyman van Slyke and Timothy Cheek, are almost a biography in themselves. For anyone interested in the way Mao's mind worked, these texts are essential – and fascinating – reading.
Other recent monographs have cast light on specific aspects of Mao's life. Any list is bound to be subjective, but among those that stand out are Elizabeth Perry's Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2013) and Stephen Averill's Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Between them they provide a vivid multi-faceted picture of the extraordinarily complex social and cultural world in which Mao began his political career. Perry describes the secret societies, labour racketeers, workers, traditional elites and corrupt (and progressive) bosses amid whom Mao, Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi attempted to ‘communicate foreign concepts through familiar conduits’ by enmeshing socialist ideas with local customs, folk religion and ritual. A decade later Mao would formalise this experience as ‘the sinification of Marxism’. Averill, who spent twenty-five years studying Jinggangshan, has left a marvellous account, published posthumously by colleagues, of peasant life and social and ethnic conflicts in the remote, bandit-infested region where in 1927 Mao established the first substantial communist base area.
Yoshihiro Ishikawa, in The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party (Columbia University Press, 2013), Steven A. Smith (A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–27, Curzon, 2000) and Alexander Pantsov (The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, University of Hawaii Press, 2000) have filled in many gaps in our knowledge of how communist doctrines came to China and the halting and often confused efforts of Chinese intellectuals to create a communist movement. While not specifically about Mao, they help to explain the context in which his ideas about Marxism developed, and Ishikawa, in particular, throws new light on the mechanisms whereby communist texts reached China through Japan.
Relatively little new work has been done on Mao's life prior to and during the May Fourth movement, no doubt because all the eyewitnesses are long dead and most of the surviving documents are already well-known.64 Other areas remain under-explored for different reasons. Crucial documents on the Gao Gang-Rao Shushi affair remain sealed because of Deng Xiaoping's involvement. That is also the case of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which Deng organised on Mao's behalf, and of the period between the 10th Plenum in 1962 and 1965, when Deng and Liu Shaoqi were working to repair the damage wrought by the Great Leap Forward. Certain documents relating to Mao's role in the sufan, the campaign against counter-revolutionaries in the early 1930s, are likewise off limits even to senior Chinese Party researchers. But the ‘black hole’ in Mao studies concerns the hidden struggle between Mao and Zhou in the late 1930s and the rectification campaign which followed, when the future Premier was forced to make a series of abject self-criticisms (none of which has ever been made public) and Party dissidents were brought to heel by imprisonment and torture. While well known in outline, the detailed story of this crucial period has yet to be written. The relevant documents are believed still to exist, hidden in the most restricted section of the Central Archives, but, given their sensitivity, it may be decades before they are made public, if ever.
So how should one judge Mao and the China he left behind? Stuart Schram concluded, after half a century studying the man and his ideas: ‘Mao's merits outweighed his faults, but it is not easy to put a figure on the positive and negative aspects. How does one weigh, for example, the good fortune of hundreds of millions of peasants in getting land against the execution … of millions, some of whom certainly deserved to die, but others of whom undoubtedly did not? How does one balance the achievements in economic development … during the whole twenty-seven years of Mao's leadership after 1949, against the starvation which came in the wake of the misguided enthusiasm of the Great Leap Forward, or the bloody shambles of the Cultural Revolution?’65
Another of Mao's biographers, Delia Davin, has written: ‘No honest person who has studied the Maoist record would wish to be cast as an apologist for him … But his revolution reunified China and made the country a force to be reckoned with in the world. The Chinese remember that and so should we.’66 Pankaj Mishra, in the New Yorker, wrote that ‘Mao provided a battered and proud people with a compelling national narrative of decline and redemption … Increasingly … China's middle classes accept the additional story in Maoism – the story of rising China: China was great, China was put down, China is rising again.’ Mao, he concluded, was ‘disgraced, discredited, and irreplaceable’.67
As for the conflicting visions of China's future pursued by Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, one may legitimately wonder how much difference it would really have made, in the long sweep of history, if Chiang rather than Mao had won in 1949. Rana Mitter, an Oxford don whose thinking is representative of the younger generation of China scholars, has pointed out: ‘Both the nationalists and the communists wanted to establish a politically independent state, with a government that penetrated throughout society, and a population that was stable, healthy and economically productive … However [neither] was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multi-party regime with significant civil liberties.’68 Indeed both explicitly rejected it. In a passage which remains relevant to American policy today, Bai Chongxi, the Guangxi warlord who in 1934 had allowed the Long Marchers to cross his territory to reach safety in the south-west, and who, ten years later, became one of Chiang's key commanders, wrote in his memoirs in the late 1970s, long before there was talk of ‘regime change’ and ‘exporting democracy’ in Washington: ‘The big mistake that America often makes is to force their model of democracy on other countries’.69
Mao's victory was viewed at the time as a grave setback for America's strategic goal of establishing a democratic or at least neutral China on the Soviet Union's southern border. Yet the ‘loss’ of China to communism did not prevent the United States becoming the world's dominant power. Nor did US support for Chiang's rump state in Taiwan make it a democracy: that did not happen until long after the Generalissimo's death. Had Chiang defeated Mao, would he have been able to unify and develop China as effectively as his communist rival? In Pankaj Mishra's words: Would China without Mao have found the political basis for its current prosperity?70 That is open to debate. In any case, the challenge to the West posed by Xi Jinping's China today is not communist but nationalist. There is no reason to think that a mainland China ruled by Chiang Kai-shek's successors would wish to act significantly differently from that now ruled by Mao's heirs.71
But all this is ‘what if?’ history. The fact is that Mao won. The historian's task is neither to blame nor to praise him, but to describe how he did so, how he used his victory and why. As Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine wrote in the preface to their biography of Mao: ‘It is far too late to settle any scores … He is dead and answerable only, as he said himself, to Karl Marx. The task we set ourselves, rather, was to portray in all essential details one of the most powerful and influential leaders of the twentieth century. It is our hope that this book will help readers to achieve a deeper and more accurate understanding of Mao, of the times and country that produced him, and of the China he created.’72 I cannot put it better.
* There is an intriguing, remarkably apposite and today largely forgotten precedent for Mao: The Unknown Story. In 1910, Sir Edmund Backhouse co
-authored a book entitled China under the Empress Dowager, which was said to be based on the diary of the Comptroller of the Imperial Household, Jing Shan. For many years, his book was regarded in European chancelleries as the ultimate authority on China's last dynasty, and it exerted a powerful influence on Western views of the warlord period over the following two decades. An account in East Asian History recalled ‘a tidal wave of eulogies’ for Backhouse's work in contemporary newspapers: ‘Critics everywhere, not to be outshone by their peers, showered it with extravagant expressions of appreciation, as if no praise were high enough.’ Thirty years later, Jing Shan's diary was shown to be a forgery. Today the entry for Backhouse in the Oxford University Press's Dictionary of National Biography concludes: ‘There may be many small truths in [his] manuscripts … but we know now that not a word he ever said or wrote can be trusted.’ As though to show that there is nothing new under the sun, in 2013 Jung Chang published a biography of the same Empress, Cixi, whom historians have portrayed with rare unanimity as a benighted, reactionary ruler, in which she advanced the contrarian argument that the dowager was actually a great and progressive woman. One of the few specialists to review the book, Pamela Crossley of Dartmouth College, writing in the London Review of Books, noted the same problems that plague The Unknown Story. ‘Many of her sources are indirect, suggestive or just plain unreliable’, Crossley wrote. ‘Her claims regarding Cixi's importance seem to be minted from her own musings, and have little to do with what we know was actually going in China … Rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense.’ Jung Chang admired Cixi; she loathed Mao. Both books come across as the fruit of personal crusades.
* In this context it is worth considering the case of the world?s next most populous nation, India. According to the Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist, Amartya Sen: ‘Despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former… India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame’ (quoted by Pankaj Mishra in ‘Staying Power: Mao and the Maoists’, New Yorker, December 20, 2010). The Indian government acknowledges that, by its own reckoning – which may be too low – 39 per cent of Indian children today are stunted by malnutrition and have a greater likelihood of starving to death than in most African countries (Global Nutrition Report, 2015). That in no way diminishes the horror of what Mao and his colleagues did, but it is a useful reminder that such abominations are not unique either to the communists or to China and that they are not yet a thing of the past.
Dramatis Personae
Mao Zedong (1893–1976):
1st marriage = Luo Yigu (m. 1908) (unconsummated)
2nd marriage = Yang Kaihui (b. 1901, m. 1920, d. 1930)
ch: Anying
Anqing
Anlong (1922–50)
(1923–2007)
(1927–31)
3rd marriage = He Zizhen (b. 1909, m. 1928–38, d. 1984)
ch: Xiao Mao
Li Min
[son]
Three children abandoned as infants (1932–lost in 1934)
(1936–)
(1939–40)
4th marriage = Jiang Qing (b. 1914, m. 1938–76, d. 1991)
ch: Li Na (1940–)
Bo Gu (1907–46): Moscow-trained member of the ‘Returned Student’ faction who was de facto Party leader from 1931 until 1935. Sidelined after the Zunyi conference but remained a CC member until his death in an aircrash.
Bo Yibo (1908–2007): Youth leader in Shanxi who developed close ties to Liu Shaoqi. After 1949, held a series of high-level posts with responsibility for the economy. Purged during the Cultural Revolution. Rehabilitated after Mao's death. Father of Bo Xilai.
Cai Hesen (1895–1931): One of Mao's closest friends at First Normal School in Changsha. Founder member of New People's Study Society. Central Bureau (later Politburo) member from 1923–7; afterwards Secretary of the CCP's North China Bureau. Arrested by British police in Hong Kong and handed over to the nationalist authorities in Canton for execution.
Chen Boda (1904–89): Mao's political secretary at Yan'an, later a key member of the Chairman's private brains trust. Head of the Cultural Revolution Group from May 1966; ranked fourth in the leadership at the time of the Ninth Congress. Purged in 1970. Sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment in the winter of 1981 for political crimes; released early because of ill-health.
Chen Duxiu (1879–1942): Radical intellectual whose journal, New Youth, prepared the ground for the May Fourth Movement in 1919. One of the two founding fathers (with Li Dazhao) of the Chinese communist movement. CCP General Secretary from 1921–7; afterwards led a Trotskyist opposition group.
Chen Yi (1901–72): Nanchang Uprising participant. With Mao on Jinggangshan. One of ten PLA marshals appointed in 1955. Politburo member; Foreign Minister from 1958. Participated in the ‘February Adverse Current’. Criticised during the Cultural Revolution but not purged. Died of cancer.
Chen Yun (1905–95): Shanghai printing worker. Zunyi veteran. Politburo member from 1934. Became a CC Vice-Chairman in 1956 with overall responsibility for economic matters. Withdrew on pretext of ill-health during radical upsurges and thereby survived the Cultural Revolution unharmed. Resumed an active political role after Mao's death.
Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975): Japanese-trained army officer who rallied to Sun Yat-sen's nationalists in 1922 and, over the next eight years, led the Guomindang (GMD) to nationwide victory. President of the GMD regime on Taiwan from 1949 until his death.
Deng Xiaoping (1904–97): Zunyi veteran. General Secretary and Politburo Standing Committee member from 1956. Purged early on in the Cultural Revolution as the ‘number-two Party person in authority taking the capitalist road’, but allowed to keep his Party membership. Rehabilitated in 1973; purged again in 1976; rehabilitated a year later to become China's paramount leader from 1978 until his death.
Deng Zihui (1896–1972): With Mao at Ruijin. In charge of agricultural collectivisation in the early 1950s. Repeatedly criticised as a ‘right conservative’ after 1956, but survived the Cultural Revolution without being purged.
Gao Gang (1905–54): North-west China CCP leader who rose to become sixth-ranking member of the leadership. Purged after a failed attempt to topple Liu Shaoqi in the winter of 1953; committed suicide a year later.
He Long (1896–1969): Participated in the Nanchang Uprising. One of ten PLA marshals appointed in 1955. Politburo member and Vice-Chairman of the CC Military Commission. Purged at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Died from deliberate medical neglect.
He Shuheng (1870–1935): One of Mao's teachers at First Normal School in Changsha, a founder member of the New People's Study Society and of the CCP. With Mao at Ruijin. Stayed behind in Jiangxi at the time of the Long March, was captured and killed.
Hua Guofeng (1921–2008): CCP Secretary of Xiangtan, Mao's home county. Appointed Hunan First Secretary after the Cultural Revolution, and picked by Mao as a possible successor in 1973. Became Party Chairman after Mao's death, but lost a power struggle with Deng Xiaoping in the winter of 1978 and went into semi-retirement three years later.
Jiang Qing (1914–91): Shanghai actress. Married Mao at Yan'an in 1938. Began playing a significant political role in the early 1960s. As Mao's wife, she became a major force during the Cultural Revolution. A Politburo member from 1969, she headed the leftist ‘Gang of Four’, all of whom were arrested four weeks after Mao's death. Received a commuted death sentence in 1981 for political crimes. Committed suicide in prison.
Kang Sheng (1898–1975): CCP Security chief in Shanghai in the early 1930s, later given intelligence training in Moscow. A member of the Politburo from 1935. Mao's hatchetman in Yan'an and during the Cultural Revolution. In 1973 he became CC Vice
-Chairman, ranking fifth in the hierarchy. Died of cancer; expelled from the Party posthumously for political crimes.
Li Lisan (1899–1967): Met Mao while a student in Changsha in 1917; they disliked each other. As de facto Party leader from 1928, Li vigorously opposed Mao's guerrilla strategy in Jiangxi, demanding that the Red Army attack cities as part of a nationwide insurrection. Dismissed on Stalin's orders in the autumn of 1930, he spent the next fifteen years as an involuntary exile in Russia. After 1949 held minor posts; committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.
Li Weihan (1896–1984): A member of the New People's Study Society. He succeeded Mao as Hunan Party Secretary in 1923. Elected to the Politburo in 1927; later occupied a succession of lesser posts. Criticised but not purged during the Cultural Revolution.
Li Xiannian (1909–92): Political Commissar in Zhang Guotao's Fourth Army. Long-serving Vice-Premier and Finance Minister from the mid-1950s. Survived the Cultural Revolution unscathed. After Mao's death, became a Party Vice-Chairman and Head of State.
Lin Biao (1907–71): Participated in the Nanchang Uprising. With Mao on Jinggangshan. Zunyi veteran. Politburo member since 1956. CC Vice-Chairman in 1958, Defence Minister a year later. Brilliant military strategist and chronic hypochondriac. Architect of extravagant Mao cult of the 1960s. Designated as Mao's successor at the outset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966; confirmed as such in the Party constitution of 1969. Lost Mao's confidence in 1970. Died in an aircrash a year later while fleeing to the USSR.
Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969): Moscow-trained Hunanese communist who spent much of his pre-1949 career in the Party underground in north and central China. Zunyi veteran. Worked with Mao at Anyuan in 1922 and again in Yan'an. Second-ranking Party leader and heir apparent from 1943. Succeeded Mao as Head of State in 1959. Purged in the Cultural Revolution as the ‘biggest Party person in authority taking the capitalist road’; expelled from the CCP as a ‘renegade, scab and traitor’ in 1968. Died a year later from deliberate medical neglect. Buried under a false name. Posthumously rehabilitated after Mao's death.
