60-40?
50-50?
70-30?
These are the common percentages used to describe Chairman Mao Zedong’s overall effect on the People’s Republic of China, with the first number representing the positive effects that Mao had, and the latter percentage representing the detrimental consequences of Mao’s actions on China. Mao frontloaded his heroic actions: most of the positive deeds he performed were in the revolutionary period leading up to the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Post-liberation, Mao trod an ever-darker path which ended by leaving him in a state of quasi-imperial senility. Due to the state control over information in the PRC, the overall domestic impression of Chairman Mao remains positive. However, the numbers assessing Mao’s legacy provide more than simple commentary on the character of the departed Chairman. By extension, the assessment of Chairman Mao’s legacy also provides a good indicator of the current sentiment on the overall legitimacy of Communist Party Rule in China.
Deng Xiaoping said that Chairman Mao’s portrait would hang above Tiananmen forever. Forever is a long time: what, if anything, differentiates Mao from any of the line-starting emperors who founded dynasties, emperors whose memories, too, were venerated for only as long as their own dynasty lasted? Why is Mao looked on as more than just an emperor in Communist clothes, an instigator of cargo cult reforms, or a scheming lecher? In my own mind, I have thought all of these things of Mao, and many more.
If I were to count on two hands the factors that led to my low appraisal of Chairman Mao’s performance as leader of the People’s Republic of China, I would proceed by saying that on the one hand, Mao caused the Great Leap Forward, and on the other hand he caused the Cultural Revolution. In the face of the death and destruction caused these two follies, any positive appraisal of Mao’s effect on China must pause and take a breath.
We can start by thinking about the Great Leap Forward, which was the nation’s attempt to catapault its economic development through a series of high-modernist reforms to the agricultural and industrial sectors. Led by Mao, the nation’s cadres organized the agrarian resources of China to export wheat in exchange for imports of technology. The idea was simple: in the words of erstwhile head of state Liu Shaoqi, “Hard work for a few years, happiness for a thousand.” Cadres battled to have their own districts’ production exceed the posted targets by the highest amount, with penalties of beatings and humiliation awaiting those who could not make the grade. A similar effort on producing iron caused the entire populace of the country to melt down the readily available household iron objects and recast the iron into useless ingots. The government’s can-do attitude worked well for mobilizing the populace; however, the methods failed to produce real results, and tens of millions starved to death, as detailed in Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts. During the famines of 1958-1961, farmers in the countryside resorted to eating wood pulp, marsh plankton, and human flesh, among other things. Efforts by farmers to improve their living conditions during the Great Leap Forward met with repression from the PRC government, particularly at the local level. For their own parts, the officials at the middle and higher levels busied themselves covering up the death toll that the Great Leap had brought to China’s countryside. 30 million people, the approximate amount that died during these three years, is roughly equivalent to the 2009 population of Iraq.
In the early 1960s, the People’s Republic earned a brief few years of respite, as the government repealed many of the policies which had proved so disastrous during the Great Leap Forward. During this time, the country swung towards a more bourgeois lifestyle, which displeased Chairman Mao. After extensive thought, he launched the Great People’s Proletarian Cultural Revolution in May 1966. The Cultural Revolution strove to eliminate ‘old’ ideas. In many respects, it succeeded. Academics, intellectuals, party officials and anyone with ‘capitalist’ background received the brunt of the fury of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 almost until Mao’s death in 1976. While the death toll of the Cultural Revolution did not reach that of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution arguably had a greater scope than the Great Leap, in that it directed itself not just at economic production, but at the underpinnings of traditional Chinese culture itself, as well as any sort of international cultural influences. At the most bizarre, the destruction extended even to dairy cows imported from Holland, as well as more obvious things such as Buddhist temples and university libraries. The destruction of traditional culture cut the feet out from under an entire generation of Chinese people, and left them jaded, cynical, and stricken with anomie, unable to turn fully either to Communist materialism or traditional spiritualism to this day.
However, besides these two obvious follies instigated by Chairman Mao as a leader, a third ill effect of his rule, less obvious than the two reasons described in the previous paragraphs, may actually have more insidious and sinister effects. The third leg of the trifecta was Mao’s governing style. When governing, Mao mainly used uncodified connections between himself and other high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party to implement his policies. The system worked adequately with Mao alive, but as soon as he died, he left his leader with the unappetizing inheritance of having to implement a system of governance from the ground up or to follow in Mao’s lead as a charismatic dictator. To this day, China lacks effective rule of law, and the party continues as a discretionary power independent of the government. Mindful of the problems facet by Sun Yat-sen during his presidency of the Republic of China, Chairman Mao also ensured that the Communist Party would keep a firm grasp on the reins of the military- the end of this practice will likely signal the first true step towards a more free China. Furthermore, Mao centralized power rather than extending it, establishing a precedent of mistrust of non-governmental organizations. Once again, the mistrust of NGOs also continues to plague China to to this day. Additionally, Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign also established a precedent for thought control towards intellectuals which has contributed to the inabililty of Chinese universities to attain true world-class levels.
In light of all the harmful acts perpetrated by or on behalf of Chairman Mao, it seems incongruous that his face now adorns all of the paper currency in the People’s Republic of China. Unquestionably, Chairman Mao must have done overwhelmingly positive things to merit the preservation of his remains at Tiananmen Square, his face on beautiful new red 100 yuan bills, and his thought taught in school. In order to determine why Mao seems so fundamental to the PRC, it is important to think more of the scope and context of the Chinese Communist movement and the victory it produced in 1949. On one level, the Communists defeated the Nationalists. We can understand this quite clearly, with one party defeating another in a revolutionary conflict. However, on another level the 1949 victory was the defeat of Feudalism by Socialism, and hence, the liberation of the vast majority of the Chinese people from over 2000 years of feudal serfdom. Putting things in terms that Americans can understand, Mao is George Washington, removing an internationally controlling force, but also and more importantly, Mao is Abraham Lincoln, liberating virtual human chattel from a degraded state. Moreover, Mao had a further function in Chinese culture which has no strong correspondence in US history, that of the state builder. Before the 1949 triumph of the Communists, China had weathered 100 years of turmoil beginning at the time of the First Opium War. The 1911 revolution left a republic too weak to survive, and the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek was far too corrupt to effectively govern China, as documented in Lynne Joiner’s Noble Survivor, the story of John S. Sayles. Through the victory in the 1945-1949 civil war Mao unified and strengthened the Chinese state in a manner reminiscent of European statesmen such as Otto Van Bismark or Camillo Benso, the Count Cavour. The strengthening of China gives a third leg to the tripod of support for Chairman Mao. Furthermore, Mao’s post-liberation personality cult meant that the entire nation depended on his decisions and at some times performed a behavior analogous to praying to the Chairman.
So where then, does this leave us? The scales hold a modernized, unified, and strengthened Chinese state on one side, and the lives of at least 30 million individuals (at a bare minimum) on the other. While without Chairman Mao, there would be no ‘New China’, the Chairman failed in much of what he set his mind to doing post-liberation. In trying to understand why there is relatively little criticism of Chairman Mao even 30 years after his death, it may help if we mentally seperate Mao the person and the results of Mao’s rule – person/bad, rule/tending to good. Dr. Li Zhisui’s book details the manner in which Chairman Mao exploited his dictatorship for his own benefit, schemed to keep primacy in Chinese society, and generally behaved irresponsibly with the lives of millions of Chinese citizens- he was a ‘bad’ person, no doubt. However, at the end of the cultural revolution and onwards, China found itself, if not perfect, at least better off than it had been under the Nationalists. Hence, the results of his life were actually good- assessments of his personal character are beside the point. Naturally, the Communist Party controls public discourse in China, and so their line on Mao, defined clearly at the end of the 1970s, will prevail until some sort of revolutionary change occurs in China. Naturally, many individuals give a perjorative evaluation of Chairman Mao in private; however, this sentiment does not surface in mass media. Those who care continue to curse Mao in private, while many feel that the time of Mao is over, and the problems of the 60s and 70s have little bearing on post-opening China, if they care to think of the problems at all. While Deng Xiaoping’s words regarding cats were speaking to the relative merits of capitalism and communism, they can also be applied to the Chairman himself. He gave China a stronger national consciousness than the hollow principles that masked the nationalists’ corruption, and in that, he did a great service to China’s people. At this point, China still awaits its Gorbachev, but until then Mao will have to suffice for Tiananmen and the face on China’s money- at this point in time, what figure could replace him?
