The Path of Demystifying: Mao in the Post-Maoist Era
In 1975, Mao Zedong was having a conversation with one of his secretaries on Sima Guang, the famous Song historian, noting that his Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government – which traced the chronological history of China from the Fifth Century BC – ended just before the foundation of the Song Dynasty in 960 AD. Mao believed that Sima Guang did so because in traditional China, it is considered too sensitive and dangerous for historians to write extensively about the founder of the current regime.[i]Given his own position as the founder of the Peoples’ Republic of China, the irony of the statement could not be lost on Mao.
When he died a year later, the official evaluation of his historical role in China became a major issue of debates among his successors, proving that the difficulty faced by Sima Guang persisted in modern times. After Deng Xiaoping and his reformist faction prevailed in the ensuring power struggles, they did not denounce him the way Khrushchev did Stalin in 1956 – even though they had suffered under Mao. Denouncement of the Chairman, founder of the Communist regime, would adversely affect the legitimacy of the entire Communist government. In the end, the official evaluation pronounced that Mao was “70% right, 30% wrongâ€. This naturally raised the question of how the mathematical equation was arrived at, namely what exactly constituted the 70% and what went into the 30%. Deng and the others proved vague about this.[ii]
In general, the 70% came largely as a result of Mao leading the communists to victory and establishing the new revolutionary regime in 1949. The 30% seemed to have concentrated on the last two decades of the Maoist era (1957-1976), which saw the disastrous policies of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Even then, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four were to bear the bulk of the blame and arguably became the scapegoats for all that went wrong. The evaluation served its purpose because the 70% protected the legitimacy of the CCP while the 30% provide the platform for Deng to continue with the process of de-Maoization through his Open-Door reforms.
While the official evaluation might have been made, it was not however always accepted by the people. This was especially so with the more opened intellectual environment of the Post-Maoist Era, which allowed for greater access to scholarly works outside of China that do not agree with the official evaluation. Indeed, there has been a huge fascination with Mao among Western scholars – including Jonathan Spence, Michael Franz and Maurice Meisner – who had written on Mao in one biographical form or another. The large volumes of works were such that in 2002, one of Mao’s biographers, Lee Feigon claimed that there are not many more facts left about Mao to expose because:
“Scholars have unearthed and published virtually every word Mao ever wrote and have attempted to describe his every action in exhaustive detail. They have even translated and analyzed the notes that he scribbled in the margins of his boyhood schoolbooks, and have documented his bowel movements before various battles.â€[iii]
Feigon’s claim was rather doubtful because there are still many mysteries surrounding Mao and much still to be revealed largely due to the relatively tight archival control of the PRC. However, the majority of biographies by the Western scholars provided many insights to Mao, as alternatives to the official evaluation. Nonetheless, there is one vital area that Western scholarship had in common with the official evaluation. The official evaluation had begun a process of demystifying Mao, who had been regarded as infallible previously. Now, the 30% was an admission that he was a flawed man. This was a trend that also find current in the West, where such biographies as Ross T Terrill’s Mao: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) and Philip Short’s well researched & highly readable Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) portrayed Mao as a flawed human.
Biographies of Mao published in China tended not to stray from the official evaluation. The trend of demystifying could also be seen in those works, especially the memoirs and reminiscences of those who had been close to Mao, such as his personal attendant, Zhang Yufeng, and his bodyguard, Li Yingqiao. Some of the reminiscences had been compiled by writer Quan Yanchi, which included the appropriately named Mao Zedong, Man, Not God (Beijing Foreign Press, 1992).[iv]Mao was remembered positively as a kind and warm-hearted leader, who truly cared about the well being of his people but misled into making the wrong decisions.
Yet, in demystifying and “exposing†his flaws, the real challenge to the official evaluation was whether Mao was just a mere 30% wrong. Interestingly, the two most important books on this aspect came from Chinese who had lived through the Maoist Era, and came to challenge the evaluation by writing and publishing their books as immigrants in a foreign country. It was not surprising that both books were banned in China.
The Private Life of Chairman Mao (London: Chatto & Winus, 1994), authored by Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, was a continuation of the trend to demystify Mao. Yet, it also set a new direction with its focus on the negative aspects of the humanized Mao. His close proximity to Mao allowed him to write an intimate but ultimately unflattering portrayal of a leader he initially admired but grew to fear and even loathed. His account revealed Mao as a degenerated tyrant who had been corrupted by absolute power, and the story was virtually a reflection of the intrigues and factionalism that was reminiscent of the old imperial court in traditional China. Given its content, it was no wonder that his memoir could only be written after he immigrated to the United States.
If Li’s scandalous but intimate memoir was a challenge to the official evaluation, then a bigger bombshell would come a decade later with the publication of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). While they could not claim to have the first-hand knowledge of Mao, they backed their work with extensive researches and archival sources. Extreme and often spiteful in its portrayal of Mao, they turned him into the single most evil man in the Twentieth Century, if not in all time.
The path of demystifying had taken the extreme route and came almost full circle. In Chung and Halliday’s biography, Mao appeared less as a human and more a personification of pure evil, responsible for “well over 70 millions deathsâ€. As expected, this biography created a wave of controversy upon release. The majority of scholars – e.g. Jonathan Spence, Andrew Nathan and Wang Gungwu – find the book very bias and its use of sources questionable. Others, such as Arthur Waldron, lauded the book for its vigorous research and exposure of the monstrous Mao.
Despite the controversy (or more likely because of it), the book was on the best-selling lists inmost countries. The communist leaders too had to worry about underground copies in China and the impact on the Chinese readers. The communist leadership had to manage the process of demystifying Mao, as they still needed to protect his name (and its own legitimacy) against the attempt to turn him into a monster.
However, it is possible that the majority of Chinese would still form their own opinion of the Chairman. In my travels to China over the past decade, I had come across people with vastly different views about Mao Zedong and his legacy.
One was an old peasant from Yunnan, a province that has been relatively untouched by the reforms of the post-Maoist Era, compared to the coastal provinces. He commented that both Mao and Deng were men of great accomplishments but Mao was the greater man because he “conquered and unified the land to make China what it is today†(是é 他打下这大片江山，æ‰æœ‰ä»Šå¤©çš„ä¸å›½).
Another was a young man from the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, well educated and very cynical of Chinese Socialism as a whole. He joked that “the Revolution had already been successfully completed, now we can all start making money” (é©å‘½å·²ç»æˆåŠŸäº†ï¼ŒçŽ°åœ¨å¯ä»¥å¼€å§‹èµšé’±).
Such opinions are likely based on their own collective memory (or that of their parents) during the Maoist Era, as well as the impact of the socio-economic changes that the Post-Maoist era have on them, rather than the availability of new historical evidence or documents.
The author is a M.A. candidate at the Department of History in NUS, studying the relations between state and historians in Early Maoist China. He likes to travel and read historical works.
[i] Xue Zeshi 薛泽石, Geng mao zedong xueshi 跟毛泽东å¦å² (Learning History From Mao Zedong), pp.991-992.
[ii] One major influence for the 70-30 formula could well come from Mao himself in his assessment of Stalin following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech†in 1956. The initial decade of the PRC was very much modeled on Stalinist USSR. Moreover, Stalin had been raised to the same level of Communist pantheon in China as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The denouncement of Stalin by his successor, Khrushchev, would therefore have serious implication on the faith of the Chinese people towards the CCP regime. Eventually, Mao took the view that Stalin was “70 percent a Marxist, 30 percent not a Marxistâ€. In giving Mao the same assessment as Mao had given Stalin, Deng was probably playing on a historical irony. This is because he had as much grievances against Mao as Mao had against Stalin but still had to protect the respective names due to the issue of legitimacy.
[iii] Lee Feigon, Mao: A Reinterpretation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), p.11
[iv] Mao Zedong, Man, Not God covered the reminiscences of his bodyguard, Li Yingqiao, and was interesting because he painted a rather sympathetic picture of Jiang Qing or Madame Mao, though she was reviled in the official history.