By A. Dane Bowen, Jr. Mr. Bowen, professor of history and economics at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, is a retired Foreign Service officer. He was national security adviser to Secretaries of the Treasury John Connolly, George Shultz, and William Simon.
Some time ago China's octogenarian leader, Deng Xiaoping, told an Italian journalist, "We're not going to do to Mao what Chairman Khrushchev did to Stalin." In other words, Deng--who was purged not once but twice under Mao Zedong and whose family suffered terribly during the Mao era--intends to embark upon no de-Maoization program resembling the de-Stalinization program of the Soviets. It was during Mao's last and most egregious of a long line of blunders and offenses, the movement with the Orwellian name the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," that Deng's grown son was thrown out of an upper-story window and abandoned with a broken neck. He is now spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Why no casting out of Mao Zedong from the Chinese Communist hagiography? China seems unable to resolve its ambivalence about Mao. On one hand, his image is neglected and his "little red book" impossible to find in China. Leaders speak of him only with some embarrassment. On the other hand, there is no official repudiation of his rule. Some students even seem to admire him.
Resting in heavenly peace
Mao's tomb has not suffered the fate of Stalin's. When I visited Red Square in Moscow in 1968, Stalin's body had recently been removed from where it had rested on public display beside Lenin's. It was re-interred between Lenin's tomb--something of a forum for the nation--and the great medieval Kremlin wall, which affords a backdrop to the tomb. Stalin's grave was at the end of a long row of graves of old Bolsheviks, going back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But unlike the other graves, which had a bust of each on top of a fair-sized headstone, and had the grave framed by red granite, Stalin's grave was unmarked.
In contrast, Mao's cadaver remains ensconced in the heart of Beijing, in an enormous mausoleum in the middle of his creation, the enlarged Tiananmen Square, the largest in the world. The mausoleum is the southern terminus of a central, north-south axis of the imperial Forbidden City, which begins at the base of a hill in the north and runs through building after building, pavilion after pavilion, courtyard after courtyard, and gate after gate, exiting through Tiananmen Gate onto the Square, and ending with Mao's remains. Mao's mausoleum thus blocks the imperial symbolism of opening out to all of China to the south.
Of this scene, a Chinese poet wrote this bitter verse:
(Quoted in Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China)
Just as Mao's mausoleum dominates the south end of Tiananmen Square, so his portrait commands a central position over Tiananmen Gate, from the top of which Mao in 1949 proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic. As the leaders of the Soviet Union stand on Lenin's tomb to review the parades in Red Square, China's leaders gather on Tiananmen Gate to review functions in the square. The Chinese even once sang a popular song called "I Love Tiananmen!"
During the height of the demonstrations in the square in May and June of 1989, some demonstrators splashed paint on Mao's portrait. Leaders of the student demonstrators helped workers replace it! Moreover, demonstrators shortly before the massacre carried posters with huge portraits of Mao and Zhou Enlai. This puzzled me at first, since I tended to assume that the students were very much against the system Mao had created.
But I recalled the reactions of some of my brightest students when I was teaching, during the pro-democracy movement, at a state university in Changsa, capital of Mao's native province of Hunan. Some of these students thought very highly of Mao, although close questioning revealed that they knew practically nothing about him other than the official line. When I told a group of male students that Mao kept a considerable stable of young women, they shook their heads in disbelief. They insisted he had three wives, but all in seriatim and legally. Had not Mao ended multiple wives, foot-binding and concubinage? When I explained that beautiful young women had been sent to Mao from all over China, that they were even sometimes seen marching together in a unit of the People's Liberation Army, they still did not believe me.
"Mr. Democracy"
One of only three statues of Mao which I came across in teaching and traveling in all the major regions of China stands at Hunan University across the river from Changsa. During the pro-democracy movement students hung a huge sign on this imposing statue, reading, "Mr. Democracy, we welcome you." While Mao may have been a reformer of sorts and called for "mass participation" (meaning continuing revolution), he was certainly never a proponent of democracy.
One of the very few things the students really knew of the real Mao was that he twice purged Deng Xiaoping, the current Chinese leader. And since the students were against Deng, they figured that Mao must have been alright, based on the old principle that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. An idealistic school teacher turned tourist guide told a New York Times reporter that she preferred Mao to the current "grandfathers" in the Chinese government.
On the evening of May 4, 1989, I sat around bonfires with my Chinese students on the campus in Hunan Province, the occasion being the celebration of "the May 4th Movement," a student-led movement of 1919. Among the songs the students sang was "Socialism is Good." Yet, many of these same students immediately before and after this officially sponsored celebration participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations.
Hometown "shrine"
When I first arrived in Changsha, I was puzzled as to why this out-of-the-way provincial capital would have such an imposing railroad station. I discovered that it was much bigger and more impressive than the railroad station in the former capital, Nanjing, or in Canton, or even in Shanghai. With its central tower, symmetrical wings, and position blocking the view at the end of the city's main drag, Wuyi Road, it reminded me of the state capitol in Austin, Texas.
Yet not only is Changsha no rail center, it is not even at the intersection of main rail lines. Only later did I read that some 20 trains a day used to depart from this station on a spur to go to Mao's birthplace and boyhood home in the farming village of Shaoshan, 75 miles to the west. The American novelist, Paul Theroux, wrote in his travelogue of China, Riding the Red Rooster, that no one went anymore to this village, virtually a shrine to Mao. That is a little bit of an exaggeration, but certainly before Mao's recent revival, not many did, and I daresay no Chinese official or bigwig goes there now.
Close by, 20 miles farther into the boondocks, I saw hordes of people and black, chauffeur-driven limousines with Chinese officials visiting the birthplace and huge museum--20 times larger than Mao's--of Liu Shaoqui. Liu was Mao's vice chairman, until he began to question some of Mao's policies, such as the break with the Soviet Union and the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Mao framed him, arrested him, and let him die in prison. Deng has completely restored him.
Just down the road from where I taught in Changsha is the normal school where Mao came as a county boy who had never seen a newspaper. He later returned to the same school to teach and to marry the daughter of one of the other professors. (She was arrested and executed by the force of Chiang Kai-shek in 1931.) One can see the bunk Mao slept in and the student desk he sat at, but there is no statue of him out front. Huge concrete statues of Mao with raised arm in salute have been toppled all over China.
Mao founded a business (which failed) in Changsha to help finance his revolutionary efforts. He often fought in and around Changsha, but the city pretty much ignores his memory today. I was the only person going through his old normal school the two times I visited it. The one train that runs to his native village each day leaves before 7 a.m., and does not seem to serve those going to venerate him.
About a billion copies of Mao's little red book were published, but not only are they not on sale now, they are very hard to find. I mentioned in all my classes that I would like to see one. After several weeks a Chinese professor came by my apartment with one. Mao buttons with the likeness of "the Great Helmsman" are almost as scarce, even though a factory in Hunan once produced 30 million a year. While seated on a park bench in Guilin in southwestern China, I once had a young man sidle up to me, look furtively over his shoulder, and start to unwrap something. I was reminded of men decades ago on Paris's Champs Elysees sliding up and whispering, "Feelthy peectures?" Sure enough, he wanted high prices for what he considered to be, or pretended to consider to be, exciting forbidden items--Mao buttons.
When Chinese professors came to visit me at my apartment on campus, I often raised the subject of Mao, and invariably got the same reaction: first was the nervous giggle, as if they were saying, "Heh, heh, I wish you had not asked that." Or, "Heh, heh, that is not a very polite question." Then, whatever followed was always prefaced by the statement, "Mao was indubitably a great man." The standard line that followed was, "Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong."
The 70-30 formula
Once Deng Xiaoping had recovered in 1978 from his second fall from power, he launched a critical review of Mao, Maoism, and the whole Cultural Revolution. The official line came to be that Mao had been "70 percent right"--although the new leadership publicly discussed more failures than would seem to fit into the "30 percent." The Chinese Communist Party retained "Mao Zedong Thought" as its guiding principle, while actually rejecting most of what was Maoism.
China has also resisted going along with the Soviet Union's de-Stalinization program; the authorities in China have never undertaken a re-appraisal of Stalin. On each May Day until the turmoil in 1989, the Chinese government erected huge portraits of the lao zuzong (old ancestors, or originators of communism) in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The four were Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. China's official line on Stalin became the same as that on Mao, that he was about 70 percent right. Later there was some talk of perhaps 50 percent.
In the summer of 1983 the Chinese Central Committee asserted that using Mao's mistakes to "try to negate the scientific value of Mao Zedong thought and to deny its guiding role in our revolution and construction" would be "entirely wrong." The Central Committee concluded, "Socialism and socialism alone can save China."
At the beginning of the 1980s Deng had worked against residual Maoism; the mere act of opening up China to Western ways and technologies after long years of isolation called into question many of the fundamental premises of Maoism. By 1982 one could criticize Mao within the Chinese Communist Party.
With the current repression, however, various elements of Maoism are being dusted off. Immediately following the Tiananmen massacre, Deng insisted that any effort to discredit the leading role of "Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong thought" must be resolutely squashed along with any attempt to introduce "the American system of the separation of the three powers." One must always choose socialism over the forces of "bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution." In other words, Mao's role in Chinese history was to be worked out only gradually, and over a very long period of time.
The real Mao
Mao was obviously a great guerrilla leader and a formidable organizer. He was a great politician as well. His knowledge of issues and politicians, his drive and assertiveness, his self-confidence, and persuasive abilities, and, especially, his prestige, enabled him to vanquish all opposition. But unfortunately for his reputation, he lived too long. Some world leaders are fortunate enough to assure their place in history by dying at the height of their popularity. Lenin died only seven years after seizing power. If Mao had similarly died seven years after coming to power, he would have gone down in history as one of the greatest statesmen and leaders of all times. As it is, he lived long enough to ruin his place in history.
One of his early admirers, the American journalists Edgar Snow, described what an impact Mao had made on China:
"In China's 3,000 years of written history, the combination of Mao's achievements was perhaps unique. Others had ridden to power on the backs of the peasants and left them in the mud; Mao sought to keep them permanently erect. Dreamer, warrior, politician, ideologist, revolutionary destroyer-creator, Mao had led a movement to uproot one-fourth of humanity and turn a wretched peasantry into a powerful modern army, which united a long-divided empire; brought scientific and technical training to millions and literacy to the masses; laid the foundation of a modernized economy, able to place world-shaking nuclear power in Chinese hands; restored China's self-respect and world respect for or fear of China; and set up examples of self-reliance for such of the earth's poor and oppressed as dared to rebel. No wonder Mao refused to yield ground to those who sought to revise his success formula."
But in the end, Mao acted like all other Chinese emperors, even to the bevy of young women. He left an unstable regime as his legacy. Just like Mao, Deng keeps naming successors, keeps saying he is retiring, and, then, keeps firing one handpicked successor after another. One need look no further than Taiwan, with a per capita income some 12 times that of China and no oil, coal, and other resources, to see that in the end Mao's legacy was to retard technological improvements, economic growth, long-range stability, and a steady evolution toward democracy.
The New York Times reporter based in Beijing, Nicholas Kristof, reports that "there has been a rising enthusiasm for not only Zhou Enlai, but Mao as well. In the last two years in various parts of the country, posters of Mao and even Mao buttons have reappeared on a small scale." He explains the phenomenon in part as follows:
"For most of the 1980s, the trend was toward cutting Mao down to size, and these days there is still revulsion at his excesses. But many Chinese also express a yearning for the days when the moral order was clear cut and unquestioned, when ordinary people and particularly the leaders seemed honest and sincere, motivated by a vision, however flawed, rather than by greed."
Undertaking a de-Maoization program would not only be a wrenching exercise, it would call into question the very legitimacy of the current leadership. When Khrushchev told the All Russian Congress about what an ogre Stalin was and the horrible mistake he had made, the fiction was maintained that the Communist Party was still infallible. That was possible because the Soviets still had Lenin to fall back on.
Mao was the legitimizer of the regime and all policies that flowed from it, whether populism, anti-intellectualism, self-reliance, mass participation, or continued revolution. China's problem in exorcising Mao is that Mao is both the Lenin and the Stalin of the regime. A de-Leninization requires much more time, but it will come to China just as it has already started in the Soviet Union.