Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

Part Two
Occupied China

In the wake of the massive and almost totally victorious Japanese offensives during 1937 and 1938, small groups of Communist soldiers and administrators fanned out across the North China Plain and central China, creating pockets of civil-military power in the interstices of the Japanese occupation, filling gaps left where local leaders loyal to Chiang Kai-shek had fled. Beginning in early 1939 Japanese strategy turned to holding operations with occasional forays in force. In response to this relaxation, both the Communists and the Nationalists became more concerned with consolidating their power in the areas they controlled. Chiang Kai-shek imposed a blockade on the Shaanganning Border Area, of which Yan'an was the capital. he brought the second unit front to an end in January 1941 with a serious attack on the Communist New Fourth Army in southern Anhui Province. From the beginning, Mao looked optimistically for ultimate victory both over the immediate enemy-Japan-and the long-term domestic foe, the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek. He never lost sight of the practical objective of destroying the enemy's armed forces, but he viewed the political mobilization of the Chinese population as a matter of foremost importance. Military victory was to be a product of rational transformation in the nation as a whole.

Mao was in a position to shape the consciousness of wartime China through words as well as deeds. Many people outside the Communist base areas learned about Mao and his ideas from the American journalist Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China(1937) was widely circulated in Chinese translation. Snow portrayed a tall, pale figure with boundless energy, an omnivorous reader who was careless of personal appearance but meticulous about the details of duty. Snow's works about a plain, patriotic, and highly moral figure with "considerable genius" in planning were reinforced by reports from other journalists and by clandestine circulation of Mao's essays. Written in a clear, easy to understand style, such works as Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War (1936) and The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan (1937) contrasted favorably with the turgid prose emanating from the Nationalist side.

Party Building

As a teacher of revolutionary practice Mao sought to build a strong moral link between Party leadership and the masses. According to Mao, those in the Party must humbly learn from the people while at the same time acting as their teachers. He urged leaders to take the masses' inchoate ideas, systematize them through study, and explain to the masses in their new form so that the masses would embrace them as their own. This "mass line" did not preclude strong moral leadership by the Leninist party. In works such as On Practice (1937) and In Memory of Norman Bethune (1939), Mao set forth the virtues of hard struggle, self-reliance, selfless behavior, implacable hostility to the enemy, and iron discipline.

The "mass line" also included economic transformation. Communist principles and earlier experience in South China indicated that income redistribution would help mobilize the masses for the patriotic goals. Wartime shortages dictated emphasis on cooperation in production. In Marxist jargon major benefits could come about from changes in human relations of production even though there might be only minor changes in the objective forces of production. A decade later, after 1949, the Yan'an program was taken as a model for social revolution in China as a whole.

The CCP needed a leader who cold stand in the public mind at the same level as Chiang Kai-shek. In scored of meetings and conferences during the rectification movement of 1942 to 1944, Mao and his followers hammered home the basic Maoist idea of combining theory and practice, instilling new discipline and purpose into the rapidly growing organization and ending the possibility that Moscow-based theoreticians such as Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) could challenge Mao's primacy. Mao's idea of a real theoretician was one who had done as much investigation and organization as he had reading. Few could doubt he had done that. In 1943 he was elected chairman of the Central Committee and the Politburo, and he remained leader of the Party thereafter.

When the Chinese Communist Part held its Seventh National Congress in Yan'an in the spring of 1945, there were nineteen Communist base areas scattered over northern and central China with a combined population of more than 90 million. Party membership was estimated at 1.2 million, with another 900,000 in the armed forces. The newly elected Central Committee and Political Bureau were overwhelmingly composed of experienced men who had proven their ability and loyalty to Chairman Mao. The new Party constitution stated in its preamble that the central guide for all future work was "the thought of Mao Zedong." In a talk entitled "On Coalition Government," Mao summarized his political thought and stated conditions under which the CCP would cooperate with the Nationalists in the postwar period.

Under American guarantees Mao flew to Chong-qing in late August 1945 to discuss with Chiang Kai-shek the nature of the postwar government. Even while they met, their armies were racing to accept surrender of Japanese and puppet troops in North China and Manchuria, and to take over their equipment. Chiang's firepower was vastly superior to Mao's, his army several times larger. His grand strategy was to take and hold the cities and rail lines. Mao's strategy during the first year of the ensuing civil war was to build peasant armies, using the countryside to surround the cities. To avoid positional warfare until ready, he even allowed Yan'an to be captured in March 1947. Despite his superior strength, however, Chiang was unable to stem inflation in the economy or corruption and defeatism within his army.

The "mass line" depended on agrarian reform to convince the peasants that revolution was in their interests. During the war against Japan agrarian reform had been restricted to limiting rent and interest, but with the breakup of cooperation with the Nationalists, a more radical policy of "land to the tiller" was adopted in many areas. Mao declared that throughout the civil war period, "the peasants stood with our Party and our army against the attacks of Chiang Kai-shek's troops wherever the land reform problem was solved radically and thoroughly." He to have been among the moderated in the Party, however, pressing for protection of the property of "middle peasants" and "small landlords" who did not egregiously exploit the labor of others, for their productive capabilities were critical to the well-being of the economy as a whole. It was this policy that was adopted in the early years after Liberation.

By the end of 1947 the tide had begun to turn. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Manchuria and North China shifted to conventional warfare and dealt the Nationalists a series of crushing defeats. During 1948 and the first half of 1949 the Red Armies rolled up the forces of their enemies of twenty-five years, and on 1 October 1949, twenty-eight years after participating in the birth of the Communist Party in China, Mao Zedong stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing to declare at the formation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that "China has stood up."

Founding of PRC

Mao was fifty-five years old when he came to supreme national power. He had never been outside of China and he had spent more than twenty years working in the countryside. Now he and his close lieutenants, Liu Shaaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun, were faced with attempting to build a powerful modern economy, a city-based industrial economy upon which a new China, free of foreign domination, could be constructed. The country was prostrate after decades of civil war and foreign occupation. Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan with US 300 million from the national treasury and five thousand soldiers. Mao recognized the magnitude of tasks that lay before him. He warned the Party against overconfidence and arrogance. "To win nationwide victory is only the first step in a long march of 10,000 li. Even if this step is worthy of pride, it is comparatively tiny; what will be more worthy of pride is yet to come."

Economic assistance form abroad was sorely needed. Attempts to open a dialogue with the United States through Zhou Enlai failed utterly. In December 1949 Mao flew to Moscow for nine weeks of negotiating with Stalin for military support in case of attack and annual Soviet industrial credits of 60 million a year for five years. One of the results was widespread adoption of Soviet-style institutions in government and industry.

Even more important was domestic reconstruction, social and economic. Mao set about the task with revolutionary vigor. In April 1950 he promised a new marriage law aimed at abolishing feudal oppression. Two months later a new Land Reform Law was announced. The property of landlords was to be confiscated and distributed among the poor, and the rural gentry was to be destroyed as a class. The intention was to be moderate so as no tot reduce food production, but popular enthusiasms were not to be curbed. Some two million people lost their lives during the transformation of China's ancient agrarian system; a permanent underclass of former landlords was created. A new sense of hope was born among the peasants, however, and Mao Zedong achieved a near mythic status: later, even his disastrous errors could not shake the staunch support he enjoyed among China's vast rural majority.

Korean War

In August 1950 Mao anticipated demobilization of a substantial part of the People's Liberation Army, but the surprise outbreak of the Korean War taxed China's military and economic resources and exacerbated his inclination toward social discipline through coercion and repression. As the war raged, he launched a thought reform campaign to transform intellectuals through mass criticism and individual self-criticism, the "Three Antis" movement to root out corrupt and inefficient cadres, and the "Five Antis" movement to direct mass criticism toward merchants and industrialists. Always a strong believer in the power of the human will Mao sought to encourage "correct" thinking as well as to solidify his own positions, by encouraging "the cult of Chairman Mao" trough publication of new versions of modern history and of the texts that would become the The Selected Works of Mao Zedong

The death of Stalin in March 1953 and the end of the Korean War in July gave Mao greater freedom and encouraged moderation and flexibility. The First National People's Congress in September 1954 elected him chairman of the People's Republic of China and of the Council of National Defense. The Soviet Union granted increased financial and technical assistance to China, and in October Nikita Khruschev visited Beijing. Krushchev's de-Stalinization speech of 1956, and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary in October, however, wrenched the international communist movement. Convinced that the Chinese people had become good socialists, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in early 1957 to encourage intellectuals to speak freely.

The strong criticism of both Party and government proved to Mao the validity of his 1937 essay On Contradiction: human society develops through a continuous series of creating and resolving contradictions. The contradictions within society could be resolved only by a permanent revolution-education and discussion to resolve "nonantagonistic" contradictions among the people, and continued use of force to resolve "antagonistic" contradictions between "ourselves and our enemies." The first to feel the iron fist in the new Anti-Rightist Campaign were those who had spoken out to criticize.

Great Leap Forward

Seeking to force the historical pace and to turn from material incentives toward massive mobilization of burgeoning human resources, Mao launched a collectivization campaign in 1957 to reorganize the countryside into communes. In 1958 he followed up with the Great Leap Forward to modernize China's agriculture and industry at breakneck speed. While there are many disputes about the significance of the Great Leap Forward, and its coincidence with poor weather conditions and weak local management, there can be no question that its failure- and the three years of near starvation that resulted –tarnished Mao's towering reputation.

At the same time, Mao sought to force the historical pace internationally. He disagreed with Khrushchev's hopes for détente with the United States, a disagreement that led to Soviet withdrawal of technicians and aid just as the other problems of the Great Leap were beginning to crest. Mao resigned as chief of state in April 1959, but defeated Peng Dehuai's attempt to dislodge him form his other posts that summer.

For the next several years, Mao was, in his own words, "in second rank." His published writings of the period, witty and keenly logical, were largely concerned with a critique of the Soviet Union's flagging revolutionary zeal, a critique that led to the Sino-Soviet split in 1963. Approaching seventy years of age, he was also deeply concerned with his own country's flagging revolutionary zeal and slow pace of economic development. In 1964 he launched a Socialist Education Movement, focusing on the vast numbers of people born since 1950. The Party leadership was in the process of becoming a bourgeois "new class," he believed. Chinese socialism could only be rescued by the young learning from heroic model socialists and from the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Cultural Revolution

In 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, mobilizing masses of young Red Guards to "storm the heights." Under the general leadership of Mao's wife of twenty-five years, Jiang Qing, the stated aim of the Cultural Revolution was to root out old customs, habits, and ways of thought using the "thoughts of Chairman Mao." The Party itself was a prime target. Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, Liu Shaoqi, and other senior leaders were subjected to public vilification and sent to dwell in vile "cow sheds." Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, Party cadres, and economic leaders were similarly mistreated.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution put great emphasis on revolutionary voluntarism, an idea more associated with the anarchist ideas of the Culture Bookstore of Mao's youth than with the ideas of Karl Marx. The result, in a country where for centuries people had been taught that there is but one truth, was severe disruption of all segments of industry, communication, and government. Red Guard groups began fighting among themselves. Only the PLA, under Lin Biao, offered a coherent structure upon which the country could be rebuilt. Lin became Mao's chosen successor, and the process of rebuilding slowly began from 1967 to 1969. However, a hidden power struggle developed as Lin attempted to shoulder aside Zhou Enlai in 1970. Zhou was guilty of attempting to deradicalize the Cultural Revolution and to go beyond military power in rebuilding political institutions. He was even prepared, with Mao's backing, to invite President Richard Nixon to visit Beijing. Henry Kissinger visited in July 1971 to prepare the way for Nixon's visit the following February. In September 1971, according to the official version, Lin Biao attempted to assassinate Mao Zedong. When the plot failed, Lin tried to escape to the Soviet Union, but his plane crashed in Mongolia, Killing all aboard.

The winding down of the Cultural Revolution accelerated after Lin Biao's death as the Authority and apparatus of the Party was put back into place. Mao expressed his regrets for the harsh treatment suffered by officials, who were being rehabilitated in large numbers.

Zhou Enlai died in January 1976. Zhu de died six months later. Only the infirm Mao was left among the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. He had made his last official appearance at the Party's Tenth Congress in 1973. When he died on 9 September 1976 at the age of eighty-two, the leaders of China's political and military bureaucracies lost little time severing the remaining links with the radicals. The "Gang of Four," leaders of the Cultural Revolution, including Jiang Qing, were arrested in October.

Conclusion

Mao's hopes for rebuilding China on the basis of voluntarism, ideological unity, and mass mobilization were thus quickly put to rest. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had Lenin to fall back on when Stalin was criticized twenty-three years earlier. In deflating the cult of Mao in China, the new leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, have praised Mao's role in the struggle for liberation while criticizing the excesses of his later years. Those attacked during the Cultural revolution have been restored to a place of honor in part to fill the void created by reducing the stature of Mao. Mao's emphasis on egalitarianism and voluntarism has been replaced by a stress on pragmatism and material incentives.

--Angus W. McDonald, Jr. The Encyclopedia of Asian History. New York: Asia Society and Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.