The huge portrait still hangs on Tiananmen Gate, but the distance between the China Chairman Mao envisioned and the China that is currently unfolding grows longer each day. And his shadow shortens in inverse proportion. In the bland square below, Mao’s embalmed body lies, stripped of its once-monumental power beyond the ability to draw a daily line of mostly Chinese tourists who file past respectfully. The wallets of everyone moving about in the square bear his image as well. Identical prints of Mao’s bust are on the one, five, ten, twenty, and one hundred yuan notes. Perhaps few think about the irony of honoring Mao in this fashion, but Mao himself seems to know. His eyes are fixed on something moving unseen to the left of the print, and his lips bend upward slightly into a thin, ironic smile.
As a foreigner living and working in China, I have found myself struggling to make sense of Mao. Toward this end, I have read three biographies, which, taken together, are like the proverbial three bowls of porridge. The first, Edgar Snow’s hagiographic Red Star Over China, presents the heroic revolutionary Mao. It is a gripping narrative, but more a matter of myth-making than historical truth. The second, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, portrays the demonic Mao, a Mao who is just as wholly evil as Snow’s Mao is wholly good. Jung Chang’s own family suffered persecution under Mao’s regime, and she has a well-founded hatred of the man. Personal vendetta, however, is not an especially attractive trait in a biographer. The third book, Michael Lynch’s Mao, takes a measured look at the man. Lynch’s Mao is an admirable but flawed revolutionary and largely a disaster as a head-of-state. This is the conflicted legacy that the Chinese people must contend with today: what to do with the memory of a man once worshiped but now the icon of a discredited vision, a man once deemed infallible but now acknowledged even by his admirers to be deeply flawed?
Deng Xiaoping, who survived two purges by Mao to become his successor and who more than anyone was responsible for setting China on a decidedly anti-Maoist course, offered a mathematical resolution to the problem of Mao: Mao, Deng asserted, was 100% right 70% of the time and 100% wrong 30% of the time. Presumably the period of unmitigated error occurred during the last two decades of Mao’s life, with state of perfection spanning the long revolutionary struggle and the early years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
For Westerners bred on Cold War ideology, the notion of the heroic Mao may initially be difficult to grasp. Our image of him derives primarily from the Cultural Revolution and the excesses and cruelty of those worshiping in the cult of his personality. But Mao as a revolutionary leader is truly a remarkable figure. From the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, he endured for nearly thirty years against extremely long odds to establish a new nation. He accomplished this despite the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union favored his rival for power in China, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.
The creation of the People’s Republic ended a century of humiliating foreign intervention and economic domination. Later, Deng would insist that his opening of the economy would lead to socialism with Chinese characteristics. On the streets of China today, it is hard to see the difference between such “socialism" and capitalism. Mao’s communism, in contrast, always remained Chinese. Marxism may have been a Western import, but Mao’s tendency was to bend Marxism to fit what he perceived to be the needs of China. As the increasingly hostile nature of China’s relations with the Soviet Union would show, Mao was a nationalist first and a communist second.
In making revolution in China, Mao not only had to combat foreign and domestic foes; more dauntingly, he had to push against the weight of a cultural tendency to treat the existing social order as divinely sanctioned. Such a worldview benefited those at the top of the hierarchy. It least served the interests of those at the bottom, the peasants and women. In the 1930s, Mao won over many peasants simply by insisting that the Red Army treat the peasants humanely—a policy never adhered to by armies in China’s long history and in marked contrast to the routine brutality and rapine visited upon the peasants by both Kuomingtang and Japanese soldiers in the 1930s. Mao offered peasants who joined the Red Army training in basic literary—the first formal education most had ever received. Beyond education, he offered them hope—a commodity nearly unknown in thousands of years of Chinese peasant life.
Mao had been a strong advocate for women since the 1920s. In a culture that still practiced foot-binding, Mao insisted on the unbinding of women in the social and economic spheres. His position would have been radical for its time anywhere but was remarkably so in China. After assuming power, Mao banned both foot-binding and prostitution and created an environment in which women might aspire to something higher than subordination to the men in their lives.
Even so, Mao always embodied contradictions. He waged revolution in the peasants’ name, but no class suffered more than the peasants once Mao gained power. The Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in the deaths of approximately fifty million Chinese people—nearly all of them peasants. Each death ultimately could be attributed to failed policies of Mao: the poorly planned collectivization of farming and the demand that farmers divert attention away from their crops to smelting down household implements in backyard furnaces that produced worthless steel. Mao had created a political culture premised on his own infallibility. Consequently, Mao could not acknowledge his own failures of judgment, and the sycophants that served him dared not speak in terms other than praise, even in the face of ideas that were clearly ruinous. As a result, fifty million people died in a famine that was both the worst in Chinese history and easily the most avoidable.
Similarly, Mao’s progressive stand on women’s equality conflicted with his behavior toward the women in his own life. The public feminist, apparently, was a private patriarch and letch. Married four times, Mao discarded one woman and took up with another when it pleased him. Although he never divorced his fourth wife, Jiang Qing—the strong-willed and sadistic scourge of the arts during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s alliance with her during the last three decades of their marriage was strictly political. While Mao may have advocated women’s equality in the abstract, he did not want an equal partner in his own life, and this ensured a rift with the outspoken Jiang Qing. From the mid-1940s on, they shared the same hard-line vision for China, but no longer a bed.
At sixty-eight, Mao took up with a teen-aged mistress, Zhang Yufeng. Among Zhang’s many duties as the chairman’s chief mistress was to procure other young women to join Mao in his “pleasure rooms” at Zhongnanhai inside the Forbidden City. Mao’s path to power had come full circle, for, as China fell into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao frolicked inside the Forbidden City with what amounted to an imperial harem. In the isolation of his unchecked power, Mao had come to resemble the decadent princes of the late-Qing period whom he had despised as a young man. The revolutionary had become an emperor. Lord Acton’s maxim about the corrupting force of absolute power could hardly find a better illustration.
Perhaps the last purely Maoist act of the People’s Republic of China was the violent suppression of the student movement in 1989. From his framed perch high above Tiananmen Square, Mao must have smiled down on that scene. But he has surely scowled at most that has transpired since. China now has a capitalist economy with a one-party state. The bargain the party has made with the Chinese people is unchallenged political power in exchange for a less invasive presence in the daily lives of ordinary citizens, increasing choice in the marketplace in exchange for the continued dearth of political choice.
Direct challenges to the party’s hold on power still exact a harsh response, and always there is memory of Tiananmen. The balance is tenuous at best, and one wonders how long the state can cling so tightly to political power while relinquishing control in other respects. There is, however, one certainty: China is no longer Maoist. Each day, it fact, it moves a little farther away from the world that Mao made, and the position of reverence he still holds requires a little more cognitive dissonance to sustain. Perhaps one day, the gulf will grow too great, and, during the night, workmen will raise scaffolding on Tiananmen Gate and draw down the giant portrait of Mao. The sun will rise again the next morning, and the people will go about their daily routines, pretending not to notice that there is now one less star in the sky.
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