Chinese Views of Mao: Preface to the New Revised Edition
When China's President Xi Jinping and his Taiwanese counterpart, Ma Ying-jeou, met in Singapore in November 2015 at the Shangri-la Hotel – aptly named for such an encounter – it was more than just the first meeting at that level since 1949.
Ninety years earlier, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek had met in Canton, shortly after the death of China's first President, Sun Yat-sen. The future Communist Party Chairman was then acting head of the Guomindang's Propaganda Department and an alternate member of its Central Executive Committee. Chiang, the nationalist army commander, was eying Sun's succession. Little is known for certain about their relationship at that time except that they were on the same side: the communists and the nationalists were allies against the northern warlords and Mao's relations with his own party, as often happened in the early part of his career, were at rock bottom. When the two next met, twenty years and a bloody civil war later, Mao was still the junior partner: contemporary photographs show him looking rather tense beside the urbane Generalissimo, as though painfully aware that he was in the lion's den. In 2015, the shoe was on the other foot. Xi was welcoming and expansive, with a grin like the Cheshire cat, while Ma, a slighter figure, locked into an interminable handshake for the benefit of the photographers, appeared torn between elation at the significance of the occasion and apprehension that he might be about to be eaten.
Amid the parallels, there was an essential difference. In 1925 and again in 1945, Mao and Chiang were reluctant partners, working together while contending for the right to rule China. The fact that they could be partners at all showed that accommodation was possible – a hopeful precedent for Xi's encounter with Ma. But on both occasions they met as Party officials. Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou – despite efforts to blur the issue by referring to each other as ‘Mr’, rather than by their titles – met as Heads of State (albeit states which refuse to recognise each other). In this sense the meeting in Singapore was not merely a replay of previous contacts. It broke entirely new ground.
For all Xi's boldness, however, he was following an agenda which Mao himself had set. At a meeting with Richard Nixon in 1972, the Chairman had said that Taiwan's fate was not a pressing matter: China was prepared to wait. Sooner or later reunification would occur. Unlike Chiang Kai-shek, who had been forced to recognise the independence of Mongolia under pressure from Stalin during the Pacific War, Mao ordained that Taiwanese independence was a red line that could not be crossed. Despite the talks in Singapore, that remains the case today.
The underlying policy choices which Mao laid down continue to guide China, forty years after his death, in unsuspected ways. The famous ‘nine-dash line’, for instance, whereby Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, is not a recent invention: it was delimited by Zhou Enlai and approved by Mao in 1953 after the Korean War.1 The first steps towards making it a reality were taken under Mao's leadership, in January 1974, when Chinese forces occupied the Paracel Islands, 180 miles south of Hainan, after a naval battle against the Vietnamese. The Chairman might insist all he wished that China had no pretensions to superpower status, but that did not stop him affirming the country's suzerain rights as the region's leading power. Mao proceeded cautiously: the ‘nine-dash line’ was made public only after Stalin's death, and the conquest of the Paracels was delayed until the Kissinger–Le Duan peace agreement signalled US disengagement from Vietnam. In part this was because, in Mao's day, China lacked the power to do more. But even now, when the country is infinitely stronger, building artificial islands on reefs many hundreds of miles from its shores to try to turn the surrounding seas into a Chinese domain, Xi Jinping is also moving prudently. Like Mao, Xi and his colleagues take an exceptionally long-term view, which makes it hard for other countries with short political cycles, whether the United States or South East Asian nations like the Philippines, to respond effectively. Xi's calculation – analogous to Mao's over Taiwan – is that, whatever grousing Chinese expansion may provoke in the short term, eventually China's dominance of the region will lead to a pax Sinensis to replace the pax Americana, and in time the country's neighbours and rivals will have no choice but to get used to it. Given the mushy US response to Xi's probing, who is to say that he is wrong? The changing balance of economic power makes this a battle which the US and its Asian protégés cannot win – and deep down America knows it.
That, of course, is not how Mao imagined his country's future. He saw China exercising its leading role in the region, and ultimately beyond, by the force of ideological example. His successors, as he had feared, embraced capitalism instead. But although the form changed, the goal remained the same. China's destiny, for Xi as for Mao, is to lead Asia and help shape the world's future. Whether it does so as an ideological flagship or an economic juggernaut is beside the point.
In the months immediately following Mao's death in 1976, no one could have imagined in their wildest dreams the extraordinary renaissance – unequalled in rapidity and extent at any time in human history – which China would undergo in the next four decades.2
If today it has become the world's factory and its second-largest economy, with commensurate political ambitions, it is because Mao's successors gambled that the freeing of market forces, the subsequent growth of private industry and commerce, and integration into the world economy, all under the political management of a Communist Party determined to conserve its monopoly of power, would transform the lives of its people. Rulers and ruled have been linked ever since by an unspoken social contract: so long as China's people refrain from challenging the Party's hold on power, they are largely free to live as they wish. Chinese families in the country's main cities today, so long as they have the money, can own their own homes, travel abroad, send their children to foreign universities, buy whatever consumer goods they like, choose where they want to work and to live, read foreign books and watch foreign films (often on sale in pirated copies before they even reach the screen in the West) – in other words, in ways that would have been inconceivable a generation before, their lives are not so different from those of people in the rest of the developed world.
Lest that picture appear too glowing, there is of course a downside. Freedom of public expression is severely curtailed. There is no rule of law. Corruption is rampant. In many rural areas, local officials ride roughshod over the peasants whom they exploit as shamelessly as the cadres of Mao's day or their long-ago imperial predecessors. Those who wish to change the system, whether intellectuals in the cities or peasant activists in the hinterlands, risk imprisonment or worse. In Tibet and Xinjiang, the slightest sign of separatism is ruthlessly repressed.
Yet overall the balance is positive. For the first time in well over a century, a fifth of the world's population is at peace, in a stable environment, where life today is usually better than yesterday and it is possible to plan for the morrow without having to fear another war or political convulsion in which everything might yet again be lost. These are things which in the West are taken for granted. In China they are new.
Where does that leave Mao – the founder of the regime?
His picture still gazes down from Tiananmen across the vast empty square laid out before the Forbidden City, at whose southern end, each morning, Chinese from the provinces queue to pay their respects to his embalmed remains in the present-day equivalent of an imperial mausoleum.
His portrait adorns the banknotes which are the lifeblood of the capitalist economy that he fought all his life to prevent, now serving as an international reserve currency, on a par with the dollar, the euro, the pound sterling and the yen. His birthplace in the village of Shaoshan, amid the ricefields of central Hunan, almost a thousand miles south of Beijing, has become a place of pilgrimage, or ‘red tourism’ as the government prefers to call it, where Chinese visitors light incense before Mao's parents’ grave, bow before his statue and buy the same kinds of kitschy souvenirs – plastic water-bottles and gilded plaster busts – that provide the shopkeepers of Lourdes with an income from devout Roman Catholics. Other sites have been developed to the same purpose: the mountain fastness of Jinggangshan, further south, where Mao's career as a guerrilla leader began; Zunyi, in the south-west, where, after numerous false starts, his political career began to take off; Yan'an, in the north-west, where the communists made their headquarters during the Pacific War; and Xibaipo, south of Beijing, where Mao masterminded, usually though not always correctly, the final battles with the nationalist armies which brought the communists to power.
His image in China today – at least as framed by the Party, which expects everyone else to follow – is as mummified as the corpse lying in his mausoleum. In death he is a ‘national treasure’, as the Japanese would put it, which the Chinese people may contemplate but not touch.
The prevailing orthodoxy on the Maoist period, to which, in theory, all Chinese writers must conform, was set out in the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic’, approved by the 6th Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in June 1981. It runs to more than fifty pages, of which nearly three quarters are devoted to a glowing account of the Party's ‘brilliant successes … achievements [and] correct line’ and of Mao's leading role in them. The remainder addresses his errors, but in such a way as to minimise their import. The anti-Rightist struggle of 1957, while ‘entirely correct and necessary’, was made ‘far too broad … with unfortunate consequences’. The Great Leap Forward, which began a year later, was due to ‘lack of experience … and inadequate understanding of the laws of economic development’ and ‘arbitrary directions, boastfulness and … the fact that Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades … had become smug about their successes [and] were impatient for quick results’. The outcome, it acknowledged, was ‘economic difficulties [and] serious losses to our country and people’ – a considerable euphemism for the worst famine in recorded history in which, between 1958 and 1962, several tens of millions of Chinese died. Even then, the resolution maintained, throughout this period the Party's successes were ‘dominant’, its errors secondary:
It is impermissible to overlook or whitewash mistakes, which in itself would be a mistake and would give rise to more and worse mistakes. But after all, our achievements … are the main thing. It would be a no less serious error to overlook or deny [these] achievements.
The resolution's harshest condemnation was reserved for the Cultural Revolution – a ‘comprehensive, long drawn-out and grave blunder’ – which lasted from 1966 to 1969 but in Chinese historiography is held to have continued until 1976 in order that the whole of the last ten years of Mao's life may be written off as a regrettable but temporary aberration. ‘Launched and initiated’ by Mao on the basis of ‘erroneous theses’, it declared, the Cultural Revolution caused ‘the most severe setback and the heaviest losses since the founding of the People's Republic’ – an extraordinary statement in view of the death toll in the Great Leap, reflecting the fact that the men who drafted the resolution suffered grievously from the one while surviving unscathed the other, which, moreover, they themselves had led.
Much space is then devoted to showing that Mao's leftist ideas during the last years of his life had no connection whatever with Mao Zedong Thought, with which they were ‘obviously inconsistent’ and which remained the Party's ‘valuable spiritual asset [and] guiding ideology’. The Chairman, the resolution said, had been ‘labouring under a misapprehension’ which had been exploited by the ‘counter-revolutionary cliques’ headed by his wife Jiang Qing and his anointed successor, Lin Biao. ‘Chief responsibility’ for the great upheaval, it concluded, ‘does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong. But it was, after all, the error of a great proletarian revolutionary … The Chinese people have always regarded Comrade Mao Zedong as their beloved great leader and teacher.’
Thirty-five years later, that remains China's official stance.
Today the convoluted arguments and double-think appear even more blatant than at the time. But in 1981, they represented a delicate balancing act. Communists are orderly people: they like to put history in boxes (a habit unfortunately shared by some academics). For the country's new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, it was essential to achieve ‘a unified view’ of the Maoist past in order to turn the page and look towards the future, just as it had been essential for Mao in 1945, after his consecration as Chairman of the Central Committee, to ensure the passage of a similar ‘Resolution on Party History’, summing up the struggles which had won him supreme leadership. Between them, the two resolutions book-end the entire period that Mao was in power. Each was intended to reconcile opposing factions: in 1945, the winners and losers in the protracted intra-Party conflict from which Mao emerged triumphant; and in 1981, those who had been close to Mao and wished to spare his memory (Deng himself among them) and those who sought a more sweeping repudiation of his errors.
In the latter case, moreover, another, much more frightening consideration had weighed on the debate: the risk that the pendulum would swing too far, and that instead of rejecting Mao's errors, the country would rise up against the system he had created and overthrow the Party's rule.
Two years earlier, during the so-called Beijing Spring of 1979, a former Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng, the son of a middle-ranking official in the State Capital Construction Bureau, had put up a wall-poster called ‘Democracy, the Fifth Modernisation’. Wei did not pull his punches. He denounced Mao as a ‘bragging despot’ and Deng as a ‘political swindler’, while the Chinese people were ‘old yellow oxen’, who, rather than being the masters of the country, as the Party's propaganda maintained, were in fact no more than slaves:
There are two old Chinese sayings, ‘To draw a cake to satisfy one's hunger’ and ‘To look at plums to quench one's thirst’. Even in ancient times, people could satirise these fallacies … Yet for several decades the Chinese people, following their Great Helmsman, took the ideals of communism as ‘the drawing of a cake’ and the [Party line] as ‘the sight of plums’, always tightening their belts and going forward. Thirty years passed like a day and left us this lesson: the people have been like the monkey, fishing for the moon in a pond and not realizing there is nothing there … The Marxist socialist experiment of using dictatorship to achieve the equal rights of man has been going on for decades. The facts have shown time and again that it simply won't work. A ‘dictatorship of the majority’ is simply a utopian dream. A dictatorship is a dictatorship. A concentration of powers is bound to fall into the hands of the few.
How many of Wei's generation of disillusioned former Red Guards and the sons and daughters of Mao's victims shared such views, there is no way of telling. Certainly they were a very small minority. But the Party leaders had grown up with the idea that, as Mao once put it, ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’, and many of them had seen that happen in the May Fourth movement in 1919, which had challenged the then ruling orthodoxy, Confucianism. Half a century later, another youth movement, manipulated this time from on high, had plunged China into chaos in the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, the chances of a repetition were infinitesimal. The Chinese people had had enough turmoil to last them a lifetime. But the leaders’ fears were not entirely misplaced, as was shown when some of Wei's arguments resurfaced in the movement which met its end in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. In any case, none of them was prepared to take that risk. While Wei and other dissidents were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, the 1981 resolution battened down the ideological hatches. From then on no one would have an excuse for not knowing the permissible limits of criticism.
In China, however, nothing remains set in concrete for very long.
The resolution, while continuing to represent the Party's immutable truth about the recent past, was quietly re-interpreted. Instead of being ‘70 per cent correct and 30 per cent mistaken’, as Deng Xiaoping had proposed in a secret speech to the Central Committee's Third Plenum in December 1978, Mao was increasingly portrayed on Chinese television and in the cinema as 99 per cent correct and, at most, one per cent mistaken. Hagiographic series were broadcast about his youth, the Long March and the War of Liberation, in which Mao and his companions were depicted as a Chinese brotherhood of Knights of the Round Table whose chivalry exceeded the Arthurian legend. The ‘twists and turns’ after 1949 were ignored or, better, written out of the script altogether. In this mass-media version of Chinese history, the anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution never happened: they have disappeared down a memory hole. Today they are not taught in university history courses, let alone at high school, nor are they often discussed at home, even in families which suffered in those movements. Deng Xiaoping argued that priority should be given to building a prosperous future rather than delving into the horrors of the past. Most Chinese – certainly most older Chinese – agree: what happened, happened; nothing can be done to change it, so why look back when the present already offers a vastly better life?
However, no system of control is foolproof, least of all in a country as large and as rebellious as China, where a tradition of independent thought and of upright scholars memorialising the throne undeterred by the risk to their lives stretches back thousands of years. Alongside the memory hole are discreet wormholes through which forbidden knowledge seeps out.
These can take various forms. Amid China's shifting political winds, there are brief moments of greater openness. During one such window of opportunity, in 2004, the Contemporary China Institute, headed by Zhu Jiamu, formerly the secretary of Chen Yun, a veteran Party leader second only to Deng in the post-Mao hierarchy, agreed that I might interview the surviving members of Mao's inner circle for a documentary series for the Franco-German television channel Arte. They included Liu Songlin, the widow of Mao's son, Anying; his grandchildren, Kong Dongmei and Mao Xinyu; members of the families of Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi; and many of Mao's personal staff, including his bodyguards, valet, nurse and doctor. Among the archive materials we used was unique footage from the Cultural Revolution, showing, among other things, Mao's erstwhile Politburo colleagues being humiliated and beaten by Red Guards at public ‘struggle meetings’. On the basis of the 1981 resolution, such images should have been acceptable. Two decades later, that was no longer the case. Senior Chinese cultural officials expressed shock and dismay. The head of the Chinese television group which had collaborated with Arte retired to hospital on sick leave for six weeks in the hope that that would protect him from the inevitable fallout when the programmes were aired.
What happened next was revealing. There was no fallout.
Instead, one of the most senior of the men who had been called in to view the offending programmes, whom I encountered at a seminar a few months later, took me aside to say that he and his colleagues understood perfectly well why I had told the story as I had and that they had no problem with the historical interpretation; unfortunately, as I would surely understand, they were not in a position to say so. Shortly afterwards a pirated DVD of the programmes, with Chinese narration, appeared in the shops in Beijing. It evidently did well, because, ten years later, it is still selling. Neither the Propaganda Department nor the police have raised an eyebrow.
Outside China the reaction was instructive, too. In an internet forum after the final programme was shown, hundreds of young Chinese, studying at universities in France and Germany, went online to discuss a past which most of them did not know existed. One young woman wrote:
As a Chinese, born after Mao's death, there are so many things we don't talk about and the result is we don't know our own history. What our parents had to live through they don't speak about. It's a past which is deliberately forgotten. I am totally shattered by these films because it's the first time that I have seen face to face all these personalities who are my grandparents’ age, or just a bit older, and some of them are still alive. For me it's incredible. I hope that one day our Chinese people can see it just as I have today.
If I have recounted this episode at some length, it is because it encapsulates the Chinese authorities’ dilemma over how Mao's legacy should be treated. The 1981 resolution turned out to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the mass media were required to eulogise the Chairman, with the result that, for most Chinese born after the mid-1970s, the Maoist turmoil of their parents’ generation is a closed book, just as today's twenty-somethings know next to nothing about the shooting of student protesters around Tiananmen in 1989. They have become non-issues and the Chinese government wants to keep them that way. On the other, the resolution legitimised historical research on the period – which in Mao's lifetime had been effectively forbidden – and as a result whatever could fly under the radar, whether pirated DVDs of foreign documentaries, research works by Chinese scholars or Cultural Revolution relics sold in flea markets, was usually permitted.
The twenty years following Mao's death saw a flood of memoirs, of collections of his speeches and Central Committee documents, and of research by Chinese historians on the major episodes of the Chinese revolution, the most sensitive reserved for internal distribution within the Party elite, but much of the rest for public circulation. That newly available material formed the basis for this book when it was first published in 1999. Since then the flood has continued. The Central Archives remain closed to all except a select few among the Party's own researchers – and significant parts even to them – but provincial, municipal and local archives have begun opening their doors, albeit cautiously, to both Chinese and foreign historians.
The contrast between the simplistic image of the past purveyed by the Chinese mass media, under strict Party control, and the meticulous accounts to be found in Chinese books and scholarly journals, is flagrant.
It is true that the latter are largely confined to publications with limited print runs, which are not stocked in high-street stores but have to be sought out in specialist book shops. It is true, too, that they often confine themselves to a factual recital, leaving it to the reader to tease out the interpretation concealed between the lines. None the less, the wealth of information now available, which not long ago would have been considered top secret and whose disclosure would have landed an author in jail, is truly remarkable. Part of the reason is the passage of time: historical details which, thirty or forty years ago, might have been used as weapons in intra-Party intrigue, become much less sensitive when most of the potential rivals are dead. Now it is a question of preserving, or rehabilitating, the reputations of the protagonists and their followers. Regional political figures demand that local heroes get their fair share of credit for revolutionary successes, rather than the whole story being centred on Mao; local historians, working from local archives, write regional histories – both to please their patrons and to advance their own standing in Party history circles – and provincial presses publish their work without, in most cases, needing to refer upward to Beijing.
In one sense, this is simply a reflection of the changed nature of the regime. Deng Xiaoping's rallying cry, which he used to repudiate the ideological excesses of Mao's closest followers, was: ‘Seek truth from facts!’ Even in the world of Party double-speak, it would have been hard to promote that slogan and at the same time prevent Chinese historians from trying to carry it out. But there was another, deeper reason. For more than 2,000 years, ever since the great Han dynasty scholar Sima Qian wrote the first comprehensive Chinese history in the second century BC – suffering imprisonment and castration for his pains – Chinese historians have viewed the past as a mirror to throw light on the present and provide guidance for the future. The 1981 resolution itself reaffirmed that principle. Small wonder, then, that the moment the powers-that-be acknowledged the legitimacy of research into the period of Mao's rule, historians both within the Party and outside it swarmed through the breach. Ever since, Chinese scholars have been steadily pushing the boundaries, and although there remain some ‘no-go areas’, such as the role of Premier Zhou Enlai as the Chairman's echo-chamber and enforcer; Deng's excesses in the political campaigns of the 1950s; and the complicity between Mao and his cantankerous wife, Jiang Qing, they are becoming the exceptions to the rule.
But why, in that case, is this openness confined to the elite? Why does the Chinese State continue to insist that Mao's image, for the great mass of the Chinese people, remain sacred and untouchable?
The answer is to be found in the nature of the Chinese polity since Mao's death. Since the 1990s, if not earlier, the Chinese Communist Party has been communist in name only. On what, then, does it base its claim to a monopoly of power? After all, absent the Marxist-Leninist assertion that ‘socialism [for which read, communism] and socialism alone can save China’, as the 1981 resolution phrased it, what possible justification can there be for maintaining a one-party system?
To the extent that the Party responds to such heretical ideas, it justifies its hold on power firstly by its ability to deliver rising living standards, not only along the developed seaboard but also in the interior; and secondly by its history. The communists, under Mao's leadership, it argues, gained the right to rule China in 1949 by bringing to an end more than a century of turmoil and humiliation and restoring to the Chinese people their national pride – a discreet allusion to the nationalism which, since Mao's death, has provided the glue to hold the country together in an era when ideology has lost its appeal. These three pillars – prosperity, nationalism and the legend of Mao's revolution – are the foundations on which Chinese political power is based. Thus far, the government's record in resisting economic shocks – in other words, preserving prosperity – has been remarkably good: China took in its stride both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the ‘Great Recession’ a decade later. The transition from export-led growth to consumption may prove trickier to manage, but there is no reason to think that the Chinese will be less successful than other nations before them. Nationalism always carries a risk that it will spin out of control, as China's rhetoric against Japan has shown, but thus far it has been kept within bounds. The founding legend, however, is a very different matter. Tampering with that could open a Pandora's box with unforeseeable consequences which would bring no possible benefit to those who now hold power.
The Chinese leaders are all the more alive to this danger – perhaps, indeed, excessively so – because both Mao, at Yan'an in 1945, and Deng, in 1981, began by repudiating those of their predecessors’ policies which contradicted their own vision of the future. In China, the past is bound up so intimately with the present that it serves not only as a mirror but as a political weapon. Moreover this cuts both ways. Xiao Yanzhong,3 Professor of Political Science at East China Normal University in Shanghai, has described Mao studies in China as ‘a bellwether that can indicate changes in China's politics, economy, and society, as well as the states of mind of the Chinese people.’ More or less openness about the past goes in tandem with the leadership's willingness, or refusal, to contemplate economic and political reform in the present.
The regime's nervousness about such matters is striking. For more than ten years, attempts have been underway to persuade the Chinese authorities to permit the making of a Western-financed big-screen movie about Mao along the lines of Richard Attenborough's classic, Gandhi. It would focus on Mao's rise to power and the epic struggle against Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists, and end with the communist victory in 1949. The ‘Big Events Group’ of the China Film Co-production Corporation was enthusiastic. But when it came to approving the project, there was silence. No one was willing to take responsibility. When the question was referred upward, the response was the same. Even at the highest levels – and even though the script avoided the contentious episodes of Mao's later years – no one saw any interest in risking the kind of controversy that such a project was bound to generate.
Hence the curious compromise that governs the study of Mao in China today: scholars are given – within limits – generous latitude to pursue their researches; but for the general public, the ‘masses’, as they were called in Mao's day, the lid is clamped hermetically shut.
Not touching Mao's image is one thing, however; not using it is another.
In 1979, after the wall-poster attacks of Wei Jingsheng and others, calling for an end to Communist Party rule and the introduction of a multi-party system, and challenges to Party orthodoxy in art and literature, Deng Xiaoping proclaimed the ‘four cardinal principles’ to which the Chinese are expected to adhere – ‘the socialist road; the people's democratic dictatorship; the leadership of the Communist Party; and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought’ – in a deliberate reassertion of pre-Cultural Revolution Maoist values. Four years later, Deng called again for ‘enhancing Mao Zedong Thought’, this time in a campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, which was equated with ‘disseminating corrupt and decadent bourgeois ideology … and sentiments of distrust towards … the Communist Party leadership’.
Thereafter the scarecrow of ‘Maoism’ was dusted off and given a ritual shake every time it was felt necessary to crack down on liberal excesses. The next occasion, in 1987, was a campaign against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, associated with Hu Yaobang, whose death in May 1989 triggered the student contestation which ended on June 4 in the carnage of Tiananmen. Then, in the 1990s, Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, revived a movement, originally launched a decade earlier, for ‘a new, socialist spiritual civilisation’. Maoist role models from the 1960s, like the soldier Lei Feng, who considered himself ‘a rustless screw’ in the Chairman's scheme of things, were exhumed and put on show for a new generation of young Chinese to emulate. By then, enough time had passed since Mao's death for nostalgia to set in. The original personality cult had been dismantled, but in some cities, including Chengdu and Shenyang (and in Kashgar, to remind restive Uighurs of the revolutionary past), huge statues of Mao, many times life-size, still stood – and still stand today – in central squares, a gigantic arm outstretched as though to point the way ahead. Taxi-drivers hung amulets with Mao's portrait on their windscreens to ward off accidents, and stories circulated in Beijing of miraculous escapes thanks to the protection they conferred. In the Chairman's home province of Hunan, local officials recounted how flowers had come into bloom in mid-winter at the anniversary of his birth.
Artists like Shi Xinning, who paints Mao in imaginary, hyper-realist settings – at Che Guevara's funeral, for instance, or with the Big Three at Yalta in 1945, in place of Chiang Kai-shek – and whose works have been collected by, among others, Mao's daughter, Li Min; and Sui Jianguo, whose monumental headless Mao jackets are in collections all over the world, took over where Andy Warhol left off, reworking Mao's image in ways which, with irony and black humour, transformed him into a twenty-first-century icon. Groups of citizens, young people as well as old, gathered spontaneously in parks at weekends to sing rousing revolutionary songs with the fervour of boy scouts around a camp fire. The words were an antidote to the materialistic money-grubbing reality around them, and the familiar, lilting melodies conjured up memories of simpler, more egalitarian times, when corruption was political rather than financial, people could have as many children as they wished and education and health care, limited though they might be, were free.
One Chinese leader, aspiring to yet higher office, sought to co-opt this movement for political ends. Bo Xilai was the son of Bo Yibo, who, when he died in 2007 at the age of 98, was the last survivor of the ‘Eight Immortals’, a group of conservative party elders led by Deng who had been together since the Long March. The family had a reputation for nepotism and ruthlessness. But the younger Bo, with his father's help, had been able to exploit the patronage network of the then Party leader, Jiang Zemin, to become First Secretary of Chongqing, the biggest of China's mega-cities with a population, including the suburbs, of some 30 million people, which he hoped to use as a springboard to membership of the Politburo's nine- (now seven-) member Standing Committee, the supreme organ of power.
Bo was not the inventor of what became known as the ‘red culture movement’ associated with his name: rather he seized on a phenomenon that had begun some years earlier and bent it to his own purposes. In Chongqing, the promotion of ‘revolutionary singing groups’ became a key official policy. Cadres came under intense pressure to foster a Maoist revival. In 2009, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party, Bo arranged for SMSs of Mao's quotations, taken from the ‘Little Red Book’, the Maoist breviary of the Cultural Revolution, to be sent to all 13 million cell-phone owners in the city. New statues of Mao were erected. Theatres revived Cultural Revolution operas and ballets.
Throughout China there was a veritable explosion of films and television programmes glorifying Mao's contributions, which reached a peak two years later on the 90th anniversary of the founding of the CCP.4 The centenary, in 2021, can be expected to produce an even greater outpouring of adulation for the founder of the regime. Nor should that be surprising. Half a century ago, the psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton wrote presciently: ‘One cannot predict future attitudes of Chinese leaders towards the Maoist image, but there is good reason to believe that for some time at least they will continue to hold [it] on high, even as they retreat from its excesses … it would be very rash to assume that a regime which has so recently commanded so much psychic power would suddenly cease to possess any at all.’5
Bo Xilai's exploitation of the Maoist myth was not all froth. In Chongqing he promoted egalitarianism and tried to reduce the gulf between urban and rural life, epitomised by the hukou system of residence permits. Instead of repressing protests, he organised round-table discussions. He launched a massive programme to build cheap housing and promote social welfare and a relentless campaign against crime. But his methods were controversial and sometimes illegal and, like many other Chinese leaders, he was deeply corrupt. More important to his peers, his outsize ego, charismatic personality and disdain for collective decision-making made him a potential threat to their own power. In 2012, a bizarre case involving the poisoning of a British businessman who had worked for him and a request by his police chief for asylum at the nearest American consulate became the pretext for his undoing. Xi Jinping marshalled support in the Standing Committee and, eleven days before Xi's appointment as Party leader, Bo was expelled from the Party. In 2013 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Qincheng prison, where Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, had languished before her suicide in 1991. Caught up in Bo's fall was his mentor, Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Standing Committee, who became the first leader at that level to be purged since the arrests of Jiang's colleagues, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao, during the campaign against the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ almost forty years earlier. Zhou, too, was expelled from the Party and sentenced to life imprisonment.
But it did not end there. In China, it rarely does.
After Bo's imprisonment, Xi proceeded to steal his challenger's clothes, approving extravagant ceremonies to mark the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth that winter; resurrecting Mao's guidelines on literature and art, laid down at Yan'an seventy years earlier; and initiating a comprehensive campaign against ideological laxity. In November 2013 a Central Committee directive entitled ‘The Current State of the Ideological Sphere’6 listed seven deadly sins which Party members were required to flee like the plague. Five dealt with ideas imported from the West – constitutional democracy; human rights; civil society; economic neo-liberalism; and a free press – and the sixth was aimed at neo-Maoists who resisted the Party's policies of ‘reform and opening up’. The seventh ‘false ideological trend’ was described as historical nihilism, which meant seeking to undermine the historical legitimacy of the CCP by emphasising Mao's mistakes. To Xi, as to Mao himself, the erosion of the Soviet Communist Party's strength – which would lead to its collapse and the break-up of the Soviet Union – began in 1956 with Khrushchev's secret speech which exposed Stalin's crimes. Mao was not only the Stalin but the Lenin of the Chinese Revolution and, at a still deeper level, the founding emperor of the dynasty which Xi now heads. Chip away at Mao's image and the whole system might come crashing down. That is not a risk which either Xi himself or any of his colleagues is prepared to take.
There is another reason for Xi to preserve Mao’s memory: not everyone in the Chinese Party, or in the country at large, is bowled over by what critics deride as ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ – the programme of economic reforms launched by Deng in 1978, which Xi is now continuing. To leftists in the Party, the reforms, and the corruption they have engendered, are a betrayal of everything Mao stood for. Such people applaud Xi's frequent warnings that, unless corrupt behaviour can be brought under control, the Party will eventually lose power, but complain that he is attacking the symptoms, not the root of the disease: the abandonment of socialist policies. Although today the leftists have less influence than in the 1980s and 1990s, it is not inconceivable that, should China encounter serious turbulence in the years ahead, the charge of jettisoning the Party's founding principles, inherited from Mao, could furnish a pretext for mobilising opposition to Xi's leadership. In this context, Mao's image is a talisman, to be burnished constantly for the protection it provides.
At the same time Xi has begun dismantling the modest checks and balances which Deng installed after 1980 to prevent any Chinese leader ever again acquiring the late Chairman's awesome powers. The old revolutionary had written in the People's Daily that year: ‘If systems [of governance] are sound, they can place restraints on the actions of bad people; if they are unsound, they may hamper the efforts of good people or indeed, in certain cases, may push them in the wrong direction.’ His answer was to separate the Party from the State; to keep the army out of politics; and, eventually, to give more power for the judiciary. The last principle was honoured in the breach, and in his later years, Deng himself was given the right – like Mao after 1943 – to approve or negate whatever decisions the Standing Committee might take. None the less, collective leadership was the lodestar and under Deng's successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, it was largely observed.
Xi's approach has been very different. His audacity in meeting Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore, thereby opening a door to eventual reconciliation which not even Deng had attempted, was the clearest sign of that. Although in a very different context, it has echoes of Mao's decision to overrule opposition and invite the US ping-pong team to China in 1971. Xi has promoted strong centralised internal controls, creating ‘super-committees’, under his own leadership, responsible for security and for economic reform in all three branches – party, government and military – and inaugurating the biggest shake-up of the armed forces since 1949, ensuring that ‘the gun’, from which, as Mao noted, ‘all political power grows’, remains loyal not merely to the Party but to himself. In so far as that too is a throwback to Mao's methods, it offers another compelling reason for leaving the Great Helmsman's image intact.