The Names Have Changed, but a ‘Helmsman’ Still Rules

On Saturday, President Clinton will sit down with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing. But there will be a ghost in the room, a shadow not possible to evade: that of Mao Tse-tung. Clinton’s aims will be darkened by that shadow, for the flaws attributed to Mao, dead since 1976, still haunt Chinese politics.

Fashion says Mao had two parts: a regrettable Mao of errors and excesses and a successful Mao prior to his utopian Great Leap Forward and his chaotic Cultural Revolution. Yet this is not a viable picture, and the reason explains why Beijing, even today, is a difficult and untrustworthy partner for the United States.

Clinton and his top aides have referred to China as “formerly communist,” but that is not the case. Clinton boasts of a “strategic partnership” with China (aimed against whom?), but this is not possible with the imperial-plus-Leninist state in Beijing.

Mao’s political methods owed much to Chinese traditions. Yet his goals came from the social engineering arsenal of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. In its fullness, this meant refashioning the Chinese spirit away from balance to polarization, away from harmony to struggle, away from individual values to collective values.

It is surprisingly common for Western China scholars to still assume that Chinese Marxist social engineering could have worked if the conditions were correct and it was properly done. Surely the 20th century has taught us that Marxist economic planning has never brought comprehensive success over a sustained period.

It is not satisfactory to laud the success of the Mao of 1949-1957 and say that, from then on, with the onset of the crusade against “rightists” in 1957 and the Great Leap Forward soon after, he fell into “excesses.” University of Michigan scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, an advisor to the Clinton State Department, is able to call the regime of the 1950s “a wholly legitimate [Chinese Communist Party] rule.” Whence its legitimacy? Communist rule continued in the 1950s for the same reason that communist rule came into being in the 1940s: the power of the gun. The Marxist self-righteousness that gave Mao a sense of his own legitimacy was cut from the same cloth as the self-righteousness that made him declare half his colleagues “counterrevolutionaries” during the Cultural Revolution.

The same Marxist self-righteousness leads Jiang to lock up dissenters, shy away from privatizing the disastrous state factories, lie to “imperialists” about his transfer of nuclear technology and his efforts to sway American elections, fear the implications of joining the World Trade Organization, resist broadcasting Clinton’s words live to the Chinese people and pressure the Lincoln Center to delete the “pornography” from its production of the opera “The Peony Pavilion,” since canceled.

Mao fought two phantoms that he would never be able to vanquish: the refusal of the Chinese Communist Party to simply be a Mao Party and the failure of socialism to take on the splendor he expected of it. “Revisionism” came to be the term Mao applied to the alleged betrayal that produced his double disappointment. But revisionism was an illusion. Mao never clearly defined it; hence he never found a way to eliminate it. Lunging after an enemy that did not exist in a form that could be tackled, he had to reimagine the enemy after each failed attack. In the end, Mao simply called the “revisionists” “zombies.”

The basic pattern was that Mao’s political methods, having to take account of some aspects of reality, repeatedly led China away from the Marxist collectivist vision; but then, periodically, Mao would fearfully or petulantly insist on returning to it. The result was the left-right-left lurches. The leftist phases were not errors and excesses--certainly not in Mao’s mind--but a reaffirmation of his goals.

Why should all this matter to Clinton? The more we learn about Mao the person, the more we are driven to analyze the system over which he presided. The imperial-plus-Leninist system made political life a pantomime of deception and wariness of “enemies.” And it acted as a magnifying glass for each quirk of Mao’s personality. That system still is in place, with Jiang Zemin as the “Helmsman.”

Beijing sings the song of a succession of three great leaders--Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang--and the building up of Jiang to near-infallibility is proof that China has not matched its economic reform with political reform. Still in play is the lifetime rule (unless purged in a nasty struggle) of the prettified, unaccountable Helmsman.

Today, the retention of power, rather than the pursuit of ideological phantoms, fuels the political process. But politics still is theater, and the Communist Party’s sense of its own rectitude still makes the populace not the source of the political process but puppets for the party’s performance of its self-appointed historical role. So it is that China fears “pollution” from America, intimidates its own outspoken people at home and abroad, speaks sweetly but plans bitterly and drains a ton of advantage from each ounce of Clinton’s weakness or opportunism.

America is an essential adversary for a Chinese Communist Party hanging on to power after the evaporation of Marxist faith.

Jiang’s Beijing is not “formerly communist” but a Leninist state with every intention of remaining so. Words from Clinton, whether uttered at Tiananmen Square or elsewhere, will not change this. “Engagement” by the U.S.--a correct course of action though not a policy--will not in the short term change it. Until political freedom dawns over Tiananmen, we simply must stand up for our interests and build an equilibrium, with Japan and other true partners, to keep Beijing in check.

Deng’s marketization of the economy marked a spectacular, historic departure from Mao. But the retention of a Leninist system perpetuates some of the illusions of social engineering. Deng and Jiang have been able to give up certain of those illusions by manipulating nationalism. Yet the inability to reform--privatize--the loss-making state factories is due to a political addiction to collectivism. A crunch lies ahead, triggered by financial and economic issues, as the remaining illusions must be torn aside by a future bold Chinese leader. Much in U.S.-China relations will hinge on the outcome.