Mao’s Impact Was Great, His Judgment Questionable

The death of Mao Tse-tung was two events, really: a staggering public spectacle staged for the Chinese people to mourn their leader, and a grim, interior drama that played out inside the Forbidden City among those who would fight to succeed him.

The private event was confused, chaotic and ghoulish. As recorded in Dr. Li Zhisui’s extraordinarily intimate biography of his patient, Mao, it was a desperate scramble to accumulate power, a life-and-death inquiry into how the revered leader had died and a weird examination of how to preserve that leader’s fast-decaying corpse.

Years after Mao’s death, the private story finally was told. Meanwhile, the public event--the parades, the body lying in state, the processions of tanks and banners--is the one newspapers of the day recorded. After all, during their brief hold on history, the world’s leading Communist governments proved nothing if not that they could stage a parade.

The mourning that ensued after Mao’s death Sept. 9, 1976, was not false. China’s leader, with his cherubic expression and vague aphorisms, was loved by many Chinese and strangely admired by socialists around the world. Strangely, not because he was a brute, but rather because his philosophy so departed from traditional Marxism as to represent something entirely new and not recognizably socialist.

Mao was an agrarian revolutionary who incorporated Marxist rhetoric but refashioned its emphasis on the suffering from alienated industrial workers to angry, oppressed farmers. Lenin, another pragmatic Marxist but one whose ideas Marx would have more readily recognized, saw peasants as an obstacle to revolution, not a vehicle toward it--much less its vanguard.

China’s fall to Mao had far more to do with Mao than Marx. As a young man, he watched Chinese troops hang rebellious followers of Sun Yat-sen from lampposts. History does not record whether he was appalled; it does reveal that when he took command of Communist Party troops in his fateful struggle with the Chinese nationalists four decades later, he was more than willing to resort to the same techniques.

Mao vanquished Chiang Kai-shek and drove the nationalists to their refuge in Taiwan in 1949. This was Mao’s finest and more defensible hour, for the forces he defeated were pillaging villains led by a dislikable tyrant.

The next 26 years saw his power ebb and flow, but over that period, no other person commanded more authority over more people anywhere on Earth. And this Mao did have in common with Lenin: What power he had, he used without compunction for the lives it cost.

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Millions perished when Mao launched his Great Leap Forward--a bizarre program that took peasants out of the fields to pursue silly attempts at industrialization, including the notion that China could surpass the West in steel production if every household would forge steel in the backyard. When he reconsolidated power after that debacle, it was under the auspices of the Cultural Revolution, whose dominant theme was that intellectuals and Communist Party bureaucrats were the enemy of revolution and therefore suitable for killing. Mao encouraged the party to self-destruct, a snake eating its own tail, so that he could rise again.

Such was Mao’s character that his landmark break with the Soviet Union was in part precipitated by his unease with that country’s post-mortem denunciation of Stalin. There were many reasons to distrust and dislike the Soviet Union; its repudiation of Stalin was not one of them.

And yet, out of such strange motivations a new era for China did open in Mao’s last years. Backed by the far more stable and predictable Chou En-lai, Mao turned China’s gaze from the East to the West, from the Soviet bloc to the United States. The relationship has never been easy, probably never will be. But in many respects, it is a more natural fit. China’s industriousness, as opposed to its industry, is a historically unarguable fact. From it, even in the context of its Communist government, comes a kind of freewheeling capitalism, one that looks a lot like America.

What’s missing is an equally robust tradition of speech and self-criticism. Mao briefly tested those ideas in China.

“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” he said, in aphoristic imitation of John Locke. The trouble was, when those flowers bloomed, Mao, an inveterate gardener, crushed them.

There’s probably a college dorm room or a Paris coffeehouse out there, where someone today argues that Mao was a good man. He was not. A great man, possibly, in that his life--and death--affected human history as few others have. But not a good man.