CFR-scholar Ian Johnson describes how oral history changes the perception people have about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, now documents and interviews emerge on the internet, he tells at the Manchester China Institute.
Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.
Are you looking for more stories by Ian Johnson? Do check out this list.
 |
| Ian Johnson |
Yet all these numbers are little more than well-informed guesstimates. There are no records that will magically resolve the question of exactly how many died in the Mao era. We can only extrapolate based on flawed sources. If the percentage of deaths attributable to the famine is slightly changed, that’s the difference between 30 and 45 million deaths. So, in these sorts of discussions, the difference between one and two isn’t infinity but a rounding error.
Mao didn’t order people to their deaths in the same way that Hitler did, so it’s fair to say that Mao’s famine deaths were not genocide—in contrast, arguably, to Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine, the terror-famine described by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum in Red Famine (2017). One can argue that by closing down discussion in 1959, Mao sealed the fate of tens of millions, but almost every legal system in the world recognizes the difference between murder in the first degree and manslaughter or negligence. Shouldn’t the same standards apply to dictators?
When Khrushchev took Stalin off his pedestal, the Soviet state still had Lenin as its idealized founding father. That allowed Khrushchev to purge the dictator without delegitimizing the Soviet state. By contrast, Mao himself and his successors have always realized that he was both China’s Lenin and its Stalin.
Thus, after Mao died, the Communist Party settled on a formula of declaring that Mao had made mistakes—about 30 percent of what he did was declared wrong and 70 percent was right. That’s essentially the formula used today. Mao’s mistakes were set down, and commissions sent out to explore the worst of his crimes, but his picture remains on Tiananmen Square.
Xi Jinping has held fast to this view of Mao in recent years. In Xi’s way of looking at China, the country had roughly thirty years of Maoism and thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalization and rapid growth. Xi has warned that neither era can negate the other; they are inseparable.
How to deal with Mao? Many Chinese, especially those who lived through his rule, do so by publishing underground journals or documentary films. Perhaps typically for a modern consumer society, though, Mao and his memory have also been turned into kitschy products. The first commune—the “Sputnik” commune that launched the Great Leap Forward—is now a retreat for city folk who want to experience the joys of rural life. One in ten villagers there died of famine, and people were dragged off and flayed for trying to hide grain from government officials. Today, urbanites go there to decompress from the stresses of modern life.
Foreigners aren’t exempt from this sort of historical amnesia, either. One of Beijing’s most popular breweries is the “Great Leap” brewery, which features a Mao-era symbol of a fist clenching a beer stein, instead of the clods of grass and earth that farmers tried to eat during the famine. Perhaps because of the revolting idea of a brew pub being named after a famine, the company began in 2015 to explain on its website that the name came not from Maoist history but an obscure Song dynasty song. Only when you’re young and fat, goes the verse, does one dare risk a great leap.Much more in the New York Review of Books.
 |
| +Lijia Zhang |
Today Mao’s legacy divides the nation. Liberal economist Mao Yushi (not related) has repeatedly written articles harshly criticising Mao and made calls to judge him as a man not a god.
Still I would say that people who look at Mao critically are in the minor ity. According to online reports, a Sina survey had found that some 82 per cent of Chinese viewed Mao mostly favour- ably. For many, he was the man who drove away the imperial powers and made the Chinese people “stand up” in the world.
Every day, thousands of people queue up to see his embalmed body in- side the Mao mausoleum in Tianan- men; a lot of taxi and truck drivers as well as many rural households still hang Mao’s pictures, out of respect or the need for a lucky charm.
Many of his admirers, the young in particular, don’t know the whole truth about him, something they can’t learn at school or from books on the mainland. Others chose not to know the negative stories about him. Mao has come to represent a national hero who would stand up to foreign aggression. Whenever there’s a wave of anti-Western sentiments, Mao searches pop up on the internet. For example, during the Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, some were saying: if Mao were still alive, he would have done something to teach the imperialists a big lesson.
There’s also a kind of deeply-rooted emperor worship here. In spring 1996, I interviewed Wu Hanjin, the party secretary of Gushui village, perched in Loess plateau of Shaanxi province. He built a temple in honour of Mao be- cause “Chairman Mao was the best emperor China ever produced”.
Our new leader Xi Jinping, though not a Maoist, likes to borrow some Maoist-style rhetoric while following the path paved by Deng Xiao- ping. On the one hand, the party needs Mao, China’s founding father, as a source for its legitimacy; on the other hand, it doesn’t want him to become a hurdle to reforms.
Since Mao and the Communist Party are inextricably connected, it’s hard to imagine that the current leadership would allow an objective and thorough reassessment of the man. To “discredit Comrade Mao Zedong would mean to discredit our party and the state”, as Deng pointed out.
In January, Xi issued the so-called two no-denials – not to deny what was done before the reforms based on what happened after it and vice versa. But this conservative approach will not solve the dilemma of Mao’s legacy.
Personally, I think this is counter- productive.
The right thing but the hard thing to do is to allow an open debate to show what kind of man Mao really was. He might have cried for losing a trusted guard but this can’t conceal the fact that he had no regard for human life.
When millions were dying in the early 1960s, he exported grain abroad, partly to show that socialist China was thriving. Most importantly, we must learn from the mistakes of Mao. With his god-like status, he was able to launch his ridiculous political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward where he fantasied about “overtaking Britain and catching up with America” or his Cultural Revolution where he wanted to overthrow the so-called revisionists that existed only in his muddled mind. These blunders were as much his as the undemocratic system’s.
A copy of her article can be found at Zhang Lijia´s website.Only when Mao is out of the way can China really prepare itself to transform, if gradually, to a modern society with democratic values. Sadly, I don’t expect this will happen in the foreseeable future.
