Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
A unique set of meticulous diaries, written by communist party member and reformist Li Rui, the secretary of Mao Zedong, have emerged in legal battles. Stanford University obtained them from Li’s daughter, but China is eager to get them back. Historian Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, comments on the diaries and fears they will disappear into the black hole Beijing’s archives are nowadays, he tells ABC News.
Political analyst Victor Shih, author of the recently released bookCoalitions of the Weak, looks – weeks ahead of the 20th Party Congress, at defining moments in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the Centre of Geopolitics.
For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao’s successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao’s strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi’s rapid consolidation of power after 2012.
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.
As you say, we can’t understand China without understanding religion, but up until recently, a lot of people would have found that statement strange, because many people – historians, ethnographers and journalists – largely ignored religion in China. It was considered to be an unimportant topic, even though it had been central to the question of how to modernize China over the past century.
Reformers from Kang Youwei to Sun Yat-sen, and leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek – not to mention Mao Zedong – saw traditional Chinese religion as a key social ill that had to either be massively reformed or eradicated. This unleashed one of the most radically secularizing campaigns in history, with hundreds of thousands of places of worship, mainly traditional temples, destroyed.
So in the 1970s one political scientist wrote—and I’m paraphrasing—of the astounding fact of our time that a nation with one quarter of the world’s population had no religious life as people had known it. At that time, all places of religion under Mao had been closed, and religion didn’t seem to be an important part of Chinese life. But that began to change at the end of the Mao era. Religion had been attacked for over a century, but in the reform era for roughly 30 years until the Beijing Olympics, there was a relatively laissez-faire policy toward it. There were moments of persecution, but by and large religion flourished on its own.
Now we’re in an era where the state is actively picking losers and winners, and religion is back at the centre of a national conversation in China, playing a role in what kind of society and values does China have – what are the ideas, the beliefs of this rising superpower? Many Chinese are grappling with these questions, while the government is trying, in typical Chinese government fashion, to guide and shape it. But it’s a very messy complex question.
Is religion filling what some people call the spiritual vacuum in China, as the nation figures out what its identity is in this newest incarnation?
There are people in China who are looking for values and answers to basic moral questions. Some find it in humanism or in democracy or in human rights, but the government has largely made these taboo topics. We do have dissidents, for example, who think China needs to change to a more open liberal society and a more participatory political system. A lot of those moral issues could be solved by having a more moral government, one that doesn’t rely on coercion and violence to keep itself in power. But other Chinese also see a wider moral issue, that China needs some kind of a moral framework.
The liberal-minded, highly educated people and those whose families suffered during a series political campaigns don’t like him, even hate him.
Some leftists love him, particularly those who are not doing so well in the reform era. They nostalgically associated Mao with the eras when there was supposedly more equality little corruption.
Some nationalistic people also like Mao, viewing him as a man who let Chinese people to stand up and give them an identity.
Plenty of farmers view him as the best emperor China ever had. In the countryside, many households hung Mao’s portrait.
What I find incredible is that even some people who did suffer under Mao’s regime refuse to hold him responsible for the disasters, perhaps because the personality cult and the god-like statue Mao enjoyed.
I remember there have been several surveys among the young people and Mao kept coming up as the most admired leaders – obviously students don’t learn the whole truth at school.
I sincerely hope that the authorities would allow people to know what he did exactly and the damage and what kind of person he was. Only then can China move on and drive towards a modern society.
I was struck by your description that the Communists’ guerrilla period was not as important to their governing style as we think. In fact, you argue that the civil war was far more important — and completely different from guerrilla war.
A.
Only when I read historical scholarship in the last 15 years that focuses on civil war and casualty figures of the Nationalists did I realize that they didn’t come to power through guerrilla war. You look at the casualty figures, and you realize that. In graduate school, most works we read glossed over that fact. For me, that was a revelation. The Communist Party did very little of the fighting against the Japanese, and it was a myth that a people’s war led the Communists to power.
Instead, the conquest of China was a military conquest, much like the [Soviet] Red Army fought the Nazis. It was a mass mobilization that supported vast armies that defeated the Nationalists. I don’t think that’s sunk into the consciousness of the field.
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How did that affect the Communists’ governing style?
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Mao had these startling victories. Everyone said he couldn’t win quickly against the Nationalists. Even Stalin urged caution. But he pushed and won. That was the approach he turned to again in the late 1950s with the Great Leap Forward. He thought that you could accomplish anything. Also, he learned that he shouldn’t listen to others.
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I was also struck by how little Mao evolved. After the civil war, he seemed to learn nothing.
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Stalin also pushed hard for Communism, but after the war, he moderated his view and become relatively conservative. Mao never moderated his views. He became more radical with time.
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In fact, he seemed like an intellectual lightweight. You say most of what he learned about Communist thought was from “The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks),” the textbook commissioned by Stalin and first published in 1938.
A.
He was a great strategist. But a lot of what he wrote was, if not ghost-written, heavily edited by people like [his secretary] Chen Boda. His understanding of Marxism-Leninism was based on a CliffsNotes edition of Stalinism.
Three generations of Chinese women, her grandmother, mother and herself used author Zhang Lijia to illustrate the changing position of women in China. "We benefited from the revolution led by Mao," she said in a speech, published at her weblog.
Zhang Lijia:
My grandmother was a prostitute-turned concubine, my mother a frustrated factory worker and myself a rocket factory girl turned-international writer. Today I am going to tell you the stories of these three women in my family, to illustrate the changing role of women in Chinese society. I am always hugely interested in women’s issues and have written many stories on the subject because I believe women’s position and the attitude towards them, tell you a lot about a society.
As in many parts of the world, Chinese women have not reached the same status as men, even though Chairman Mao famously declared that “Chinese women can hold up half of the sky.” I think the statement is as elusive as the sky itself. But I have to point out that the Chinese Communist Party has done a great deal for women, probably more than what has been acknowledged. I believe all three women in my family have, to a greater or lesser degree, benefited from the revolution led by Mao....
The income gap between men and women has been widening in the past three decades. Prostitution has made a spectacular return and the rich and powerful men once again boast to have ernai – the modern version of concubines. Women workers are always among the first to be laid off in the ailing state-owned enterprises. And female graduates have a much harder time in finding employment.
The government has retreated some of its responsibilities to the market. Yet the market doesn’t always treat women kindly.
China lags behind the world in terms of female political participation, especially in the grassroots and top governmental level. These days, the head of the village is brought about through direct election. Currently about 2% of the village heads are women. Some still hold the belief that decent women shouldn’t take an interest in public affairs and women are bad decision makers. We have a saying: women have long hair but short wisdom.
Now look at the senior government level. Women account for about 22% of people’s representatives in National People’s Congress, China’s parliament; only 15% in the standing committee. In the next level, there are only two women in the politburo and no women in the standing committee.
Unlike in the political field, Chinese women are faring better in the business. Half of the world’s self-made richest women come from the mainland China. Business is the area where women can fully explore their potentials.
Despite all the problems, I feel hopeful about women’s future in China, because Chinese women have started to take the matter into their own hands and are putting up a fight. They’ve set up NGOs, dealing with the issue of domestic violence, providing legal aid to women and helping sex workers. In recent years, I’ve noticed increased activism. Women have bravely gone to the street, to protest against domestic violence, against discrimination in employment and against lack of female toilets. Early this year, I marched for a week in central China with a young feminist friend. She walked all the way from Beijing to Guangzhou, in protest against child sex abuse.
There’s still a long way to go before women can truly hold up half of the sky. The good thing is that we are not sitting here, waiting for the miracle to happen. We are taking action.
All in all the reform agenda is a strong one: its diagnosis of China’s economic ills is compelling, and the proposed cures seems sensible. There are three concerns. First, there is the worry that the government has underestimated the financial risks of the burgeoning debt burden and a rapidly-changing financial system. The only clear promise of stronger financial regulation so far is Lou’s statement that a deposit insurance system will be launched later this year. This would reduce moral hazard by clarifying for investors which financial assets are guaranteed and which are risky. But more action to cut debt and restrain the “shadow banking” sector may be needed.
Second, it is possible that reforms may be thwarted by powerful bureaucratic and business interests: some reforms (like the property tax) have been proposed in the past but gone nowhere. On the whole, Xi’s success at whipping officialdom into line by the anti-corruption and mass line campaigns suggests he will be more effective than his predecessor, but there is no guarantee. Finally, there is the worry that Xi’s program succeeds, and validates highly centralized and authoritarian style of governance that could harm China’s long-term prospects for development into a more open and liberal society.
Most people in China still fail to understand what Mao Zedong did right, and what he did wrong, argues author Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. Especially now current president Xi Jinping is lending some of his legacy, an open debate is urgently due, although it is unlikely to happen.
Zhang Lijia:
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.
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.
China's younger generation sees Chairman Mao Zedong as one of the most admired people, writes author Zhang Lijiaon her weblog, recalling a meeting under one of the few statues of Mao in Shenyang. The difficult relation with a former leader.
Zhang Lijia
Since I was with a foreigner, several people came up to talk to us, quite a few of them students. A young man who called himself Alexander told me proudly that he is planning to go to Canada to study next year. When I asked him about what he thought of Mao, he said: “Chairman Mao was great! Our great leader and national hero.”
I thought to myself: well, if the great leader were still alive, you wouldn’t dare to study English or even dream to go abroad. I am not surprised by his answer. In various surveys among the Chinese youth about the most admired men in the world, Mao repeatedly comes on the top of the list. For many Chinese, the young and the old, Mao was the man who united China, who made China to stand up in the world and who gave its people an identity. Besides, the young people have not had a chance to study Mao truthfully. The official verdict on Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. The authorities don’t want its citizens know too much about his mistakes or the causes of such mistakes – after all, they reflected the faults of the Party and the system. Years ago, I was invited by a Chinese publishing company to write a book on western image of Mao, to be published in 1993, to commemorate 100th anniversary of his birth. I read all the books I could find in English on the man and interviewed many westerns from all walks of life. But the book failed to pass the censorship – his image was far too negative, I was told.
