QUESTION MAO MAO IN Phil Hearse reviews Mao - The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Jonathan Cape, London 2005, $25. Thirty years ago this book would have been dismissed people in the Communist movement. but by most of the left and even many liberals. But since the death of Mao Ise-tung' in 1976. and especially since the defeat of the Gang of Four and the coming to power of Deng Xiao-ping in 1978. much more of the real stort of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in the struggle for power and exercising poner has become known. Little of this story reveals Mao. Maoism or the Chinese Communist Party in a positive light. Jung Chang. author of the best-selling Wild Swans. and Jon Halliday, formerly the East Asian expert of the len Left Review editorial board. spent ten years researching and writing this book. Their sources are not just written records and memoirs, but hundreds of interviews with participants, in China itself and internationally. If even 20 percent of the facts about the modus operandi of the CCP and Mao presented in this book are true (and that's an absolute minimum) it is going to force many leftists - even those who were always critical of Mao and Maoism - to re-evaluate their views. It seems obvious now that many of the opinions expressed in the pre- 1976 period. even by critical Marxists, let alone Maoists and liberal Mao groupies like Edgar Snow and William Hinton. were wildly optimistic about the regime in general, its attitude to the popular masses, its alleged 'egalitarianism' and the supposedly radical and revolutionary forces within sections of the student youth and workers during the Cultural Revolution. However, while constructing an irrefutable charge against Mao. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday are unable to build their own explanatory framework for why the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949 and what the basic social forces at work were. Thus they inadvertently make Mao seem not just evil, but a Machiavellian political of unparalleled proportions. The Jung- Halliday charge sheet is formidable, and only a representative slice of it can be reproduced here. to give the general flavour. The authors charge that: In the late 1920s and early 1930s Mao carried out unprincipled manoeuvres to attempt to gain control of the different Red Armies. denigrate and humiliate their successful leaders. gain rank and position in the eyes of the Shanghai party headquarters and Moscow and callously send thousands of Red Army soldiers to their deaths in militarily useless actions aimed at discrediting other commanders. This reached its peak in his successtul 28 JUNG CHANG JON HALLIDAY The Unknown Story subjugation and humiliation of Zhu De. the most successful Red Army commander. The first red base ruled over by Mao and his army (in Hunan) operated on the basis of terror and pillage. of which the main victims were the peasants — a continual theme in Mao's progress. When Mao's army left after fifteen months the area had been bled dry and the locals hated the Reds. Wounded men and civilian Communists left behind were massacred. Between 1929 and 1931 Mao unified his own small army with the much larger and more successful armies of Peng De-huai and Zhu De. manoeuvring to become overall commander. Trying also to subjugate the Communist-controlled province of Jiangxi to his command. Mao met stiff resistance from local Communists. He responded by launching a massive purge against Anti- Bolsheviks' ('ABs"). The authors allege that 4,400 Communists were identified as Abs. that most were killed and all were tortured. and Mao later admitted that this. They further allege on the basis of the testimonies of survivors. that the wives of AB' leaders were sadistically tortured The first Red State in Jiangxi (1931-34. capital Ruijin). where Mao was not (vet) the sole. supreme leader, but where the basic institutions and securit! apparatus had been put in place by Chou En-lai, was a state based on the extraction of the maximum surplus from the local population. to support the Communist apparatus and military machine. The area was the site of the world's then largest known deposits of tungsten, a source of huge income. but this huge income did not restrain the attempts to maximise extractions trom the population, in the form of ceaseless labour. forced purchase of "bonds, donating tamily jewellery and other valuables. Peasants and workers were forced to give literally everything. even losing their houses and furniture and being reduced to penury. The local regime was also one of constant political mobilisation in the form of endless. mind-numbing, meetings and rallies which consumed what free time was left over from labour. During the Long March Mao did not march or ride on a horse, as frequently depicted. but was carried on a litter. As usual he lived a lite of'extreme comfort, while conditions for the ordinary soldiers and other on the march were terribly hard. Mao had collected a secret horde of confiscated mone! and other valuables that was taken with him on the march. By the time of the Long March bureaucratic privilege for the leaders was firmly established. Mao was indifferent to the suffering of the rank and file, to which his own irrational military decisions often contributed. Some of these were deliberate. to undermine potential rival commander: and ensure they suttered significant losses.
Mao excelled at publicity. which ensured him constant attention by the party centre and in Moscow: this was aided by the hagiographic writings of US liberal journalist Edgar Snow. Mao's armies did virtually nothing to fight the Japanese invaders; rather he preserved his armies the better to fight the Nationalists. This drove Stalin to distraction during the Second World War, when he was desperate to tie up the Japanese. to prevent them invading from the East while the Soviet state tried to repel the Nazi invasion. Mao's Second World War base in Yenan was built through terror. Thousands of idealistic youth went there to join the fight against landlordism and imperialism: once there they were not allowed to leave and subject to forced labour. Executions and torture were common. Discontent with this was articulated by the writings of Wang Shi-wei (who had translated some of Trotsky's works into Chinese) and a political opposition began to emerge, although it never had time to crystallise. The result was brutal, almost unimaginable, repression in which thousands were brutally tortured and murdered. Mao came to power mainly through Russian backing in termis of arms, and also the Russian invasion of Manchuria at the end of the war. He further benefited from the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek, who was much more popular than the Communists, but unaccountably let Mao and the Communists off the hook on many occasions. The actual seizure of power was followed by the execution of hundreds of thousands. mainly to instil in the population and appropriate understanding of the need for obedience The central dynamic of post-revolutionary China revolved around Mao's determination to make his country into a first-rate military superpower. To do this meant huge purchases of arms and technology from Russia and Eastern Europe, which was paid for by massive exports of food and agricultural produce to those countries, while the peasantry in China starved. Ever more unrealistic targets were given for peasant production and millions were reduced to starvation and penury. This was the source of the first political battles with Peng De-huai and Liu Sao-chi in 1956, when their alliance with Chou En-lai actually forced some temporary retreat on Mao's priority to heavy industry. This conflict over Mao's unrealistic attempt to force-march China into superpower status through insane extractions from the peasants and the even more insane Great Leap Forward (1958-9) led to a split in the party leadership which precipitated the Cultural Revolution, an attempt by Mao to circumvent party structures br unleashing the hero-worshipping youth to carry out more mass murder and mayhem. This split was only finally resolved by Mao's death. the defeat of the Gang of Four. and ultimately the reforms of Deng Xiao-ping This brief attempt to sum up some of the main themes of a lavishly-documented 800-page book leaves out thousands of details and hundreds of crimes. but hopefully the main gist of it can be grasped. It seems obvious however that whatever the truth of the Jung-Halliday charge sheet fand about the repression and violence it's clearly mainly true their overall stor lacks focus and conviction. 'One very bad man took over China because he was a meglomaniac who wanted all the power. all the luxury and all the women for himself, is not a convincing story: it might explain the rise of a gangland mafia boss, but the conquest of the mest populous nation on earth requires a little more explanation. Two things need explaining: a) why did thousands of idealistic youth, workers and even peasants rally to the Communists? b) What. socially and politically. did Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists represent? On the former question it seems obvious that the Communists articulated a programme of national independence and anti- imperialism, together with anti-landlordism (land reform). anti- warlordism and social egalitarianism. capable of attracting tens of thousands. Jung-Halliday do not attempt to measure what Chiang and the Nationalists represented, nor their relationship with imperialism. They seem to think it adequate to say that Chiang was the real nationalist. the one who was popular, and really represented 'the nation'. But whose nation? What social classes backed him? What social programme did he represent? Double standards operate even on the details of crimes and rights. Mao's many crimes are lavishly documented and commented on in gut-wrenching detail, but crimes by the Nationalists are mentioned in a matter-of-fact, detached way. The authors cannot seem to deal with a paradox, an historical contradiction, and a tragic one of course: that an elemental struggle of revolutionary proportions of the ultra-exploited Chinese workers and peasants was channelled by an organisation formed in the school of Stalinism. which established a political tyranny. And they are incapable of looking at the overall social results of the revolution. One conclusion from the book seems obvious: the argument that the revolution was a 'peasant' revolution and the CCP was a peasant party is contradicted by virtually every fact the book offers. Mao and the party leadership had complete contempt for the peasants. The "countryside to the cities' theory was a post-hoc invention (by Lin Biao, not Mao). Mao was always concerned to take power in the cities. The class that became the privileged interlocutor of the ruling bureaucracy after the revolution was the working class. If the peasantry was subject to persistent super-exploitation in the 'Red Bases' and then at an all-China level. the working class had installed the minimum social backup of the iron rice bowl' and some basic social provision. albeit primitive. in the same way as the working class in Russia and Eastern Europe. This of course represented real social progress. but it is not discussed. Indeed the real conditions of the workers (and peasants) in non- communist controlled China before 1949 is not examined - no mention of the carts going around (Western-dominated) Shanghai each moring to pick up the 80-100 bodies of the homeless who had died overnight. and indeed no real examination of the fate of the landlord-dominated peasant millions. Although there is not space to elaborate this here. the book poses serious questions for simplistic. formulaic and circular theories of Stalinism, which is identified unilaterally as always 'popular frontist: always opposed to taking power as against putting the bourgeoisie in power. and always subservient to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy (and in any case why was it true that the Soviet bureaucracy was always against Communists taking power, after the experience of Eastern Europe?). Finally: many people sympathetic to Mao and Mao's China nevertheless see organisations like Peru's Sendero Luminoso or the Philippines Communist Party of José Maria Sison as authoritarian aberrations. After reading this book. they seem like the authentic children of Mao Tse-tung 1. This review uses the transliteration conventions of the book, hence Mao Tse-tung and not Mao Zedong 2. In books like Snow's Red Star Over China and Hinton's Fanshen - Report from a Chinese Village 29