Mao Zedong

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
Mao Zedong
by Jonathan Spence

“Robust ... this is an intelligent, adroitly presented, informative overview of the historical figure known for ‘orchestrated’ political purges and the ’unorchestrated’ terrors of the Cultural Revolution. It provides a balanced view written with the sure hand of the knowledgeable historian.”
—Book

 

“The task of bringing Mao to a large, non-specialist audience is one for which Spence is eminently well-suited. His lucidly written, com pellingly narrated explorations of modern Chinese history have attracted a readership unmatched by that of any other academic China specialist. His study of Mao is short ... his writing tight, his judgments restrained.”
—The Washington Post

 

“An elegant account, at once sparse and robust.”
—The Economist

 

“Spence ... compresses Mao’s story into a read-on-a-plane format, a task he accomplishes without sacrificing his academic rigor.”

 

“An exceptionally successful contribution to Penguin’s series of brief biographies.”—
The New Yorker

 

“Simple but to the point.... Spence ... draws upon his extensive knowledge of Chinese politics and culture to create an illuminating picture of Mao.... Superb.”
—Chicago Tribune

 

“Jonathan Spence [is] a eloquent chronicler of Chinese history.... [A] brisk, elegant book.... Spence skillfully uses Mao’s letters and poems to explore the Chinese leader’s thinking and relationships.”—USA Today

 

“There is no better person to write a general, readable account of Mao than Spence, an acclaimed Chinese historian and author of several biographies.”
—Library Journal
(starred review)

 

“Fluid and informative despite its brevity.”
—Publishers Weekly

 

“Spence is the best known and most talented historian of China writing in English today.... His
Mao Zedong
succeeds.”
—Los Angeles Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Spence’s eleven books on Chinese history include
The Gate of Heavenly Peace
and
The Death of Woman Wang.
He teaches at Yale University. His awards include a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2006

Copyright© Jonathan Spence, 1999

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, edited by Tony Saich.
E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York;
Mao’s
Road to
Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949, volumes I, II, III, edited by Stuart R. Schram.
E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York; Red Star Over China
by Edgar Snow.

Map illustration by James Sinclair

eISBN : 978-1-101-07704-7

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are “the best of kings.”... Seen
as they were,
their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous.

 

William Hazlitt,
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays

MAO’S BEGINNINGS were commonplace, his education episodic, his talents unexceptional: yet he possessed a relentless energy and a ruthless self-confidence that led him to become one of the world’s most powerful rulers. He was one of the toughest and strangest in China’s long tradition of formidable rulers who wielded extraordinary powers neither wisely nor well, and yet were able to silence effective criticism for years or even decades by the force of their own character and the strength of their acolytes and guards. Mao need not have done what he did, and it was he alone who ensured that his visions of social and economic change became hopelessly enmeshed with violence and fear. It was his rhetoric and his inflexible will that led to the mobilization of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, who—even when they wished to—could find no way to halt the cataract of energy swirling around them.

Those who endured Mao’s worst abuses execrate his memory. Those who benefited from his policies and his dreams sometimes still revere him, or at least remember the forces that he generated with a kind of astonished awe. In the end it was really only physical decay and weakness that brought him down, even though his chosen policies had long been shown to be full of inconsistencies and what Mao himself termed “contradictions.”

One goal of this book is to show how Mao was able to rise so high, and sustain his eccentric flight for quite so long. Context was naturally intrinsic to the drama, and the narrative tries to introduce the essential background that any reader needs to make sense of Mao’s life. Historians in China and the West are slowly hauling Mao back down to earth, deflating the myths that sustained him, even as they often exclaim over the patience and deliberation with which Mao and his confidants constructed those same myths. We are learning more about Mao’s relations with his family, friends, and confidential assistants; and Mao’s own youthful writings, his poems, original drafts of several key speeches, and a good many surviving personal letters help us get some way into his mind. But many of the wilder flights of Mao’s fancy, and the remarkable efforts he expended to attain them, take the historian out into a different zone, where the well-tried tools of exploration are of only limited help.

I have come to think of the enigmatic arena in which Mao seemed most at home as being that of order’s opposite, the world of misrule. In the European Middle Ages it was customary for great households to choose a “Lord of Misrule.” The person chosen was expected to preside over the revels that briefly reversed or parodied the conventional social and economic hierarchies. The most favored time for the lords’ misrule was during the twelve days of Christmas, but they might preside, too, at other festivals or saints’ days. When the brief reign of misrule was over, the customary order of things would be restored: the Lords of Misrule would go back to their menial occupations, while their social superiors resumed their wonted status.

In the European examples with which we are familiar, the period of misrule was expected to be strictly limited, and the intention of the entire exercise was lighthearted. But sometimes the idea of Lord of Misrule would spill over from the realm of revel to the realm of politics. Milton wrote of the “loud misrule of Chaos,” and the need to overcome it if the purpose of creation were to be realized. In the seventeenth century, some churchmen applied the Lord of Misrule label to Oliver Crom well. The term also came to have sexual connotations, as in John Lyly’s sixteenth-century play
Endymion,
when the hero declaims that “love is a Lorde of Misrule, and keepeth Christmas in my corps.” Similar types of reversals could be found in many other European societies: in some, the apprentices took over from their guild masters for a reckless day or two, in others gender roles were reversed for a day as the women took over the tasks and airs normally associated only with men.

Chinese philosphers also loved the paradoxes of status reversed, the ways that wit or shame could deflate pretension and lead to sudden shafts of insight. Even if they did not specify the seasons, they knew the dizzying possibilities inherent in turning things upside down. To Chinese thinkers, the aspects of misrule were always embedded within the concept of order, for they were natural dialecticians, and understood that everything contains within itself the seeds of its own opposite.

It was Mao’s terrible accomplishment to seize on such insights from earlier Chinese philosophers, combine them with elements drawn from Western socialist thought, and to use both in tandem to prolong the limited concept of misrule into a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval. To Mao, the former lords and masters should never be allowed to return; he felt they were not his betters, and that society was liberated by their removal. He also thought the customary order of things should never be restored. There would be no Twelfth Night to end the Christmas season. The will of most people seemed frail to Mao, their courage to bear the pain of change pathetically limited. So Mao would achieve the impossible for his countrymen by doing their thinking for them. This Lord of Misrule was not a man who could be deflected by criticisms based on conventional premises. His own sense of omniscience had grown too strong for that.

I OWE THE WARMEST THANKS to several people for their help with this book. Zhao Yilu was indefatigable in locating and translating recent Chinese sources on Mao and his family, and Argo Caminis made a broad computer review of recent Western sources. Professor Zhang Guangda read the first draft with care, and alerted me to several problems. Lorenz Luthi gave me copies of some important sources I had missed. Jesse Cohen’s editorial suggestions were sharply on target. Betsy and Julie Mc-Caulley, and Peggy Ryan, typed the drafts with their customary unflappable precision in the face of imminent deadlines. And Annping Chin, besides helping with Mao’s poetry, kept me always alert to what his actions and visions had meant to others.