Mao in History

chapter 10 Mao in History ‘Who has passed judgment on the good and ill you have brought these thousand autumns?’1 To weigh a person or a thing requires a scale. Human greatness or smallness is hard to express absolutely, and is usually expressed relatively. To weigh a revolutionary, the scale must be another revolutionary – there is no point in comparing Sun Yat-sen with Yuan Shikai2 or Marx with Bismarck. That is why the Summary of the Rules of Propriety in the Bookof Rites says that ‘when comparing things, compare things of a like nature.’ Politicians who compare themselves to people in history let slip, without equivocation, the sort of people they are. Confucius dreamed of Duke Zhou, Zhuge Liang likened himself to Guan Zhong andYueYi,3 Stalin admired himself in the mirror of Ivan the Terrible, and Chiang Kai-shek liked to imagine that he had personally penned Zeng Wenzheng’s Letters Home,4 revealing a common- ality not just of temperament and aspiration but of class stand. In Lenin’s case, ‘the Marx scale was the most titanic for measuring human personality.’5 Although, according to Lunacharsky, Lenin ‘never looks at himself, never glances in the mirror of history, never even thinks of what posterity will say of him,’6 Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) said that shortly before his death he returned again and again to Trotsky’s article likening him to Marx, and was perhaps touched by it. But the Marx scale cannot apply to Stalin and Mao, for although they see themselves as Marxist-Leninists, or even as today’s Marx or today’s Lenin, they also posture as latter-day sovereigns, affecting the literary and martial genius of their ‘great ancestors.’ Lenin represented pure, thorough-going revolution, while Stalin and Mao mixed revolution and counter-revolution. So the historical worth of Lenin, and 1 Mao poem, ‘Kunlun.’ 2 Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), a Qing military commander and president of the first Chinese Republic from 1912 to 1916. 3 Duke Zhou (Zhou Gong) (d. 1032BCE) was a member of the royal family of the Zhou dynasty famed for acting as a loyal regent, for suppressing rebellions, and for his writing. Zhuge Liang (181–234) was a statesman and strategist. Guan Zhong (c. 720–645BCE) was a chancellor and reformer of the State of Qi. Yue Yi was a military leader of the State of Yan in the Warring States period. 4 Zeng Wenzheng is another name for Zeng Guofan, a nineteenth-century statesman and Con- fucian scholar. 5 Quoted in Trotsky 2012, p. 510. 6 Anatoly Lunacharsky, quoted in E.H. Carr 1950–78, 3 vols, in vol. 3, p. 164. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004421561_014 mao in history 267 of Lenin-style visionaries, can be weighed on a Marx scale, while Stalin, Mao, and their like need a dual standard. They can be weighed against revolutionar- ies like Marx and Lenin, but also against progressive and reactionary rulers of the past. (In this book on Mao, we talk only about Mao.) Alongside Marx and Lenin, Mao might reach to their knees but hardly to their waist. Mao himself knew this, and rarely cited the two greats. This was partly because he knew only Chinese, but the barrier was mainly one of approach. Mao felt that China’s indigenous theory and experience offered a wealth of knowledge in the fields of politics and warfare. Only a handful of for- eign imports – a few Comintern resolutions and some of Stalin’s writings – were needed to supplement it. These things, in Mao’s eyes, were nothing special. Their chief role was to provide theoretical guidance or defensive cover, for his actions. Mao knew little about Marx, Engels, and Lenin before joining the front in the modern war of ideologies, not to mention about other thinkers in the world socialist movement. He had read Stalin, as I said earlier, but only his Ques- tions of Leninism together with some articles about the Chinese Revolution. As a theorist, Mao was too inferior to bear comparison, even with leaders of the Second andThird Internationals like Kautsky, Luxemburg, Mehring, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin. He had only a smattering of Marxist knowledge, a few general principles and organisational or executive methods, made in the Stalin factory of ideas and given a Lenin varnish. So Mao’s name occupies a tiny place on the spectrum of revolutionary thinking, or, by comparison with Marx, no place at all. Put theory to one side, and the discrepancy between Mao and revolutionar- ies of the stature of Marx and Lenin is smaller, though still there. This is mainly because Marx and Lenin always applied principles to problems, whereas Mao (like Stalin) was ready to barter them for temporary advantage. I have given many examples. Weighed against Marx and Lenin, Mao’s slightness is also manifested in his lack of internationalism. He knew from the Communist Manifesto that ‘prolet- arians of all countries should unite,’ but the spirit of internationalism never entered his soul. The world outside China existed for him only as a concept. Its proletariat meant nothing, in terms of material contact or spiritual exchange, to this intellectual grown up in a village in central China. During the Chinese Revolution, the first time Mao experienced the true meaning of proletarian internationalism was when the CCP received material and spiritual aid from the Soviet Union. But because of Stalin’s errors and reactionary intent, this aid caused defeats in China, leading Mao to conclude that the Chinese Revolu- tion must be self-reliant and reinforcing his national prejudice and his anti- internationalism. The victory of the Chinese Revolution and the ensuing rela-.

Load more