THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISfORY AND CULTURE Mao Zedong and China's Revolutions A Brief History with Documents Related Titles in THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Advisory Editors: Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University Ernest R. May, Harvard University Lynn Hunt, University of California at Los Angeles David W. Blight, Amherst College The japanese Discovery ofAmerica: A Brief History with Documents Peter Duus, Stanford University Schools and Students in Industrial Society: japan and the West, 1870-1940 Peter N. Stearns, Carnegie Mellon University Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays Akira lriye, Harvard University My Lai: A Brief History with Documents James S. Olson, Sam Houston State University, and Randy Roberts, Purdue University THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Mao Zedong and China's Revolutions A Brief History with Documents Timothy Cheek University of British Columbia palgrave *MAO ZEDONG AND CHINA'S REVOLUTIONS, by Timothy Cheek The library of Congress has catalogued the paperback edition as follows: 2001097845 Copyright© Bedford/St. Martin's 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-312-29429-8 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: PALGRAVE, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published by PALGRAVE, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd. (formerly Macmillan Ltd.). Manufactured in the United States of America. 7 6 5 4 3 2 fedcba ISBN 978-1-349-63485-9 ISBN 978-1-137-08687-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-08687-7 Cover art: Mao Zedong © Bettmann/CORBIS. Acknowledgments Acknowledgments and copyrights can be found at the back of the book on pages 243-44, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 Foreword The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do. The historian's first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources. There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is wel­ come, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single ver­ dict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says. Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and per­ haps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers. Each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with some element of historical narrative-an introduction or a bio­ graphical essay, for example-that provides students with an analysis of the primary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced. Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific historical period. Each provides a basis for lively thought and discussion about several aspects of the topic and the historian's role. Each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week as­ signment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge­ and fun -of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past. Natalie Zemon Davis Ernest R. May Lynn Hunt David W. Blight v Preface What can the life of a notable figure tell us about the experience of a people or a country? And how can we get at that life-get access to the thoughts and goals of a leader? This book seeks to provide such an avenue through a brief history and documents by and about Mao Zedong. Mao is probably the greatest figure of twentieth-century China-a hero to some, a demon to others. He led the Chinese Com­ munist party (CCP) to national victory in 1949. He drove the People's Republic of China (PRC) through three decades of tumultuous revolu­ tions, from the Soviet model in the 1950s, to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, to rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s. More than twenty-five years after his death in 1976, Mao remains an iconic figure in China today, both as the indispensable legitimator of the troubled CCP and as the object of popular fascination and nationalist hopes. Mao's writings provide a concrete path into the experience of China's twentieth-century revolutions, as he deals with rural misery in the 1920s, government formation in the 1940s, and social revolution in the late 1950s and 1960s. Earlier histories, in the West as well as in China, have conventionally presented Mao as the embodiment of each stage of the Chinese revolution. Now we can ask, When was Mao in synch or out of synch with the social experiences and political aspira­ tions of major groups in China? In the 1920s, Mao was not the most important CCP leader, but his 1927 "Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan" was an accurate assessment of rural poverty and its poten­ tial as a catalyst for social revolution. By 1940, when Mao wrote "On New Democracy," he was a top leader of a revived CCP, and the plan outlined in that essay became the public blueprint for the CCP's takeover of China in 1949. By 1957 Mao was supreme leader and ideo­ logical fountainhead, but his assessment of Chinese society, as well as his hypocritical reluctance to follow his own prescriptions, made his "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People" both vi PREFACE vii misrepresent reality and contribute to tragedy. By the era of the Cul­ tural Revolution, beginning in 1966, Mao's writings had been reduced to oracular pronouncements and sound bites from the famous "Little Red Book" (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong). These writings did not provide an accurate assessment of Chinese society, but they did contribute to the Mao cult and the emerging chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The three long essays by Mao referred to above characterize three periods in the life of Mao and China. Briefer selections of the Chair­ man's writings are also included to provide a sense of Mao's national­ ism, poetry, literary policies, and leadership model. In each of these three periods-rural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, political revo­ lution in the 1940s, and utopian social revolution in the late 1950s and 1960s-we can observe Mao's contributions (for good or for ill) to China's varied revolutions in nationalism, socialism, and economic development. This collection offers students in an introductory or world studies course a manageable and representative sample of Mao's writings. I have chosen long extracts from the three periods outlined above. As a result, I have omitted some of the topics covered by Mao's ex­ tensive corpus, such as his views on the Soviet Union and land re­ form, his philosophical essays, and his economic plans. These are all available in the new comprehensive collections of Mao's writings edited by Schram and by Kau and Leung (see the bibliography). Some teachers may find the three core texts too long and may choose to focus on certain sections of them. Or they may focus on one of the three main essays (and the related secondary texts in part two) or on certain themes, such as the status of women or changes in rural life. In any case, these three core texts represent complete thoughts by Mao that were published under his scrutiny and were influential both inside and outside China. They remain important primary docu­ ments, which intelligent readers can mine for purposes beyond those I suggest. The Mao texts are followed by several writings about Mao to help describe the contexts in which Mao operated and to indicate some­ thing of what Mao meant to Chinese and non-Chinese in the twentieth century. They range from Edgar Snow's famous interview with Mao in 1936, to the memoirs of his doctor, to uses of Mao by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and by people in China today. This section also includes a taste of what academics have tried to contribute to our understanding of Mao. The romanization of Chinese names and words viii PREFACE has been changed to the pinyin system, except for a few names, such as Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. The volume begins with a comprehensive introduction, which pre­ sents the major issues in modern Chinese history and Mao's growing role in the events of the twentieth century. It includes a small set of photographs and graphic images to give a sense of how Mao was por­ trayed. In all, this book aims to equip students to make their own read­ ings of Mao's writings and to find for themselves what the "Great Helmsman's" life and work can teach us about China's continuing revolutions. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Jeff Wasserstrom for making this project possible and Louise Townsend for making it happen. I am grateful to the students in my Mao seminar at Colorado College for testing the readings and offering necessary suggestions.