Less than a quarter century after Chairman Mao’s death, I had a hard time finding a copy of the Red Book in Beijing. “The Great Helmsman” was now a tourist attraction. A giant portrait of him hung in Tiananmen Square while his embalmed body drew visitors into a mausoleum.
The son of a prosperous peasant from Hunan, Mao developed an anti-imperialist outlook early in life. He converted to Marxism-Leninism at Peking University in the 1920’s. He led the Long March in the mid-1930’s, lasting 370 days and traversing 5600 miles. His struggles culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Mao was the undisputed ruler of China until his death. But he had begun losing control in the mid-sixties, causing him to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Historian Sergey Radchenko writes, “Mao wanted to tap into the Chinese people’s enthusiasm for him to feed the fading vigor of Communist revolution and to transform the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which he felt had grown rotten on the inside.”
Toward the end of his life, Mao was paranoid that a war would break out. Radchenko comments, “Instead, the new generation of Chinese leaders set out to repair the misery that the Chairman had inflicted on his country during his lengthy reign. In his crystal casket in Tiananmen Square, Mao remained oblivious to the changes around him as China embraced capitalism with gusto. Beijing turned into a glittering metropolis, and China into the world’s economic powerhouse, something Mao had failed to achieve through his reckless economic experiments.”
The Great Leap Forward of 1958 sought to convert China into an industrial society. Instead, it unleashed a famine that eventually killed 15-55 million. The Cultural Revolution killed millions and disgraced many “capitalist roaders” who were publicly humiliated and sent to work in camps.
Historian Sergey Radchenko writes, “Mao wanted to tap into the Chinese people’s enthusiasm for him to feed the fading vigor of Communist revolution and to transform the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which he felt had grown rotten on the inside.”
While Mao united China, advanced its literacy, raised the status of women and extended life expectancy, 40-80 million Chinese died on his watch through starvation, persecution, prison labor and mass executions.
Deng Xiaoping became China’s absolute ruler a few years after Mao’s death. He said Mao was “seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong.”
How did Mao fall from grace? He was a hero for liberation movements in the Third World from the 1950s through the 1970s. They saw in Mao’s China a more likeable alternative to the US and to the USSR.
The ideas in his “Red Book” and “Selected Works” successfully extended Marxist-Leninist theory, which was centered on a class struggle between capitalists and industrial workers, to agrarian societies that faced a class struggle between feudal lords and peasants.
A hagiography of Mao was written in the 1930s by Edgar Snow. He toured China at Mao’s request and wrote “Red Star over China.” Mao emerged as the man who had rescued the Chinese from centuries of exploitation, a true communist who believed in the rights of the masses, not just in China but in the rest of the Third World. At some point, Mao became a beacon of hope for oppressed people everywhere.
Mao took on the mightiest power of the day, the US, during the Korean War and continued to challenge it during the Vietnam War, calling it a paper tiger. The fact that Mao had used human-wave tactics during the Korean War that had killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans was overlooked. Neither was the fact that he risked getting into a nuclear war with the US that would have wiped out millions.
Mao, in the eyes of millions around the globe, could do no wrong. What people remembered was that under his leadership, China acquired not only the atom bomb but also the hydrogen bomb. He derided the Soviets for betraying Marx and Lenin and reverting from socialism. They were no different from the czars, whose navies had patrolled the world’s seas.
In Pakistan, there was no shortage of Mao’s acolytes. An early recruit was the foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In the early 1960s, he positioned Pakistan’s foreign policy around China and later used the “Mao cap” given to him by the Chairman to position himself as the champion of the Pakistani masses. Despite his own feudal roots, Bhutto fashioned his party's manifesto around the oxymoronic banner of “Islamic socialism.” Perhaps it is fitting that he is shown stooping deferentially toward a pale and ill Mao in the last official photograph of the Chinese icon.
Several books came later that challenged the Mao orthodoxy. Philip Short, in “Mao: The Man who made China,” acknowledged that Mao was a defining figure of the 20th century, a man of awesome vision and power “whose life was played out on such a vast canvas that his greatest contemporaries seemed minor by comparison.” But he also noted that Mao was responsible for more deaths of his own people than Stalin and Hitler combined.
A more strident critique was Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s “Mao: The Unknown Story.” Chang was a Red Guard whose family suffered heavily during the Mao era. She married Halliday. The biography contains graphic descriptions of torture being carried out on former associates of Mao, who is painted as a tyrant on the scale of Genghis Khan, a man driven by dreams of world conquest. Mao comes across as the embodiment of evil, an egomaniac who lusts for power both politically and personally. Contrary to his professed beliefs, he is neither a communist nor a nationalist. He even looks down on the Chinese peasants.
His friends fear him as much as his enemies. The list of those who were purged ruthlessly includes the defense minister, the president and the army chief. Even Zhou Enlai, China’s world famous premier, was denied medical treatment for cancer so that he would not outlive the Chairman. But Mao’s wrath takes its biggest toll on the very masses that he had sworn to protect. Seventy million are killed either by starvation or executions.
Cleverly, Mao used his knowledge of imperial Chinese history to strengthen his rule. He “sold” communism to the Chinese by making them wave the red flag, knowing that the red color means good luck in China, and making them sing, “The East is Red.” He made himself impregnable by expropriating the emperor’s yellow color for himself.
In history, Puyi is regarded as the last emperor of China. But, in many ways, that honor belongs to Mao.