The Unknown Story

Mao - The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Jonathan Cape,
London 2005, £25.

Mao in Question

By Phil Hearse in Online magazine: July-August 2005

Thirty years ago this book would have been dismissed as a work of
anti-Communist fantasy, not just by people in the Communist movement,
but by most of the left and even many liberals. But since the death of
Mao Tse-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 story of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in the struggle
for power and exercising power 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 New Left Review editorial board,
spent 10 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% of the facts about the modus operandi of the CCP and
Mao [1] 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 [2], 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 genius of
unparalleled proportions.

Mao Indicted
The Jung- Halliday charge *** is formidable, and only a
representative slice of it can be reproduced here, to give the general
flavour. The authors charge that:

a) In the late 1920s and early 1930s Mao carried out serial
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 successful subjugation and humiliation of Zhu
De, the most successful Red Army commander.

b) 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 15 months the area was bled dry and the locals hated
the Reds. Wounded men and civilian Communists left behind were
massacred.

c) 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.

d) The first 'Red State' in Jiangxi (1931-34, capital Ruijin),
where Mao was not (yet) the sole, supreme leader, but where the basic
institutions and security 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 from the population, in
the form of ceaseless labour, forced purchase of 'bonds', donating
family 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.

Bureaucratic Privilege from an Early Stage
e) 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
life 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 money and other valuables, which was taken with him on
the march.
By the time of the Long March bureaucratic privilege for the leaders
was firmly established in a finely-graded and precise hierarchy. This
included for example access to medical treatment and food. 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 commanders and ensure they
suffered significant losses.

f) 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.

g) 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.

Executions and Torture
h) Mao's Second World War base in Yenan was built through terror.
Again it was an exemplar of gross bureaucratic privilege, with even a
Rolls Royce sent by Chinese laundry workers in New York to be an
ambulance for wounded soldiers, appropriated by Mao for his personal
use. 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 and a regime of
constant interrogations and 'confessions' was established.

i) Mao came to power mainly through Russian backing in terms 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

j) 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.

Mao's Forced March to Industrialisation
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 by 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 *** (and about the repression and violence it's clearly
mainly true) their overall 'story' lacks focus and conviction.

"One very bad man took over China because he was a megalomaniac who
wanted all the power, all the luxury and all the women for himself"
is not a convincing story: it might (just) explain the rise of a
gangland Mafia boss, but the conquest of the most populous nation on
earth requires a little more explanation.

Two things need explaining: a) why did thousands of idealistic youth,
workers and 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 put forward
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
don't 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 human
rights. Mao's many crimes are lavishly documented and commented on in
gut-wrenching detail, by crimes by the Nationalists are mentioned in a
matter-of-fact, detached way.

Historical Contradiction
The authors can't 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 brutal, totalitarian political tyranny,
one which needed no lessons from Stalin in how to stay in power through
the unremitting use of murderous repression. And the authors 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 an ex post
facto invention (by Lin Biao, not Mao). Mao was always concerned to
take power in the cities. The CCP leadership had its roots in the
radicalised petty-bourgeoisie in the cities, and of course those
sections of the working class in which supported the party.

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 morning 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 identified it unilaterally as always 'popular
frontist', always opposed to taking power as against keeping 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?). Of course the word 'Stalinism' is
not important in itself, provided that not using it is not a way of
implying 'more democratic', 'less repressive', 'more
egalitarian' etc.

On the basis of the facts enumerated in this book, it is very difficult
to sustain the view that the CCP suffered bureaucratic degeneration
after the seizure of power. Once the CCP had conquered territorial
spaces, it proceeded to set up a bureaucratic tyranny with immense
social privileges for the leaders, in each and every case. The
political police, the Chinese KGB, was well-established by the early
1940s in Yenan.

Super-exploitation of the Peasantry
There is one central aspect of the argumentation in the book which I
find utterly convincing - the quest from the early 1950s onwards for
rapid industrialisation and arms accumulation, in order to force-march
China into becoming a superpower. The dynamics of this seem to me to be
irrefutable.

Stalin himself remarked that China's arms requirements were
"excessive" and that the Soviet Union had never allocated such a
large proportion of GDP to arms, even during the war against the Nazis!
By even 1954-5 Mao was arguing that the peasants were eating too much
(a constant refrain from Mao), and that appropriation of grain and
other agricultural products by the state had to be stepped up. It
wasn't so much that the state appropriated the surplus, more that it
tried to accumulate just about everything.

Alleged resistance to state accumulation of most agricultural products
led to another massive purge with thousands of executions and probably
many thousands of suicides in 1955. It also led to the setting up of
the Peoples Communes, so that the whole of the agricultural product
would come under the direct and immediate purview and control of the
party. The Peng-Liu-Chou En-lai resistance to this insanity, based on
their direct experiences visiting villages and the widespread knowledge
that disenchantment with and hostility to the party had become endemic
in the population, led to a tactical retreat by Mao in 1956, but Mao
came back strongly with the Hundred Flowers campaign and the Great Leap
Forward. [3]

The Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap Forward
Jung-Halliday see the Hundred Flowers campaign as a deliberate trap. In
February 1957 Mao invited criticism of the party under the banner of
"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought
contend." An extraordinary outflowing of wall-posters and primitive
samizdat appeared denouncing the regime.

Only five months later, when many oppositionists had shown their hand
and come into the open, the Hundred Flowers were shut down and the
brutal purge of 'rightists' was launched, with hundreds of
thousands of 'intellectuals' denounced and imprisoned and many
thousands executed. Whether the Hundred Flowers was a deliberate ploy
to force the opposition into the open to be purged its difficult to
know. Maybe Mao just got scared about the extent of the opposition it
revealed. Either way, the closing down of the Hundred Flowers and the
launching of the anti-rightist campaign resulted in creating the
conditions for consolidating Mao's position in the leadership and the
next insane bid for rapid industrialisation, the Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap (1958-61) combined demands for impossible levels of
agricultural production, huge forced-labour projects like dams and
canals, and of course the infamous and useless back-yard steel
production. The conflicts over the super-exploitation of the peasantry,
and the insanities of the Great Leap which cost more than 30 million
lives through starvation and over-work, led directly to the Cultural
Revolution, a systematic attempt by Mao to go outside the structures of
the party by mobilising millions of Red Guards to 'Bombard the
headquarters', ie attack Liu Shao-chi and anyone who might harbour
similar criticisms.

Jung Chang has modestly claimed this book will transform the way that
China sees Mao and the Mao legacy. I suspect tens of millions of
Chinese already have a highly critical view of Mao and the Mao period.
The problem is that merely by adding up the catastrophes and crimes of
Mao leads to an unspoken conclusion, but one which is obviously the
position of the book's authors - that it would have been better if
the revolution had not taken place. Jung-Halliday would have obviously
preferred it if not Mao but Chang Kai-shek and the Nationalists had
come to power.

But it is highly speculative to believe that democracy and prosperity
would have resulted. China would still have been in the grip of
imperialism, the peasants would have been under the landlords and the
Kuomintang would probably have instituted a military dictatorship.
Despite all the errors, crimes and fearful economic waste, major
progress towards industrialisation was made under Mao, national unity
was created and the country broke with imperialism. Contrary to the
contemporary myth that China's runaway economic growth was created by
globalisation, the infrastructural basis for it was created through
industrialisation following the victory of the revolution in 1949, and
the statisation of the economy in the 1950s.

But the tragedy is that the Jung-Halliday discourse is all too credible
to the younger Chinese generation in the light of what we now know
about the political tyranny under Mao. It will take a long time, and
many new experiences in the Middle Kingdom and internationally, for
socialism to become a major force in China again.

NOTES

[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

[3] The authors have long and interesting sections on China's
acquisition of nuclear bomb technology from Russia, arguing that Mao
deliberately caused confrontations with the US over Taiwan/Quemoy , and
unnecessarily prolonged the Korean war, to frighten the Russians into
thinking they had no choice but to give the bomb to Mao, or get drawn
into providing a nuclear umbrella themselves, thus risking Russia being
drawn into a nuclear confrontation with the US. There isn't any proof
for this type of speculation; moreover it's clear that in the late
1950s Kruschev wanted to repair relations with China and not risk a
split in the international communist movement (although China effected
the split anyway), and this might have been the reason for Russia's
generosity with the bomb. The authors say no country has acquired the
bomb with less effort, although it seems that does not hold true for
Israel, who were also donated nuclear technological know-how, courtesy
not of the US as often alleged but by mainly by France and also by
Britain.

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