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China under Mao - What we know now and what we should have known then
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE
There's no longer an excuse for any illusions about the horrors of China under Mao Zedong.
Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, has taken advantage of new laws regarding the archiving of Chinese Communist Party records to produce a meticulous catalogue of the horror and tyranny of the early years of the Maoist regime.
His new book, Mao's Great Famine, does two things comprehensively: it provides a gruesome and impeccably sourced account of the Great Famine that accompanied the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward, and it attributes the ensuing destruction to Mao's particular brand of communism and rapid forced industrialisation. Stories of the hunger, fear, and brutality of the Maoist regime are interspersed with criticisms that cut to the core of communist ideology: the reader is left in no doubt that Mao was a paranoid tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions, but equally, one is forced to appreciate the importance of individual incentives and private property, and the disconnect between Maoist idealism and the realities of the human condition.
Mao's Great Famine is not particularly long, but it makes for challenging reading. The total number of excess deaths from Mao's famine is estimated at a minimum 45 million, with some scholars suggesting that in light of new evidence, the number of deadcould be as high as 50-60 million. The figures, official and estimated, are shocking, but the great power of this book is in the stories of hunger, disease and violence taken from official records and occasionally, from survivors. By the time one reaches the second last chapter, on instances of cannibalism during the famine, a sort of intellectual and emotional exhaustion sets in.
Dikötter begins by characterising the Great Leap Forward as a direct consequence of Mao's paranoia and fears of inadequacy. Spurred on by a desire to outdo Khrushchev, and in the belief that China had been slighted and should be the centre of the global communist movement instead of the Soviet Union, Mao claimed:
I speak on the strength of considerable evidence ... Comrade Khrushchev tells us that the Soviet Union will overtake the United States in fifteen years. I can tell you that in fifteen years we may well catch up with or overtake Britain.
The strategy for achieving this ambitious target was the Great Leap Forward, a rapid program of forced socialisation of farming and industry, with production targets set by the central party leadership without any reference to marketdetermined price signals, all informed by Mao's opinion that ‘there is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.'
China had experienced a small taste of the famine to come during the 1955-56 Socialist High Tide; rapid collectivisation and inflated production targets for commodities such as grain, steel and coal during this period produced shortages and famine in some parts of the country.
However, Mao chose to ignore this early warning, branding those who expressed doubts about the efficacy of rapid forced collectivisation ‘rightist conservatives', ‘landlords', and ‘counter-revolutionaries', and subjecting many to torture, forced labour and abuse.
It is clear from the accounts detailed in Mao's Great Famine that for Mao, maintaining the appearance of a successful communist state was of far more importance than the reality on the ground. Dikötter takes great care to remind the reader that China continued to export grain, among other goods, to the Western world, despite simultaneously importing grain from its communist bloc neighbours to feed its starving population.
It will surely come as no surprise that corruption and dishonesty were endemic across all levels of society during the Great Leap Forward; from the starving emaciated farmer who stole a handful of grain, to the local party officials who reported agricultural yields well above actual yields in order to gain favour within the party, and to the party bosses who preferred to eat, drink, and be entertained at an endless round of conferences instead of face the reality that their policies were causing mass starvation.
Interestingly, Dikötter attributes the corruption to the profit motive, but in a very different way to the Mao apologists. Rather than perpetuate the utopian myth that communism could work if only we could overcome our base instincts to profit and further our position insociety, Dikötter explicitly states that the Maoist ideology,
which destroyed incentives encouraging individual effort and reward, is directly responsible for the Great Famine through the destruction of labour productivity and the will to work.
Dikötter points out that ‘one of the many paradoxes of the planned economy ... was that everybody traded.' With the command economy unable to efficiently allocate resources, people engaged in bartering and trade to supplement their inadequate incomes and purchase food. Black markets in goods thrived, and were in fact
propped up by the same party officials who had previously destroyed private property rights with forced collectivisation and ‘nipped in the bud even a faint hope of actually owning something private.'
All this leads one to the conclusion that surely party members were aware of the impossibility of a strict Maoist conception of communism, and records of party meetings show that this was indeed true. In 1961 Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission, described the Great Leap Forward as ‘too high, too big, too equal, too dispersed, too chaotic, too fast, too inclined to transfer resources.'
That even senior party officials were capable of seeing the problems posed by lack of incentives - ‘too equal' - makes the great love for Mao among Western intellectuals and the tendency of Western governments to ignore or excuse Maoist authoritarianism all the more damning.
It is true that the Great Famine was brushed over by the Chinese Communist Party and to some extent hidden from the outside world. But the deaths of an estimated 45-60 million people from mass starvation is ultimately difficult to hide, and it leads one to the conclusion that Maoist sympathising Western intellectuals chose to ignore Mao's atrocities in pursuit of his perceived ideological purity.
Gerard Henderson has written that Australia's ‘love affair with China reached ridiculous lengths.' Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated by the political reaction to Mao's death in September 1976. Both sides of parliament promptly rose to praise the dictator.
Malcolm Fraser claimed that Mao ‘gave China an effective administration, restored a country ravaged by civil war and secured the basic necessities of life to China's people.' While admitting that the Chinese Communist Party's ‘conception of the desirable organisation of a society was not and is not ours,' Fraser went onto record the House's ‘sympathy for the Chinese people in their loss.'
The little awareness Fraser may have had about the bloodshed and tyranny that actually characterised Red China was entirely lacking across the floor. Gough Whitlam was effusive. ‘No man has so embodied the aspirations of a great people and given in equal measure practical and spiritual impetus to a revolutionary movement.'
Mao was ‘the authentic father of his people and the new China' and ‘the Chinese people, far from discovering a vacuum in their national life, will take renewed inspiration from the memory of his great achievements.' Whitlam described the ‘admiration' of the Australian parliament for Mao as an individual, as a symbol, and as a political
idealist.
The former Whitlam minister, Tom Uren, went even further, sympathising not only with Mao as a symbol and spiritual leader of his people, but praising his ideas:
China has undertaken a process in which, material incentives are being steadily abandoned in favour of moral incentives. The people do not work for material gain for themselves or out of insecurity. I have observed at first hand many examples of the Chinese people taking joy in their work for the benefit of the whole society.
Uren's argument for a Maoist revolution went on:
The thoughts of Mao that, people, of great significance to all classes of people throughout the world who have felt the authority of the ruling class and of foreign domination. His thoughts have guided the Chinese revolution for 50 years and they will live long in the future achievements of new China. They will be a guide to the future shaping of all human society.
In the Senate, Reginald Withers said:
Unlike the armies of the Chinese leaders before him, his armies did not loot, pillage or rape. He organised great land reform and just government. He was a poet in the classical style and a humane head of a government which was the biggest bureaucracy on earth.
If this was simply ignorance, it could perhaps be excused. But the evidence to suggest that all was not well in China was abundant, and growing. Simon Leys' - the pen name of the Belgian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans - work, The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, had been published in 1971. Leys - accurately, it turns out - depicted Mao as an old-style Chinese emperor, and documented, as best as was possible, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. But Leys was hardly the only person writing on the Maoist atrocity. Mao's China was a closed door but there was enough publicly accessible material to shed light on his totalitarianism to condemn the attitudes of the Australian parliament.
The member for Mackellar, William Wentworth, provided the one saving grace in this embarrassing farce. He didn't hold back. Condemning Mao's ‘treachery and terror', Wentworth compared the Chinese leader with Hitler and Stalin, saying that ‘many praised the dead Stalin before they realised the true nature of the monster. And most now praise Mao.' Wentworth continued:
Maoism has subjected the Chinese people to an alien ideology and has denied them all their traditional life and culture. It has demanded the rejection of all family ties and accepted decencies, culminating in its assault of Confucianism. For religion it has substituted the ritual nonsense of the Little Red Book, the analogue of the ridiculous ‘Heil Hitler' of the Nazi discipline.
As Henderson points out, along with Kevin Cairns, Col Carige, and Dick Klugman, Wentworth left the chamber before a vote to express condolences for Mao's death was taken.
The evidence presented by Dikötter in Mao's Great Famine unambiguously and overwhelmingly vindicates the position of Wentworth, Cairns, Carige and Klugman. And Dikötter's catalogue of Maoist crimes makes the bipartisan enthusiasm of Fraser and Whitlam for Mao even more worthy of condemnation.
The Australian parliament was hardly alone in its effusive praise of the Maoist project.
Just how obscenely deluded Western intellectuals andpolitical activists were about the nature of Mao's regime is made clear in The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, by Richard Wolin. Wolin, a professor at City University of New York, tells the story of French student radicals who explicitly looked to Mao as their ideological guidance in the years surrounding the May 1968 French protests and general strike.
From the first, these Maoists had no idea about China, nor about the nature of the regime. None of them spoke Chinese. A tiny number had been to China at all. As Wolin writes, ‘the less information the students possessed concerning the People's Republic ... the more leeway they had to project their own utopian hopes and dreams.'
They were seduced by Mao's apparent ideological purity. Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966. This was a cultural revolution, rather than the drab political and economic revolution of the Russian Soviet so admired by aging French Communists. The contrast was appealing. Mao was an intellectual, a poet. He claimed that students were the foundation of his revolution.
Wolin writes that for French students, the dominant cultural and intellectual influences in 1967 were Chinese. French intellectuals adopted the Mao-collared suits - ‘les cols Maos'. Left Bank bookstores regularly sold out of Quotations from Chairman Mao. A French pornography magazine, Lui, which Wolin describes as the French equivalent of Playboy, took advantage of the Mao moment with an eight page spread of half-nude models dressed in Red Guard attire and holding rifles. The images were accompanied by excerpts from Mao's Little Red Book.
The chic filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, fresh from condemning Western bourgeois consumerism in Week End, produced a cycle of Chinese apologetics, including La Chinoise, in 1967; The Wind from the East, in 1969; and See You at Mao, in 1971. This period-in which Godard's films became more experimental, more overtly political, and cruder-is known as his Maoist period. Godard helped found the Dziga Vertov Group, named after the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker who claimed to use even his cinematography to emphasise political messages.
Other prominent French intellectuals shared a Mao moment. Michel Foucault's poor judgment extended to Mao as much as it extended to the Iranian Revolution. Foucault missed 1968-he was teaching in Tunis at the time-but upon returning to France, was eager to ingratiate himself with the now extremely radicalised student body. The philosopher promptly affiliated himself with Maoist populism.
Sartre used Maoism to escape a doctrinaire Marxism that, in radical circles, was tediously passé. In Paris, by the 1960s he was seen as somewhat of a has-been. His attempt to fuse existentialism and Marxism had fizzled out. Having failed to keep up with the post-modernism of Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Claude Levi-Strauss, Sartre grasped 1968 with desperation, joining the Maoist side of the protest. Sartre admired revolutionarism, which the Maoists professed an undying and uncompromising commitment to. He also admired their rhetorical, and occasionally physical, commitment to violence.
Sartre argued that the Maoists' task was:
To show that the violence inflicted on the people in the name of alleged economic imperatives, the subtle but total violence that [workers] endure in factories here... all of that is in reality a form of slavery. There are no legal means or possibilities for reform to counter this violence. There is only one solution: popular violence.
The Italian Communist Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi was one of the few who had actually travelled to the People's Republic, and wrote about it in Daily Life in Revolutionary China. For Macciocchi, China was ‘the most astounding political laboratory ... a people is marching with a light step toward the future. This people may be the incarnation of the new civilization of the world.'
The unbelievable lack of awareness about Mao's China is most clearly demonstrated by Macciocchi, when she wrote ‘Mao is essentially anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian'. If there was one thing Mao was not, it was anti-authoritarian. Or anti-dogmatic - in fact the extent of Mao's communist dogmatism went so far as to encompass crop planting methods. Despite evidence and warnings to the contrary, from Soviet agricultural experts no less, Mao was an advocate of ‘close-cropping'. Seeds were planted too closely, too deeply, and suffocated with fertiliser, but Mao's considered opinion was that seeds conformed to the communist ideology: ‘with company they grow easily, when they grow together they will be more comfortable.'
Not all ‘Maoists' toed the Maoist line diligently. For years, the general strikes and protests of May 1968 was a focus of theoretical debate within student and intellectual circles. One Maoist group decided that the explicitly libertarian - or anarchist - elements of May 1968 were the strike's definitive attribute. After all, May 1968 was anything but organised or centrally controlled; it had no obvious leadership, no goal, and no coherent political program. Claiming a synthesis between fashionable Maoism and the libertarian character of May 1968, this group claimed to develop ‘anarcho-Maoism' - probably the strangest ideological appellation in the history of Western thought.
In the West, commentators and academics are always admiring different forms of economic development - in the 1920s it was the Soviet Union, in the 1930s the corporatism of Mussolini's Italy. In the 1960s and early 1970s it was China. Professional Sinologists found much they liked about China as they were shuffled around Potemkin villages. One wrote in Foreign Affairs in October 1972 that the Chinese people ‘seem healthy, well-fed and articulate about their role as citizens of Chairman Mao's new China.' He went on to argue ‘The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened to the Chinese people in centuries.'
Commentators imagined China was modernising with a unity of purpose that was absent in the West-the same sort of admiration they had once heaped upon Stalin. John K Fairbank claimed that China was ruled by ‘exemplary moral men.' When many intellectuals were faced with evidence to suggest that all was not well under Mao, they dismissed it. In his 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Paul Hollander documents the many ways Mao's apologists in the West downplayed, ignored, or sought to shift blame for human rights abuses in China to those who were being victimized.
Mao's Great Famine demonstrates the utter indefensibilityof the Maoist regime. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' is the great communist tagline; a superficially pleasing promise of equality and plenty. As Dikötter points out though, ‘all too often the reality was much closer to Lenin's dictum that "he who does not work shall not eat".' Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be found in the treatment of the vulnerable: children, the elderly, and those too weak to work through malnutrition and disease. The Chinese Communist Party line was simple: ‘there are so many people working, it doesn't matter if you beat a few people to death.'
To sympathise with the Maoist cause is to completely ignore the atrocious reality that Mao and forced collectivisation inflicted on the Chinese people. From the Left Bank to the Australian parliament, many in the West chose to praise Mao's regime by dismissing evidence of the horror of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Reliable information from China was certainly hard to come by. But the closed nature of Mao's China should have been, at the very least, an indication that all was not well. Even those who did not share the views of anti-communists that communism was necessarily tyrannical could have, at least, approached Mao with a sceptical eye.
But instead, intellectuals and politicians allowed themselves to be seduced by the platitudes and poetry of communist propaganda-entranced by a vision of a world which they believed was more appealing that the crass capitalist system which they felt oppressed them.
Frank Dikötter's achievement is to show just how sick that judgement was.