Mao Zedong: Savior or Dictator?

Mao Zedong: Savior or Dictator?
Introduction
Professor Nathan raised an important question regarding Mao Zedong: why people followed him? This question induced me to write this exploratory paper. As a Chinese resident, looking back on how Mao Zedong is seen in China, among colleagues and friends, I realize that people in China fervently followed him not only when he was alive but also even today. Furthermore, people not just in China, but around the world worship him. Maoist political and insurgency movements still exist in many parts of the world. Many remember him as a savior of the poor, a successful revolutionary and a good war and foreign policy strategist. In today’s China, plagued by rampant corruption, many miss Mao’s time when the people could question and beat officials. Others are concerned about the big gap between rich and poor and miss the greater degree of equality prevailing under Mao. But many just miss his populist appeal: in times without heroes, they miss the towering figure of Mao. Of course, there are dissenting views. Some share the prevailing view among many western scholars that Mao was a dictator like Hitler and Stalin. Others have mixed feelings about Mao. But the reality is that Mao Zedong enjoyed for decades –and continues to enjoy today-- the strong support of many in the Chinese population.
The question of why Mao Zedong was followed so ardently is an issue that permeates populist political science. Many others, from Peron to Fidel Castro, have received broad popular support. It is an important question to determine why they are followed, not only because populist leaders have influenced history, but because they will continue to emerge in politics, whether it is a Hugo Chavez or some other strongman elsewhere. But I like to find out why Mao Zedong was followed because of my own personal reasons. I am one of those confused Chinese people who have such complicated feelings on him. This is an essential topic for Chinese people, again not only involving history but also the present and future of China, because populism could make its way back into Chinese politics. This exploratory paper provides my own initial steps towards answering this question.
How to make judgments about continuing support for a leader? Often, people do not have a clear principle of how to judge leaders who have a complicated personality or have accomplished various deeds. But what should be that principle? I realize that our judgment should be based on a humanistic principle---the impact the leader has had on us as human beings. This impact can vary and be difficult to assess due to the many dimensions we have as individuals, relating to class: landlord, capitalists, workers and farmers; wealth: rich or poor; religion: atheist, Buddhist, etc.; regional: urban versus rural, or provincial; time: whether we focus on the past, present or future, and even psychologically and culturally, in terms of how we see authority figures. Each person makes an overall assessment of a political leader on the basis of how valuable the leader is to him or her. Therefore, to determine what moves someone to support a populist leader, one can examine his or her main political, economic, education, cultural, etc. positions and policies, and analyze how their implementation has influenced a person’s life. I will start this exploration by focusing on my own evaluation of Mao Zedong’s policies and deeds.
My evaluation of Mao Zedong
Period before 1949. This must be considered Mao’s most successful. It was a time when China’s old and traditional social system entered into a transition period when many people felt a duty to look for a new system to make China a stronger and modern country. In 1912, Sun Yet Sen had set up a government whose goal was to set up democracy in China, but the process was delayed by the warlord war and stopped by the Japanese invasion. Many saw Mao as a modernization alternative, one which would destroy the archaic, semi-feudal system in the country while strengthening the nation. Indeed, Mao was an ardent nationalist when he was young. He was ambitious, smart and wanted to help the country. He realized the importance of workers and peasants and wanted to alleviate their suffering. He also had strong leadership abilities, which allowed him to beat all his enemies inside the CCP (Wangming, Zhang Guotao, etc.) and outside it, including Qiang Kai sheik.
Of course, in reaching power, Mao led bloody movements which had substantial destructive power as well. But from the vantage point of 1949, one can understand why many people supported him and had great hopes for the future.
The political policy after 1949: Law must run a country, but as professor Nathan mentioned in class, there was essentially no legal system in China at all during Mao’s time. So there were no laws to protect people’s rights, no laws to regulate government performance, etc. As a result, Mao and his supporters had no boundaries in pursuing adversaries and imposing their will on anybody within the country. From the country’s Minister of Defense, Peng Dehuai, President Liu Shaoqi, to any landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, etc., could be persecuted, without any guidelines. There are political movements one by one, and many people have been persecuted. One recent scholarly account asserts that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured .
Mao had called for democracy on in his 1945 article “On the Combined Government.” But after he gained power, he reversed course and, on the contrary, he built a One Party Dictatorship, just as he had criticized in Qiang Kaisheik’s government. He cheated other parties, such as the Democratic Union, which originally supported the CCP, and fooled the whole Chinese people who had admired him so much. While his supporters and his political and military machinery ardently followed him, a significant fraction of the population was marginalized. Fears and hatred was promoted about populations within China, to gain the support of the masses. This approach was at its peak during the Cultural Revolution.
The Chinese communist system became Mao’s personal dictatorship. Mao said he would build the “Proletarian dictatorship and will take away all the bad people’s right of speech, but only give proletarian people the right of speech” . And he did it. He was successful in maintaining his political power, but this came at a substantial cost to the country, not only in terms of civil rights and the lack of personal freedom, but also economically.
Economic policy: Mao copied from the Soviet Union the planned economic system, totally giving up on markets. In the agricultural sector, after 1949, the land owned by landlords and peasants was taken away and redistributed to poor peasants, which was the policy Mao used to induce peasants to join his army (following other peasant rebellions of the past). But soon, Mao betrayed the peasants who had helped him. The peasants’ land, tools and animals were taken away when collective farms were created and later changed into communes. He also implemented the household policy that prohibited the mobility of peasants. The aim was to use cheap agriculture products to support the industrialization in cities. These policies seriously hurt the peasants’ quality of life and led to a loss of incentives for agricultural production.
Mao’s economic policies were also disastrous in the industrial sector, Mao tried to develop heavy industry quickly, as he wanted to enter into a communist society as fast as he could. He said China would surpass the steel production of the UK in 15 years. But due to a lack of technology and skilled labor, this Great Leap was never realized. On the contrary, the collapse of agriculture and the lack of industrial progress led to the death of 20 to 30 million people through 1959—1961 because of starvation. Liu Shaoqi made a speech in 1962 at Seven Thousand Man's Assembly criticizing that "The economic disaster was 30% fault of nature, 70% human error." Mao’s economic policies were abandoned after the Deng Xiaoping ‘s reforms, when China returned to a market economic system.
Culture and education policy: Education policy in China was dominated by communist ideology and shifted depending on Mao’s whims and those of the system he had implanted. Mao had an anti-intellectual side that emerged periodically in purges of intellectuals and cultural workers. The maximum expression of this was during the Cultural Revolution, when universities were closed, literature was forbidden, books burned and the Red Guards destroyed many ancient sites. Intellectuals were sent to labor camps between 1955 and the 1970s. Between 12 and 18 million youth were sent to countryside. They only received primary to high school education. Higher education was stopped. At the same time. 369 million of Mao’s Quotations and 1,214 million of his pictures were printed .
Conclusion. My own detailed personal assessment of Mao’s accomplishments is mixed, but definitely tilts towards a very negative assessment. His period before 1949 suggested a strong leader with great potential to improve the human condition in China. His personality and motivation were influenced by his family, the background of Chinese society at that time, Marxism, and ancient Chinese culture. As a Marxist and Qing Shihuang, Mao became in effect the last emperor during the long march of Chinese searching for a modern social system. He appeared at first as an idealist who wanted to build up a communism Utopian or Datong (Great Harmony) society. He had done good research on the past Chinese emperors and peasants uprisings, and he acquired power on the basis of strong strategic analysis of his enemies.
But the hopes that Mao represented in 1949 were never realized and the political and economic disasters during the 1949 to 1976 period dominate any assessment to be made of Mao as a leader. His self-absorbed and ambitious personality and desire to maintain power blinded any broader societal goals and, despite greater equality, led to poverty and dismal economic growth.
Given the evident political and economic disasters under Mao’s rule, one must rely on other factors to explain why Mao has had so much support. It is possible that nationalist and communist ideologies, deeply ingrained in education and society during Mao’s era, could have led to judgments that were not based on reality. This is especially the case in communist countries where indoctrination is part of the strategy to maintain support for a leader. This does not explain, however, why Mao has maintained so much prestige among various political movements outside the country. Misinformation, however, could explain this. The fact is that the CCP decided to provide a rosy picture of Mao and has provided the world with limited negative information about Mao. In addition, Mao damaged mostly people in his own country, inside China, and he did not do harm to other countries, such as Hitler did. This also limited negative attitudes towards him outside China.
This exploratory paper has served as my first step in the examination of the question of why Mao Zedong has been followed so ardently. I believe this is an important question that must be studied carefully. The influence of populist leaders on a country’s political system can run deep. Even today, within the CCP, there are still Mao’s shadows there: the authoritarian regime, the pragmatic foreign policies, the view that practice is the only way to test the truth, etc. In fact, the CCP’s documents and the style of writing of Chinese media and people still follow the style adopted under Mao. It is important, therefore, to understand Mao’s appeal.
Finally, I should conclude with some more general thoughts I have on my investigation of Mao’s life and his accomplishments (or lack of them). I find that the philosophy of politics of its leaders is very important to a country. Mao had a pragmatic view that justified any means to achieve a goal, including the most abject ignorance of life (through violence and war), and lack of humanity (as reflected in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution). As it turns out, an alternative political philosophy, one which could have been more successful, I believe would have been based on a humanistic idea, which involves an emphasis on human rights, negotiation, and tolerance with each other, instead of hate, war and violence. A political system based on these values is more likely to lead to long-term improvements in quality of life.
References:
Jin Zhong (Editor), Mao Zedong Pipan(Critisize), KeNing Public House, Taiwan, 1994
Chen Zhirang, Mao Zedong and Chinese Revolution, edited by the CCP’s Historical Document Rublish House,1963
Zhisui, Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao--the Memoirs of Mao’s Peronal Physician, Translated by Professor Tai Hung-chao, with the editorial assistant of Anne F. Thurston, New York, Random House, 1994.
Terrill, Ross, Mao: A Biography, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
The Honesty Words (Zhiyan), Lirui’s worry and thinking during 60 years, Lirui. Today’s China Publish House