Mao and the Great Harmony
Revolutionaries are,
by their nature, powerful and single-minded personalities. Almost
invariably they start from a position of weakness vis-à-vis the
political environment and rely for their success on charisma and on
an ability to mobilize resentment and to capitalize on the
psychological weakness of adversaries in decline.
Most revolutions have
been on behalf of a specific cause. Once successful, they have been
institutionalized into a new system of order. Mao’s revolution had
no final resting place; the ultimate goal of “Great Harmony” that
he proclaimed was a vague vision, more akin to spiritual exaltation
than political reconstruction. Cadres of the Communist Party were
its priesthood, except their task was crusading, not fulfilling a
defined program. Under Mao, cadres also led a life at the edge of
perdition. For them, there was always the danger—over time the near
certainty—of being engulfed in the very upheavals they were incited
to promote. The roster of leaders of the second generation (that of
Deng Xiaoping) had almost all suffered that fate, returning to
power only after periods of great personal trial. Every close
associate of Mao during the revolutionary period—including in the
end his long-serving Premier and chief diplomat Zhou Enlai—was
eventually purged.
It was no accident
that the Chinese ruler whom Mao most admired was the founding
Emperor Qin Shihuang, who ended the Period of the Warring States by
triumphing over all other rivals and unifying them into a single
polity in 221 B.C. Qin Shihuang is generally considered the founder
of China as a unified state. Yet he has never been afforded
ultimate respect in Chinese history because he burned books and
persecuted traditional Confucian scholars (burying 460 of them
alive). Mao once remarked that China’s governance required a
combination of Marx’s methods and Qin Shihuang’s, and he eulogized
the Emperor in a poem:
Please don’t slander Emperor Qin Shihuang, Sir
For the burning of the books should be thought through again.
Our ancestral dragon, though dead, lives on in spirit,
While Confucius, though renowned, was really no one.
The Qin order has survived from age to age.1
Mao’s China was, by
design, a country in permanent crisis; from the earliest days of
Communist governance, Mao unleashed wave after wave of struggle.
The Chinese people would not be permitted ever to rest on their
achievements. The destiny Mao prescribed for them was to purify
their society and themselves through virtuous
exertion.
Mao was the first
ruler since the unification of China to tear apart Chinese
traditions as a deliberate act of state policy. He conceived of
himself as rejuvenating China by dismantling, at times violently,
its ancient heritage. As he proclaimed to the French philosopher
André Malraux in 1965:
The thought, culture, and customs which brought China to where we found her must disappear, and the thought, customs, and culture of proletarian China, which does not yet exist, must appear. . . . Thought, culture, customs must be born of struggle, and the struggle must continue for as long as there is still danger of a return to the past.2
China, Mao once
vowed, was to be “smashed” like an atom, in order to destroy the
old order but, at the same time, produce an explosion of popular
energy to lift it to ever greater heights of achievement:
Now our enthusiasm has been aroused. Ours is an ardent nation, now swept by a burning tide. There is a good metaphor for this: our nation is like an atom. . . . When this atom’s nucleus is smashed the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power. We shall be able to do things which we could not do before.3
As part of this
process, Mao generated a pervasive assault on traditional Chinese
political thought: where the Confucian tradition prized universal
harmony, Mao idealized upheaval and the clash of opposing forces,
in both domestic and foreign affairs (and, indeed, he saw the two
as connected—regularly pairing foreign crises with domestic purges
or ideological campaigns). The Confucian tradition prized the
doctrine of the mean and the cultivation of balance and moderation;
when reform occurred, it was incremental and put forward as the
“restoration” of previously held values. Mao, by contrast, sought
radical and instant transformation and a total break with the past.
Traditional Chinese political theory held military force in
relative disesteem and insisted that Chinese rulers achieved
stability at home and influence abroad through their virtue and
compassion. Mao, driven by his ideology and his anguish over
China’s century of humiliation, produced an unprecedented
militarization of Chinese life. Where traditional China revered the
past and cherished a rich literary culture, Mao declared war on
China’s traditional art, culture, and modes of
thought.
In many ways,
however, Mao incarnated the dialectic contradictions that he
claimed to be manipulating. He was passionately and publicly
anti-Confucian, yet he read widely in Chinese classics and was wont
to quote from the ancient texts. Mao enunciated the doctrine of
“continuous revolution,” but when the Chinese national interest
required it, he could be patient and take the long view. The
manipulation of “contradictions” was his proclaimed strategy, yet
it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian
concept of da tong, or the Great
Harmony.
Maoist governance
thus turned into a version of the Confucian tradition through the
looking glass, proclaiming a total break with the past while
relying on many of China’s traditional institutions, including an
imperial style of governance; the state as an ethical project; and
a mandarin bureaucracy that Mao loathed, periodically destroyed,
and, in the end, equally periodically was obliged to
re-create.
Mao’s ultimate
objectives could not be expressed in a single organizational
structure or be fulfilled by realizing a specific set of political
objectives. His goal was to sustain the process of revolution
itself, which he felt it was his special mission to carry on
through ever greater upheavals, never permitting a resting point
until his people emerged from the ordeal purified and
transformed:
To be overthrown is painful and is unbearable to contemplate for those overthrown, for example, for the Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] reactionaries whom we are now overthrowing and for Japanese imperialism which we together with other peoples overthrew some time ago. But for the working class, the labouring people and the Communist Party the question is not one of being overthrown, but of working hard to create the conditions in which classes, state power and political parties will die out very naturally and mankind will enter the realm of Great Harmony.4
In traditional China,
the Emperor had been the linchpin of the Great Harmony of all
living things. By his virtuous example, he was perceived to keep
the existing cosmic order in joint and maintain the equilibrium
between heaven, man, and nature. In the Chinese view, the Emperor
“transformed” rebellious barbarians and brought them to heel; he
was the pinnacle of the Confucian hierarchy, assigning to all
people their proper place in society.
This is why, until
the modern period, China did not pursue the ideal of “progress” in
the Western sense. The Chinese impetus for public service was the
concept of rectification—the bringing of order to a society that
had been allowed to fall into dangerous imbalance. Confucius
declared as his mission to try to recover profound truths that his society had
neglected, thereby restoring it to a golden age.
Mao saw his role as
diametrically the opposite. The Great Harmony came at the end of a
painful process likely to claim as victims all who traversed it. In
Mao’s interpretation of history, the Confucian order had kept China
weak; its “harmony” was a form of subjugation. Progress would come
only through a series of brutal tests pitting contradictory forces
against each other both domestically as well as internationally.
And if these contradictions did not appear by themselves, it was
the obligation of the Communist Party and its leader to keep a
permanent upheaval going, against itself if necessary.
In 1958, at the
outset of the nationwide program of economic collectivization known
as the Great Leap Forward, Mao outlined his vision of China in
perpetual motion. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he
proclaimed, was organically a precursor to a new upheaval whose
beginning needed to be hastened lest the revolutionaries became
indolent and start resting on their laurels:
Our revolutions are like battles. After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and the masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervour, instead of conceit. Indeed, they will have no time for conceit, even if they like to feel conceited. With new tasks on their shoulders, they are totally preoccupied with the problems for their fulfillment.5
The cadres of the
revolution were to be tested by ever more difficult challenges at
shorter and shorter intervals. “Disequilibrium is a general,
objective rule,” wrote Mao:
The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.6
But how can a state
in permanent upheaval participate in the international system? If
it applies the doctrine of continuous revolution literally, it will
be involved in constant turmoil and, likely, in war. The states
that prize stability will unite against it. But if it tries to
shape an international order open to others, a clash with the
votaries of continuous revolution is inevitable. This dilemma beset
Mao all his life and was never finally resolved.