The Continuous Revolution and the Chinese People
Mao’s opening to the
United States was a major ideological as well as strategic
decision. But it did not alter his commitment to the concept of
continuous revolution at home. Even in 1972, the year of President
Richard Nixon’s visit to China, he caused to be distributed
nationwide a letter he had sent to his wife, Jiang Qing, at the
beginning of the Cultural Revolution six years earlier:
The situation changes from a great upheaval to a great peace once every seven or eight years. Ghosts and monsters jump out by themselves. . . . Our current task is to sweep out the Rightists in all the Party and throughout the country. We shall launch another movement for sweeping up the ghosts and monsters after seven or eight years, and will launch more of this movement later.19
This call to
ideological commitment also epitomized Mao’s dilemma as that of any
victorious revolution: once revolutionaries seize power, they are
obliged to govern hierarchically if they want to avoid either
paralysis or chaos. The more sweeping the overthrow, the more
hierarchy has to substitute for the consensus that holds a
functioning society together. The more elaborate the hierarchy, the
more likely it is to turn into another even more elaborate version
of the replaced oppressive Establishment.
Thus from the
beginning Mao was engaged in a quest whose logical end could only
be an attack on Communism’s own institutions, even those he had
created himself. Where Leninism had asserted that the advent of
Communism would solve the “contradictions” of society, Mao’s
philosophy knew no resting place. It was not enough to
industrialize the country as the Soviet Union had done. In the
quest for the historic Chinese uniqueness, the social order needed
to be in constant flux to prevent the sin of “revisionism,” of
which Mao increasingly accused post-Stalin Russia. A Communist
state, according to Mao, must not turn into a bureaucratic society;
the motivating force must be ideology rather than
hierarchy.
In this manner, Mao
generated a series of built-in contradictions. In pursuit of the
Great Harmony, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956,
which invited public debate and then turned on those intellectuals
who practiced it; the Great Leap Forward in 1958, designed to catch
up with the West industrially in a three-year period but which led
to one of the most pervasive famines in modern history and produced
a split in the Communist Party; and the Cultural Revolution in
1966, in which a generation of trained leaders, professors,
diplomats, and experts were sent to the countryside to work on
farms to learn from the masses.
Millions died to
implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his
rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up
against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from
themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end,
destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast
enterprise.
Mao’s faith in the
ultimate success of his continuous revolution had three sources:
ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism. The single most
important one was his faith in the resilience, capabilities, and
cohesion of the Chinese people. And in truth, it is impossible to
think of another people who could have sustained the relentless
turmoil that Mao imposed on his society. Or whose leader could have
made credible Mao’s oft-repeated threat that the Chinese people
would prevail, even if it retreated from all its cities against a
foreign invader or suffered tens of millions of casualties in a
nuclear war. Mao could do so because of a profound faith in the
Chinese people’s ability to retain its essence amidst all
vicissitudes.
This was a
fundamental difference with the Russian Revolution a generation
earlier. Lenin and Trotsky viewed their revolution as a triggering
event for world revolution. Convinced that world revolution was
imminent, they agreed to cede a third of European Russia to German
control in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918. Whatever happened
to Russia would be subsumed by the imminent revolution in the rest
of Europe, which, Lenin and Trotsky assumed, would sweep away the
existing political order.
Such an approach
would have been unthinkable for Mao, whose revolution was largely
Sinocentric. China’s revolution might have an impact on world
revolution but, if so, through the efforts and sacrifice and
example of the Chinese people. With Mao, the greatness of the
Chinese people was always the organizing principle. In an early
essay in 1919, he stressed the unique qualities of the Chinese
people:
I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people.20
Twenty years later,
amidst Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war, Mao extolled
the historic achievements of the Chinese nation in a way that the
dynastic rulers could have shared:
Throughout the history of Chinese civilization its agriculture and handicrafts have been renowned for their high level of development; there have been many great thinkers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, soldiers, men of letters and artists, and we have a rich store of classical works. The compass was invented in China very long ago. The art of paper-making was discovered as early as 1,800 years ago. Block-printing was invented 1,300 years ago, and movable type 800 years ago. The use of gunpowder was known in China before the Europeans. Thus China has one of the oldest civilizations in the world; she has a recorded history of nearly 4,000 years.21
Mao kept circling
back to a dilemma as ancient as China itself. Intrinsically
universal, modern technology poses a threat to any society’s claims
to uniqueness. And uniqueness had always been the distinctive claim
of Chinese society. To preserve that uniqueness, China had refused
to imitate the West in the nineteenth century, risking colonization
and incurring humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao’s
Cultural Revolution—from which indeed it derived its name—had been
to eradicate precisely those elements of modernization that
threatened to involve China in a universal culture.
By 1968, Mao had come
full circle. Driven by a mixture of ideological fervor and a
premonition of mortality, he had turned to the youth to cleanse the
military and the Communist Party and bring into office a new
generation of ideologically pure Communists. But reality
disappointed the aging leader. It proved impossible to run a
country by ideological exaltation. The youths who had heeded Mao’s
instructions created chaos rather than commitment and were now in
their turn sent to the remote countryside; some of the leaders
initially targeted for purification were brought back to
reestablish order—especially in the military. By April 1969, nearly
half of the Party’s Central Committee—45 percent—were members of
the military, compared with 19 percent in 1956; the average age of
new members was sixty.22
A poignant reminder
of this dilemma came up in the first conversation between Mao and
President Nixon in February 1972. Nixon complimented Mao on having
transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: “I
haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few
places in the vicinity of Beijing.”23
After a lifetime of
titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little
pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of
Chinese culture and the Chinese people. One of the historically
most powerful Chinese rulers had run up against this paradoxical
mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant,
imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesitance in
executing orders they considered incompatible with the future of
their family.
Therefore, in the
end, Mao appealed not so much to the material aspects of his
Marxist revolution as to its faith. One of Mao’s favorite tales
drawn from classical Chinese lore was the story of the “foolish old
man” who believed he could move mountains with his bare hands. Mao
related the story at a Communist Party conference as
follows:
There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. He called his sons, and hoe in hand they began to dig up these mountains with great determination. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party had long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart.24
An ambivalent
combination of faith in the Chinese people and disdain for its
traditions enabled Mao to carry out an astonishing tour de force:
an impoverished society just emerging from a rending civil war tore
itself apart at ever shorter intervals and, during that process,
fought wars with the United States and India; challenged the Soviet
Union; and restored the frontiers of the Chinese state to nearly
their maximum historic extent.
Emerging into a world
of two nuclear superpowers, China managed, despite its insistent
Communist propaganda, to conduct itself as essentially a
geopolitical “free agent” of the Cold War. In the face of its
relative weakness, it played a fully independent and highly
influential role. China moved from hostility to near alliance with
the United States and in the opposite direction with the Soviet
Union—from alliance to confrontation. Perhaps most remarkably,
China managed, in the end, to break free of the Soviet Union and
come out on the “winning” side of the Cold War.
Still, with all its
achievements, Mao’s insistence on turning the ancient system upside
down could not escape the eternal rhythm of Chinese life. Forty
years after his death, after a journey violent, dramatic, and
searing, his successors again described their now increasingly
well-off society as Confucian. In 2011, a statue of Confucius was
placed in Tiananmen Square within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only
other personality so honored. Only a people as resilient and
patient as the Chinese could emerge unified and dynamic after such
a roller coaster ride through history.