Mao Zedong

“The Red Scarf Girl” “Many friends have asked me why, after all I went through, I did not hate Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution in those years. The answer is simple: we were all brainwashed. ”p. 276 The book “The Red Scarf Girl” is a memoir written by author Ji Li Jiang recounting what it was like to grow up during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, taking place in China from 1965 to 1968.

During this time, a political leader named Mao Zedong convinced the people of China that the “four olds”, or the old ways of China, were wrong and that the only way for their country to move forward was to completely revamp their beliefs and ways of life; basically creating a whole new culture for the Chinese. By ways of torture as well as basically brainwashing the people into thinking whatever he said was true, Chairman Mao single handedly shaped China’s culture by removing all anti-communist beliefs.

During the first part of this book, little things that Ji Li Jiang witnesses and says hints that Chairman Mao was forcing change onto the people of China. For example, in chapter 2, Ji Li helps destroy a sign for the Great Prosperity Market, saying that names like this are four olds. Many other words and phrases such as “fortune” and “innocent” were also considered four olds, and were not to be used. But this was just the first step of Chairman Mao’s plan.

He also convinced his workers, called “the red guards”, to publicly humiliate people for various anti-Communist acts. These public humiliations got more and more violent as time went on; in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, people were mainly humiliated for their clothing. On page 30, a man’s clothing is cut apart while he is standing in the middle of a street because the tight pants and pointed shoes he wore were considered four olds; “…tight pants and pointed shoes are what the Western bourgeoisie admire.

For us proletarians, they are neither good looking nor comfortable” said the Red Guard preforming this act. But as the story progresses, people are forced to wear dunce caps and signs with horrible messages written about them around their neck. They were then paraded around while people yelled horribly mean things at them, sometimes even throwing things. Many people were treated this way because of their, or someone in their family’s occupation; if you or anyone in your family was a landlord, you would definitely be treated this way.

Landlords were believed to be “black welps”, meaning that they were evil people, because they would take land from the poor if they did not pay their taxes, and also often were wealthy enough to afford housekeepers. Many teachers were also treated harshly if the Red Guards had any reason to believe that they were teaching their students anti-communist ideas. The people of China did not think twice about this behavior, however, because Chairman Mao had convinced them that people like this should be treated harshly. To us Chairman Mao was god. He controlled everything we read, everything we heard, and everything we learned in school. We believed everything he said. Naturally, we knew only good things about Chairman Mao and The Cultural Revolution. Anything bad had to be the fault of others. Mao was blameless. ” (p. 276) Certain people were treated even more severely. Struggle meetings (gatherings within the workplace where people were publicly humiliated) were very common and often used physical violence to correct people.

During one struggle meeting, a woman is beaten and forced to climb the chimney of a factory as a punishment, for she was believed to be a teacher pushing anti-communist beliefs on her students. Ji Li Jiang’s father is forced to partake in these daily because he was believed to be conspiring against the communist party. Even if The Red Guards did not have substantial evidence to torture these people, they had full permission to anyway under the power of Chairman Mao. “When I started to write this book, I asked An Yi’s mother if she had hated Mao when she was forced to climb the factory chimney. I didn’t hate him’ she told me. ‘I believed that the Cultural Revolution was necessary to prevent revisionism and capitalism from taking over China. I knew that I was wronged, but mistakes happen under any system. If the country was better for the movement that persecuted me, I was still in favor of it. It was only after Mao’s death that I knew I was deceived. ” For Ji Li Jiang, it was not until her father was tortured that she realized that the Cultural Revolution may not have been great as it sounded. Before then, Ji Li Jiang actively participated in these events.

So did all of her siblings and classmates. They all believed whole heartedly that Chairman Mao was doing this for the good of the people. Before the Cultural Revolution, people had big ceremonies for their ancestors, and for the Chinese New Year. They believed in many superstitions, such as not sweeping the floor on New Year’s Day as to not sweep out the god of wealth, and eating spring rolls to “roll in the money”. People were not ridiculed because they were wealthy; wealth was admired and people strived for it. People collected stamps and other valuable things and cherished them with all their hearts.

They kept photographs of themselves and their family members. They wore fancy clothes on special occasions, and the elderly kept elaborately decorated trunks containing all their families heirlooms and passed them down from generation to generation. People were allowed to hire housekeepers to help them around the house and with taking care of their children. But during the Cultural Revolution, none of these things were allowed. They were all considered four olds, and people’s houses were searched and pillaged to make sure that none of these things were going on.

Years after the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao was proven guilty of unleashing this chaos onto the people of China purely to protect his own political position. “It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 that people woke up. We finally learned that the whole Cultural Revolution had been part of a power struggle at the highest levels of the Party. Our leader had taken advantage of our trust and loyalty to manipulate the whole country. This is the most frightening lesson of the Cultural Revolution: without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. This is as true now as it was then. ”

By all standards, Mao Zedong belongs in the company of the few great political men of our century. Born and raised in the obscurity and restrictions of nineteenth-century rural China, he rose to assume the leadership of the Chinese Revolution, rule the largest population in the world with the most pervasive and intense government known in history, and finally has clung to life long enough to become the last of the political heroes of the great generation of World War II. His life ps the emergence of modern China and his character has shaped the manner and style of the Chinese Revolution.

His name has become the label for revolutionary extremists throughout the world, “the Maoists,” yet it is Mao Zedong with whom leaders throughout the world seek audiences. The Pope in one day admits to his presence more people than Mao Zedong grants audiences in a year. When Mao last appeared publicly, more than a million people expressed tumultuous joy, and since then the occasions for allowing a select few into his presence have been newsworthy throughout the world.

The announcement that the American Secretary of State has had a couple of hours of discussion with the Chairman is a signal to all that the Secretary has been favored, indeed, honored; and, of course, when a trip to China does not include a visit with the Chairman, the universal interpretation is that favor is being withheld.

The extraordinary appeal of Mao Zedong is hard to identify. Some may suggest that it lies less in the man and more in the nature of Chinese society, for the Chinese do seem compelled to make all of their leaders into imperial figures. Yet, the fact remains that many non-Chinese, who have no affinity for his rural origins but represent a host of varied social and personal backgrounds, seem to find inspiration for their political lives in his words and his example. Restless youth scattered throughout the world who have more formal education than he had feel that in his revolutionary ardor and purity he speaks for them.

What is the character of the man that lies behind all this greatness? Merely to raise the question is an act of sacrilege for many. For the Chinese and other worshippers of Mao and his thoughts, it is enough to dwell on his public virtues, read only hagiographies, and reject all else as being in bad taste. For his detractors, the whole spectacle is revolting, and Mao the man must be the devil behind the Chinese version of socialist totalitarianism. Yet between these extremes there are those who are honestly curious.

The public record reveals a man at home in rural China, a man of the peasantry, who knows the myths and folklore of traditional China. Yet, although he received a Confucian education, Mao was also part of the first full generation of Chinese to explore Western knowledge. From his rural isolation, he moved effectively into the chaotic, competitive world of Chinese student politics and revolutionary scheming. As soldier, ideologist, and planner, he became the symbolic leader of the Chinese Communist guerrilla struggle. As victorious ruler he was a visionary who looked beyond immediate problems of administration to the goals of a new society and to the molding of a new form of man.

The paradox of Mao Zedong is that while his claim to greatness is unassailable, in every specific sphere whether as philosopher, strategist, economic planner, ideologue or even world statesman, his qualities are not the match of his right to greatness. Since Mao’s greatness lies so clearly in the realm of emotions, the problem of Mao Zedong is a problem in political psychology. To treat Mao merely as an intellectual or as a calculating strategist is to miss the essential dimensions of his historic role. Furthermore, if we are to understand how Mao came to be so successful in mobilizing the feelings of the Chinese, and of others, we must explore his own emotional world and discover the dynamics of his psychic relations with others.

As an individual, Mao is intrinsically fascinating. His acts and his words are startling and unexpected. In his conversations he will bring up the most unlikely subjects: Why are some Africans more dark-skinned than others? Have not all the advances in medical science only increased the number of diseases? The Chinese people have always known Marxism because they have always appreciated contradictions.

A dedicated materialist, Mao can suddenly speak as a conventional believer in the hereafter: “I shall soon be seeing God” (Cheek 124). “When we see God, or rather Karl Marx, we will have to explain much” (Cheek 115).  At times he has depicted himself as an outstanding hero of Chinese history: “Yes, we are greater than Ch’in Shih Huang-ti” (Cheek 79). “We must look to the present to find our heroes” (Cheek 80).

Intrinsic fascination aside, Mao’s character demands serious analysis because there is much in the history of modern China that cannot be explained except in terms of Mao Zedong’s personality. In the fluid circumstances of the Chinese Revolution, time and again events and processes took on decisive form in direct response to the personality of Mao Zedong. In stable societies with solid institutions the scope for the influence of personality considerations is constrained to the narrow limits of how different individuals may perform established roles. In the case of Mao Zedong there was no defined role for him to fill; rather his own personality created his own roles and thereby shaped Chinese history.

When the story of modern China is systematically related to the activities of Mao, a key element of Mao’s genius is immediately highlighted: his remarkable capacity to perform different, and even quite contradictory, roles at different times. As Mao took on the roles of peasant organizer, military commander, ideological spokesman, political strategist, and ruling statesman, he also vacillated between such contradictory public persona as fiery revolutionary and wise philosopher; dynamic activist and isolated recluse; preacher of the sovereign powers of the human will and patient planner who knows that history cannot be rushed.

In a very strange manner Mao Zedong has been able to communicate a sense of the integrity of the human spirit precisely because he has defied logic and spoken for exactly opposite points of view. He has praised books (indeed sanctified the presumed magic of his own “Little Red Book”) and he has denounced bookish knowledge–“Reading books only makes myopic children” (Cheek 117). He has equally extolled and denounced violence. He has championed reason and also scorned the paralyzing impulses of reasonableness. His intellectual integrity is as unassailable as folk wisdom, with its appropriate sayings for every option.

Mao’s revolutionary ideas, like those of his intellectual compatriots elsewhere, drew inspiration from both experience (observing and doing) and intellectual exercise. They were a response to the genuine plight of large numbers of poor, illiterate, and exploited people, although they were also the result of profound romanticization and sometimes willful ignorance of who and what the people really were.

They reflected a strong inclination to distrust complex patterns of administration and governance — in a word, bureaucracy-because these only served the interests of ruling elites; and they relied upon popular enthusiasm and passion as substitutes for technical expertise and intellectual sophistication, and too frequently as a means for mobilizing (and manipulating) the masses. Moreover, they displayed an inconsistency born of a human inability to divorce oneself completely from one’s cultural environment, with its heavy baggage of traditions, habits, and customs. Thus, rebellion against the decrepit and defeatist past of China was accompanied by appeals — sometimes disguised, sometimes not — to the social virtues, modes of discourse, and general spirit of that same past.

If from a classical Marxist standpoint Lenin was wrong to represent Russia as an appropriate site for a Marxist revolution, Mao erred in proclaiming the same for China despite his disingenuous contention in 1942 that “Marxism-Leninism has no beauty, no mystical value; it is simply very useful” (Cheek 127). Much evidence existed, of course, to sustain an argument that China needed fundamental changes in its economic, social, and political order.

Chinese had been debating this for many decades. It was also clear that foreign powers had an enormous impact on China’s development, fostering it in some ways, but distorting and exploiting it in others. Mao’s writings reveal that he understood quite well that his country’s vulnerability to external aggression resulted largely from internal weaknesses, and that this relationship lay at the heart of his analysis and his demand for revolution.

The doctrine of the mass line did not develop in isolation but reflected what was arguably the most fundamental of Mao’s attitudes: voluntarism. Like Lenin, whose successes must have been instrumental in showing Mao the value of seizing the moment, Mao was a committed voluntarist — a believer in the ability of human will to overcome virtually any obstacle, despite the essential irrelevancy of human motivation to Marx’s revolutionary theory.

By seeking to foster revolution in places unsuitable theoretically for such a process, both Lenin and Mao had to relinquish Marxist principle and emphatic determinism (the revolution will follow under the right, organically evolved, socioeconomic conditions) in favor of willful action (the revolution will occur under whatever conditions we can take advantage of). For the sake of possibly seeing the revolution transpire in their own lifetimes, they had to impose their own wills on circumstances and equate volition with accomplishment. Marxism’s attraction was, thus, also its weakness.

The theory was supposed to ensure that revolution would occur, but it never promised that it would occur to suit the timetables of revolutionaries. For tremendously egotistical men like Lenin and Mao, Marxist determinism had to be balanced by a voluntarist spirit, men and women had to help make the revolution by whatever means they could be sold on, and time had to be made an ally and not an enemy.

The succession to Mao Zedong will in time  worked out, and China has new leaders. Regardless of whatever private feelings they may have about Mao, they acknowledged his greatness in the making of modern China. As all great men in history he will be honored, especially by those who will seek the magic of his greatness to insure the legitimacy of their authority.

Thus it is likely that as time goes by the public Mao became increasingly shrouded in myth, and it  became even more difficult to penetrate to the domain of the private man where must lie the secrets of his greatness. Just possibly, however, history may take a slightly different turn, and, as unlikely as it may seem now, there may be revelations of more facts about the life of Mao Zedong making it possible to evaluate better our interpretation of his greatness.

Mao Zedong’s place in Chinese history is, however, secure, and his successors, whoever they may be, will be of quite different character. Mao’s belonged to the era of China’s response to the modern world: He wanted China to change, to become strong and powerful in the eyes of all the world; yet he also wanted China to be true to itself. He was a leader out of rural China, educated in a provincial setting, and unacquainted with any foreign language. His distrust of cities refiected in part that be was not at home with the more cosmopolitan generation of Chinese who went further in exploring foreign ways than he was ever ready to do.

Works Cited

Cheek, Timothy. Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedfort, 2002.