Mao and Then: The Controversy over Mao's Memory

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s polemical – nay, furious biography Mao: The Unknown Story has just been published in paperback. As a result, Chang, better known as the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, has been featured in the press in recent days, helping to re-ignite an often very polarized debate over the legacy of Communist China’s “Great Helmsman”, Mao Zedong.

From his youth as a Communist Party organizer to his time as a Cold War statesman, Chang and Halliday’s Mao describes a brutal man whose motivations were selfish rather than ideological. Terrible periods of twentieth century Chinese history, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are described not as the result of structural upheaval or economic mismanagement, but as springing almost directly from the sadistic character of Mao himself.

Jung Chang sees herself as hitting back at a tradition of left-wing apologism for the Mao era in Europe and the US, and refers pointedly in interviews to a comment made by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, that Mao’s time in power could be justified by his eradication of footbinding in China – a statement which seems almost calculated to incur tabloid fury.

I’ll admit there is some truth in Chang’s criticism, not only of Livingstone’s gaffe (footbinding was outlawed in the early 20th century, some 50-odd years before Mao took power), but also of earlier Western attitudes to Mao. A number of European authors writing in the 1960s and 1970s, from China-specialists such as William Hinton to feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, did look rather naïvely on Maoist China as a glimmering alternative to the Cold War dichotomy of US imperialism on the one hand and Soviet state capitalism on the other, and managed to play down the society’s violent excesses in the process. But Chang and Halliday’s account is simplistic and untenable, their view of Mao as a man without an ideological driving force seems absurd considering his role in the Cultural Revolution, a violent upheaval steeped in utopian sentiment, far from a military coup such as Mao could have staged if his only goal was renewed power. Significant questions have also been raised about the quality of the historical research which went into Mao, a heated debate about which can be followed in the pages of the LRB, following the publication of Columbia political scientist Andrew Nathan’s article about the book.

Facing a debate framed in such extreme terms as Chang’s or Livingstone’s then, is there any hope for a more nuanced understanding of the Mao era to emerge? This hope was clearly what inspired Tuesday’s Centre for the Study of Democracy symposium entitled “Was Mao a Monster?” at the University of Westminster. On a sweltering hot day in the capital, around 50 people turned up to see journalist John Gittings and historian Rana Mitter discuss how Mao Zedong might be understood without either the outright demonisation of Chang and Halliday’s book, or indeed the simplicity of the Chinese Communist Party’s official verdict – that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong.

While their individual analyses differed somewhat, both speakers were keen to move beyond what Rana Mitter correctly identified as a proliferation of the “Great Man theory” of history: the idea that history is principally moved by individual heroic personalities, rather than say, ideas or structures. Certainly this has been the framework of Party ideologues during and after the Mao era, who flattered Mao’s egomania by directly identifying the People’s Republic with the figure of Mao Zedong, and vice versa. In the case of Chang and Halliday’s book, this theory is now being advanced again – but as its flipside: identifying Mao as pretty much the sole agent of the horrors of twentieth century Chinese history; as if a wickedness disseminated throughout China from his peasant birth in Shaoshan village, Hunan, to his period of rockstar iconicity in the Cultural Revolution era.

The Great Man trend in thinking not only removes responsibility from other actors in China’s history, but also ultimately reinforces Mao’s own narrative of himself as the key mover of the Chinese century. Both Mitter and Gittings seem forward-thinking in their willingness to problematize the importance of the very question “Was Mao a Monster?”, asking whether in fact his alleged monstrosity is the question at all.

It seems a far more challenging question to ask whether the title should in fact be, “Was Mao really that important?” It cannot be doubted that Mao’s legacy will continue to cast a huge shadow across China, but the question could encourage us to look at the People’s Republic less in isolation, and to consider other factors –  the role of the pre-1949 Nationalist government and New Youth movement, the importance of Western foreign policy towards China, as well as the broader structural and ideological dimensions of historical change in twentieth century China.