Most
of the mass movements initiated by Mao Zedong were
successful in changing old ideas and reshaping Chinese
society. Even the Great Leap Forward, for which Mao is
vilified, was successful in important areas, and
estimates of 30 million deaths are wildly exaggerated.
Bad weather, famines and the US trade embargo caused
most of the deaths. Today's neo-liberal globalization
has inflicted far more death and suffering than the
Great Leap.
Mao understood that the pernicious
power of Confucianism was permeating Chinese society and
hindering its advancement, so he tried to combat it by
launching mass movements, culminating in the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. But even after
a decade of enormous social upheaval, tragic personal
sufferings, fundamental economic dislocation and
unparalleled diplomatic isolation, the Cultural
Revolution failed to achieve its goal even with serious
damage to the nation's physical and socio-economic
infrastructure and to the prestige of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), not to mention the decline of
popular support and near total bankruptcy of
revolutionary zeal among even loyal party cadres.
Imperial monarchy cannot be restored in modern
China. Once a political institution is overthrown, all
the king's men cannot put it back together again. Nor
would that be desirable. Yet the modern political system
in China, despite its revolutionary clothing and radical
rhetoric, is still fundamentally feudal, both in the
manner in which power is distributed and in its
administrative structure.
In Chinese politics,
loyalty is always preferred over competence. The ideal
is to have both in a minister. Failing that, loyalty
without competence is preferred as being less dangerous
than competence without loyalty - the stuff of which
successful revolts are made. For socialist China,
loyalty is to the socialist cause. It is imperative that
leaders remain loyal to the socialist ideal.
Confucianism (Ru Jia), by placing blind faith in
a causal connection between virtue and power, has
remained the main cultural obstacle to modern China's
attempt to evolve from a society governed by men into a
society governed by law. The danger of Confucianism lies
not in its aim to endow the virtuous with power, but in
its tendency to label the powerful as virtuous.
In order to change Chinese feudal society toward
communist social order, which is understood by
communists as a necessary goal of human development, Mao
Zedong developed specific methods out of Leninist
concepts that rendered special characteristics to
Chinese communism, its strengths and shortcomings. These
methods, above all the system of organized mass
movements, stress the change of social consciousness,
ie, the creation of new men for a new society, as the
basis for changing reality, ie, the mode of production.
The concept of the mass politics, relevant in Chinese
political thought from ancient time, plays a role as
important as that of the elite cadre corps within the
party.
Mao's mass line The mass
movement as an instrument of political communication
from above to below is peculiar to Chinese communist
organization. This phenomenon is of utmost importance in
understanding the nature and dynamics of the governance
structure of the CCP. The theoretical foundation of mass
movement as a means of mediation between the will of the
leaders and the people pre-supposes that nothing is
impossible for the masses, quantitatively understood as
a collective subject, if their power is concentrated by
a party of correct thought and action. This concept
comes out of Mao's romantic yet well-placed faith in the
great strength the masses are capable of developing in
the interest of their own well-being. So the "will of
the masses" has to be articulated by the masses and
within the masses, which the CCP calls the "mass line".
Mao's mass-line theory requires that the
leadership elite be close to the people, that it is
continuously informed about the people's will and that
it transforms this will into concrete actions by the
masses. From the masses back to the masses. This means:
take the scattered and unorganized ideas of the masses
and, through study, turn them into focused and systemic
programs, then go back to the masses and propagate and
explain these ideals until the masses embrace them as
their own.
Thus mass movements are initiated at
the highest level, announced to party cadres at central
and regional work conferences, subject to cadre
criticism and modification, after which starts the first
phase of mass movement. Mass organizations are held to
provoke the "people's will", through readers' letters to
newspapers and rallies at which these letters are read
and debated. The results are then officially discussed
by the staff of leading organs of the state and the
party, after which the systematized "people's will" is
clarified into acts of law or resolutions, and then the
mass movement spreads to the whole nation.
The
history of Chinese politics is a history of mass
movements. Mass movements successfully implemented Land
Reform 1950-53; Marriage Reform 1950-52;
Collectivization 1953 - the General Line of Socialist
Transformation (from national bourgeois democratic
revolution to proletarian socialist revolution); and
Nationalization 1955 (from private ownership of
industrial means of production into state ownership).
The method used against opposition was thought reform
through "brainwashing" (without derogatory connotation),
which is a principle of preferring the changing of the
consciousness of political opponents instead of
physically liquidating them.
Mao's mass
movements succeeded until 1957 The Hundred Flower
Movement of 1957 was launched on February 27 by Mao with
his famous four-hour speech, "On the Correct Handling of
Contradictions among the People", before 1,800 leading
cadres. In it, Mao distinguished "contradiction between
the enemy and ourselves" from "contradiction among the
people", which should not be resolved by a dictatorship,
ie physical force, but by open discussion with criticism
and counter criticism. Up until 1957, the mass-movement
policies of Mao achieved spectacular success.
Land reform was completed, the struggle for
women's emancipation was progressing well, and
collectivization and nationalization were leading the
nation into socialism. Health services were a model of
socialist construction in both cities and the
countryside. The party's revolutionary leadership was
accepted enthusiastically by society. By 1958,
agricultural production almost doubled from 1949 (108
million tons to 185 million tons), coal production
quadrupled to 123 million tons, and steel production
grew from 100,000 tons to 5.3 million tons.
The
only problem came from bourgeois intellectual rebellion.
On May 25, 1957, Mao expressed his anxiety at a session
of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and gave his
approval to those who warned against too much bourgeois
liberty. That afternoon, Mao told cadres at a Conference
of Communist Youth League that "all words and deeds
which deviate from socialism are basically wrong". At
the opening session of the People's Congress on June 26,
Zhou Enlai initiated the "counter criticism" against the
critics. Mao's call for open criticism was serious and
genuine, but the discussion he had conceived as a safety
valve reached a degree of intensity he had not
anticipated. Mao overestimated the stability of the
political climate and underestimated the residual
influence of Confucianism.
Crossroads: Soviet
model or independent path Against this
background, the CCP stood at the crossroads of choosing
the Soviet model of development or an independent path.
Economy development was based on three elements:
Build up heavy industry at the expense of
agriculture.
Establish an extensive system of individual
incentives by means of which productive forces could be
developed from a conviction that the superiority of
socialist modes of production would be vindicated by a
visible rise in living standards.
The acceleration of the socialist transformation of
society in order to create the precondition required by
the CCP for establishing a socialist order.
Two
paths were opened to the CCP leadership in 1958:
Consolidation.
Pushing forward toward permanent revolution.
Mao was forced by geopolitical conditions (the
abrupt withdrawal of Soviet aid and the US Cold War
embargo) to overcome the lack of capital through
mobilization of China's vast labor reservoir. The
strategy was to connect political campaigns to
production campaigns. Under pressure from orthodox
Leninists within the party apparatus, with the failure
of the "Hundred Flower Movement", Mao concluded it was
impossible to create a socialist consciousness through a
gradual improvement of material living conditions; that
consciousness and reality had to be changed concurrently
and in conjunction through gigantic new efforts at
mobilization.
This led to the Anti-Rightist
Campaign of 1957-58, followed by "Three Red Banners" in
the spring of 1958, initiating simultaneous development
of industry and agriculture through the use of both
modern and traditional methods of production under the
"General Line of Building Socialism". It was to be
implemented through a labor-intensive development policy
by a "Great Leap Forward" and by establishing a
comprehensive collectivization by establishing "People's
Communes".
Great Leap Forward succeeded in
many areas The Great Leap Forward (GLF) was not a
senseless fantasy as many in the neo-liberal West and
some in China have since suggested in hindsight. It
called for the new system of "Two Decentralizations,
Three Centralizations and One Responsibility". By this
was meant the decentralized use of labor and local
investment; central control over political decisions,
planning and administration of natural investment
capital; one responsibility meant every basic unit to
account for itself to its supervising unit.
The
GLF was successful in many areas. The one area that
failed attracted the most attention. It was the area of
back-yard steel-furnace production. The technological
requirement of steelmaking, unlike hydro-electricity,
did not lend itself to labor-intensive mass movements.
Yet steel was the symbol of industrialization and a
heroic attempt had to be made to overcome the lack of
capital for imported modern mechanization. The attempt
failed conspicuously, but its damage to the economy was
overrated. The program did not operate year-around, and
did not disrupt farm harvests.
The real test,
however, was in the People's Commune. Favorable weather
conditions produced high yields in 1958 in the
experimental communes. True to Confucian cultural
behavior pattern, this led to a rush nationwide to
follow suit, even though almost everywhere the
fundamental preconditions for successful operation were
absent. Most did not have adequate administrative
offices, nurseries, canteens, old people's homes,
hospitals, etc, institutions necessary for successful
communal life. In other places, the local leadership
took the transition to communism at face value and
severed all connection with supervising organs in the
name of the withering away of the state. Disorder grew
into chaos within months.
During the Wuhan Party
Plenum of December 1958, Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized
the overextended commune program, leading to the plenum
initiating a readjustment of the "Three Red Banners"
policy. Concurrently, the Central Committee approved
"the wish of Comrade Mao Zedong not to stand again as a
candidate for the chairmanship of the PRC [People's
Republic of China] after the end of his term in office".
Liu Shaoqi was elected as head of state by the second
People's Congress on April 27, 1959, and became heir
apparent after Mao in the party.
Mao,
criticized, vowed to lead new peasant revolt In
the fateful Lushan Conference of July 2-August 16, 1959,
Marshal Peng shifted his criticism from policy to the
person of the leader. On July 23, Mao, in an emphatic
speech, rejected the reproach of his critics and
declared, with justification, that the Great Leap
Forward and the People's Commune had brought about more
advantages than disadvantages. Mao threatened an open
split: "If we deserve to perish I shall go away, I shall
go to the countryside and lead the peasants to overthrow
the government. If you of the PLA [People's Liberation
Army] will not follow me, then I shall find a new Red
Army. But I believe that the PLA will follow me."
On August 16, 1959, Peng and his followers were
condemned as an "anti-party clique" by a resolution
passed by the Eighth Plenum. On September 17, Peng was
dismissed as defense minister. Peng died in 1974 and was
rehabilitated posthumously in 1978, after Mao's death.
In late 1959, several natural disasters and bad
weather conditions were reported in the press. Floods
and drought brought about the "three bitter years" of
1959-62. After 1962, the economy recovered, but the
politic was shifting toward a struggle against
revisionism, which brought on the Cultural Revolution
four years later.
There would have been no
deaths in the 1961-62 famines if not for the US embargo.
Reports of severe natural disasters in isolated
places and of bad weather conditions in larger areas
appeared in the Chinese press in the spring of 1959,
after the Wuhan Plenum in December 1958 had already made
policy adjustments based on the technical criticism of
Peng Dehuai on the People's Communes initiative. In
March 1959, the entire Hunan region was under flood, and
soon after that the spring harvest in southwestern China
was lost through drought. The 1958 grain production
yielded 250 million tons instead the projected 375
million tons, and 1.2 million tons of peanuts instead of
the projected 4 million tons. In 1959, the harvest came
to 175 million tons. In 1960, the situation deteriorated
further. Drought and other bad weather affected 55
percent of the cultivated area. Some 60 percent of the
agricultural land in the north received no rain at all.
The yield for 1960 was 142 million tons. In 1961, the
weather situation improved only slightly.
US
embargo caused millions to starve In 1963, the
Chinese press called the famine of 1961-62 the most
severe since 1879. In 1961, a food-storage program
obliged China to import 6.2 million tons of grain from
Canada and Australia. In 1962, import decreased to 5.32
million tons. Between 1961 and 1965, China imported a
total of 30 million tons of grain at a cost of US$2
billion (Robert Price, International Trade of
Communist China Vol II, pp 600-601). More would have
been imported except that US pressure on Canada and
Australia to limit sales to China and US interference
with shipping prevented China from importing more.
Canada and Australia were both anxious to provide
unlimited credit to China for grain purchase, but alas,
US policy prevailed and millions starved in China.
The University of Wisconsin's Maurice Meisner,
whom many consider to be the dean of post-World War II
Chinese scholarship, presents three related ways of
looking at the alleged 20 million to 30 million deaths
caused by the Great Famine begun in the late 1950s under
Mao's tenure in The Deng Xiaoping Era and Inquiry
into the Fate of Chinese Socialism 1978-1994 (New
York, Hill and Wang, 1996). One, it was a horrible
miscalculation. Two, it was the end of famines on this
scale (famines had been occurring for the previous few
centuries off and on in China about every generation or
so). In other words, it brought this horrible historical
pattern to an end. Or, three, it was a horrible
miscalculation, while also afterward bringing this
pattern of famine every generation of so to an end, thus
saving millions from a similar fate.
It is now
the common perception in the West that 30 millions
starved to death as a result of Mao's launching of the
Great Leap Forward. Is it true or is it again a result
of manufactured history? An article from the
Australia-China Review contains a noteworthy refutation
of the widely accepted figures of tens of millions of
deaths caused by the GLF. The following is excerpted
from this article, "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian
Strategy" by Wim F Werthheim, emeritus professor from
the University of Amsterdam, one of the best-noted
European China scholars:
But the figure amounting to tens of
millions ... [lacks] any historical basis. Often it is
argued that at the censuses of the 1960s "between 17
and 29 millions of Chinese" appeared to be missing, in
comparison with the official census figures from the
1950s. But these calculations are lacking any
semblance of reliability. At my first visit to China,
in August 1957, I had asked to get the opportunity to
meet two outstanding Chinese social scientists: Fei
Xiao-tung, the sociologist, and Chen Ta, the
demographer. I could not meet either of them, because
they were both seriously criticized at that time as
rightists; but I was allowed a visit by Pang Zenian, a
Marxist philosopher who knew about the problems of
both scholars. Chen Ta was criticized because he had
attacked the pretended 1953 census. In the past he had
organized censuses, and he could not believe that
suddenly, within a rather short period, the total
population of China had risen from 450 [million] to
600 million, as had been officially claimed by the
Chinese authorities after the 1953 census. He would
have [liked] to organize a scientifically well-founded
census himself, instead of an assessment largely based
on regional random samples as had happened in 1953.
According to him, the method followed in that year was
unscientific.
For that matter, a Chinese
expert of demography, Dr Ping-ti Ho, professor of
history at the University of Chicago, in a book titled
Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953,
Harvard East Asian Studies No 4, 1959, also mentioned
numerous "flaws" in the 1953 census: "All in all,
therefore, the nationwide enumeration of 1953 was not
a census in the technical definition of the term"; the
separate provincial figures show indeed an
unbelievable increase of some 30 percent in the period
1947-1953, a period of heavy revolutionary struggle.
(p 93-94) My conclusion is that the claim that in the
1960s a number between 17 [million] and 29 million
people was "missing" is worthless if there was never
any certainty about the 600 millions of Chinese. Most
probably these "missing people" did not starve in the
calamity years 1960-61, but in fact have never
existed.
Globalization causes more
death, suffering than Mao Neo-liberal
globalization has caused poverty for three-quarters of
the world's population, which brings it to more than 3
billion. At least 3 percent of these victims die
prematurely of starvation, bringing it to 90 million,
mostly children who died from malnutrition. That
statistical evidence is more scientific than the alleged
30 million deaths in China. Anti-China neo-liberals
dismiss the lack of evidence with the arguments that
"totalitarian" governments are "guilty" by their very
nature.
While Mao headed the CCP, leadership was
based on mass support; and it is still. The chairmanship
of the CCP is similar to the position of pope in the
Roman Catholic Church, powerful in moral authority but
highly circumscribed in operational power. The Great
Leap Forward was the product of mass movement, not of a
single person. Mao's leadership extended to the
organization of the party and its policy-formulation
procedures, not the dictation of particular programs.
To describe Mao as a dictator merely reflects an
ignorance of the true workings of the Chinese Communist
Party. The failures of the Great Leap Forward and the
People's Communes were caused more by implementation
flaws rather than conceptual error. Bad luck and a US
embargo had also much to do with it. These programs
resulted in much suffering, but the claim that 30
million people were murdered by Mao with evil intent was
mere Western propaganda.
Without Mao, the
Chinese Communist Party would not have survived the
extermination campaign by the Nationalists. It was Mao
who recognized the invincible power of the Chinese
peasant. It is proper that the fourth-generation leaders
of the PRC are again focusing on the welfare of the
peasants.
In Europe, the failure of the
revolutions of 1848 led to World War I, which destroyed
all the monarchal regimes that had successfully
suppressed the democratic revolution six decades
earlier. The full impact of Mao's revolutionary spirit
is yet to be released on Chinese society. A century from
now, Mao high-minded principles of mass politics will
outshine all his neo-liberal critics. Like US president
Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong will be remembered in
history as a great leader; and unlike Lincoln, Mao will
be remembered also as a great revolutionary.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
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2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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