by Li Guoyuan
On the 1st of October 2009, at the military parade held in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a phalanx of troops held aloft the slogan ‘Love Live Mao Zedong Thought’. While everyone is familiar with the term Mao Zedong Thought (or Maoism), it is no longer often used.
Actually, only those above the age of fifty are truly familiar. People under forty will be less clear about the term’s evolution. Even those over fifty, if they’ve paid no attention to politics, won’t necessarily have a clear understanding. I’ve stupidly spent much of my life attempting to explain my understanding of this term to the youth.
In my schooldays I often saw the slogan, ‘Long Live Invincible Mao Zedong Thought’. The term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ was created by Liu Shaoqi, and later, in the new party constitution passed at the 7th National Congress in 1945, it was described as “the conceptual unification of the theory of Marxism-Leninism and the praxis of the Chinese Revolution, it is Chinese Communism, Chinese Marxism.” Mao Zedong Thought was designated as the guiding ideology for all of the Party’s work.
At that time, the simplistic understanding of Maoism was that it was simply ‘the thoughts in Mao Zedong’s head, his opinions’, and of course, Chairman Mao’s opinions are correct.
Later on, Lin Biao, who was once called Chairman Mao’s greatest student, his most intimate comrade, who held the red flag of Mao Zedong Thought higher than anyone else, described Maoism as “Marxism-Leninism in an era where imperialism is on the verge of total collapse and socialism is heading toward complete world victory. It is the most powerful weapon against imperialism, revisionism and dogmatism”. Holy smokes! I finally realized just how awesome Mao Zedong Thought was, it can achieve world revolution. Lin Biao has even higher praise, “Mao Zedong Thought is the highest level of Marxism, the most advanced, most thriving form of Marxism in the modern era. The words of Chairman Mao are truth. A single sentence is worth a thousand.” He also said, “The shortcut to studying revolutionary theory is the study of Mao Zedong Thought, as long as you study that you have enough.”
How does one study and understand Mao Zedong Thought? He explains, “Read Chairman Mao’s books, listen to Chairman Mao’s words, handle affairs according to Chairman Mao’s instructions.” This shows that Mao’s work, words and instructions are the concrete manifestations of Mao Zedong Thought.
Below are some quotations from Chairman Mao that were treated like scripture during the Cultural Revolution:
“The Cultural Revolution is the completely necessary and extremely timely prevention of the restoration of capitalism; it is the consolidation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
“The Capitalist Class is inside the Communist Party”
“The schools have been captured by the capitalist intellectual class.”
“The examination system needs to be attacked.” … “During exams exchanging answers with classmates should be allowed.”
“Marxism is complicated and multifaceted, but in the final analysis, all the truths of Marxism can be summed up simply: To rebel is justified.”
“In the past it seems that wherever there were no police and no courts, society was a mess, as soon as I heard that our courts had collapsed I was overjoyed!”
“Things are going well, the signs are all good: chaos. Some places don’t have enough chaos… universal chaos! Down with universal peace and order!”
“The Communist Party’s philosophy is the philosophy of struggle. To struggle against heaven is a great joy, to struggle against the earth is a great joy, to struggle against man is a great joy!”
“In order to secure the global victory of the revolution, we are prepared to sacrifice 300 million men”.
“People don’t want to be destroyed, but destruction has its benefit, once dead they can serve as fertilizer.”
“It is vital that young intellectuals go to the countryside and receive reeducation from the ‘poor and middle peasants’”
“After studying for years, the more [they] study the dumber they get.”
During the Sixties and Seventies, everyone kept a copy of ‘Quotations From Mao Zedong’ close to their chests, . The newspapers would remind you that if ran into difficulties at work, you could whip out the ‘Little Red Book’, recite a few lines like a sutra: “Determined and unafraid of sacrifice, we will overcome every obstacle and strive for success”, and just like that your problems would melt away, mission accomplished. Even world champions of table tennis relied on Mao Zedong Thought for guidance.
On the 18th of May, 1966, Lin Biao gave a speech at a Politburo meeting, afterwards its contents were disseminated nationwide for study purposes, in the speech he states that: “Revolution is fundamentally a question of political power. Those who have power, the proletariat, the laboring masses, have everything. Those without political power have nothing… Political power is the power to suppress… In recent months, Chairman Mao has paid special attention to the prevention of counter-revolutionary coups, he has adopted a large number of measures… he has dispatched troops to prevent them capturing the state’s vital organs, radio and broadcasting… He has spent these months preparing an essay, this essay has yet to be completed, this is not a work in print, but we should study this unpublished work of Mao. Chairman Mao has had many sleepless nights due to this affair, it is a profoundly important matter.”
This shows that even if Mao had not put anything down in words, even if it was just something that occurred to him in the middle of the night, Lin Biao still intuitively grasped Mao’s train of thought. Consequently some people lavished praise on him, calling him the man with the deepest understanding of Mao Zedong Thought, which wasn’t entirely groundless.
Lin Biao elevated Mao Zedong Thought, he deified it to such an extent that naturally dissent was forbidden, if anyone had any objections then ‘the whole party must demand their execution”. So, after Liu Shaoqi was deposed, it made perfect sense to have him killed. Even though Liu Shaoqi created the term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’, he held views different from Mao, therefore his execution was unavoidable. Ironically, Lin Biao was a victim of his own standards.
As soon as Mao’s back was turned, Lin Biao told his followers that Mao was: “a Confucian disguised as a Marxist, the biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history since Qin Shi Huang.”
Later, after Lin Biao had betrayed him and ended up dead in Undurkhaan, Mao mocked him for his shameless brown-nosing, “A single sentence is just a single sentence! How can it be worth a thousand?”
That “the words of Chairman Mao are truth”, however, was still not something to be questioned. Zhang Zhixin thought that Mao had violated the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, so she had to be killed. Before her execution they cut her larynx to prevent her from saying anything critical about the Chairman.
But truth cannot be forever bound by chains. As soon as Mao had died, his acolytes, the Gang of Four, were arrested by his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. The economy was on the verge of collapse, anarchy and disorder plagued the entire country. What was the solution? Unlike Mao, Chairman Hua lacked the ‘boldness’ to keep the entire population in a state of chaos, instead he freed and promoted the ‘rare talent’, Deng Xiaoping, and let him rule with an iron fist to put the nation back on the right track.
This begged the question: were Mao Zedong’s words still considered truth? Must they be followed in their entirety? If the answer is yes, then, arresting the Gang of Four and reinstating Deng Xiaoping is surely a violation.
For the sake of resolving this contradiction, Deng Xiaoping came up with a quite unconvincing explanation: Mao Zedong Thought is a system, one must completely and accurately understand it. However it’s simply not possible to ‘completely’ and ‘accurately’ understand “we must criticize Deng and attack the right-wing demand to overturn his sentence” as “we must promote Deng Xiaoping to a powerful position”.
Hu Yaobang was politically astute, he appointed a group of theorists to compose an essay titled ‘Practice is the Sole Criterion For Testing Truth’, which sparked nationwide debate. The result of this debate was, of course, that ‘truth must stand the test of practice’. Mao Zedong’s works, speeches and instructions were no exception.
The first test was Mao’s series of talks and directives which launched and then directed the Cultural Revolution. The ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in The History of the Party Since the Founding of the Republic’, a paper drafted under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, explicitly points out that:
“The Cultural Revolution which lasted from May 1966 until October 1976, caused the country and the people to suffer the most critical setbacks and damages since the founding of the Republic.”
“The history of the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao, confirms that the main idea behind it is neither in line with Marxism-Leninism nor national reality.”
“Practice confirms that the Cultural Revolution is not and cannot be in any sense considered revolutionary or progressive.”
“[It] was civil strife mistakenly triggered by Mao and exploited by a counter-revolutionary clique, causing severe damage to the party and the people.”
“Politically, close to one hundred million people were harmed, the economy was on the verge of collapse, culturally we regressed hundreds of years.”
The idea that ‘Chairman Mao’s words were truth’ had been thoroughly debunked.
Not only the Cultural Revolution but everything that Mao thought and did after the founding of the Republic failed to stand the test of practice. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 harmed over a million intellectuals; the Three Red Banners movement of 1958 led to a famine that killed 37 million peasants. The equivalent of 450 atomic bombs!
This presented an unprecedented crisis for Maoism. Since the Seventh National Congress in 1945, the party had always pushed the idea that “Mao Zedong Thought is Invincible”. How could they explain its apparent failure?
Eventually some people came up with the following explanation: Mao Zedong Thought is not the thought of Mao alone, it is the fruit of the Chinese Communist Party’s collective wisdom. The older generation of revolutionaries all made their own contribution to the formation and development of Mao Zedong Thought. The theory of New Democracy condensed the the ideas of Cai Hesen, Qu Qiubai, Gao Junyu, Deng Zhongxia, Zhou Enlai and others. The most glorious idea in the treasure house of Mao Zedong Thought wasthe theory of ‘Using the Countryside To Encircle the Cities’, which was the product of the collective wisdom of Yun Daiying, Zhou Enlai and others. The military thought of Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Liu Bocheng is the source of Maoism military theories. Chen Yun while managing the realities of a socialist economic system, wrote a number of essays on economic theory that influenced the Maoist position on the subject.
Note that here that by this point Mao Zedong Thought is no longer the product of one individual, it’s a collective endeavor. Mao’s writings, speeches and instructions after the founding of the Republic are nowhere mentioned.
Then certain people concluded that: Mao Zedong Thought is not Mao Zedong Thought; Non-Mao Zedong Thought is also Mao Zedong Thought; Mao Zedong Thought is not erroneous Mao Zedong Thought; Mao Zedong Thought is correct Mao Zedong Thought; Early Mao Zedong Thought is Mao Zedong Thought, Late Mao Zedong Thought is not.
A little baffling, huh? Can an ideology so confused and convoluted really be invincible?
In reality, the Mao Zedong Thought that lead the Communists to victory prior to 1949 and then lead them to seize political power, is itself not without flaws.
Documents reveal that during the period of Anti-Japanese resistance, Mao’s general policy was to devote 10% of the party’s energies to resisting Japan, 20% to dealing with Nationalist and Soviet condemnation, and 70% to developing base areas and overall military strength.
The only famous battles the Communist Party conducted were the ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive’ and the ‘Battle of Pingxingguan’. Even these two famous battles were severely criticized by Mao, to the extent that when Peng Dehuai was attacked during the Cultural Revolution, the battles were included in his list of crimes. As far as Mao was concerned, Anti-Japanese resistance was a crime.
For this reason, he cautioned his generals, “You mustn’t assume that Anti-Japanese resistance is patriotic, it is patriotism for the nation of Chiang Kai Shek. Our motherland, like every other communist party in the world, is the Soviet Union.” Expanding on this theme, he continued, “We should let the Japanese occupy more territory, in order to form ‘Three Kingdoms’, The Japanese, Chiang’s and ours. This scenario is most beneficial for us, it would be disastrous if the Japanese captured the whole country, but we needn’t worry about that, we could always rely on the Soviets to help us reclaim territory!”
Stationed in Yanan during the period of Anti-Japanese resistance, Comintern liaison officer and TASS news agency correspondent, Peter Vladimirov noted the following in his diary:
“The Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, since the start of 1941, have actually ceased fighting against Japan, the Hundred Regiments Campaign was their final battle. Both were instructed that, any sort of operation against the Japanese was forbidden, without exception. If they encountered Japanese aggression, they should run.”
“The Eighth Route Army did not take the initiative in carrying out military operations to restrain the aggression of the Japanese invaders, they limited themselves to feeble defensive operations in Communist base areas. If attacked by enemies they would flee to the mountains, avoiding conflict.”
“Preserve the strength of the Eighth Route Army at any cost”
“Mao Zedong believed that taking part in the Anti-Japanese resistance was a mistake, it was only one element in the plan to launch a civil war”
“Mao using the camouflage of Anti-Japanese resistance, captured territory, in order to expand his base for the future civil war against the Nationalists.”
“All of Mao’s activities were geared toward preparing for civil war, as the Japanese invaders devastated their homeland, they launched a war against the Nationalists.”
“Mao endorsed the formation of a united front, but did everything in his power to destroy it, he was primarily responsible for the split among anti-Japanese forces… the split naturally was in the interests of the invaders. By sabotaging the united front strategy, he strengthened the position of dozens of Japanese divisions.”
“I once arrived at a village surrounded by a unit of He Long‘s troops, inside the village was a small number of Japanese soldiers, I asked one of He Long’s men why they hadn’t eliminated them, he explained that his superiors told him that if we didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother us. It was in this way that the Communists lived in harmony with the Japanese. The Eighth Route Army’s propaganda was directed against the Kuomintang, military planning was also directed against them, as a result almost all Japanese operations were successful.”
“After arriving at the front line, I was certain that the Communist leadership had no intention of waging war against the Japanese, instead they saw resistance as an opportunity to establish bases, they let the Japanese and the Kuomintang fight each other, if the Japanese defeated the nationalists, the power of the central government would be undermined, giving the Eighth Route Army the opportunity to immediately infiltrate those areas, and if necessary, eliminate their united front allies in order to seize power. Before the enemy attacked, Mao would flee and look for ways to make the Nationalists and the Japanese come into direct conflict”
In 1937, Communists troops comprised less than 30,000 men, by the time the Japanese surrendered, their numbers had grown to over 1.2 million. As soon as Japanese defeat was assured, they promptly sent troops to every Japanese-occupied city to accept surrender, snatching the fruits of victory. Meanwhile Mao accused Chiang of the same thing, “He sat atop Emei Mountain watching the tigers fight, then came down to pick the spoils”
From the plethora of documents we now have access to, we can see that it was actually Mao who was holed up in Yanan, letting the Japanese and Nationalists fight, gradually accumulating strength until the moment to pick the spoils arrived. During the period of Anti-Japanese resistance, what exactly was Mao doing in Yanan? Most famously he promoted the ‘Emergency Rescue Movement’ and the ‘Rectification Movement’. The former involved indoctrinating a large number of anti-Japanese youths and putting them to use a spies, the latter was centred on the criticism of Peng Dehuai’s Hundred Regiments Offensive, and also criticized Wang Ming and Zhou Enlai for accepting the guidance of the Kuomintang during the united front alliance.
The Kuomingtang battlefront was the genuine ‘blood-soaked war’, the true ‘bitter fight to the end’. While this was going on, Mao, at Yanan, ‘rectified’ Anti-Japanese radicals, he cheated on his wife Hi Zizhen with his English teacher Lily Wu, which led to their divorce. After she was out of the picture, he married Jiang Qing.
During his critique of Peng Dehuai in 1959, Mao again settled old scores, claiming that “The Hundred Regiments Offensive helped our enemies”. Elaborating, he explained, “Some comrades believed that the less territory occupied by the Japanese, the better, later they came to realize that letting the Japanese take more territory was still patriotic. Otherwise we’d become patriots of the nation of Chiang Kai Shek.”
Now, after reading the above, one will find nothing strange about Mao’s comments below.
On the 24th of January 1961, Mao Zedong met with Japanese Socialist Party politician Hisao Kuroda. Mao told him that “in the past, The Japanese Imperial Army occupied more than half of China, this taught the Chinese people a valuable lesson. If it were not for the Japanese invasion, we’d still be up in the mountains, incapable of visiting the capital and watching Beijing opera. It’s precisely the Japanese occupation that allowed us to established so many Anti-Japanese bases, which created the conditions for our victory in the war of liberation. If I have to thank anyone it’d be the Japanese Imperial Army for invading China.”
On the 10th of July 1964, when Mao Zedong met the chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party Sasaki Kozo in Beijing, he told him, “One time when I was speaking with a Japanese friend, he said, ‘We’re so very sorry about the Japanese invasion of China.’ I replied, ‘Don’t be! If it weren’t for the Japanese occupying more than half of Chinese territory, the Chinese people would not have been able to unite and overcome Chiang Kai Shek and seize political power. The Japanese Imperial Army were our saviors.’”
Sasaki Kozo offered an apology, “Today I heard Chairman Mao talk in an extraordinarily magnanimous manner. In the past, Japanese militarism lead to the invasion of China, causing great harm, we all feel much regret.” Mao immediately responded, “There’s nothing to apologize about. Japanese militarism brought great benefit to China, it helped the Chinese people seize power. Without your Imperial Army, it would’ve been impossible. On this one point, we’re in disagreement, we have a contradiction.” The audience laughed and became animated. Mao continued, “We don’t need to dwell on that chapter of history. The Japanese invasion can be considered a good thing, it was a tremendous help.”
In 1972, when China and Japan established diplomatic relations, Mao formally met with Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, and again reiterated this same opinion. After Prime Minister Tanaka officially apologized on behalf of the Japanese government for the invasion, Mao responded, “No need for apologies, you provided a great service, were it not for the Japanese invasion how could we have become so powerful? How could we have seized power? How could we have defeated Chiang Kai Shek?” Mao continued, expressing his gratitude, “How can we possibly thank you? We don’t want your war reparations!”
I needn’t go on any further, after all what’s more important: resisting Japan’s attempt to wipe out the Chinese people or the Communist Party seizing political power? For any Chinese patriot the answer is obvious, as is the difference between loving your country and selling it out. What Maoism truly represents is also quite obvious.
Maoist Miscellany 