Interpreting Mao -- Beijing Review

Thirty years ago, Chairman Mao Zedong died in Beijing at the age of 83. On the occasion of the September 9 anniversary of his death, Beijing Review asked scholars to discuss the legacy of the most legendary state leader that modern China has ever seen.

Merle Goldman, Professor Emerita of History at Boston University and an associate of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, Thomas Paul Bernstein, a political science professor and member of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University, and Yang Kuisong, a history professor at Peking University, shared their opinions with Beijing Review reporters Wang Yanjuan and Chen Wen in New York and Li Li in Beijing.

Goldman: I think that China's high rate of literacy, the rise in the position of women, improved health care and the beginning of the building of a modern infrastructure were due to the leadership of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.

Bernstein: When one goes to China, you will see a remarkable amount of admiration for Mao. Among ordinary people, like the taxi drivers, they often keep a portrait of Chairman Mao. People say he was tough, and he managed to unite the country and he eliminated foreign influence on China.

Yang: Mao's influence still can be seen everywhere in China, from the jumbo sculptures in many city squares, airports and colleges to the portraits decorating the walls of the farmers' homes in poverty-stricken areas. Many of China's social problems today can find their source in Mao's era, such as the severe inequality between cities and rural areas and the harsh criticism on the Internet over the yawning wealth gap.

How do you view Mao's role in founding the People's Republic of China in 1949 and why could Mao achieve this success? What do you think Mao brought to the Chinese people?

Goldman: Mao had the strategy to reunite China after 60 years of disunion by the use of military force and attention to the needs of the farmers.

Bernstein: He was a great state builder and a person who was chiefly responsible for China's standing up-recovering its place as a power that had to be taken seriously, even though it was still a weak country, but a country very different from the one before 1949. That's his greatness.

He had the determination to forge ahead and transform China, making it an industrialized nation and implementing all the socialist and communist ideals. But he did it at a sharply accelerated pace. The original idea was to maintain new democracy for maybe 50 years before moving ahead into socialism and to lay a solid foundation for the socialist transformation. I think a lot of people in China, intellectuals, regret the fact that the new democracy had such an abbreviated life, you know, the socialist transformation was class struggle and the ending of the private sector, and came much too early and much too abruptly. I think China should have taken a much more gradual road.

Yang: As the founding father of the People's Republic of China, Mao was the only Communist Party leader who dared to use military tactics and to change the scheme of class struggle at will to defeat the enemies. Although he managed to destroy an old world, he failed to construct an ideal new world. His mistake lies in clinging to the experiences of class struggle in guiding the social transition and reconstruction. The aftermath is that people fell into the mire of political struggles after the brief excitement of peaceful development.

Bernstein: The interesting thing about Mao is that he had this utopian side-transformed new men and women, unselfish society and things like that. And then he had a very realistic streak. I think over time, the utopian aspect prevailed over the realistic aspect, and the Chinese people paid a great price for that. But when he was in his realistic mode, he understood that you can't get along without material incentives; you can't get along without improving people's standard of living.

I think there are a lot of negative lessons that his successors have learned. Class struggle has its limits; it may be good for the takeover period, in a time when you have landlords and counterrevolutionaries around, and this permanent labeling creates a kind of caste: outcasts. Constant campaigns are too destructive to orderly growth.

One can take his works and find very sensible things. You can pluck out the sensible things and study those. But that of course isn't the whole Mao. You can use them today but you're not really using the full Mao; you're only using part of him.

Yang: The influence is mainly spread by the governing Communist Party of China, which publicizes an ideology glorifying Mao through media and education. Meanwhile, Mao's theories on egalitarianism and class struggle are still latently affecting many people's minds.

Mao is widely noted for starting the revolution from the countryside. How do you think the drastic effect Mao had on rural China is playing out today?

Goldman: First of all, he and the Communist Party had the strategy to unite China after 50 to 60 years of disunion; that was very important. Second, he and the Communist Party provided an education for a whole younger generation. That means that today's China has a literacy rate of close to 90 percent. Remember this is a country of 1.3 billion people, but with a very high literacy rate. Third, he raised the position of women. [It's] very important in trying to understand what's going on today.

Mao and the Communist Party began building the infrastructure in this period. And finally, and maybe just as important, the health care of the Chinese-China had a life expectancy of that of a developed country, even though it was a very, very poor country. And we made fun of those barefoot doctors who went from village to village. But they did something very important; they went into the villages, they cleaned up the water, they gave injections, they moved on. But China's life expectancy certainly was very much prolonged.

So when Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s and began the economic reforms, he had a literate, healthy population that's ready to respond. And I think those factors are very important in understanding what happened.

Yang: Mao used to be the savior of poor farmers in China. Meanwhile, due to his blind worship of the Soviet Union model, Mao regarded farmers and their private land as potential threats to realizing Soviet Union-style socialism. He also believed that industrialization should be based on the sacrificing of farmers' interests. Thus, through the implementation of the commune system for land ownership and the hukou [residence registration] system in the 1950s, farmers were put in a disadvantageous position again. Although today farmers have regained the right of free migration, compared with city residents, they are still victims of Mao's policies

The Chinese people say, in the words of Deng Xiaoping, that Mao was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad. Do you think this legacy will evolve in the years to come?

Goldman: When I teach my class I evaluate Mao as 30 percent good and 70 percent bad. The 30 percent are the points I made above-the strategy for uniting China, providing universal education, health care and raising the position of women. But then Mao persecuted the intellectuals whom he needed to modernize the country; he carried out the Great Leap Forward campaign in the 1950s, and launched the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which undermined the earlier reforms and caused chaos, disunion and bloodshed.

Bernstein: I don't think one can put percentage terms on it. I don't think these percentages are meaningful. Given the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, if any percentage, I would say 70 percent bad and 30 percent good, simply because they set China back so much. Mao had heavy responsibility for this. That weighs very heavily on the evaluation of Chairman Mao.

Yang: Deng's judgment is regarded as the most accurate by the Communist Party. The successive Party leaders believe they are entitled to inherit the statesmanship of Mao without needing to bear his mistakes. They know that any campaign criticizing Mao, like Khrushchev's indictment of Stalin in 1956, would invite trouble for themselves. Therefore as long as the Communist Party is the governing party, Deng's judgment over Mao will be stuck to.

Bernstein: Despite the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the "cultural revolution"(1966-76), Mao did lead a much stronger country that had economic and military achievements. I don't know how the Chinese people really feel; it's hard to gauge.

There is another aspect of Mao that one needs to take seriously. When you compare Mao with Stalin, Stalin pretended to have a well thought-out ideology, to be an innovator of Marxism, but Mao really did think about fundamentals of socialist and communist development. The result was terrible, but in the mid-1950s, in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao made his "Contradictions Among People" speech. I think this is still a guiding principle for China today. There are interest conflicts in China among the people as well. There are not necessarily contradictions between people and enemies among the people. Now there are more and more conflicts in China. Mao recognized that at a very early stage. I think he was the first one in the communist camp to recognize that. Mao knew the contradictions between farmers and workers, between Han and minorities, between towns and cities, between heavy industry and light industry.

Yang: The most important legacy of Mao is the regime that continues today. The regime has achieved unification of the country, which previous governments had failed to do for a long time.

Another important legacy from Mao is the failed egalitarian ideals and practices. Although Mao's try in this regard ended up a total failure, it still was the utmost attempt to pursue equal distribution in modern history. That still recalls Mao and Mao's era to many Chinese people.