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In 2005, the British publisher Jonathan Cape launched Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, to great fanfare. The book pictures Mao as a liar, ignoramus,… - in short, a monster, equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin.…

For the most part, the reviewers in this volume [Was Mao Really A Monster?] confine themselves to questioning Chang and Halliday’s methods and approaches, their treatment of specific issues and events, and their judgement. On the whole, they do not tackle the wider question of whether the Chinese Revolution was, on balance, good or bad for China. Chang and Halliday’s answer is, of course, that it was irredeemably bad. The Chinese Revolution was not only unnecessary and undesirable but a disaster. This theory is comforting for opponents of radical change everywhere and explains why Western conservative establishments hailed the book with such glee and deference. In what remains of this introduction, we make a counterargument in the revolution’s critical defence at a time when revisionist histories of the great social revolutions are in the ascendancy.

Chang and Halliday explain the Chinese Revolution as the evil product of one man at the head of a conspiracy of dupes and slaves. Their book is essentially the story of a court intrigue, what Barmé calls ‘ despot-centred history’. They erase the active contribution of men and women other than Mao from the events they describe – even major leaders like Zhou Enlai are discounted, as Mao’s servile tools. Mao is shown to win out over his fellow conspirators by exercising greater viciousness and cunning. The authors talk almost exclusively about conspiracy and manipulation. They say practically nothing about the revolution’s social, economic, political and cultural setting. The intellectual context that shaped Mao’s and his fellow leaders’ ideas vanishes almost entirely from sight in their view of it. In contrast, serious studies treat the Chinese Revolution as a complex, creative process in which millions of ordinary Chinese pursued their transforming visions in interaction with the party and its leaders.21 When others’ agency and the historical context are restored to view in this way, the revolution appears in a quite different light.

At the time of its founding in 1921, the CCP was inspired by noble aims. Its founders had stepped out of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s, which campaigned for enlightenment, democracy, women’s liberation, social justice, internationalism and the resolution of China’s crisis of sovereignty. Its first General Secretary, Chen Duxiu, pioneered China’s democracy movement in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, the humanist and universalist values for which he stood continued to inspire the party. In 1929, however, he was expelled as a Trotskyist. At the time of his expulsion, he reminded the other party leaders that ‘democracy is a necessary instrument for any class that seeks to win the majority to its side’ and warned against the suppression of dissident viewpoints.22 Although his former comrades dismissed these ideas as ‘bourgeois’, the party carried on its struggle for a ‘new democratic revolution’ with the support not only of the rural and urban poor but also of many educated Chinese. Li Dazhao, another founder of the CCP who died a martyr in 1927, also championed the idea of national, social and individual liberation and insisted on the necessary coherence of individualism, socialism and liberalism in a democratic system of ‘commoners’ politics’.23

The party’s drift towards bureaucratic centralism started in the mid 1920s with its ‘Bolshevization’ – the imposition of ‘iron discipline’ and extreme centralism of the sort promoted by the Communist International in Moscow, particularly under Stalin. Bolshevization of this sort was speeded by the communists’ defeat in the cities in 1927 and their immersion in the countryside, where they switched to a strategy of armed struggle. Geared up for war, party leaders stressed the need for regimentation, secrecy and top-down command. In the villages, they came to see themselves as the sole source of decision and authority. The administration they formed in Beijing in 1949 reflected this experience of infallible command. It was run from above, along authoritarian lines, and based explicitly on a statist model, despite Mao’s efforts to combat bureaucracy and Stalinist dogmatism.

However, it is important to contextualize these turns in the party’s strategic thinking and organizational methods, for it faced powerful enemies on all fronts and constant white terror. To historicize the revolution is not to defend its weaknesses, mistakes and crimes. Although tragically deformed by its militarization, rustication, and Stalinization, the party continued to retain many of its founding goals and characteristics. After the Long March, when the Red Army battled its way north at the cost of enormous losses, the party spearheaded the resistance in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. In the rural areas after 1945, it led the poor in transforming their local communities. In the villages in the revolutionary years and in the cities after 1949, it changed women’s lives for the better – not completely, but nevertheless massively. Chiang Kai-shek, by comparison, failed to reform the agrarian economy, was an ineffectual leader against Japan, did little to improve women’s status, ruled over an unjust society, and headed a brutal, corrupt and reactionary regime.
Chang and Halliday focus exclusively on the failures of the revolution, including the disastrous outcome of the Great Leap Forward and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The picture they give is thus distorted and incomplete. Rounded studies of the Mao years argue that the CCP’s achievements outweighed its failures. Stuart Schram, the doyen of Mao studies, concluded in an essay published in 1994 on Mao’s legacy that at other times during his years in power, impressive rates of growth and technological exploits … were recorded.… Though the Great Leap Forward brought the peasants widespread misery rather than the promised collective prosperity and happiness, the successive phases in agrarian policy from 1946 onward destroyed the old landlord economy and thus laid the foundations for the emergence of a system of peasant smallholdings in the 1980s.24
The historian Maurice Meisner, a rigorous critic of Mao, argued in a lecture in 1999 that the Chinese communist victory and China’s subsequent socio-economic development ‘must be seen as one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century’. He concluded that despite ‘all the horrors and crimes that accompanied the revolution, … few events in world history have done more to better the lives of more people’.25

A balanced view of China in the decades of reconstruction after 1949 would also give full weight to the international environment. Blockades and threats by foreign powers created a fear of subversion that degenerated for long periods into cruel hysteria. Political controls tightened even further. Barry Naughton pointed out that resources were massively diverted from production and welfare spending to defence.26 As John Gittings noted in his review of Mao, ‘we should ask how far western (effectively US) hostility encouraged Mao’s radical turn from the mid-1950s onwards, fostering a climate of chauvinism from which China has not yet completely emerged’.27

Even some of Chang and Halliday’s admirers question the polemical onesidedness of their approach. Kristof, for example, felt obliged to remind his readers of Mao’s successes:

Land reform in China … helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women … moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao’s assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world’s new economic dragon.

Other triumphs included the steep rise in life expectancy after 1949, despite the famines, and China’s emergence as a strong and independent country. Even before the spectacular reform-induced growth, China was already leading much of the developing world in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, educational attainment and gender equality.28 Once ‘the sick man of Asia’, China awakened under Mao as a world power, a transformation inextricably tied in the minds of most Chinese to Mao’s very person.

Because Mao’s party never entirely turned its back on the ideals that gave birth to it, it continued to receive the support after 1949 of widely respected humanists like Liu Binyan, Wang Ruoshui and Su Shaozhi who used Marxism to criticize Deng Xiaoping and the post-Deng regime. Worker and peasant activists protested against some of the Deng-ite reforms by appealing to Mao’s revolutionary tradition.29 Among younger intellectuals, ‘new left’ thinking took off in the 1990s, disseminated by websites and other e-media.30 These responses from below are worth noting, for commentators outside China often fail to distinguish sufficiently between the CCP before and after 1978. Despite denouncing Mao while praising Deng, many such commentators talk of the Chinese ‘party’, ‘state’, and ‘regime’ as if they had not undergone remarkable transformations. Yet inside China, the post-1978 regime is criticized by some for its institutional and other systemic continuities with the 1949 revolution, while others regret the abandoning of old ideological tenets and socio-economic policies. The legacies of Maoism are highly pertinent to these debates in Chinese critical discourse.

Chang and Halliday start their book with the claim that Mao ‘was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader’, principally during the Great Leap Forward, when they say 38 million died. They also say Mao was not only indifferent to the thought of mass deaths but positively welcomed and even celebrated them. On this point of relative despotism, brutality and vileness, we round off this introduction. Apologists for the CCP often seek to minimize the effects of its political crimes and the social disasters it caused by resorting to analogies or comparisons with supposedly worse crimes and disasters perpetrated elsewhere. On the other hand, some of its critics try, through what Barmé calls ‘competitive body counting’, to cast Mao as the world’s greatest monster. But if it is dishonourable to use a comparative framework to disguise the extent of Chinese wrongdoing, it is also unacceptable to put Mao at the top of a league of modern atrocities without due regard for historical perspective, given that the twentieth century is littered with such tragedies and evils. This is especially true in China studies, where the claim that Mao outmonstered everyone risks chiming with the Sinophobic idea of a special ‘oriental’ despotism. As Bill Willmott points out, ‘So many people are keen to believe the worst about China, and this book will reinforce their beliefs. Already prejudiced readers will see the Chinese Revolution as nothing more than megalomaniacs killing each other and millions of others’.

Scholars have offered widely differing estimates of the death toll in China between 1959 and 1962, many of them far lower than Chang and Halliday’s. Wim Wertheim, emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam, reported in his review of Chang’s Wild Swans that Chinese scholars and demographers in the 1950s privately doubted the accuracy of the Census of 1953 upon which calculations of the scale of deaths are often based, on the grounds that it was carried out unscientifically and registered ‘an unbelievable increase of some 30 percent in the period 1947–1953’. Wertheim concluded that ‘the claim that in the 1960s a number between 17 and 29 million people was “missing” is worthless’ if one cannot say for certain that the population in 1953 was 600 million.31 Others, including Ping-ti Ho, an expert in Chinese demography, have pointed to many flaws in the 1953 ‘nationwide enumeration’. Further studies either sweepingly or partially at odds with Chang and Halliday’s could be cited.32 It is symptomatic of Chang and Halliday’s approach that they largely ignore such counter-arguments, which raise serious questions about their findings. Few would deny that the Great Leap led to a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Even admirers of Mao who support the Great Leap’s basic goals concede that it failed – because ‘the hierarchical, authoritarian party system was totally inappropriate for the leadership of a campaign which could only flourish on popular support’, according to Jack Gray.33 However, many would doubt the assumptions that underlie Chang and Halliday’s projections, and their lack of balance and perspective.

A closer look at modern death tolls suggests the record of the British Empire is at least as deplorable as China’s. Under the Raj between 1896 and 1900, more than ten million people died in avoidable famines out of a population little more than one third the size of China’s in 1960. In the Bengal famine of 1943, between three and seven million died, out of a population of 60 million. The 1943 famine was just one of a series of crises in colonial India that together resulted in millions of avoidable fatalities. Chang and Halliday might wish to object that the Bengal deaths were caused, at least in part, by the war, but Winston Churchill himself famously blamed them on the people’s tendency to ‘breed like rabbits’34 and historians attribute the severity of the crisis to British indifference and incompetence (Churchill thought the Indians ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans’). Needless to say, a proportionately far greater number died in Ireland under British rule in 1845–46. On an even larger scale, the Aboriginal population of Australia and the American Indian population were wiped out in many areas. In any case, the Great Leap deaths were unintended: any equation of them with colonial and racist genocides would be preposterous and indefensible.

We note these other tragedies and atrocities not to minimize the Chinese suffering between 1959 and 1962 but to provide the perspective Chang and Halliday ignore. Far from wishing to justify Mao’s policies in those years, each of us has, in writings stretching back over many years, rigorously and consistently criticized the crimes and errors committed under his rule. However, we reject Chang and Halliday’s indiscriminate approach to the catastrophe and their one-sided refusal to contextualize it or to consider accounts by other scholars and commentators that might undermine their own dogmatic certainty. An extreme example of the authors’ tendentiousness is their portrayal of Mao as a Chinese Hitler.35 They liken the effects of the famine caused by the Great Leap to the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz and draw a parallel between Mao’s communes and Hitler’s slave-labour camps. These analogies display a saddening lack of moral taste and historical judgement. Six million of Europe’s eight million Jews died in the Holocaust. Auschwitz was the chief instrument in Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. The Great Leap Forward, on the other hand, was designed to accelerate China’s industrialization and farm production. Chang and Halliday show no understanding of the dilemma Chinese communists faced in the late 1950s, as a result of China’s severe international isolation and the military blockade. In Chang and Halliday’s view, the Great Leap was a crime perpetrated by a madman. Others, however, see it as a fundamentally rational scheme to mobilize surplus rural labour in order to create local industry, improve rural infrastructure, and achieve national self-sufficiency, as a way of resolving the crisis caused by China’s quarantine. It also had a utopian dimension, rooted in a belief in the need for popular participation and self-government. That it went so catastrophically wrong was due to the manner of its implementation. No one ordered or desired the deaths. The Holocaust, in contrast, was a deliberate barbarity.

Readers will reach their own conclusions about whether Mao: The Unknown Story is good biography or caricature and propaganda, or a bit of both, or more the one than the other. We hope these essays help them make up their minds. Some may object that the selection is prejudiced against Chang and Halliday and therefore of little help in forming an opinion, yet there has been no bending of the stick. What might seem like bias reflects the weight of opinion in reviews by experts. Unlike the worldwide commercial media, which embraced the book with uncritical and even fawning adulation, most professional commentary has been disapproving. Such has been the avalanche of academic criticism that it is hard to fathom why the two authors apparently do not feel moved to answer it. Had they formulated a systematic defence against the many charges levelled at them, we would happily have published it here, but none has as yet transpired, three years after the criticisms first began appearing.36

Notes:
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23.Cf. Tong Shijun, ‘Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shi shang de minzhu guannian: Yige yi Li Dazhao wei zhuyao wen ben de taolun’ (The concept of ‘democracy’ in China’s modern thought: A discussion of Li Dazhao’s texts), in Yang Guorong, ed., Zhongguo xiandaihua jincheng de renwen xiangdu (The human dimension of China’s modernization process) Shanghai: Huadong Normal University Press, 2006, chapter 8. ↩
24.Stuart R. Schram, ‘Mao Zedong a Hundred Years On: The Legacy of a Ruler’, in Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, edited by Gregor Benton, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 2008, vol. 4, pp. 384–403, at p. 397. ↩
25.Maurice Meisner, ‘The Significance of the Chinese Revolution in World History’, London: LSE Asia Research Centre Working Papers 1, 1999, p. 1 and 12. ↩
26.Barry Naughton, ‘The Third Front: Defence Industrialisation in the Chinese Interior’, China Quarterly, no. 115 (September 1988), pp. 351–86. Chris Bramall notes that ‘consumption grew slowly in Maoist China primarily because of the American threat … China could only have avoided this fate by surrendering her sovereignty’. In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, p. 336. ↩
27.‘A Great Leap Backward’, The Guardian, 23 July 2005. ↩
28.Lu Aiguo and Manuel Montes, eds, Poverty, Income Distribution and Well-Being in Asia During the Transition, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 8–9. See also Amartya Sen on ‘China’s excellent achievements’ in raising the quality of life for women in education, health, employment and other aspects of gender equality in Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf, 2000, p. 17. ↩
29.Anonymous, ‘Mao Zedong Forever Our Leader! A Statement in Commemoration of the 28th Anniversary of the Passing of Mao Zedong,’ in Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, vol. 4, pp. 180–2. ↩
30.This is a theme of Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, London: Pluto Press, 2008. ↩
31.‘Wild Swans and Mao’s Agrarian Strategy’, China Review, August 1995; quoted in Henry C. K. Liu, ‘Mao and Lincoln’, Asia Times online, http://www.atimes.com/ atimes/China/FD01Ad04.html, accessed 17 October 2008. See also Carl Riskin, ‘Seven Questions about the Chinese Famine of 1959–61’, Chinese Economic Review, vol. 9, no. 2 (autumn 1998), pp. 111–24. ↩
32.See, for examples, Penny Kane, Famine in China, 1959–61, London: Macmillan, 1988; Justin Yifu Lin and Dennis Tao Yang, ‘Food Availability, Entitlement and the Chinese Famine’, Economic Journal, vol. 110 (460), January 2000, pp. 136–58; and Li Chengrui, ‘Da yuejin yinqi de renkou biandong’ (Demographic change caused by the Great Leap)’, Dangshi yanjiu (Communist Party history research), no. 2, 1997, pp. 97–110. Notes 189 ↩
33.Jack Gray, ‘Mao in Perspective’, in Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, vol. 4, pp. 425–5, at p. 431. ↩
34.Quoted in Amartya Sen, ‘Nobody Need Starve’, Granta, no. 52 (winter 1995), pp. 213–10. ↩
35.In an interview about the book broadcast on 24 June 2005, on the BBC’s Hardtalk Extra, Chang told Mishal Husain that Mao was as evil as Hitler and Stalin. ↩
36.Chang and Halliday did briefly respond to Andrew Nathan’s review in The London Review of Books, but they refused permission for their response to be reprinted alongside the review in vol. 4 of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution.