Mao Zedong Read online

  Table of Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - A Child of Hunan

  Chapter 2 - Self-Strengthening

  Chapter 3 - Casting Around

  Chapter 4 - Into the Party

  Chapter 5 - Workers and Peasants

  Chapter 6 - The Long Retreat

  Chapter 7 - Crafting the Image

  Chapter 8 - Taking Over

  Chapter 9 - The Ultimate Vision

  Chapter 10 - Bleak Harvest

  Chapter 11 - Fanning the Flames

  Chapter 12 - Embers

  NOTES

  FOR MORE FROM JONATHAN D. SPENCE, LOOK FOR THE

  FORTHE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FORTHE

  Praise for Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence

  “Robust ... this is an intelligent, adroitly presented, informative overview of the historical figure known for ‘orchestrated’ political purges and the ’unorchestrated’ terrors of the Cultural Revolution. It provides a balanced view written with the sure hand of the knowledgeable historian.” —Book

  “The task of bringing Mao to a large, non-specialist audience is one for which Spence is eminently well-suited. His lucidly written, com pellingly narrated explorations of modern Chinese history have attracted a readership unmatched by that of any other academic China specialist. His study of Mao is short ... his writing tight, his judgments restrained.” —The Washington Post

  “An elegant account, at once sparse and robust.” —The Economist

  “Spence ... compresses Mao’s story into a read-on-a-plane format, a task he accomplishes without sacrificing his academic rigor.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “An exceptionally successful contribution to Penguin’s series of brief biographies.”—The New Yorker

  “Simple but to the point.... Spence ... draws upon his extensive knowledge of Chinese politics and culture to create an illuminating picture of Mao.... Superb.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Jonathan Spence [is] a eloquent chronicler of Chinese history.... [A] brisk, elegant book.... Spence skillfully uses Mao’s letters and poems to explore the Chinese leader’s thinking and relationships.”—USA Today

  “There is no better person to write a general, readable account of Mao than Spence, an acclaimed Chinese historian and author of several biographies.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Fluid and informative despite its brevity.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Spence is the best known and most talented historian of China writing in English today.... His Mao Zedong succeeds.” —Los Angeles Times

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan Spence’s eleven books on Chinese history include The Gate of Heavenly Peace and The Death of Woman Wang. He teaches at Yale University. His awards include a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright© Jonathan Spence, 1999

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, edited by Tony Saich.

  E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York; Mao’s Road to

  Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949, volumes I, II, III, edited by Stuart R. Schram.

  E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York; Red Star Over China

  by Edgar Snow.

  Map illustration by James Sinclair

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07704-7

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Annping

  Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are “the best of kings.”... Seen as they were, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous.

  William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays

  FOREWORD

  MAO’S BEGINNINGS were commonplace, his education episodic, his talents unexceptional: yet he possessed a relentless energy and a ruthless self-confidence that led him to become one of the world’s most powerful rulers. He was one of the toughest and strangest in China’s long tradition of formidable rulers who wielded extraordinary powers neither wisely nor well, and yet were able to silence effective criticism for years or even decades by the force of their own character and the strength of their acolytes and guards. Mao need not have done what he did, and it was he alone who ensured that his visions of social and economic change became hopelessly enmeshed with violence and fear. It was his rhetoric and his inflexible will that led to the mobilization of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, who—even when they wished to—could find no way to halt the cataract of energy swirling around them.

  Those who endured Mao’s worst abuses execrate his memory. Those who benefited from his policies and his dreams sometimes still revere him, or at least remember the forces that he generated with a kind of astonished awe. In the end it was really only physical decay and weakness that brought him down, even though his chosen policies had long been shown to be full of inconsistencies and what Mao himself termed “contradictions.”

  One goal of this book is to show how Mao was able to rise so high, and sustain his eccentric flight for quite so long. Context was naturally intrinsic to the drama, and the narrative tries to introduce the essential background that any reader needs to make sense of Mao’s life. Historians in China and the West are slowly hauling Mao back down to earth, deflating the myths that sustained him, even as they often exclaim over the patience and deliberation with which Mao and his confidants constructed those same myths. We are learning more about Mao’s relations with his family, friends, and confidential assistants; and Mao’s own youthful writings, his poems, original drafts of several key speeches, and a good many surviving personal letters help us get some way into his mind. But many of the wilder flights of Mao’s fancy, and the remarkable efforts he expended to attain them, take the historian out into a different zone, where the well-tried tools of exploration are of only limited help.

  I have come to think of the enigmatic ar
ena in which Mao seemed most at home as being that of order’s opposite, the world of misrule. In the European Middle Ages it was customary for great households to choose a “Lord of Misrule.” The person chosen was expected to preside over the revels that briefly reversed or parodied the conventional social and economic hierarchies. The most favored time for the lords’ misrule was during the twelve days of Christmas, but they might preside, too, at other festivals or saints’ days. When the brief reign of misrule was over, the customary order of things would be restored: the Lords of Misrule would go back to their menial occupations, while their social superiors resumed their wonted status.

  In the European examples with which we are familiar, the period of misrule was expected to be strictly limited, and the intention of the entire exercise was lighthearted. But sometimes the idea of Lord of Misrule would spill over from the realm of revel to the realm of politics. Milton wrote of the “loud misrule of Chaos,” and the need to overcome it if the purpose of creation were to be realized. In the seventeenth century, some churchmen applied the Lord of Misrule label to Oliver Crom well. The term also came to have sexual connotations, as in John Lyly’s sixteenth-century play Endymion, when the hero declaims that “love is a Lorde of Misrule, and keepeth Christmas in my corps.” Similar types of reversals could be found in many other European societies: in some, the apprentices took over from their guild masters for a reckless day or two, in others gender roles were reversed for a day as the women took over the tasks and airs normally associated only with men.

  Chinese philosphers also loved the paradoxes of status reversed, the ways that wit or shame could deflate pretension and lead to sudden shafts of insight. Even if they did not specify the seasons, they knew the dizzying possibilities inherent in turning things upside down. To Chinese thinkers, the aspects of misrule were always embedded within the concept of order, for they were natural dialecticians, and understood that everything contains within itself the seeds of its own opposite.

  It was Mao’s terrible accomplishment to seize on such insights from earlier Chinese philosophers, combine them with elements drawn from Western socialist thought, and to use both in tandem to prolong the limited concept of misrule into a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval. To Mao, the former lords and masters should never be allowed to return; he felt they were not his betters, and that society was liberated by their removal. He also thought the customary order of things should never be restored. There would be no Twelfth Night to end the Christmas season. The will of most people seemed frail to Mao, their courage to bear the pain of change pathetically limited. So Mao would achieve the impossible for his countrymen by doing their thinking for them. This Lord of Misrule was not a man who could be deflected by criticisms based on conventional premises. His own sense of omniscience had grown too strong for that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I OWE THE WARMEST THANKS to several people for their help with this book. Zhao Yilu was indefatigable in locating and translating recent Chinese sources on Mao and his family, and Argo Caminis made a broad computer review of recent Western sources. Professor Zhang Guangda read the first draft with care, and alerted me to several problems. Lorenz Luthi gave me copies of some important sources I had missed. Jesse Cohen’s editorial suggestions were sharply on target. Betsy and Julie Mc-Caulley, and Peggy Ryan, typed the drafts with their customary unflappable precision in the face of imminent deadlines. And Annping Chin, besides helping with Mao’s poetry, kept me always alert to what his actions and visions had meant to others.

  1

  A Child of Hunan

  MAO ZEDONG WAS BORN in late 1893, at a time when China was sliding into one of the bleakest and most humiliating decades in its long history. The Qing dynasty, which had ruled China with a firm hand for two hundred and fifty years, was falling apart, no longer understanding either how to exercise its own power or how to chart the country’s course into the future. For over thirty years the Qing rulers had been trying to reorganize their land and naval forces, and to equip them with modern Western weapons, but in 1894 their proud new navy was obliterated by the Japanese in a short, bloody war that also brought heavy casualties to the Chinese ground forces. Victorious, the Japanese staked out major spheres of influence in southern Manchuria—once the ancestral home of the Qing rulers—and also annexed the Chinese island of Taiwan, transforming it into a Japanese colony. Before the century was out, the Germans had seized areas of north China, near the birthplace of China’s ancient sage Confucius, the British had expanded the territory they dominated in central China, along the Yangtze River, and the French were pushing their influence into China’s mountainous southwest. In 1898, an emperor with a broad view of the need for economic and institutional change was ousted in a palace coup only a hundred days after he began his reform program. And in 1900, as the old century ended, rebels in north China seized Beijing, and by killing scores of foreigners and thousands of Chinese Christian converts, brought upon their country an armed invasion of reprisal by a combined force of eight foreign nations.

  These catastrophic political events occurred as other elements of Chinese society were feeling the stirrings of change. In some of China’s large coastal cities like Shanghai and Canton, a class with many of the traits of the Western bourgeoisie began to emerge. Some members of this new Chinese middle class had been educated in missionary schools and had acquired a knowledge of Western science, religion, and political structures; others were exploring new aspects of business, discovering the effectiveness of advertising, distributing foreign goods inland, and experimenting with new forms of labor organization in their fledgling factories. This new middle class also began to subscribe to Chinese-language newspapers and journals that advocated political and social change, to use the postal and telegraph services newly installed by foreign companies, and to travel on China’s rivers by steamer. But in a largely rural, inland province like Hunan, where Mao was born, such changes were barely felt. Only in the Hunan capital of Changsha might one have found a considerable clustering of self-styled reformers, and their eyes were turned more toward the far-off east coast cities than into the unchanging villages and farms that were spread all around them.

  Mao Zedong was born in a sprawling courtyard house with a tiled roof in one of these farm villages, called Shaoshan, about thirty miles south and slightly west of Changsha. The exact date was December 26, 1893. He began to work on his parents’ farm at the age of six, and after he was enrolled in the village primary school at the age of eight, he continued to do farm work in the early mornings and in the evenings. Their farm was small by Western standards, around three acres, but in that area of Hunan such a farm was considered a decent size, more than enough to support a family if well managed. As soon as his reading and writing skills were good enough Mao also began to help his father keep the family accounts, since his father had only two years of schooling. Mao stayed in primary school until some time in 1907, when he was thirteen and a bit; at that point he left school and began to work full time for his father, who had prospered in the meantime, buying at least another acre of land, hiring a paid laborer to help in the work, and expanding into bulk grain trade.

  Mao’s mother was born in an adjoining county, southwest of Shaoshan; although her birthplace was just the other side of a range of hills, in that highly localized rural society she grew up speaking a dialect that was quite distinct from her husband’s. She bore seven children altogether—two daughters and five sons—but only three survived, all boys. Mao Zedong was the eldest of these three survivors, born when his mother was twenty seven. The few records we have concerning his childhood and early adolescence suggest a timeless world, rooted in long-standing rural Chinese patterns of expectation and behavior. For months on end in his early childhood, Mao lived with his maternal grandparents and must have absorbed some of their gentler outlook on life—his father had served as a soldier in the provincial army before returning to the farm, and always had a quick temper and firm views. Family discussions often
focused on his mother’s Buddhism—she was a devout believer, while her husband was a skeptic. The young Mao was caught between the two, but sympathetic to his mother’s point of view. She had a kind of “impartial love,” he said of her in his funeral eulogy (she died in 1919 at the age of fifty-three), “that extended to all, far or near, related or unrelated.” He added that his mother “never lied or cheated. She was always neat and meticulous. Everything she took care of would be put in order. She was clear in thinking, adept in analyzing matters. Nothing was neglected, and nothing was misplaced.”

  Despite Mao’s love for his mother, it was his father who laid out the lines of the boy’s life: there would be five years of study in the Shaoshan village school, with a traditional teacher, in time-honored texts from the Confucian canon emphasizing filial behavior and introducing some aspects of early Chinese history from the first millennium B.C. There seems to have been no suggestion that Mao should do more than acquire basic literacy to help on the family farm; no hints, for example, that Mao might strive to pass the first level of the state examination system that would edge him toward the rural gentry life of those trained to work in the bureaucracy. In any case, if there had been such an intent, it would have vanished in 1905, just before Mao left school, when the court in Beijing announced the end of the exam system based on knowledge of Confucian classics. Mao’s father encouraged his eldest son to be adept at calculation on the abacus; he had plans to apprentice the boy to work in a rice shop. If he valued his son’s literacy for anything more than its teaching of filial behavior and practical book-keeping, it was so that his son’s knowledge of classical texts and use of some well-chosen quotations, produced at the right moment, “could help him in winning lawsuits.”