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Omnipotent God-Emperor or Simply the Spark on a Tinderbox?

The Primacy of Mao in Cultural Revolution Historiography

Dahpon Ho

Chairman’s tomb and Emperor’s palace

face each other across the square,

One great leader in his wisdom

Made our countless futures bare.

—excerpt from a Chinese pro-democracy poem in 1978 (Spence, 661)

Although fully twenty-six years have elapsed since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the memory of his reign is something that countless people continue to struggle with. This has been true both for Western observers attempting to place Mao historically and for millions of Chinese whose lives were irrevocably changed by the successive revolutionary waves of the past half-century. Historiography and reflection on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Mao’s final contribution to China’s “continuous revolution,” have been characterized by some degree of ambivalence with regard to the primacy of Mao in defining the movement from beginning to end. Such views in some cases reflect the tenor of their times, as with the above poem from China’s brief democracy movement in the early years of the post-Mao era—the poet bitterly equated Mao with tyrants of the past and held him single-handedly responsible for the ruinous GPCR decade. In other instances, as will be touched upon in this essay, underlying assumptions, authorial motivations, and foci of inquiry shaped the emphasis or de-emphasis of Mao’s role in the Cultural Revolution.

That Mao played a pivotal role in promoting the GPCR, and that the immense power he wielded influenced its explosive events and its violent outcome, seem indisputable facts. The authors under consideration in this essay, as with all contributors to Cultural Revolution historiography, have been obliged to devote at least some attention to his personage and/or ideology. However, they are not uniform in their interpretations of precisely how significant Mao was to the events of the GPCR, nor do they allot him the same priority in their respective discussions. Some authors emphasize Mao’s primary role and machinations in elite politics to assign him blame for a Cultural Revolution gone awry; in contrast, some authors confine their treatment of Mao to background generalities and focus instead on the role of independent actors and the choices they made amidst the chaos. Differences in methodological foci and topic are possible founts to which such discrepancies may be attributed, but authorial intentions deserve even more scrutiny. Value judgments also play a part in shaping the discourses on Mao’s role. To what extent is a supposed primacy of Mao employed or negated to strengthen an author’s primary thesis? While this line of inquiry may seem largely speculative, it is hoped that a closer examination of how the primacy of Mao is utilized in various works of Cultural Revolution historiography may help us understand the diversity of responses that this tumultuous event has generated.

Red Guard Memoirs and Victims’ Accounts: The Shifting Eddies of Blame

For locating the primacy of Mao the accounts of Red Guards and victims of the Cultural Revolution are rich sources to begin with, precisely because they are so subjective by nature. In their attempts to recollect and rationalize their experiences during the ten years of turmoil, participants and victims—many people being both—are generally confounded with issues of conscience, guilt and moral responsibility. Consequently, where they place Mao in the grand scheme of things is often very much related to where they place themselves as actors or victims of the GPCR.

Dai Hsiao-Ai’s Red Guard experience, as recounted in Gordon Bennett and Ronald Montaperto’s Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-Ai, is one instance in which the author subscribes to the notion of Mao’s primary role in the Cultural Revolution. In Dai’s words, “Mao Zedong might have been born as a sun god. The Communist Party was created and developed by him alone; the country’s army was brought into being and cultivated by him alone; all successes and achievements were his alone, and he never made mistakes. More than ten years of education could not but strike some response within me” (Bennett and Montaperto, 101). Mao is portrayed as the “Great Helmsman” whose authority has been effectively drilled into the minds of impressionable schoolchildren. On another occasion Dai states: “We [Red Guards] knew nothing of the real meaning of the Cultural Revolution and could not imagine its significance” (Bennett and Montaperto, 71). By this account the student rebels of Canton are shown primarily as recipients of Mao’s instructions rather than independent initiators of revolution—their responses to the GPCR are in large part attributed to their intense political indoctrination and susceptibility to the organs of propaganda. Responsibility for the Cultural Revolution thus seems to fall more squarely on the shoulders of Mao, the helmsman charting the course from the top, rather than the ignorant and malleable masses.

Ken Ling’s Revenge of Heaven: From Schoolboy to “Little General” in Mao’s Army directly contradicts the notion that Red Guards were just “faithful tools” struggling to do Mao’s bidding. Rather, in his words, “mutual exploitation had become the real basis of the relationship between the central authorities and us” (Ling, 131). Ling goes on to describe how he, like other student leaders in Amoy, was motivated by a personal desire to prove his own willpower and courage, and how he thought of himself and his comrades as bold revolutionaries staging a new order: “Our basic premise was that we were the future masters of the country. Only after this basic premise was destroyed by Mao Zedong were we to realize too late that Mao had used us more than we did him.” (Ibid., 131) By positing the Red Guard organizations as independent actors in a mutual power struggle with the state, Ling attempts to dispel the myth that the Cultural Revolution was a one-way process whereby Mao used the students to accomplish his political goals. It is implied in Revenge of Heaven that Mao was the important spark that set off the blaze, but that the real movers of the Cultural Revolution were the ambitious young rebels at local levels who used Mao’s rhetoric to their own advantage. Moreover, Ling suggests the assumption of personal responsibility for his own actions in the revolution. He neither points blaming fingers at Mao nor castigates a “betrayal” of the revolution—rather, he suggests that in a tug-of-war of mutual exploitation between the Red Guards and the center, the Red Guards ultimately lost.

One might speculate that Ling’s motive for denying the primacy of Mao in the Red Guard movement is in part to aggrandize his own personal bravery and leadership in the movement by downplaying any suggestion of control by Mao. However, it may also be true that in fact Mao was not as much of a revolutionary prime mover as some have suggested. Another possibility is that a sense of personal conscience, such as Ling’s open self-blame for the death of his beloved during the factional fighting, may have motivated him to dispense with the easy pretense of blaming Mao for local excesses. Speculation aside, Ken Ling is certainly not the only writer who has declined to dwell upon the image of Mao’s all-importance—others, like Gao Yuan in Born Red, also suggest that much of the “revolutionary spirit” supposedly inspired by devotion to Mao was in actuality motivated by a combination of narrow self-interest and personal vendettas. In response to a request to join a classmate’s Red Guard organization, Gao’s words were: “Do you want me to give up my kingdom? Although I have only two followers, I am king. Why should I give up my throne to be your servant?” (Gao, 197) Gao also appears to believe in the proper assignment of local responsibility, and therefore he downplays the myth that Mao was at fault for everything. The accounts of Gao and Ling thus accentuate the accountability of Red Guards responding to local power conditions over the accountability of Mao. In general, Red Guard memoirs tend to encompass a range of different portrayals of Mao’s importance that is inversely proportional to the author’s assumption of local responsibility.

With regard to victims’ accounts, it seems reasonable to expect value judgments attached to role of Mao—the stories collected in Anne Thurston’s Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution are weighted toward the view that Mao is the primary culprit of the suffering caused by the GPCR. As a work of oral history, in which the words of the victims are ostensibly allowed to speak for themselves without excessive narrator intrusion, Thurston’s collection presents a vivid denunciation of Mao for his leadership in the Cultural Revolution. Thus interviewee Liu Zhiping is quoted as saying, “In the end, it [the GPCR] was one man, the authority of just one man. It was Mao Zedong,” and another victim, Bai Meihua, agreed: “I hate Mao…Mao began the Cultural Revolution. It was his Cultural Revolution, and for that I hate him” (Thurston, 283-4). Other interviewees also concurred to varying degrees that Mao, rather than the Gang of Four or other leaders, was responsible for the decade-long travail. However, in historiographical terms it seems to be Thurston’s own primary concern with presenting the Cultural Revolution as “a failure of morality” (Thurston, xix) that best explains the book’s emphasis on the primacy of Mao. Thurston employs the theme of Mao’s absolute authority as a tool to support her thesis that “the history of China…from 1949 to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is also the history of an erosion of moral values, a decline in the capacity of the Chinese people to make reasoned moral choices or even to recognize choices as moral” (Thurston, 279). The supposed primacy of Mao in the GPCR is thus expedient to Thurston’s claim that the lack of a rule of law, the elevation of Mao “beyond emperor to a god…near-slavish subservience, blind obedience, unquestioning faith…[and] the willing, even eager, sacrifice of their own freedom and independence of judgment” (Thurston, 284-5) all combined to make the GPCR an unmitigated moral disaster. Enemies of the People is a prime example of how the rhetoric of Mao’s overwhelming responsibility for the GPCR is employed to strengthen the author’s primary thesis, that of deplorable moral failure.

Overviews and Value Judgments

Liu Guokai’s A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution, in purporting to provide a profound analysis of “the movement’s essence,” undoubtedly draws upon the author’s value judgments in the construction of its third main theme, that of the moral comparison of the Cultural Revolution’s various groups. The manuscript was originally written in secret in 1971 as an explication of Liu’s alienation and disillusionment with the Maoist regime that had unleashed a massive movement and then brutally suppressed it. In this overview of the 1966-69 period, Liu devotes much effort to reconstructing Mao’s primary role in the three years of calamity, which he believes to be that of an “arch criminal” who exploited the masses “to establish absolute personal authority and a Maoist cult” (Liu, 29, 144). He relates the absolute authority of Mao with abuse of state power and a “fascistic” military (Liu, 137), clearly placing the brunt of blame on Mao for the violence and excesses of the GPCR. The primacy of Mao in this case is posited as a causal link for just about everything that went wrong in the “three chaotic years.”

A similar claim that during the GPCR Mao abused state power and “placed himself above the constitution and the law, [such that] the law actually ceased to be effective” can be found in Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao’s Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution (Yan and Gao, 531). Yan and Gao stress the dominant role of Mao in the GPCR as nothing less than another Stalin-like cult of supreme power, and characterize Mao’s purpose in unleashing the Cultural Revolution as a move to protect and prolong his absolute authority for personal gains. They heavily blame Mao for this “colossal catastrophe in which human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and civilization itself were unprecedentedly trampled…[and in which] the whole of China tumbled into insanity” (Yan and Gao, 529). In this case, it seems that the authors’ emphasis on the primacy of Mao has as much to do with their own intended value framework as the aforementioned examples of Anne Thurston and Liu Guokai had to do with their own respective value judgments. As a pro-democracy activist who was placed on a wanted list in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, Yan Jiaqi is undoubtedly critical of the current political system in China and its lack of a rule of law. To criticize the most extreme case of power abuse and lack of a rule of law (i.e. Mao’s Cultural Revolution) and to cast it—in their own words—as a “negative example making the Chinese people realize the importance of freedom, democracy, a legal system, and human rights,” (Yan and Gao, 530) could possibly be an instance of what Gottfried-Karl Kindermann has called an “old Chinese device of introducing the new by seemingly reinterpreting the old” (Cheng, 75).

In brief, what seems to be at stake for Thurston, Liu, and Yan and Gao in promoting an image of Mao’s utmost primacy is the issue of moral or political failure and the subsequent need for a rule of law where no single person’s authority can wantonly violate and trample the rights of another (Yan and Gao, 531). This may help explain, at least in part, why Liu Guokai’s castigation of Mao as an “archcriminal” who abused his unbridled power, Anne Thurston’s complaint that during the GPCR “there was in China no higher or separate moral code outside and beyond that of Party Chairman Mao Zedong, no agreed-upon principles of human behavior” (Thurston, 286), and Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao’s call for a rule of law are all grounded in a notion of Mao’s primacy in the Cultural Revolution.

Other Historical Studies: Paradigm without Presupposition

In contrast to the works described thus far, Hong Yung Lee’s Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution analyzes “Mao’s unique and decisive role” (Lee, 2) without passing blatant value judgments on his leadership. While arguing that Mao was the most responsible for setting the GPCR in motion and issuing key decisions at each stage of the movement, Lee qualifies his analysis by acknowledging that “Mao was [also] constrained by the expectations and pressures of various political groups, by his own ideological pronouncements, by his commitments to ideological goals, and by resources available to him at any given moment” (Lee, 329). Essentially, Lee proposes that Mao was but one of (albeit the most significant of) seven political actors whose interactions formed the “cleavages and coalitions” of the GPCR (Lee, 4). Lee’s multi-tiered approach, which examines the interactions of the seven political actors (Mao, the Cultural Revolution Small Group, the PLA, the Party organization, the government, the radical mass organizations, and the conservative mass organizations) operating on the levels of supreme leader, the elite, and the masses, reflects the disciplinary paradigms of political science. The primacy of Mao and Mao’s Thought is useful to Lee as a conceptual paradigm, a “rule of the game” (Lee, 343) that was generally adhered to by all actors, but not as a hegemonic discourse that stripped all actors of agency. By holding back from an assumption of Mao’s primacy, Lee is able to present a more intricate and nuanced view of the factional struggles and class divisions that considers the rational decisions of each group based on mutual interests. In this respect Lee’s work is of a superior standard to that of Liu Guokai and Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao.

Like Hong Yung Lee, Stanley Rosen approaches historical inquiry in the Cultural Revolution period in a manner informed by the methodology of political science. However, Rosen’s concern in Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou is centered “less on the elite level and more on the mass level” (Rosen, 98). This study focuses on contradictions in the Guangzhou education system that had built up years before the outbreak of the GPCR. Mao is not sought after as a source of blame for the factionalism that divided students movements of the Cultural Revolution; rather, Rosen locates spatially and temporally the growing tensions within the schools that made middle school students “contenders” in an educational system of shifting state priorities. In doing so, Rosen argues convincingly that “the arrival of the GPCR in one sense prevented a resolution of these [pre-1966] contradictions dividing China’s students; in another sense, however, the GPCR provided a lighted stage upon which these contradictions could be publicly played out” (Rosen, 5). Neither Rosen nor sociologist Jonathan Unger, who also writes on the Canton education system, is a proponent for the primacy of Mao. Unger’s Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980, for example, addresses the so-called “diploma disease” that had afflicted China’s secondary education system. Indeed, given the geographical focus of their case studies—well away from Mao and the “palace politics” of Beijing—both scholars naturally focus on the role of independent actors responding to local conditions rather than elite politics. At the same time, like Hong Yung Lee they do not reject the important influence of Mao and Mao Zedong Thought on the subjects that they study. Rather, they focus on the local subjects while keeping in the background Mao’s powerful image as a higher-level “rule of the game” that affected education reforms and the fate of the radical education system of the Cultural Revolution years. Thus, due to the nature of their research foci Rosen and Unger can be characterized as fairly neutral with respect to the primacy of Mao.

On the Power of Mao

Two final cases will be considered here. William Hinton’s Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village, and Frederick Tiewes and Warren Sun’s The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971 approach the question of Mao’s primacy with differing motives. Tiewes and Sun clearly support the idea that Mao possessed an almost unimaginably absolute authority, “a power comparable only to that exercised by the most awesome emperors,” and that the force of his personality dominated the Cultural Revolution in every respect—“slogans and the Mao cult [were] a game that was de rigueur for all actors, not just Lin Biao and the civilian radicals” (Tiewes and Sun, 163-4). They propose that Mao’s defining role in the Cultural Revolution was such that Lin Biao could not resist Mao’s web of power, that he became “tragically entrapped by his political system and political culture” (Tiewes and Sun, 166). The image of Mao’s primacy is thus highly compatible with Tiewes and Sun’s project to portray Lin Biao as a passive, un-ambitious, and ultimately tragic figure who was thoroughly used by Mao. The implication is that Mao, as the consummate wielder of power, is also in large part the repository of blame for the “tragedy” of the victim, Lin Biao as well as the excesses of the GPCR It is not surprising that the authors endorsed the omnipotent emperor paradigm in this context.

Hinton also ascribes power to Mao in abundance, especially after the 1959 Lushan sacrifice of Peng Dehuai, in the course of which “Mao shed a lot of democratic clothing, the garments of a comrade, in order to don, layer by layer, the vestments of a sovereign…as Mao rose, his colleagues fell from the status of companions to that of subjects” (Hinton, 256). While he decries Mao’s enthronement, Hinton lauds in principle Mao’s leadership of the utopian mass movements, especially “Mao’s supreme effort,” the Cultural Revolution. To Hinton, it seems that primacy of leadership does not necessarily connote the lion’s share of responsibility for the failures of the GPCR, as it did for writers like Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao. While the last chapter of Shenfan does point to “subjective failings on the part of Mao and his supporters,” Hinton clearly states his belief that “objective factors—particularly the stubborn ability of China’s traditional civilization to survive, revive, regroup and reassert itself—probably played the decisive role” (Hinton, 764, 766). By this he suggests that the failures of mass movements in post-Liberation China were to blame on countless bureaucrats and officials who “parried, misdirected, blocked or coopted every popular thrust” more than they were the fault of flawed utopianism on the part of Mao (Hinton, 767). As a supporter of the collectivization movement and a believer in the exemplary Dazhai model brigade, Hinton sees the post-Cultural Revolution de-collectivization policy as a betrayal of the revolution, not a justified correction of ultra-leftism. In this light, it is not unreasonable to suggest that one of Hinton’s motives for emphasizing the primacy of Mao’s idealist leadership in the Cultural Revolution may be to hold up Mao’s utopian vision in protest to those who “dismantled not only the ideological, cultural and institutional superstructure built under Mao’s leadership, but also the basic economic relationships that had brought peasants, handicraftsmen and rural workers together…” (Hinton, 762)

The Question Remains

While no one has been so radical as to espouse the notion that Mao Zedong was of no importance at all to the Cultural Revolution, in moving up the spectrum the question remains as to where precisely Mao belongs. Various works of Cultural Revolution historiography have emphasized or de-emphasized the primacy of Mao’s leadership in the Cultural Revolution according to, in large part, the authors’ own intended political and philosophical messages. For some observers, Mao’s call for a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the beginning of ten years of unmitigated disaster, a lesson in high tyranny and oppression. For others, Mao’s utopian ideals were inspirational but ultimately impracticable. For participants and victims, Mao was—depending on whom one asks—a villain or a saint. The scope of Cultural Revolution studies considered here also suggests that differences in topic and research focus play a role in the attribution of primacy. In particular Red Guard studies, like those of Gao Yuan, Ken Ling, and Stanley Rosen, tend to gravitate toward the view that as dominant as Mao was in Chinese life, he could not completely direct the fires of rebellion once he had set them ablaze. Those who focus on elite machinations, like Tiewes and Sun, and those who speak for Chinese informants, such as Anne Thurston, seem especially prone to blaming Mao for the Cultural Revolution’s excesses.

I tend to find more convincing a middle course that locates Mao between the god-emperor and the Party Chairman narratives, as is the case with Hong Yung Lee’s perspective on the issue. In any case, the debate on the primacy of Mao demonstrates the importance of being mindful of the political overtones and motivations involved in any historical portrayal. Though objectivity is the essence of the field, at times subjectivity is a characteristic of the craft.

References

Bennett, Gordon and Ronald Montaperto. Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai

Hsiao-ai. New York: Anchor Books, 1972.

Cheng, Chu-yuan, ed. Sun Yat-sen’s Doctrine in the Modern World. Boulder: Westview

Press, 1989.

Gao, Yuan. Born Red: a Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1987.

Hinton, William. Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York:

Random House, 1983.

Lee, Hong Yong. The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1978.

Ling, Ken. The Revenge of Heaven: From Schoolboy to “Little General” in Mao’s Army.

Trans. Miriam London and Lee Ta-ling. New York: Putnam, 1972.

Liu Guokai, A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Anita Chan. Armonk:

M.E. Sharpe, 1987.

Rosen, Stanley. Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou.

Westview Replica Edition. Boulder: Westview Press, 1982.

Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.

Thurston, Anne F. Enemies of the people: The Ordeal of Intellectuals in China's Great

Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Tiewes, Frederick and Warren Sun, The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the

Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971. Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

Unger, Jonathan. Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-

1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Yan Jiaqi and Gao, Gao. Turbulent Decade: a History of the Cultural Revolution.

Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996.

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