Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Jonathan
Cape, 832pp, £25 (hbk)
From his victory over the nationalist Kuomintang in 1949 to his
death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Tse-tung has
exercised a morbid grip over the imagination of the Western intelligentsia.
Just released on DVD is French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard's La
Chinoise (1), a bizarre but fascinating collapse of film into Maoist
agit-prop, originally filmed in 1967 when the Mao cult was at its height. Then
avant garde composer Cornelius Cardew alarmed his free-form 'Scratch Orchestra'
by presenting them (for the first time) with sheet music: a military march in
the Maoist style.
I can remember reading the author of Stockhausen serves
Imperialism's obituary in the Maoist paper he supported, The Worker's
Weekly, claiming that his accidental death walking in the middle of the
street at night during a heavy snowfall in 1981 was the work of the CIA.
The Mao cult might have seemed more comic than tragic in the West,
but it did muddy the political waters in the 1960s and 1970s, serving as a
phoney radicalism for the radical intelligentsia when the conservative
influence of the official Communist movement could no longer be avoided.
Students in the London School of Economics, and of structuralist philosopher
Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, hid their
embarrassment at talking to ordinary people in Britain and France by an
imaginary association with Mao's Red Bases.
For the Chinese, however, the cult of Mao, subject of a new
biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, was much more destructive,
symptomatic of the country's one-sided liberation from foreign domination.
Unfortunately missing from Chang and Halliday's biography is an account of the
defeat suffered by China's Communists in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1927, which
makes it harder to understand that Mao's ascendance was the consequence of a
terrible setback.
The real
story
In the 1920s, the movement to free China from foreign domination,
and from the vicious rule of warlords and Emperors, came to a head in the
rapidly industrialising coastal fringe of the country. Foreign investment had
spurred the growth of the market there, and with it the emergence of a
capitalist class and a vast working class. These two forces were both
represented in the nationalist movement to free the country, though it was an
alliance that was straining at the seams. The merchants, led by soldier and
sometime commodity dealer Chiang Kai-shek, were aghast at the strike wave that
the left had launched in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The story is told best in Harold Isaacs' Tragedy of the Chinese
Revolution, and was the inspiration for Andre Malraux's novel The Human
Condition. Most recently it has been told from the point of view of an
English officer of the Shanghai Military Police in Robert Bicker's Empire
Made Me (2). The left, led by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and calling themselves
Communists in identification with the Bolshevik revolution, were reluctantly
following Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's advice to stick with the nationalists.
Ever cynical, Stalin did not believe that socialism was possible in China, but
hoped to influence Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang responded by slaughtering the
Chinese Communists in their thousands to take control of the nationalist
movement, the Kuomintang.
Mao rose to prominence in the Chinese Communist Party as someone
who would cover up the disaster of the 1920s. He helped to reorient the
scattered militants of the CCP from a workers' revolution to one based on the
ancient grudges of the Chinese peasantry: 'it was the class struggle of the
peasant uprisings and the peasant wars that constituted the real motive force
of historical development in China', he wrote in 1939 (3). It was a policy that
seemed destined to failure. The peasants had only ever produced violent
jacqueries, which usually ended in disaster, most recently in the Boxer
rebellion of 1900. But it had the advantage that it covered Stalin's blushes
over 1927, and for that reason he helped promote Mao above Ch'en Tu-hsiu.
In the end, Mao's peasant-based Red Army did win out over the
nationalists, in the context of the struggle against Japan's invasion. Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday struggle to explain Mao's victory in their Unknown
Story, because their hostility to their subject forbids any credit
whatsoever. In this telling the Red Army's victories over his Kuomintang rivals
are explained away as increasingly bizarre conspiracies. In the decisive
campaigns, they allege, the Kuomintang troops were led by CCP spies infiltrated
into the leadership 22 years earlier, when they were all on the same side, and
these generals deliberately led their men to disaster after disaster (4). Worse
still, the Western diplomats advising Britain and America that the Kuomintang
were corrupt and brutal, Archibald Clark Kerr and Lauchlin Currie, were Soviet
agents (5).
It does not fill you with confidence in Chang and Halliday's
research to discover that outside of far-right websites, nobody believes that
either Baron Inverchapel or the New Dealer Currie were Soviet agents, not even
the authorities that they cite (6). Chang and Halliday also misunderstand the
defections back and forth between the Kuomintang and the CCP. These were less
examples of espionage, as the fluidity of the situation, when many Chinese top
brass were just not sure who would come out on top, and hedged their bets.
What is more, there is no need to descend into conspiracy theory
to explain Mao's victory. Chang and Halliday's instinct that Mao's political
appeal or military know-how are not sufficient explanation is justified. The
reason that Mao won was because of the collapse of all the other alternatives:
the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi had abdicated; the British Empire had retreated
before the Japanese advance on Hong Kong and Singapore; the Kuomintang had
failed to defend Manchuria against invasion; and finally the Japanese in turn
had been driven back by US troops. Once they stopped retreating into the
marshland (the Long March properly demystified by Chang and Halliday), the
Communists succeeded in filling the power vacuum. Mao 'had not overthrown the
government', said US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1950, because 'there
was nothing to overthrow' (7).
On a socio-economic level, the export of capital to the less
developed world in the 1920s, having failed to resolve the stagnation of the
developed economies, was thrown into reverse. The massive destruction of
industry and capital in the war led to a retraction of investments back into
Japan to partake in the postwar reconstruction, leaving mainland China starved
of new funds. Chiang Kai-shek's attempt to build a national movement on the
basis of the Chinese merchant class failed because it was eating up its own
dwindling support in extortionate taxation (8). Of the two nationalist
movements, the one that was based on the capitalists was bound to fail because
capital was being withdrawn from the mainland.
Chang and Halliday seek to challenge the accepted view that 'the
CCP were more patriotic and keener to fight Japan than the nationalists', which
they say is an example of 'history rewritten' and 'completely untrue' (9). They
support this assertion with a nit-picking analysis of the difference between
the CCP slogans '"Down with the Nationalists", but merely "oppose Japanese
Imperialism"'. But before considering the facts of the case, it is worth asking
who it was that so deceived us. 'Chiang Kai-shek had adopted a policy of
non-resistance in the face of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria and increasing
encroachments on China proper', according to one account, 'and had concentrated
instead on trying to annihilate the Communists'. Who is the author? Jung Chang,
in Wild Swans, the best-ever-selling family memoir (10). To support this
earlier claim, Chang quotes Chiang Kai-shek's maxim, 'the Japanese are a
disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart'.
A
new interpretation
Indeed Mao: The Unknown Story flatly contradicts Wild
Swans throughout. One revelation in Unknown Story is that Mao
engineered Chiang Kai-shek's abduction by his junior Chang Hsuieh-lang in 1936.
But in Wild Swans Chiang was 'partly saved by the Communists' (11).
Perhaps Unknown Story is intended to correct the 'completely untrue'
claims made in Wild Swans, and put the 10million readers of this
best-ever-selling non-fiction paperback right. But there are no indications
that Jung Chang is correcting her earlier assertions in the text or footnotes.
And look, here, on the back page cover of Unknown Story, not corrections
of, but 'praise for Wild Swans'.
It is not just the earlier Wild Swans that contradicts the
argument in Unknown Story that the nationalists took on the Japanese
occupiers, or the many other sources (12), but the facts presented in
Unknown Story itself. Just 20 pages on, Chang and Halliday tell us that
Chiang Kai-shek 'mobilised half a million troops'. To fight the Japanese? No.
'He had agreed a truce with the Japanese, acquiescing to their seizure of parts
of north China, in addition to Manchuria, and this freed him to concentrate his
strength on fighting the reds', they write approvingly (all the time condemning
Mao for fighting Chiang, not the Japanese) (13). When evidence of Communist
opposition to Japan is unavoidable, Chang and Halliday insist that it was an
exception, as in the July 1940 campaign against supply lines in northern China
to relieve besieged Chongqing, which cost the Eighth Route Army 90,000 men
(14). When Chiang Kai-shek slaughters the Communist New Fourth Army in 1941,
Chang and Halliday want it both ways: minimising the atrocity, but also blaming
Mao for betraying his rival commander Xiang Ying.
It is not the facts that are new, so much as the interpretation
that Chang and Halliday put on them. Even the interpretation is not that new,
repeating much of the argument put by the US right, the Taiwanese government
created by the Kuomintang's retreat to that island, and more latterly by the
increasing number of mainland Chinese critics of Mao.
Chang and Halliday argue that Chiang Kai-shek let the Red Army
retreat north because Stalin was holding his son hostage in Russia. Not wholly
unknown: Chiang Ching-kuo, who later went on to become president of Taiwan,
gave this explanation of his articles condemning his father in the Moscow Press
back in 1937 (15). Chang and Halliday shore up their argument by asserting that
Chiang Kai-shek's information minister Shao Li-tzu, who had accompanied
Ching-kuo to Moscow, was a Communist agent, and that Li-tzu's son had been
killed by the Kuomintang in revenge in 1931. Which is a great tale, except that
Shao Li-tzu kept his post as the information minister right up until 1949, in
'an almost unbelievably complex web of intrigue, deceit, bluff and double
bluff' (16). Or
maybe it is just plain unbelievable.
Of course it is more than possible that Stalin detained Chiang
Ching-kuo in Moscow as leverage, but that does not mean that he did not
initially go willingly in 1925 - many Kuomintang were trained in Moscow. More
importantly, Chiang Kai-shek does not seem to have worried about the danger to
his son enough to stop killing off thousands of CCP members in Shanghai and
Hong Kong in 1927, so why would he have been so moved to spare Mao? A simpler
explanation is that Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the Communists' long retreat from
the coastal cities, and Chang and Halliday describe well the way that the
Kuomintang boxed the Red Army in.
Pursuing the Communist 'sleeper' explanation of Kuomintang
strategy, Chang and Halliday allege that Russian mole general Zhang Zhi-zhong
single-handedly started the war with Japan, in August 1937. 'This was probably
one of Stalin's greatest coups', they write, noting that the eight-year war
cost 20million lives and shifted the ratio of Chiang's army to Mao's from 60:1
at the start to 3:1 at the end (17). The implication is that the Communists
(through their agents) provoked the war with Japan to advance their cause. A
more conventional explanation of the conflict is the division of China between
the major powers at the Washington conference in 1921, and that 'Japan lacks
many of the raw materials needed for industrial manufacturing', driving it to
establish 'a colonial penumbra' before 1945. At least that was the explanation
that Jon Halliday preferred in 1973, when he gave it in the book Japanese
Imperialism Today (18). But 30 years later the overriding need to excoriate
Stalin and Mao means blaming them for their enemies' sins. Japan's atrocities
against China are supposed to be down to Communist provocation not imperialist
domination. Even the infamous Japanese massacre of 300,000 Chinese at Nanjing
is minimised by a comparison with starvation during the Communist siege of
Changchun in 1948 (19).
Similarly the 1950 Korean War between the North's Kim Il Sung,
backed by China, and the USA, is explained wholly in terms of Mao's attempts to
secure Soviet military aid. No doubt those were among Mao's motives, but Chang
and Halliday ignore the motives of the other players, South Korea's Syngman
Rhee and US President Truman. In fact, South Korean forces had tried to invade
North Korea in June 1949, a year before Chang and Halliday have North Korea
invading the South (20). Whatever Mao's motives, Truman needed a war to promote
his containment policy. As US General Van Fleet said in 1952: 'There had to be
a Korea either here, or some place in the world.' (21)
In Chang and Halliday's telling, Mao's determination to string out
the war led America to bomb, in US Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk's
words 'until there was nothing left to bomb'. No doubt Mao's cynical
recklessness exacerbated the conflict, but in the end it was America, not China
that destroyed Korea. As impressive as Unknown Story's bibliography is,
one glaring omission is Halliday's own book Korea: The Unknown War, or
any of the many books by its coauthor Bruce Cumings that have detailed American
and South Korean provocations and atrocities against the North (22).
In Hong Kong, too, the Unknown Story argues that while the
British colonial authorities might have 'killed some demonstrators' in 1967,
the real danger was attacks on police by mainland Chinese soldiers (23). A much
better account of the conflict between the people of Hong Kong and the British
authorities can be found in Halliday's 1974 essay 'Hong Kong: Britain's Chinese
Colony', where the 1967 events are 'anti-colonial riots' against an
administration where there 'is no democracy'. Thankfully the younger Halliday's
call for an end to 'over a century of British aggression against China and the
cessation of the horrendous and continuing exploitation of four million Chinese
in Hong Kong' prevailed over the older Halliday's version of Britain as a
victim of Chinese aggression (24). But sadly Chang and Halliday's demonisation
of Mao leads them to emphasise the conflict between Britain and mainland China
over a more interesting investigation of the collaboration between them on Hong
Kong's special status as offshore trading post (25).
Despite its retrieval of Cold War positions, Mao: The Unknown
Story is especially interesting on Mao's various attempts to create an
'Asian Cominform', and to influence the development of the emerging Third
Worldist movement, and how these were eventually stymied by the Soviet Union.
Halliday's original research in Moscow's archives adds a lot. Compellingly,
Chang and Halliday relate China's failure to internationalise Maoism to the
moves towards rapprochement between China and America in the 1970s. Though here
they portray Nixon and Kissinger as patsies who give away too much, forgetting
that the major reason for the opening to China was to undermine the USSR.
However, the most interesting material in Unknown Story is China's own
internal development under Mao.
The ghoulish details of Mao's rule ought to disabuse the most
unreconstructed Maoist: that he travelled the Long March carried by servants on
a bier, that President Liu Shao-chi's six-year-old daughter was brought to
watch her parents being beaten, that the party outlawed irony in the Spring of
1942, and launched a campaign to outproduce US steel with domestic furnaces
(26). (My own favourite is the story of the comrade who arrives late at a
meeting to hear a compelling denunciation of the errors of leader Li Li-san,
only to be told when asking the speaker his name, 'I am Li Li-san'.)
No doubt Mao's personal depravity was a decisive factor, but it
blossomed in the peculiar conditions of China's liberation through the
withdrawal of all developmental possibilities, whether capitalist or socialist.
Mao made a political state that corresponded to the deformation of Chinese
society and industry. It was in that context that Mao attempted to substitute
political will for economic development, launching his 'Great Leap Forward'
between 1958 and 1961. This attempt to industrialise through coercion alone
only succeeded in plunging the country into starvation (27).
Chang and Halliday are particularly informative on the political
in-fighting that followed, and specifically Mao's determination to overthrow
the party machine that forced him to back down on the Great Leap Forward, and
even demanded humiliating 'self-criticisms' at the February 1962 Conference. 'A
few years later', Chang and Halliday tell us, Mao 'launched his Great Purge,
the Cultural Revolution, in which [President] Liu and most of the officials in
that hall...were to be put through hell' (28).
Wild
Swans
It is the atrocity stories from the Cultural Revolution that began
in 1965 that have excited reviewers. It is at this point, though, that Mao:
The Unknown Story ought to have a health warning. Jung Chang was one of the
Red Guards, the shock troops of Mao's great purge. 'I was not forced to join
the Red Guards', she wrote in Wild Swans, 'I was keen to do so': 'I was
thrilled by my red armband' (29). This is of course a political affiliation
that she shared with her husband-to-be, Jon Halliday, who in 1973 was lauding
Mao's political thought (30).
In fact, not just a Red Guard, Jung Chang was the privileged
daughter of China's Communist elite. It is a peculiarity of the reception of
Wild Swans that it was told and read as a story of great personal
suffering, when its author grew up with a wet-nurse, nanny, maid, gardener and
chauffeur provided by the party, protected in a walled compound, educated in a
special school for officials' children (31). As a Grade 10 official (32), her
father was among the 20,000 most senior people in a country of 1.25billion, and
'it was in this period that "high officials" children became almost a stratum
of their own' (33). Still, the enthusiastic Western audience of Wild
Swans found something to identify in Jung Chang's perennial fear of being
reduced to the level of the rest of the population, shuddering with her at the
prospect that 'Mao intended me to live the rest of my life as a peasant' (34).
Chang's description of the Red Guard ideology is disturbingly
familiar since many of its themes, though watered down, were carried over into
the radical left in the West: a philistine rejection of past culture and
literature, dismissal of higher learning, exams and attacks on teachers, 'the
idea that everything personal was political' (35), and disengagement from the
global economy into 'self-reliance'. At the risk of trivialising the Chinese
experience, one can see what the deconstructionists of the École Normale
Supérieure got out of their early flirtation with Maoism.
As Chung explains, the first Red Guards were themselves the sons
and daughters of the high officials (equivalent to the Soviet nomenklatura).
This gave rise to the 'theory of the bloodline', summed up in the saying 'the
son of a hero father is a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but
a bastard'. And Chang admits 'I was according to the "theory of the
bloodlines", born bright red, because my father was a high official' (36).
'Armed with this theory, some high officials' children tyrannised and even
tortured children from "undesirable backgrounds"', she says, though she only
admits to withdrawing from the company of her less senior classmates and
colleagues (37).
Chang is careful to reject the theory of the bloodline ('ridiculous
as it was brutal'), but it is hard to avoid that it is the unconscious theme of
the earlier book Wild Swans, an account of three generations of women
rising above the political din of civil war and revolution. One theme that
Chang returns to again and again is the betrayal of the parents by the
children, which she says was the point of the Red Guard - to use the younger
generation to overthrow the party establishment. What she does not say is
whether she personally denounced her father, though he was purged, and
suggestively she does record his forgiving her - 'it is good that you young
people should rebel against us the older generation' - as if to salve her
conscience (38).
Chang accounts for her own disillusionment with the Red Guards on
the grounds that they were being turned against the old guard (39). But a
keener motive is that the original predominance of the children of the elite
was being diluted as the movement attracted more plebeian supporters: 'The
original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart,
as they had been organised around the children of those same high officials who
now became targets.' (40) Chang's personal realisation that the Cultural
Revolution did not advance her position in the hierarchy but threatened it
mirrors the broader elite's fears that they had unleashed forces that were
wrecking public order. Under the slogan 'arm the left', competing Red Guard
groups were descending into civil war (41).
Falling out of love with Mao
Just as they had fallen in love with Mao in the 1960s, Chang and
Halliday fell out of love with him in the 1980s. Where once he had been the
great leader, now he was the evil despot. The limitations of this
personalisation of the regime's failings is that it restricts the criticisms to
Mao alone, where in truth the elite as a whole were culpable - including Jung
Chang and her parents. Chinese-American academic Wenying Xu, who lived through
the Cultural Revolution, characterises a kind of autobiography whose authors
'strive to portray their own moral superiority to those Chinese who betrayed,
persecuted, or brutalised others for their own political security or
advancement', and 'Such is the tone in Jung Chang's Wild Swans'. These
are 'unsatisfactory because of their high moral tone, which exonerates them
from any responsibility for the horrors' (42).
One factor driving the scholarship is that there are clearly many
more critical accounts of the Mao era being published in the People's Republic
of China. Veteran Communist and former secretary to Mao, Li Rui, chose the
publication of Mao: The Unknown Story to demand the country face up to
its past (43). Now that Mao is dead and buried, it is relatively easy to
project all of the country's failings on to one individual. For Jung Chang that
means excusing her own role as Red Guard, and retrospectively exonerating her
father (despite his own admissions of supporting torture and issuing execution
orders (44)). Seeing how convenient it is to restrict the blame for China's
crippled development to Mao you have to remind yourself that Jung Chang played
in 'Auntie Deng's' apartment as a child - that is to say the apartment of the
stepmother of Deng Xiaoping, architect of the market reforms after Mao's death
(45). It might not be officially sanctioned, but Mao: The Unknown Story
is parallel to the historical revision that the Chinese leadership is
undertaking as part of its opening to capitalism.
The attraction of the book in the West is that it seems to confirm
the prejudice that radical change must end in disaster. This is especially
pressing for one-time radicals who have now made their peace with the system.
In his Guardian column, Simon Hoggart admitted: 'I still flush with
embarrassment when I think that as a student I thought Mao was a good thing',
before turning on Tony Benn for thinking the same, when the evidence of Mao's
depravity is there in Chang and Halliday's book (46). As well as provoking an
embarrassment at youthful indiscretions, Mao: The Unknown Story
satisfies a Western superiority complex that has been provoked by China's
recent economic take-off. Irritated at China's much higher growth rates,
Europeans and Americans enjoy reading horror stories that tell them this is a
deficient society after all.
The single fact that every reviewer cites is Chang and Halliday's
estimate of 70million deaths attributable to Mao's rule. Tellingly, the figure
does not feature in the text but in a picture caption. The principle components
are the 38million deaths due to the 'Great Leap Forward' famine, the estimated
27million deaths in camps, the three million killed in the Cultural Revolution
(47). This is indeed a ghastly indictment of the attempt to enforce a
disengagement from the world economy and economic development by political will
- and its attendant repression - alone.
But if Mao was guilty of making a virtue of China's isolation, he
did not create it. That was a consequence of the postwar contraction of
capitalist accumulation to its metropolitan centres, Western Europe, America
and Japan. Chang and Halliday dismiss China's liberation as the beginning of
enslavement to Mao, but China free from foreign domination did develop within
the constraints put upon it. Even with the 1957-61 famine and the Camps, life
expectancy rose from 35 in 1949 to 63 in 1975 (71.3 in 2000) (48). Political
independence, too, is the precondition for the indigenous development of
Chinese industry today - and this great leap forward has real prospects.
Cape, 832pp, £25 (hbk)
From his victory over the nationalist Kuomintang in 1949 to his
death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Tse-tung has
exercised a morbid grip over the imagination of the Western intelligentsia.
Just released on DVD is French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard's La
Chinoise (1), a bizarre but fascinating collapse of film into Maoist
agit-prop, originally filmed in 1967 when the Mao cult was at its height. Then
avant garde composer Cornelius Cardew alarmed his free-form 'Scratch Orchestra'
by presenting them (for the first time) with sheet music: a military march in
the Maoist style.
I can remember reading the author of Stockhausen serves
Imperialism's obituary in the Maoist paper he supported, The Worker's
Weekly, claiming that his accidental death walking in the middle of the
street at night during a heavy snowfall in 1981 was the work of the CIA.
The Mao cult might have seemed more comic than tragic in the West,
but it did muddy the political waters in the 1960s and 1970s, serving as a
phoney radicalism for the radical intelligentsia when the conservative
influence of the official Communist movement could no longer be avoided.
Students in the London School of Economics, and of structuralist philosopher
Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, hid their
embarrassment at talking to ordinary people in Britain and France by an
imaginary association with Mao's Red Bases.
For the Chinese, however, the cult of Mao, subject of a new
biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, was much more destructive,
symptomatic of the country's one-sided liberation from foreign domination.
Unfortunately missing from Chang and Halliday's biography is an account of the
defeat suffered by China's Communists in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1927, which
makes it harder to understand that Mao's ascendance was the consequence of a
terrible setback.
The real
story
In the 1920s, the movement to free China from foreign domination,
and from the vicious rule of warlords and Emperors, came to a head in the
rapidly industrialising coastal fringe of the country. Foreign investment had
spurred the growth of the market there, and with it the emergence of a
capitalist class and a vast working class. These two forces were both
represented in the nationalist movement to free the country, though it was an
alliance that was straining at the seams. The merchants, led by soldier and
sometime commodity dealer Chiang Kai-shek, were aghast at the strike wave that
the left had launched in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The story is told best in Harold Isaacs' Tragedy of the Chinese
Revolution, and was the inspiration for Andre Malraux's novel The Human
Condition. Most recently it has been told from the point of view of an
English officer of the Shanghai Military Police in Robert Bicker's Empire
Made Me (2). The left, led by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and calling themselves
Communists in identification with the Bolshevik revolution, were reluctantly
following Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's advice to stick with the nationalists.
Ever cynical, Stalin did not believe that socialism was possible in China, but
hoped to influence Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang responded by slaughtering the
Chinese Communists in their thousands to take control of the nationalist
movement, the Kuomintang.
Mao rose to prominence in the Chinese Communist Party as someone
who would cover up the disaster of the 1920s. He helped to reorient the
scattered militants of the CCP from a workers' revolution to one based on the
ancient grudges of the Chinese peasantry: 'it was the class struggle of the
peasant uprisings and the peasant wars that constituted the real motive force
of historical development in China', he wrote in 1939 (3). It was a policy that
seemed destined to failure. The peasants had only ever produced violent
jacqueries, which usually ended in disaster, most recently in the Boxer
rebellion of 1900. But it had the advantage that it covered Stalin's blushes
over 1927, and for that reason he helped promote Mao above Ch'en Tu-hsiu.
In the end, Mao's peasant-based Red Army did win out over the
nationalists, in the context of the struggle against Japan's invasion. Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday struggle to explain Mao's victory in their Unknown
Story, because their hostility to their subject forbids any credit
whatsoever. In this telling the Red Army's victories over his Kuomintang rivals
are explained away as increasingly bizarre conspiracies. In the decisive
campaigns, they allege, the Kuomintang troops were led by CCP spies infiltrated
into the leadership 22 years earlier, when they were all on the same side, and
these generals deliberately led their men to disaster after disaster (4). Worse
still, the Western diplomats advising Britain and America that the Kuomintang
were corrupt and brutal, Archibald Clark Kerr and Lauchlin Currie, were Soviet
agents (5).
It does not fill you with confidence in Chang and Halliday's
research to discover that outside of far-right websites, nobody believes that
either Baron Inverchapel or the New Dealer Currie were Soviet agents, not even
the authorities that they cite (6). Chang and Halliday also misunderstand the
defections back and forth between the Kuomintang and the CCP. These were less
examples of espionage, as the fluidity of the situation, when many Chinese top
brass were just not sure who would come out on top, and hedged their bets.
What is more, there is no need to descend into conspiracy theory
to explain Mao's victory. Chang and Halliday's instinct that Mao's political
appeal or military know-how are not sufficient explanation is justified. The
reason that Mao won was because of the collapse of all the other alternatives:
the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi had abdicated; the British Empire had retreated
before the Japanese advance on Hong Kong and Singapore; the Kuomintang had
failed to defend Manchuria against invasion; and finally the Japanese in turn
had been driven back by US troops. Once they stopped retreating into the
marshland (the Long March properly demystified by Chang and Halliday), the
Communists succeeded in filling the power vacuum. Mao 'had not overthrown the
government', said US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1950, because 'there
was nothing to overthrow' (7).
On a socio-economic level, the export of capital to the less
developed world in the 1920s, having failed to resolve the stagnation of the
developed economies, was thrown into reverse. The massive destruction of
industry and capital in the war led to a retraction of investments back into
Japan to partake in the postwar reconstruction, leaving mainland China starved
of new funds. Chiang Kai-shek's attempt to build a national movement on the
basis of the Chinese merchant class failed because it was eating up its own
dwindling support in extortionate taxation (8). Of the two nationalist
movements, the one that was based on the capitalists was bound to fail because
capital was being withdrawn from the mainland.
Chang and Halliday seek to challenge the accepted view that 'the
CCP were more patriotic and keener to fight Japan than the nationalists', which
they say is an example of 'history rewritten' and 'completely untrue' (9). They
support this assertion with a nit-picking analysis of the difference between
the CCP slogans '"Down with the Nationalists", but merely "oppose Japanese
Imperialism"'. But before considering the facts of the case, it is worth asking
who it was that so deceived us. 'Chiang Kai-shek had adopted a policy of
non-resistance in the face of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria and increasing
encroachments on China proper', according to one account, 'and had concentrated
instead on trying to annihilate the Communists'. Who is the author? Jung Chang,
in Wild Swans, the best-ever-selling family memoir (10). To support this
earlier claim, Chang quotes Chiang Kai-shek's maxim, 'the Japanese are a
disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart'.
A
new interpretation
Indeed Mao: The Unknown Story flatly contradicts Wild
Swans throughout. One revelation in Unknown Story is that Mao
engineered Chiang Kai-shek's abduction by his junior Chang Hsuieh-lang in 1936.
But in Wild Swans Chiang was 'partly saved by the Communists' (11).
Perhaps Unknown Story is intended to correct the 'completely untrue'
claims made in Wild Swans, and put the 10million readers of this
best-ever-selling non-fiction paperback right. But there are no indications
that Jung Chang is correcting her earlier assertions in the text or footnotes.
And look, here, on the back page cover of Unknown Story, not corrections
of, but 'praise for Wild Swans'.
It is not just the earlier Wild Swans that contradicts the
argument in Unknown Story that the nationalists took on the Japanese
occupiers, or the many other sources (12), but the facts presented in
Unknown Story itself. Just 20 pages on, Chang and Halliday tell us that
Chiang Kai-shek 'mobilised half a million troops'. To fight the Japanese? No.
'He had agreed a truce with the Japanese, acquiescing to their seizure of parts
of north China, in addition to Manchuria, and this freed him to concentrate his
strength on fighting the reds', they write approvingly (all the time condemning
Mao for fighting Chiang, not the Japanese) (13). When evidence of Communist
opposition to Japan is unavoidable, Chang and Halliday insist that it was an
exception, as in the July 1940 campaign against supply lines in northern China
to relieve besieged Chongqing, which cost the Eighth Route Army 90,000 men
(14). When Chiang Kai-shek slaughters the Communist New Fourth Army in 1941,
Chang and Halliday want it both ways: minimising the atrocity, but also blaming
Mao for betraying his rival commander Xiang Ying.
It is not the facts that are new, so much as the interpretation
that Chang and Halliday put on them. Even the interpretation is not that new,
repeating much of the argument put by the US right, the Taiwanese government
created by the Kuomintang's retreat to that island, and more latterly by the
increasing number of mainland Chinese critics of Mao.
Chang and Halliday argue that Chiang Kai-shek let the Red Army
retreat north because Stalin was holding his son hostage in Russia. Not wholly
unknown: Chiang Ching-kuo, who later went on to become president of Taiwan,
gave this explanation of his articles condemning his father in the Moscow Press
back in 1937 (15). Chang and Halliday shore up their argument by asserting that
Chiang Kai-shek's information minister Shao Li-tzu, who had accompanied
Ching-kuo to Moscow, was a Communist agent, and that Li-tzu's son had been
killed by the Kuomintang in revenge in 1931. Which is a great tale, except that
Shao Li-tzu kept his post as the information minister right up until 1949, in
'an almost unbelievably complex web of intrigue, deceit, bluff and double
bluff' (16). Or
maybe it is just plain unbelievable.
Of course it is more than possible that Stalin detained Chiang
Ching-kuo in Moscow as leverage, but that does not mean that he did not
initially go willingly in 1925 - many Kuomintang were trained in Moscow. More
importantly, Chiang Kai-shek does not seem to have worried about the danger to
his son enough to stop killing off thousands of CCP members in Shanghai and
Hong Kong in 1927, so why would he have been so moved to spare Mao? A simpler
explanation is that Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the Communists' long retreat from
the coastal cities, and Chang and Halliday describe well the way that the
Kuomintang boxed the Red Army in.
Pursuing the Communist 'sleeper' explanation of Kuomintang
strategy, Chang and Halliday allege that Russian mole general Zhang Zhi-zhong
single-handedly started the war with Japan, in August 1937. 'This was probably
one of Stalin's greatest coups', they write, noting that the eight-year war
cost 20million lives and shifted the ratio of Chiang's army to Mao's from 60:1
at the start to 3:1 at the end (17). The implication is that the Communists
(through their agents) provoked the war with Japan to advance their cause. A
more conventional explanation of the conflict is the division of China between
the major powers at the Washington conference in 1921, and that 'Japan lacks
many of the raw materials needed for industrial manufacturing', driving it to
establish 'a colonial penumbra' before 1945. At least that was the explanation
that Jon Halliday preferred in 1973, when he gave it in the book Japanese
Imperialism Today (18). But 30 years later the overriding need to excoriate
Stalin and Mao means blaming them for their enemies' sins. Japan's atrocities
against China are supposed to be down to Communist provocation not imperialist
domination. Even the infamous Japanese massacre of 300,000 Chinese at Nanjing
is minimised by a comparison with starvation during the Communist siege of
Changchun in 1948 (19).
Similarly the 1950 Korean War between the North's Kim Il Sung,
backed by China, and the USA, is explained wholly in terms of Mao's attempts to
secure Soviet military aid. No doubt those were among Mao's motives, but Chang
and Halliday ignore the motives of the other players, South Korea's Syngman
Rhee and US President Truman. In fact, South Korean forces had tried to invade
North Korea in June 1949, a year before Chang and Halliday have North Korea
invading the South (20). Whatever Mao's motives, Truman needed a war to promote
his containment policy. As US General Van Fleet said in 1952: 'There had to be
a Korea either here, or some place in the world.' (21)
In Chang and Halliday's telling, Mao's determination to string out
the war led America to bomb, in US Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk's
words 'until there was nothing left to bomb'. No doubt Mao's cynical
recklessness exacerbated the conflict, but in the end it was America, not China
that destroyed Korea. As impressive as Unknown Story's bibliography is,
one glaring omission is Halliday's own book Korea: The Unknown War, or
any of the many books by its coauthor Bruce Cumings that have detailed American
and South Korean provocations and atrocities against the North (22).
In Hong Kong, too, the Unknown Story argues that while the
British colonial authorities might have 'killed some demonstrators' in 1967,
the real danger was attacks on police by mainland Chinese soldiers (23). A much
better account of the conflict between the people of Hong Kong and the British
authorities can be found in Halliday's 1974 essay 'Hong Kong: Britain's Chinese
Colony', where the 1967 events are 'anti-colonial riots' against an
administration where there 'is no democracy'. Thankfully the younger Halliday's
call for an end to 'over a century of British aggression against China and the
cessation of the horrendous and continuing exploitation of four million Chinese
in Hong Kong' prevailed over the older Halliday's version of Britain as a
victim of Chinese aggression (24). But sadly Chang and Halliday's demonisation
of Mao leads them to emphasise the conflict between Britain and mainland China
over a more interesting investigation of the collaboration between them on Hong
Kong's special status as offshore trading post (25).
Despite its retrieval of Cold War positions, Mao: The Unknown
Story is especially interesting on Mao's various attempts to create an
'Asian Cominform', and to influence the development of the emerging Third
Worldist movement, and how these were eventually stymied by the Soviet Union.
Halliday's original research in Moscow's archives adds a lot. Compellingly,
Chang and Halliday relate China's failure to internationalise Maoism to the
moves towards rapprochement between China and America in the 1970s. Though here
they portray Nixon and Kissinger as patsies who give away too much, forgetting
that the major reason for the opening to China was to undermine the USSR.
However, the most interesting material in Unknown Story is China's own
internal development under Mao.
The ghoulish details of Mao's rule ought to disabuse the most
unreconstructed Maoist: that he travelled the Long March carried by servants on
a bier, that President Liu Shao-chi's six-year-old daughter was brought to
watch her parents being beaten, that the party outlawed irony in the Spring of
1942, and launched a campaign to outproduce US steel with domestic furnaces
(26). (My own favourite is the story of the comrade who arrives late at a
meeting to hear a compelling denunciation of the errors of leader Li Li-san,
only to be told when asking the speaker his name, 'I am Li Li-san'.)
No doubt Mao's personal depravity was a decisive factor, but it
blossomed in the peculiar conditions of China's liberation through the
withdrawal of all developmental possibilities, whether capitalist or socialist.
Mao made a political state that corresponded to the deformation of Chinese
society and industry. It was in that context that Mao attempted to substitute
political will for economic development, launching his 'Great Leap Forward'
between 1958 and 1961. This attempt to industrialise through coercion alone
only succeeded in plunging the country into starvation (27).
Chang and Halliday are particularly informative on the political
in-fighting that followed, and specifically Mao's determination to overthrow
the party machine that forced him to back down on the Great Leap Forward, and
even demanded humiliating 'self-criticisms' at the February 1962 Conference. 'A
few years later', Chang and Halliday tell us, Mao 'launched his Great Purge,
the Cultural Revolution, in which [President] Liu and most of the officials in
that hall...were to be put through hell' (28).
Wild
Swans
It is the atrocity stories from the Cultural Revolution that began
in 1965 that have excited reviewers. It is at this point, though, that Mao:
The Unknown Story ought to have a health warning. Jung Chang was one of the
Red Guards, the shock troops of Mao's great purge. 'I was not forced to join
the Red Guards', she wrote in Wild Swans, 'I was keen to do so': 'I was
thrilled by my red armband' (29). This is of course a political affiliation
that she shared with her husband-to-be, Jon Halliday, who in 1973 was lauding
Mao's political thought (30).
In fact, not just a Red Guard, Jung Chang was the privileged
daughter of China's Communist elite. It is a peculiarity of the reception of
Wild Swans that it was told and read as a story of great personal
suffering, when its author grew up with a wet-nurse, nanny, maid, gardener and
chauffeur provided by the party, protected in a walled compound, educated in a
special school for officials' children (31). As a Grade 10 official (32), her
father was among the 20,000 most senior people in a country of 1.25billion, and
'it was in this period that "high officials" children became almost a stratum
of their own' (33). Still, the enthusiastic Western audience of Wild
Swans found something to identify in Jung Chang's perennial fear of being
reduced to the level of the rest of the population, shuddering with her at the
prospect that 'Mao intended me to live the rest of my life as a peasant' (34).
Chang's description of the Red Guard ideology is disturbingly
familiar since many of its themes, though watered down, were carried over into
the radical left in the West: a philistine rejection of past culture and
literature, dismissal of higher learning, exams and attacks on teachers, 'the
idea that everything personal was political' (35), and disengagement from the
global economy into 'self-reliance'. At the risk of trivialising the Chinese
experience, one can see what the deconstructionists of the École Normale
Supérieure got out of their early flirtation with Maoism.
As Chung explains, the first Red Guards were themselves the sons
and daughters of the high officials (equivalent to the Soviet nomenklatura).
This gave rise to the 'theory of the bloodline', summed up in the saying 'the
son of a hero father is a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but
a bastard'. And Chang admits 'I was according to the "theory of the
bloodlines", born bright red, because my father was a high official' (36).
'Armed with this theory, some high officials' children tyrannised and even
tortured children from "undesirable backgrounds"', she says, though she only
admits to withdrawing from the company of her less senior classmates and
colleagues (37).
Chang is careful to reject the theory of the bloodline ('ridiculous
as it was brutal'), but it is hard to avoid that it is the unconscious theme of
the earlier book Wild Swans, an account of three generations of women
rising above the political din of civil war and revolution. One theme that
Chang returns to again and again is the betrayal of the parents by the
children, which she says was the point of the Red Guard - to use the younger
generation to overthrow the party establishment. What she does not say is
whether she personally denounced her father, though he was purged, and
suggestively she does record his forgiving her - 'it is good that you young
people should rebel against us the older generation' - as if to salve her
conscience (38).
Chang accounts for her own disillusionment with the Red Guards on
the grounds that they were being turned against the old guard (39). But a
keener motive is that the original predominance of the children of the elite
was being diluted as the movement attracted more plebeian supporters: 'The
original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart,
as they had been organised around the children of those same high officials who
now became targets.' (40) Chang's personal realisation that the Cultural
Revolution did not advance her position in the hierarchy but threatened it
mirrors the broader elite's fears that they had unleashed forces that were
wrecking public order. Under the slogan 'arm the left', competing Red Guard
groups were descending into civil war (41).
Falling out of love with Mao
Just as they had fallen in love with Mao in the 1960s, Chang and
Halliday fell out of love with him in the 1980s. Where once he had been the
great leader, now he was the evil despot. The limitations of this
personalisation of the regime's failings is that it restricts the criticisms to
Mao alone, where in truth the elite as a whole were culpable - including Jung
Chang and her parents. Chinese-American academic Wenying Xu, who lived through
the Cultural Revolution, characterises a kind of autobiography whose authors
'strive to portray their own moral superiority to those Chinese who betrayed,
persecuted, or brutalised others for their own political security or
advancement', and 'Such is the tone in Jung Chang's Wild Swans'. These
are 'unsatisfactory because of their high moral tone, which exonerates them
from any responsibility for the horrors' (42).
One factor driving the scholarship is that there are clearly many
more critical accounts of the Mao era being published in the People's Republic
of China. Veteran Communist and former secretary to Mao, Li Rui, chose the
publication of Mao: The Unknown Story to demand the country face up to
its past (43). Now that Mao is dead and buried, it is relatively easy to
project all of the country's failings on to one individual. For Jung Chang that
means excusing her own role as Red Guard, and retrospectively exonerating her
father (despite his own admissions of supporting torture and issuing execution
orders (44)). Seeing how convenient it is to restrict the blame for China's
crippled development to Mao you have to remind yourself that Jung Chang played
in 'Auntie Deng's' apartment as a child - that is to say the apartment of the
stepmother of Deng Xiaoping, architect of the market reforms after Mao's death
(45). It might not be officially sanctioned, but Mao: The Unknown Story
is parallel to the historical revision that the Chinese leadership is
undertaking as part of its opening to capitalism.
The attraction of the book in the West is that it seems to confirm
the prejudice that radical change must end in disaster. This is especially
pressing for one-time radicals who have now made their peace with the system.
In his Guardian column, Simon Hoggart admitted: 'I still flush with
embarrassment when I think that as a student I thought Mao was a good thing',
before turning on Tony Benn for thinking the same, when the evidence of Mao's
depravity is there in Chang and Halliday's book (46). As well as provoking an
embarrassment at youthful indiscretions, Mao: The Unknown Story
satisfies a Western superiority complex that has been provoked by China's
recent economic take-off. Irritated at China's much higher growth rates,
Europeans and Americans enjoy reading horror stories that tell them this is a
deficient society after all.
The single fact that every reviewer cites is Chang and Halliday's
estimate of 70million deaths attributable to Mao's rule. Tellingly, the figure
does not feature in the text but in a picture caption. The principle components
are the 38million deaths due to the 'Great Leap Forward' famine, the estimated
27million deaths in camps, the three million killed in the Cultural Revolution
(47). This is indeed a ghastly indictment of the attempt to enforce a
disengagement from the world economy and economic development by political will
- and its attendant repression - alone.
But if Mao was guilty of making a virtue of China's isolation, he
did not create it. That was a consequence of the postwar contraction of
capitalist accumulation to its metropolitan centres, Western Europe, America
and Japan. Chang and Halliday dismiss China's liberation as the beginning of
enslavement to Mao, but China free from foreign domination did develop within
the constraints put upon it. Even with the 1957-61 famine and the Camps, life
expectancy rose from 35 in 1949 to 63 in 1975 (71.3 in 2000) (48). Political
independence, too, is the precondition for the indigenous development of
Chinese industry today - and this great leap forward has real prospects.