Reading: 'Mao: the Unknown Story'

So I've managed to snag a copy of Mao: the Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, 2005, London: Random House) from some very nice people who are allegedly trying to downsize their library. It's an 800-page monster, so I'm chipping away at it quite slowly right now. First impressions of Part 1: pretty good. Most of it feels meticulously researched, drawing on a really wide range of sources (it did take a decade to write, so that seems reasonable). It does a good job of highlighting areas where the evidence they've uncovered seems to deviate significantly from the official Chinese Communist Party version. Given that there do seem to be a significant number of Maoists around in the world today, I'd like to think that this book would give some of them food for thought (although in practice, I doubt that many of the pro-Communist people in South Asia or Peru are likely to have access to a copy in a relevant language).

One concern I have at the moment is that whenever the author's are analysing Mao's own opinions on anything, they always seem to leap to the interpretation which shows him in the worst possible light (I realise that this may sound like a bit of a weird statement given that we're talking about the guy who may have broken the record for "greatest number of own citizens dead during peacetime"). My take on this is that if we're going to properly engage with Mao's regime then it makes sense to consider the possibility that he had some positive traits (I'm not going to say 'redeeming traits' here, because I don't think that 'killed millions of people' is something one can really consider a personality trait on the same scale as 'was nice to his secretary and liked dogs a lot'. But I do think that it makes sense for a biography of Hitler to consider both of these things- I think the film 'Downfall'/'Der Untergang' does this quite well).

An example of this in the first few chapters is Mao's attitude towards violence. From what Chang and Halliday say, Mao was initially a relatively moderate political activist (as in, when fellow members of the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suggested that they should try to spark open conflict between peasants and landlords, Mao argued against this. He's quoted here (p.37) as saying that when this approach had been tried in other parts of China, the landlords had quickly re-established control and banned the local Communist organisations, leading the local peasantry to conclude that Communism was good for nothing but stirring up pointless trouble. He's also reported to have argued that "there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and gentry" (this is a paraphrase of Mao's views, as quoted from a primary source written by another Communist). This attitude got him into a certain amount of trouble with the CCP's Russian financial backers, since it was counter to Soviet policy (p.39).

However, Mao's position seems to have suddenly shifted in early 1927, when he went on a brief trip to the Hunan countryside, where he met grassroots peasant activists who had begun publically assaulting and humiliating local landowners and gentry (sometimes going as far as beating them to death). At this point (as Mao himself later acknowledged), his attitude changed dramatically- he said that witnessing the violence made him feel "a kind of ecstasy never experienced before... It is wonderful!" When he was asked what should be done over the fact that people had been killed, his response was "one or two beaten to death, no big deal." (p.41) When he returned from the countryside, he was active in encouraging rural agitators to adopt violent tactics (the teaching text he used, which he may well have written himself, suggested slicing people's ankle tendons or cutting their ears off if they were "stubborn"). This pleased the Soviets but angered some of the leading Chinese Communists (p.43).

Chang and Halliday's interpretation of this is as follows:

"What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule." (p.41)

There's a similar implication in Chang and Halliday's explanation for why Mao chose to stick with the CCP when the violent crackdown against Chinese Communism began in earnest. They note that Mao himself was on the list of wanted criminals, but also point out that Mao had close contacts in the Nationalist party, who were at that point rising in power and distancing themselves from Communism- he could theoretically have jumped ship. So what explanation do they offer for this risky choice?

"Quite apart from all this, to stay with Wang [Nationalist leader and Mao's mentor]would mean having to become a moderate, and respect social order. Mao was not prepared to do this, not after he had discovered his fondness for brutality in rural Hunan." (p.47)

I should start by saying that the authors know vastly more about Mao than I do, so maybe they're onto something here. There's also a chance that I'm just acting on an interpretive tic peculiar to anthropologists ('if someone attributes something to an individual personality quirk, twitch violently and immediately insist that it must actually be a product of their cultural context'). But I'm not terribly happy with the automatic assumption that if someone expresses approval for political violence, then this is likely to be an expression of their inherent sadism, rather than anything to do with their sociopolitical context.

I think Chang and Halliday would argue that Mao's support for violence was definitely not motivated by any desire to improve the lot of the peasantry or Chinese society in general. They repeatedly argue that Mao was indifferent to the position of Chinese peasants. However, at least some of the stuff that they cite in support of this seems to be equally easy to read as saying that Mao wasn't very good at mimicking the style of peasant-related propaganda which was then popular in the USSR (e.g. see p.39, 43). Some of the other stuff they cite to support this involves the argument that Mao later fabricated a story about meeting the leader of a local peasant rebellion, and that as a young man he doesn't seem to have expressed any particular sympathy for the peasant situation (instead arguing that it was relatively easy for peasants to become well-off, and so intellectuals had it harder). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he dwelled on or thought about any of the tragedies affecting his local peasantry (e.g. the severe famine which hit Changsha when he was living there in 1921) (p.9). He also doesn't seem to have shown any particular enthusiasm for his early roles in the CCP (running a Communist bookshop and organising labour unions- he was apparently so incompetent at the latter that he failed to get invited to the Second Party Congress) (p.20, 29, 31).

This certainly doesn't sound like my normal mental image of someone so driven by their hardcore commitment to a specific ideology. But I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the argument that Mao stayed committed to the CCP because his experience in Hunan had awakened a kind of latent sadism in him. This is partly because 'sadism' is a bit of a vague word which seems like it might be descriptive rather than predictive. By which I mean: if they're just saying "Mao enjoyed watching people getting beaten up in Hunan because he was a sadist", then does this mean anything more than just: "Mao enjoyed watching others' pain because he's the sort of person who enjoys watching others' pain"?

Chang and Halliday make the interesting point (p.42) that the incident where Mao reassured the Hunan rebels that a few deaths were "no big deal" was probably the first time when Mao had literally held someone else's life in his hands. This is one of the areas where I wish the book had a bit more sociohistorical context (yes, I know it's already 800 pages long and I should probably come back and be picky after *I've* finished a ten-year research project- but I think it would have been more convenient for me personally if they'd split Mao's life into two or more parts and then published a series of books with more fleshed-out context). Specifically, I'm now wondering: what sort of general attitude did this part of China have towards violence at this point? E.g. did Mao grow up in the sort of place where it was relatively normal for people to beat or execute criminals in a public place? I have no idea. But that seems like a relevant bit of information if we're trying to think of what sorts of jobs a hypothetical latent sadist would be attracted to (and whether 'CCP member' would be likely to be at the top of the list).

Another thing which I'm still uncertain about: from what Chang and Halliday say, both the CCP and the Nationalists had member bases with mixed opinions about the role of violence in politics. Chang and Halliday seem to be arguing that when the anti-Communist crackdown started, Mao weighed up the options and decided that although the CCP was currently on the losing side, it was the longterm better option for someone who wanted the power to order beatings and executions. But at this point the Nationalists were increasing in power, and even if Wang was relatively moderate as far as executions and beatings went, they were still attempting a military uprising. It feels to me as though that sort of thing would be quite attractive to a hypothetical sadist. Or at least, more attractive than the idea of being a wanted man tied to a party which was tiny in relation to the Nationalists, doesn't seem to have had any immediate prospects of victory at this point, and also seems to have contained a significant number of influential people who were opposed to the idea of political violence.

Probably I'm making some sort of really basic mistake in my armchair analysis of the situation- but it would have been interesting to see Chang and Halliday go into more detail over this sort of stuff. I'll have to report back if it comes up later in the book.

Another random interesting thing:

"Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the 'Internationale'." (p.47)

For some reason, this image feels very similar to the idea of Christian martyrdom (and martyrdom in some other creedal faiths, no doubt). I wonder whether anyone has looked at the old doctrine vs praxis debate in the context of supposedly secular ideologies? Especially in relation to the idea that doctrinal religion tends to be associated with exposure to one of a relatively small number of cultural centres (the West being one of them).