Mao

S.G. Breslin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

A lucid analysis of Mao as revolutionary general, ideologist and astute political manipulator, this introduction to the life and career of Mao Zedong provides an excellent introduction to modern Chinese history and its enigmatic protagonist.

Chapter 1

FROM PEASANT TO POWER

. . .

THE MAKING OF THE REVOLUTIONARY

Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan in Hunan province on 26 December 1893. In later life, Mao was to make much of his peasant background – he came from the peasantry and instinctively knew what the Chinese masses felt. In reality, however, Mao had a rather privileged and atypical upbringing (at least in the context of the day). For example, alongside his two younger brothers and his adopted sister, his mother brought him up in a Buddhist environment.¹ Furthermore, while his father had once been a peasant (albeit a relatively wealthy one), by the time Mao Zedong was born he had developed a prosperous business as a grain merchant. In short, as Hollingworth notes, he was born into a family that in many ways represented the antithesis of everything that the atheist egalitarian Mao was later to believe in.²

Hollingworth’s portrayal of Mao’s early life paints a picture of a man who was a natural born rebel. He ran away from home at the age of ten to escape the beatings that were part and parcel of family discipline; he refused to accept the betrothal that his father had arranged to a local girl in what was essentially a business deal to gain more labour for the Mao family’s land; and he preferred to spend his school holidays travelling around the countryside of Hunan staying with peasant families rather than returning home to his secure middle-class family.

Although these early acts of defiance were very personal actions against his family, they nevertheless were political actions – albeit unintentional political actions. By rebelling against his family, Mao was rejecting the basic principles of the Confucian social order which had not only dominated China for thousands of years, but which also underpinned the political order.

Confucianism placed a heavy emphasis on understanding your position in the social hierarchy, and conducting yourself accordingly in the ‘correct’ manner towards people of different social status. For example, within the family, women were considered inferior to men and younger males inferior to older males.³ Each person’s position within this hierarchy of worth in the family carried with it specific duties and responsibilities, both to other individuals within the family and to the family itself. Thus, had Mao been a good Confucian son, he would have accepted his father’s authority with a sense of filial piety. His father was older and wiser; for example, by arranging a marriage for his son, he was acting out of consideration for the greater good of the family that Mao too should have accepted with equanimity. But whilst Mao’s acts of personal rebellion would have been extraordinarily radical in earlier times, they were not quite so extraordinary in the context of turn of the century China.

. . .

CHINA AT THE TIME OF MAO’S CHILDHOOD: A REVOLUTIONARY ENVIRONMENT

The Chinese imperial system can be traced as far back as the establishment of the Xia dynasty in c.2205 BC.⁴ Perhaps more meaningfully, when Qin Shi Huangdi unified China in 221 BC, he set in place a political structure which survived more or less intact until 1911. By the time of Mao’s birth, however, the strains and pressures that were eventually to lead to its demise were already clearly evident. Population growth and urbanisation had begun to alter the social fabric of China in the late eighteenth century, but the watershed for the imperial system came in 1839 in the form of military conflict with Britain.

When King George III sent an embassy to China to negotiate a new trade relationship in 1793, the Emperor Qian Long responded that: ‘The Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance, and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.’ The Emperor’s words here are an expression of the sinocentric world-view that dominated the imperial system. China was seen as the centre of civilisation – indeed, the Chinese word for China is zhongguo or ‘central kingdom’.⁵ Those states which accepted Chinese supremacy – most clearly Korea, but to different extents the Japanese and the people of what became Vietnam – were considered to be part of the ‘sinitic’ world, and therefore worth dealing with. Those who rejected these ideas were simply barbarians who had nothing whatsoever to teach China, and were not worth dealing with unless they too accepted the sinocentric view.

Despite the official response, the British were undeterred in their commitment to gaining access to Chinese silk, tea and spices. The solution was opium. Grown in northern India and exported to China under the auspices of the British East India Company, the opium was distributed around southern China with the help of enterprising local officials. And even though the Chinese authorities declared opium contraband in 1800, and banned its smoking outright in 1821, the trade flourished. In the century from 1736, opium imports into China increased a thousandfold, and on the eve of the war with Britain in 1838, opium accounted for over half of all imports into China (and doubled again between 1838 and 1853).

War between Britain and China broke out in 1839 when the Chinese authorities seized and burnt opium being stored in warehouses in Canton. Having revoked the British East India Company’s monopoly on exporting opium to China, the British sent a fleet to China in the name of defending ‘free trade’. Faced with this vastly superior fleet – in terms of the boats themselves and the armaments and fire-power that they carried – the Chinese authorities agreed to sign a treaty accepting the British demands; but then vacillated and simply waited for the British to return home. When the gun-boats returned, the Chinese finally ratified the Treaty of Nanjing, which now included extra protocols granting even greater concessions to the British.

Defeat in the Opium Wars⁶ had profound and far-reaching consequences for China. On one level, China’s national pride was severely wounded, not only by losing to the barbarians, but also by being forced to cede Chinese territory to Britain in the shape of Kowloon and Hong Kong. Furthermore, the British were granted rights to trade in China’s coastal cities and also granted extra-territorial rights, which made British citizens immune from Chinese law. While the psychological impact of the Opium Wars might be difficult to calculate, the massive indemnity the Chinese were forced to pay to cover Britain’s expenses in the war provided a more concrete legacy.

Once the British had established the weakness of China’s military (particularly naval) defences, many other states followed the example. Of all the military humiliations in the second half of the nineteenth century, the most humiliating of all was China’s defeat at the hands of Japan in Korea. Not only did China lose her traditional influence over the Korean peninsula, but also lost to a nation that she traditionally perceived to be a vassal state. With each defeat, more and more territory was opened to the western powers, and more and more treaties forced the Chinese to pay out indemnities to them. In financial terms, the final straw came when the Boxer rebels began a campaign of terror against westerners in China. Western powers allied to invade Beijing and put down the rebellion, and the subsequent 1901 Boxer Protocol imposed an indemnity of US$334 million (with a 4 per cent interest rate) which all but bankrupted the Chinese state.

The imperial system responded to each new indemnity by increasing the tax burden on the peasantry. Unable to meet the state’s fiscal demands, many peasants turned to moneylenders to fill the gap. Interest rates were exorbitant: money lent in the spring had to be repaid with a 100 per cent interest rate in the autumn. Slowly, but surely, the already fragile existence of many peasants was eroded.

These pressures resulted in a number of rebellions against imperial rule in the period preceding Mao’s birth.⁷ The largest and most important of these, the Taiping Rebellion of 1851–64,⁸ defeated imperial armies across the southern half of China, and even established a new rival national government in Nanjing before collapsing through a combination of internal divisions and renewed imperial attacks.⁹

Faced with these external and internal challenges to its authority, the imperial system twice tried to reform itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. But rather than strengthening the imperial system, both attempts at reform did much to hasten imperial decline. The first attempt at reform, the Tongzhi Restoration¹⁰ in the 1860s, was built on the concept of ziqiang or self-strengthening. There was no notion here that the imperial system needed fundamentally to re-assess its underlying principles and practices, but just that it needed to change some specific policies in order to ward off the immediate threats and challenges, and return to the golden days of the past. Thus, a new foreign office was established in order to deal with the western powers, with the hope of dealing with any future conflict between China and western powers in keeping with western diplomatic procedures, and thus reduce the possibility of military conflict. China’s military forces were also developed to deal more effectively with both external military challenges and internal rebels like the Taipings.

In many ways, the Tongzhi Restoration missed the point entirely. As Mary Wright put it in her excellent interpretation of nineteenth-century China: ‘What was required was not merely a restoration at the eleventh hour of effective government along traditional lines but the creation of new policies that could ward off modern domestic and foreign threats’.¹¹ The irony here is that although from the vantage point of history we can assess the reforms as being far too conservative, for many within China itself at the time, the reforms were too radical. Many within the imperial system itself feared that any change would undermine their own position and status, and the Tongzhi Restoration eventually simply petered out in the face of obstruction from sceptics both in the imperial court itself and throughout the imperial bureaucracy across the country.

The Tongzhi Restoration nevertheless had three important consequences for imperial rule. First, military modernisation entailed the devolution of considerable operational autonomy to the military leaders in the regions. Military leaders like Yuan Shikai, who headed the Northern or Beiyang Army, became important power-brokers, and continued imperial rule eventually became contingent on their support. Second, for some of the younger generation within the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, the failure of the Tongzhi reforms to bring about real change was a great disappointment. If the entrenched conservatism of the imperial bureaucracy would not accept even these limited changes, then perhaps the imperial bureaucracy itself would have to be reformed by compulsion if China was to survive.

Third, the Tongzhi reforms introduced an element of western learning to improve Chinese understanding of the attitudes and actions of the western powers. Whilst access to western learning was strictly limited, it did give some younger educated Chinese their first experience of western history and ideas. For those who were disillusioned with the imperial system and its inability to accept limited reform, western history provided both positive and negative examples of what happened to entrenched political systems that refused to change.

For Kang Youwei, a young scholar who had progressed with flying colours through the Confucian examination system into the imperial bureaucracy, the negative example came from the partition of Poland by the great powers – a situation that he saw had much in common with the way in which the contemporary powers were dealing with China. If China (and not just the imperial system) was to survive, then it must learn from the reforms of Peter the Great in Russia, or even of the Meiji Reformers in Japan, and undertake a root and branch modernisation of the Chinese political and social structure.

Kang’s constant petitions to the Emperor to learn the lessons of history eventually bore fruit, and in 1898 Kang Youwei and another young reformer, Liang Qichao, instituted a number of radical reforms aimed at rapidly modernising China. The Confucian examination system was to be abandoned, and western learning was to become dominant at all levels; radical bureaucratic reform would be introduced to support new ‘western’ style economic development; and freedom and liberalism would become the new basis of politics and society. Not surprisingly, these reforms provoked intense anger from all those who stood to lose from the changes – which included virtually everybody within the imperial court and the imperial bureaucracy. Crucially, the military forces of Yuan Shikai, brought to Beijing to force through the reforms in the face of this opposition, abandoned the Emperor and sided instead with the conservatives under the leadership of the Empress Dowager, Cixi. Although Kang and Liang escaped from Beijing, the Emperor himself was arrested and after a Hundred Days of Reform the old imperial system was restored – but without a real Emperor at its head.

The failure of the Hundred Days of Reform marked the last real attempt to reform the imperial system from within. For those who believed that China had to change to survive, any chance of reforming the existing structure seemed much less likely than overthrowing the basic structure itself. This was particularly true of those young men who had been sent to Japan to study and learn how the Japanese themselves had responded (much more successfully) to the arrival of the west, and to gain a second-hand understanding of western ideas.¹² Rather than becoming the saviours of the empire, many of these students instead took the lead in looking to the non-Chinese world for solutions to China’s ills. Indeed, it was Chinese students in Japan who established the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance in 1905 under the leadership of Sun Yatsen – the first national political organisation committed to overthrowing the empire. As these students sent books and texts back to their friends in China, and then returned to take up positions within the imperial bureaucracies and armies, a revolutionary movement began to take shape within China.

Imperial rule continued until 1912, but with the imperial court consumed by its own factional in-fighting, the political vacuum in Beijing all but necessitated local leaders taking more and more power onto themselves. When they lobbied for a greater say in national politics with the creation of a new national assembly, they were frustrated by proposals that would have packed the assembly with the kinsmen of the courtesans, essentially maintaining a veto for the central imperial court.

These frustrations came to a head in October 1911 when troops in Wuhan in central China rebelled, fearing that an investigation into an accidental bomb explosion would reveal the extent of support for the Revolutionary Alliance within their ranks. Wuhan fell in just three days, and its declaration of independence from the empire was swiftly followed by similar declarations from other provinces as the revolution proceeded more by provincial decrees than by violence. The final straw for the empire came when Yuan Shikai took his troops south to defeat the rebels in Wuhan. Rather than engaging in conflict, Yuan engaged in discussions, and having secured the promise that he would become President of the new republic, the military joined the revolution and the empire’s fate was sealed.

On 12 February 1912 the last Emperor, Puyi, formally abdicated, but rather than marking the end of uncertainty and turmoil in Chinese government, it merely marked the start of a new period of uncertainty. The Revolutionary Alliance reformed itself as the Nationalist Party – the Guomindang – to fight China’s first (and to date only) national parliamentary elections. Although they won the vote, the new President Yuan Shikai simply declared the elections invalid and attempted to reconstitute power around himself. Indeed, in Novemb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 From Peasant to Power
• Chapter 2 Establishing the New Political Order: Maoism and its Critics
• Chapter 3 The First Major Cleavage: 1949–1957
• Chapter 4 Towards the Cultural Revolution
• Chapter 5 Launching the Cultural Revolution
• Chapter 6 Mao and the World
• Chapter 7 The Politics of De-Maoisation
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Bibliographical Essay
• Bibliography of all Works Cited in the Text
• Maps
• Index