Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

MacFarquhar on Mao and the Launching of the Cultural Revolution

The conclusion of Roderick MacFarquhar's (1974, 1983, 1999) three-volume Origins of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 0192149954; 0231057164; 0231110839)

CONCLUSIONS

The first volume of this work started with a mass movement. Another mass movement was the theme of the second volume. It was the ultimate failure of both collectivization and the Great Leap Forward that was one key element in the political process that led eventually, though not inevitably, to Mao's third major mass movement, the Cultural Revolution, the cataclysm....

The rapid and relatively peaceful completion of collectivization... had been a stunning success for Mao, won in the face of his colleagues' doubts. The social fabric of the nation had apparently been transformed without the massive upheavel that had occurred in the Soviet Union.... In war, [Mao] had bested Chiang Kai-shek; in peace, he had surpassed Stalin. The victor of the revolution had become the architect of national renewal, and would go on to pioneer new structures like the communes. Yet a decade later, Mao emerged at the head of a wrecker's crew, preaching 'destruction before construction'. That Jekyll-to-Hyde metamorphosis can partly be traced to collectivization.

Mao envisaged his collectivist triumph as the launch pad... to make his nation rich and powerful... economic success had to be the surest advertisement for and guarantor of the new social order.... Unfortunatley for Mao, his hopes collided with reality. The economic 'little leap' of 1956 ws aborted by the guardians of the Soviet model. At this point, the Chairman had no alternative... and... more pressing concerns: the beginnings of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the other key element in the origins of the Cultural Revolution.

The confusion and heart-searching... precipitated by Khrushchev's attack on Stalin in... February 1956... caused Mao to distrust the CPSU 1st secretary and to ponder how to avoid a similar crisis within China.... [Mao] called on non-party intellectuals and bureaucrats to help remold the CCP. But his unprecedented invitation... backfired. Criticisms mounted, campus agitation spread, cadre morale sagged. So Mao reneged.... Punishing the educated elite for answering his call, he... turned back to development, and to the peasants who had provided him with his greatest triumphs in war and peace....

Mao launched the GLF and the commune movement in a utopian effort to create a new form of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The peasants... poor and blank... could be transformed into renaissance men, equally proficient in agriculture, industry, commerce, education, or the military.... But his second grand design, a collectivist cornucopia, collapsed in the nationwide famine which the GLF precipitated.... Collectivization may have been a victory for Mao, but it had been a defeat for China. The rapid spread of the responsibility systmein the early 1960s demonstrated that the vaunted 'transformation' had been only superficial. The CCP should have left well alone after land reform.

But... Mao... could not sanction surrender without... humiliating loss of face and the sacrifice of his vision.... Fortunately... as in the case of the GLF, only one old comrade was bold.... As at Lushan in 1959, so at Beidaihe in 1962, non of the whistle-blower's colleagues was prepared to stand by him.... [T]he party's rural chief Deng Zihui stood alone.... [H]is disgrace was less demeaning than Peng Duhuai's. The CCP and the peasants were compelled to muddle through with scaled-down communes. But at least Mao quit the economic arena....

The Chairman['s]... perception of... lack of ideological steel reinforced other concerns arising from the CPSU's 20th Congress.... Mao felt that th eSoviet leader had gone soft on the international bourgeoisie.... Gradually... Mao became convinced that the origins of Soviet treachery lay in the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism by CPSU leaders in the interests of a capitalist restoration.... [T]he Chairman pondered the meaning of developments in the Soviet bloc for China, again asking... How can we avoid this fate?...

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the record shows that Mao was always in overall charge if not always in day-to-day command. He controlled the agenda.... Mao bowed to force majeure, but not to his colleagues.... When Mao chose discretion, his lieutenants might feel obliged by circumstances to alter course, but they checked with him on every importnat issue. They assumed or hoped that silence or a mumble indicated consent. The brief interlude of 'rightest' policies in the early 1960s... were rational responses by committed communists to... crises. Leftists grumbled, but through January 1962 Mao gave the policies his imprimatur. When the great helmsman returned to the bridge in mid-1962 and reversed course, his lieutenants aye-aye'd.... Prometheus bided his time; he was never bound. And he always made the difference.

If this account of the decade leading up to the Cultural Revolution is correct--albeit at variance with earlier conventional wisdom--the questions arises: why was the Cultural Revolution necessary at all? If Mao could call the shots, why shoot the piano-players?...

[T]he evidence suggests that 'Mao's ultimate dread... [was] the death of the revolution'.... Many revolutionary victors are happy to settle for power and stability. Mao was not....

But by the mid-1960s, the Chairman was running out of options.... His efforts to galvanize the country over the previous decade had all boomeranged.... The most serious setback for Mao was the failure of rural collectivism. The intellectuals he could shrug off.... His persona was not invested in industry.... Mao built a field of dreams but the peasants would not come.... By 1965, he realized how right he had been a decade earlier to worry about the 'spontaneous and constant growth of capitalist elements in the countryside'.... And by early 1965 Mao felt also that the radicalized Socialist Education Movement... could not be pressed forward on the lines envisaged by Liu Shaoqi. The political costs were unacceptable.

At this point... most other leaders would have settled for second-best. Not Mao. Ruthlessly Machiavellian in the acquisition and retention of power, Mao remained recklessly utopian in the uses to which he put it.... [T]he Chairman had to find a way to implant his people with an ideological inner compass.... If th eparty could not change society, then Mao would unleash society to change the party.

But the Cultural Revolution was rooted in personal as well as principled disputes.... Khrushchev's dismissal increased his sense of the threat from Liu and Deng.... Since Mao proved quite prepared to dump Liu Shaoqi, his close comrade-in-arms... of twenty-years standing... why should he not have considered the earnest, uncharismatic, but doggedly assertive Liu capable of equal treachery towrad himself?...

[I]t does seem extraordinary that [Liu] put up no resistance.... Whatever the explanation, the restraint displayed by Liu, and by Deng, Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Luo Ruiqing, Yang Shangkun, and many others... was enormously helpful.... He ws able to safeguard his own position by getting rid of colleagues... and surround[ing] himself with toadies.... Mao thus stripped China of a priceless asset... the Yan'an Round Table... which had conquered China and guided it....

[T]here were... reasons, unconnected with the Chairman's personal security of tenure, why he might have wanted to prevent Liu succeeding him.... Mao was for 'opneing wide' and 'unleashing' mass movements, while Liu always opted to exercise tighter control through hands-on party leadership.... Liu's... tendency to yaw violently from one extreme to another... from ultra-leftism during the GLF to ultra-rightism during the post-GLF famine, and then back to ultra-leftism in the second half of the SEM....

[I]f Mao wished to revolutionize the CCP, he had to remove Liu Shaoqi and those who emulated his style of leadership.... This was clearly an important determinant of the mannger in which the Cultural Revolution was launched. Why were Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Luo Ruiqing, and Yang Shangkun all charged in quick succession...?... Whatever genuine if misbegotten idealism inspired Mao, his first resort was to sorded political intrigue. The Cultural Revolution bore the mark of Cain from birth....

Uncertain, now, where the revolutionary Grail was to be found, Mao pinned all his hopes on the quest for it.... [M]aking revolution woudl be the revolution. He sent the comrades of the Yan'an Round Table out to face one ultimate test in the hope that, purified in the flames of class struggle, in luan, at least some--a former favorite like Deng Xiaoping, for instance, might return, born again in Mao Thought.... And if all else failed, the revolution was incarnate in its leader and the prime directive was: Long Live Chairman Mao!

I think MacFarquhar is broadly right in his claim that the Cultural Revolution should not be understood as a countercoup by a Mao Zedong who had been shoved aside at the start of the 1960s into an honorable semi-retirement by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaopoing. After all, only an essentially unchallenged dictator could have launched something like the Cultural Revolution in the first place.

But I find it hard to believe--and I think that if MacFarquhar had carried his story further into the Cultural Revolution itself he would have found it impossible to sustain the illusion--that it was at its core an even half-thought-out plan to permanently stem the tide of Soviet-style "revisionism" within the Chinese Communist Party. The many rapid twists and turns of the Party Line, the replacement of communists by sycophants in positions of high authority, the politics of murder and assassination that made it clear that high politics was as much a matter of persons and power as of policies, the focus on destruction rather than construction--no one sane and in touch with reality could have thought that the Cultural Revolution served as a positive utopian model.

So I think that MacFarquhar would have done better to focus his attention not on the fight against "revisionism" but on a much older and more standard story line: that of an old, sick emperor, paranoid, with too-few sources of outside information, vulnerable to sycophants and fearful that his time has already passed.