On China (14 page)

Mao’s China was, by design, a country in permanent crisis; from the earliest days of Communist governance, Mao unleashed wave after wave of struggle. The Chinese people would not be permitted ever to rest on their achievements. The destiny Mao prescribed for them was to purify their society and themselves through virtuous exertion.

Mao was the first ruler since the unification of China to tear apart Chinese traditions as a deliberate act of state policy. He conceived of himself as rejuvenating China by dismantling, at times violently, its ancient heritage. As he proclaimed to the French philosopher André Malraux in 1965:

China, Mao once vowed, was to be “smashed” like an atom, in order to destroy the old order but, at the same time, produce an explosion of popular energy to lift it to ever greater heights of achievement:

As part of this process, Mao generated a pervasive assault on traditional Chinese political thought: where the Confucian tradition prized universal harmony, Mao idealized upheaval and the clash of opposing forces, in both domestic and foreign affairs (and, indeed, he saw the two as connected—regularly pairing foreign crises with domestic purges or ideological campaigns). The Confucian tradition prized the doctrine of the mean and the cultivation of balance and moderation; when reform occurred, it was incremental and put forward as the “restoration” of previously held values. Mao, by contrast, sought radical and instant transformation and a total break with the past. Traditional Chinese political theory held military force in relative disesteem and insisted that Chinese rulers achieved stability at home and influence abroad through their virtue and compassion. Mao, driven by his ideology and his anguish over China’s century of humiliation, produced an unprecedented militarization of Chinese life. Where traditional China revered the past and cherished a rich literary culture, Mao declared war on China’s traditional art, culture, and modes of thought.

In many ways, however, Mao incarnated the dialectic contradictions that he claimed to be manipulating. He was passionately and publicly anti-Confucian, yet he read widely in Chinese classics and was wont to quote from the ancient texts. Mao enunciated the doctrine of “continuous revolution,” but when the Chinese national interest required it, he could be patient and take the long view. The manipulation of “contradictions” was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of
da tong,
or the Great Harmony.

Maoist governance thus turned into a version of the Confucian tradition through the looking glass, proclaiming a total break with the past while relying on many of China’s traditional institutions, including an imperial style of governance; the state as an ethical project; and a mandarin bureaucracy that Mao loathed, periodically destroyed, and, in the end, equally periodically was obliged to re-create.

Mao’s ultimate objectives could not be expressed in a single organizational structure or be fulfilled by realizing a specific set of political objectives. His goal was to sustain the process of revolution itself, which he felt it was his special mission to carry on through ever greater upheavals, never permitting a resting point until his people emerged from the ordeal purified and transformed:

In traditional China, the Emperor had been the linchpin of the Great Harmony of all living things. By his virtuous example, he was perceived to keep the existing cosmic order in joint and maintain the equilibrium between heaven, man, and nature. In the Chinese view, the Emperor “transformed” rebellious barbarians and brought them to heel; he was the pinnacle of the Confucian hierarchy, assigning to all people their proper place in society.

This is why, until the modern period, China did not pursue the ideal of “progress” in the Western sense. The Chinese impetus for public service was the concept of rectification—the bringing of order to a society that had been allowed to fall into dangerous imbalance. Confucius declared as his mission to try to
recover
profound truths that his society had neglected, thereby restoring it to a golden age.

Mao saw his role as diametrically the opposite. The Great Harmony came at the end of a painful process likely to claim as victims all who traversed it. In Mao’s interpretation of history, the Confucian order had kept China weak; its “harmony” was a form of subjugation. Progress would come only through a series of brutal tests pitting contradictory forces against each other both domestically as well as internationally. And if these contradictions did not appear by themselves, it was the obligation of the Communist Party and its leader to keep a permanent upheaval going, against itself if necessary.

In 1958, at the outset of the nationwide program of economic collectivization known as the Great Leap Forward, Mao outlined his vision of China in perpetual motion. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, was organically a precursor to a new upheaval whose beginning needed to be hastened lest the revolutionaries became indolent and start resting on their laurels:

The cadres of the revolution were to be tested by ever more difficult challenges at shorter and shorter intervals. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao:

But how can a state in permanent upheaval participate in the international system? If it applies the doctrine of continuous revolution literally, it will be involved in constant turmoil and, likely, in war. The states that prize stability will unite against it. But if it tries to shape an international order open to others, a clash with the votaries of continuous revolution is inevitable. This dilemma beset Mao all his life and was never finally resolved.

Mao proclaimed his basic attitude toward international affairs on the eve of taking power. Before the newly assembled People’s Political Consultative Conference, he summed up China’s attitude toward the prevailing international order in the phrase “The Chinese people have stood up”:

To stand up to the world was a daunting prospect for China in 1949. The country was underdeveloped, without the military capacity to impose its own preferences on a world that vastly outmatched it in resources and, above all, in technology. When the People’s Republic emerged on the world stage, the United States was the principal nuclear superpower (the Soviet Union having just exploded its first nuclear weapon). The United States had supported Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese civil war, transporting Nationalist troops to northern Chinese cities after the Japanese surrender in World War II to preempt the Communist armies. Mao Zedong’s victory was greeted with dismay in Washington and triggered a debate over who had “lost” China. That implied, at least in Beijing, an eventual attempt to reverse the outcome—a conviction reinforced when in 1950, upon the North Korean invasion of the South, President Truman moved the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, forestalling an attempt by the new government on the mainland to reconquer Taiwan.

The Soviet Union was an ideological ally and was needed initially as a strategic partner to balance the United States. But China’s leaders had not forgotten the series of “unequal treaties” extorted for a century to establish the Russian possession of its Far East maritime provinces and a zone of special influence in Manchuria and Xinjiang, nor that the Soviet Union was still claiming the validity of concessions in northern China extracted from Chiang Kai-shek in wartime agreements in 1945. Stalin took for granted Soviet dominance in the Communist world, a stance incompatible in the long run with Mao’s fierce nationalism and claim to ideological importance.

China was also involved in a border dispute with India in the Himalayas, over the territory known as Aksai Chin in the west and over the so-called McMahon Line in the east. The disputed region was no small matter: at roughly 125,000 square kilometers, the total contested area was approximately the size of Pennsylvania or, as Mao later noted to his top commanders, the Chinese province of Fujian.
⁸

Mao divided these challenges into two categories. At home, he proclaimed continuous revolution and was able to implement it because he increasingly exercised total control. Abroad, world revolution was a slogan, perhaps a long-range objective, but China’s leaders were sufficiently realistic to recognize that they lacked the means to challenge the prevailing international order except by ideological means. Within China, Mao recognized few objective limits to his philosophic visions other than the ingrained attitudes of the Chinese people, which he struggled to overwhelm. In the realm of foreign policy, he was substantially more circumspect.

When the Communist Party seized power in 1949, substantial regions had broken away from the historic Chinese Empire, notably Tibet, parts of Xinjiang, parts of Mongolia, and the border areas of Burma. The Soviet Union maintained a sphere of influence in the northeast, including an occupation force and a fleet in the strategically located Lushun harbor. Mao, like several founders of dynasties before him, claimed the frontiers of China that the empire had established at its maximum historic extent. To territories Mao considered part of that historic China—Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, border regions in the Himalayas or the north—he applied the maxim of domestic politics: he was implacable; he sought to impose China’s governance and generally succeeded. As soon as the civil war ended, Mao set out to reoccupy the secessionist regions, such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and eventually Tibet. In that context, Taiwan was not so much a test of Communist ideology as a demand to respect Chinese history. Even when he refrained from military measures, Mao would put forward claims to territories given up in the “unequal treaties” of the nineteenth century—for example, claims to territory lost in the Russian Far East in the settlements of 1860 and 1895.

With respect to the rest of the world, Mao introduced a special style that substituted ideological militancy and psychological perception for physical strength. It was composed of a Sinocentric view of the world, a touch of world revolution, and a diplomacy using the Chinese tradition of manipulating the barbarians, with great attention paid to meticulous planning and the psychological domination of the other side.

Mao eschewed what Western diplomats viewed as the commonsense dictum that to recover from the decades of upheaval China should conciliate the major powers. He refused to convey any appearance of weakness, chose defiance over accommodation, and avoided contact with Western countries after establishing the People’s Republic of China.

Zhou Enlai, the first Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, summed up this attitude of aloofness in a series of aphorisms. The new China would not simply slip into existing diplomatic relationships. It would set up “a separate kitchen.” Relations with the new regime would have to be negotiated from case to case. The new China would “sweep the house clean before inviting the guests”—in other words, it would clean up lingering colonial influences before establishing diplomatic relations with Western “imperialist” countries. It would use its influence to “unite the world’s people”—in other words, encourage revolution in the developing world.
⁹