Mao

The subtitle of this new biography of Mao Zedong, the long-time leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine—“the real story”—implicitly challenges an earlier biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005). Chang and Halliday met with criticism in some scholarly circles for making far-fetched claims about Mao—in effect, for demonizing him. Pantsov and Levine, by contrast, are clear from the start that, in their eyes, “Mao was neither a saint not a demon, but rather a complicated figure” (pp. 5–6). This “balanced” assessment of Mao highlights his achievements of having unified China and having liberated it from the shackles of imperialism (the authors’ terms) while criticizing his “criminal” behavior in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The authors discuss Mao's cunning and his political talents in the struggle for power, but they also emphasize his ideological delusions and genuine belief in the potential of a revolutionary transformation of China.The book's major claim to novelty is the use of Russian archival sources, especially materials from the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, which holds the records of the Communist International (Comintern). One of the authors, Pantsov, is chiefly known to Western audiences as a historian of relations between Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1920s and the 1930s, and the present biography is perhaps at its strongest in dealing with that earlier period of Mao's rise to power. It is here that Pantsov and Levine are most persuasive, their evidence is most compelling, and their narrative is at its most gripping. This part is also the most detailed. By comparison, the post-1949 years come across as an afterthought.Perhaps the most important argument advanced by Pantsov and Levine is that Mao consistently received backing from the Comintern and from the Soviet Union, and that this support proved crucial to his political survival amid the treacherous tides of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The authors discredit the Chinese leader's later claim that the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin continually undercut his position by supporting Mao's rivals in the CCP leadership. Pantsov and Levine show how Mao, for his part, professed firm commitment to Stalin and Stalinism—a very different picture from the one that casts Mao in the role of a rebellious revolutionary who bravely opposed Moscow's diktat. Opposing Moscow, Pantsov and Levine argue, was, in any case, a non-starter, given the CCP's complete reliance on covert Soviet cash infusions.Pantsov and Levine do not do as well with the post-1949 years. Their analysis often comes across as simplistic and one-sided, and their evidence is often uncertain and inadequate, primarily because the Comintern materials go up to only 1943 (when Stalin disbanded the organization). To give one example, the authors argue that Stalin's insistence on the establishment of New Democracy in China (a broad coalition government of an anti-imperialist but not a Communist orientation) was a well-thought-out ploy to paralyze the Kuomintang and gradually take it over from within while trying to fool Washington that the Chinese Communists were not actually Communists. This was the reason, according to Pantsov and Levine, that Stalin consistently refused to receive Mao in Moscow—he did not want U.S. officials to think that Mao was a Soviet agent! Mao, the authors assert, cooperated with Stalin's trickery by fooling the U.S. “Dixie mission” and otherwise downplaying his Communist credentials in 1944–1946. The authors provide no credible evidence to back up these claims.The book's coverage of Mao's visit to Moscow in December 1949–February 1950 falls far short of the existing historiography, not least Dieter Heinzig's seminal The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004) and does not take advantage of the new evidence found in the two parts of Vol. 5 of Andrei Ledovskii et al., eds., Sovetsko-Kitaiskie Otnosheniya v XX veke, including items translated in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin. Their narrative suffers from confusion about the basic chronology of the Mao-Stalin discussions and fails to address key questions: Why did Stalin change his mind about concluding the Sino-Soviet treaty? Why did Mao seek to conclude a new treaty? Who gained and who lost in these difficult negotiations?Mao's decision to enter the Korean War is presented in the book as simply an indication that Mao was “unable to oppose Stalin” (p. 385). The latter, Pantsov and Levine argue, was dead set on “dragging” the United States into the war as a precursor to a “world revolution.” (The evidence for this argument is confined to Stalin's message of 27 August 1950 to Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, which is well known to historians.) This argument portrays Stalin as a reckless gambler, failing to account for the complex calculations leading to his decision to support Kim Il-Sung's plans to invade South Korea. By the same token, limiting Mao's rationale to his “inability” to oppose Stalin fails to account for many of the reasons that the Chinese leader himself would want to intervene, including those related to issues of ideology, domestic mobilization, and national security (all of these have been discussed extensively in the historiography, notably in Chen Jian's work).In their discussion of Sino-Soviet relations, Pantsov and Levine assert that Nikita Khrushchev committed a “fatal mistake” by coming to China in 1954. This made him appear weak in the eyes of Mao, who “respected only force” (p. 410). The crash of the Sino-Soviet alliance several years later was, in the eyes of the authors, attributable to a conflict of personalities between Mao and Khrushchev. This was, to be sure, an important factor but surely not the only factor in play. By the same token, the authors’ argument that Mao pursued a Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s because a breakthrough in relations with Washington would elevate his, and his country's, prestige, misses out on a host of other reasons for the rapprochement, not least Mao's preoccupation with the possibility of a Soviet invasion, a subject analyzed in recent studies by Yang Kuisong and Xia Yafeng, among others.By contrast, in discussing the reasons for Mao's domestic campaigns—from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution—Pantsov and Levine allow a sufficient degree of multicausality. They show, in particular, that Mao was motivated not only by a thirst for power but also by revolutionary visions. This interpretation is sound, but it is hardly new. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals offer a similar take on Mao's radicalism (e.g., see their Mao's Last Revolution). In the assignment of responsibility, the authors occasionally err on the side of collective guilt, arguing that overzealous and sycophantic cadres frequently misled Mao into thinking that his policies were successful. Mao, they argue was, not as malicious as Stalin. He did not sign death warrants for his enemies. This argument sets Pantsov and Levine apart from scholars like Frank Dikötter who assign a greater share of blame to Mao. Pantsov and Levine stretch their argument beyond all credulity in asserting that Mao was the “greatest victim” of the system he had put into place. The bones of many of his starved and tortured victims beg to disagree.The scale of Mao's life, Pantsov and Levine argue in this important book, “was too grand to be reduced to a single meaning.” On the one hand, he “transformed China from a semi-colony into an independent and powerful state.” On the other hand, the transformation cost tens of millions of lives. The purpose of this biography, the authors say, is not so much to praise or to blame Mao as to show why his legacy endures and why his portrait hanging over the Gate of Heavenly Peace is unlikely to come down anytime soon. What Pantsov and Levine do not fully do, however, is account for alternative scenarios. Was the tortuous road toward liberation a necessary one, and could China have become an “independent and powerful state” without the absurdities of the Mao era? These still-unanswered questions will ultimately determine the real meaning of Mao Zedong's tragic and contradictory legacy

Political science · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies