Sometimes it seems the most dangerous word in Chinese politics isn’t
democracy or liberalism. It’s Maoism. Not that liberals get much airtime in today’s China; just last month, the Unirule Institute of Economics, a noted liberal think tank, was
shut down by the authorities. Equally striking, however, were arrests in the past year of idealistic, young
activists on some of China’s top campuses – including Peking University – who were advocating Chinese workers’ rights, not in the name of liberty or civil rights, but as a
tribute to the legacy of Mao Zedong.
The Communist Party saw real danger in a group of twentysomethings who decided that the current regime had twisted beyond recognition the real intentions of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. That founder, Mao, is very much visible in China in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. Yet the arrests of the young Maoists in China suggest that the founder’s legacy is still fluid, and subject to interpretation.
Whether in China or in the West, it’s hard to make a final judgment on just where his significance lies. How should we explain his lust for violent change?
Make no mistake, Mao did not simply express regret at breaking human eggs to make socialist omelettes. Rather, from an early age he was influenced by a sort of social Darwinism that implied transformative violence was a positive good. “A revolution is not a dinner party,” he observed in 1927. “It cannot be so refined.”
Nothing Mao did suggested he ever resiled from that sentiment. During the rectification campaign of 1942 to 1944 in Yanan, the party’s base before it took control of China, Mao and his thuggish security chief
Kang Sheng (who learned his techniques from Joseph Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD) forced Communist activists to abandon bourgeois or individualistic thoughts through psychological and physical pressure, including food deprivation and torture. Their Nationalist opponents used torture too.
But Mao’s regime seemed to make physical coercion a virtue in its own right. Repeatedly, during the campaign that Mao launched under his rule in 1949, the same tactics of public humiliation and physical torture were used to force political enemies to come to heel. In those early years, one could see signs of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, in which
millions of Chinese starved to death even though Mao was aware of their fate, and the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, in which Mao turned China’s classes against one another in a self-inflicted civil war.
