Professor Maurice Meisner was not alone among Western academics in painting a sympathetic picture of Mao Tse-tung during the 1960s and '70s. It was common for "China Hands" to give Mao a supportive press, partly in the hope that he might actually emerge as the prophet of a new utopian world order.
Meisner's previous book on the subject of Maoism and the Chinese Communist revolution, Mao's China, conveyed a clear ideological affinity with both the philosophy and goals proclaimed by the "Great Helmsman." The book garnered immediate praise from scholars across the ideological spectrum for being one of the most comprehensive and detailed studies of Communist China when it appeared in 1977. The accolades drowned out those more conservative voices that called his analysis of Mao too optimistic to be believed with any degree of confidence.
Meisner may find himself to be somewhat of a loner in his current interpretative orientation. In Mao's China and After, he lights a rather rapid current by going against popular and academic opinion about Mao and his legacy, for he holds that today's conventional views treat Mao unkindly, especially when he is placed in proper historical perspective.
Mao's China, which this volume revises and updates, was published during the heyday of Maoism. Since Mao's death in 1976, the "Gang of Four" trials, and the reemergence of Teng Hsiao-ping, there has been sober rethinking of the previous optimism concerning the so-called glories of Mao's leadership and thought. This has occurred both in the West and in mainland China itself. Discredit of Mao and Maoism is now considerably more common, yet Meisner still champions Maoism as "a good thing gone bad."
Although this view has a decided ring of ideological romanticism to it, Meisner does provide one of the best recent analyses of how and why Mao and Chinese communism emerged with such force in China. His assessments of China during the early 20th Century clearly define the conditions that helped spawn the Chinese revolution, including the impact of Western imperialism on the breakdown of traditional social order, the causes of continued backwardness across China, and the reasons for the decline in power and effectiveness of the gentry class.
Meisner traces in detail the early struggles of the CCP during the 1920s and '30s, including the intricacies of how the Moscow-directed CCP originally worked under the banner of the Nationalist Party headed by Chiang Kai-shek while secretly spreading its own revolutionary agenda among workers and peasants.
He is critical of the attempts made later by the Nationalists to purge the Communists from their ranks, asserting at one point that the Nationalists committed acts of "unprecedented brutality" against the Communists that were "as yet unmatched in the 20th century" in terms of the numbers killed. Given the historical context he is trying to set in this revised edition, Meisner's account suggests a trend toward selective criticism weighted against the Nationalist Party.
This orientation is coupled with a more romanticized assessment than facts may support of the Communist "Long March" of 1935-36, as the Nationalist armies chased Mao and the Communists into the hinterlands of China. Nevertheless, the CCP's eventual refuge in Yenan comes across as the low-point of Chinese communism.
Meisner agrees with the view that Chinese communism was probably saved by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. This forced a redirection of the Nationalists' military campaign away from the Communists and eventually created the conditions for an uneasy alliance between the Nationalists and Communists that provided important breathing space and time for the latter to regroup. The circumstances also gave the Communists an opportunity to return to their former strategy of living off the Nationalist bureaucracy while pursuing their own ends.
Meisner argues that the eventual failure of the Nationalist efforts to defeat the CCP in the late 1940s was due in large measure to its inability to come to grips with the economic needs of China's four hundred million peasants. The CCP, on the other hand, had since the war years with Japan concentrated its efforts on rural programs and recruitment of peasants into the Party. Simultaneously, Mao established himself as the leader and intellectual architect of an agrarian-based communist revolution.
When Meisner begins his coverage of the first ten years of Communist rule, the tone changes from a sympathetic underdog view of the Communists to an apologetic one, even though he claims care in distinguishing between apologia and justifiable reasons for Mao's policies. Despite a favorable bias toward Mao, he nevertheless offers excellent insights into the problems the Communists faced, not only on practical developmental issues, but also when encountering the legacy of their three-decade-old revolution. Severe inconsistencies and contradictions in their ideology appeared when measured against their programs.
His insights into the Communist ideological and developmental dilemmas are matched, however, by a series of apologetic arguments with regard to Mao's establishment of a totalitarian police state in the post-revolutionary period. He asserts that communist revolutions necessarily turn repressive after victory is achieved in order to create the stability and to maintain the social order needed for development. This is an interesting analytic twist. Having vilified the Nationalists for trying to repress the communists in an effort to quash rebellion and achieve stability, Meisner leaves himself open for criticism by seeming to say left-wing repression is justifiable as a means to an end—a clear double standard.
Other excuses for excessive communist controls in the immediate post-revolutionary period emerge in the text as well. Among other ostensibly legitimate reasons for institutionalizing totalitarian control, Meisner cites a backward economy, lack of a communication and transportation infrastructure, and an untested social and political order. His attempt to put the Nationalists in the most unfavorable analytic light is pushed to an extreme when he argues that certain external factors, notably the threat of a U.S.-sponsored Nationalist Chinese invasion of the mainland from Taiwan, gave the Communists ample reason to run a police state. Misplaced blame for totalitarian repression indeed.
Despite all these egregious faults, Mao's China and After is not an anti Nationalist polemic. Mao and the CCP are in fact taken to task for their initial (and continuing) ambiguity toward the proper extent of state power, especially with respect to the democratic ideals so clearly stated in the CCP "Constitution."
Meisner criticizes Mao for not fulfilling the political promise of the revolution by providing genuine democracy in an atmosphere of freedom, and admits that this was a major disappointment for those who believed that Mao would be different from Lenin and Stalin. He adds that the repression which followed the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1958 "destroyed the hope that China's 'transition to socialism' might proceed on the basis of some form of popular democracy and with some real measure of intellectual freedom."
The year-long Hundred Flowers campaign is treated with considerable scholarly caution. No one can really be sure what Mao was up to when he encouraged public criticism of the CCP's performance. Many critics contend that Mao intentionally introduced the campaign in order to bring his ideological enemies out into the open so they could later be purged and eliminated.
Meisner takes a less harsh view, arguing that Mao was probably trying to close the gap between the state bureaucracy and the people it governed. By the late 1950s, Mao had begun to feel that the CCP was losing its "closeness" with the people and he decided to use the Hundred Flowers as an anti-bureaucratic weapon.
At this point the book begins a more hard-nosed phase of criticism, both of the Communist revolution and the CCP itself. Meisner's analysis of the years 1956-60 spans 100 pages, and dwells at length on Mao's attempts to decentralize the bureaucracy while at the same time raising productivity through communization of first agriculture and then factories.
But Mao's role in the disasters such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) is still sort-pedaled. Meisner calls this an attempt to put China in the fast-lane of development and simultaneously bring about an entirely new social order on the heels of the expected economic progress.
The Great Leap Forward turned out to be a giant leap backwards, and a tragedy of as yet untold proportions. Meisner argues that it was a good Maoist idea that went bad when the CCP rank and file went overboard in their expectations and programs after communization was achieved. But his assertion that the original intent of the Leap and its ideals were logical and hope-inspiring are not very convincing economically, politically, or otherwise. The plan and implementation were genuinely colossal mistakes, and it is difficult to excuse the utter misery and massive starvation on a scale perhaps unprecedented in history that resulted from the policy.
Meisner does not ignore these facts, but he is only critical of them after he first glorifies Mao's intentions. This may not sit well with readers either, for as Meisner himself admits, history judges actions and results, not intentions.
Mao was not much more successful in putting a spark back in the communist revolution by his launching of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a label that has to be one of the greatest misnomers ever conceived. Disappointingly, Meisner still tries to acquit Mao of the fundamental responsibility for this tragic period.
He tries to lend an air of credibility to Mao's intentions by noting that the Cultural Revolution was Mao's "last desperate attempt to revive a revolution that he believed was dying." Not much comfort for those on the receiving end. And when Meisner puts the blame for the catastrophe on the "Gang of Four," the argument becomes especially murky.
The final section of the book is completely new, and covers the period from Mao's death in 1976 to the end of 1984. An interesting thesis emerges in the new historiography of Mao. Meisner argues that Teng Hsiao-ping and the other current leaders of the CCP who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution have a vested interest in emphasizing the ugliness of that period. He also hints that by magnifying the scope of the disaster, the CCP leadership would further legitimize their current hold on the reins of power. This argument not only lacks subtlety, it ignores a growing corpus of facts concerning the devastation and terror that reigned during the Cultural Revolution.
While this final section presents substantial reasons why the new leadership cannot denigrate Mao altogether for fear the CCP legacy itself might collapse as well, Mao is still spared his due share of criticism. And suggestions that the new leadership is just as repressive as Mao or even more so are not effective defenses of Mao's status.
But what about the Maoist legacy? What is Meisner's assessment ten years after the death of the "Great Helmsman"? Mao's legacy is divided into its political and economic dimensions. On the political side, the conclusion is that Maoism was a good thing gone bad, and that it was indeed excessive and tragic. On the economic side, however, the verdict is much more positive.
Meisner cites economic data showing that mainland China's GNP grew at an annual rate of eleven percent during Mao's reign. Not even Japan or the Republic of China on Taiwan grew so rapidly. That mainland China is still backward and impoverished is not disputed, nor is the current wealth of Japan and the ROC which were at about the same level as mainland China in 1949. Yet Japan and the ROC are now more than ten times richer than Communist China, making it difficult to be impressed with Meisner's statement that Mao presided over "one of the great modernizing epochs in world history, and one that brought great social and human gains."
Economics aside, the so-called "social and human gains" of Communist society frankly do not elicit unbridled awe in many people. This line illustrates a tone that pervades the book: a decided ducking of hard questions about Mao and Maoism. While it is instructive to read arguments seeking to prove that Mao did more good than harm to the Chinese nation and people, that conclusion remains unconvincing. At one point Meisner confesses that Maoism "sowed the seeds of its own destruction." Ironically, this book performs a similar task concerning the thesis that Maoism was once a good thing for the people of China.