Just a week ago I finally finished
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. This book is engaging, very informative and thorough, not to mention heart-wrenching as it throws open widows of light onto the basest tyrant in history. I found it at Half-Price Books for $8, and I’m not sure I want to sell it back. I hope this summary with exterior links will help explain why Mao is venerated despite his tyranny. I rely totally on the book for information.
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Mao Tse-Tung (Mao is the family name; Tse-Tung means “to shine on the East”) was born to peasant parents in Shaoshan of the Hunan province. This village of rice, tea and bamboo farmers was about 400 miles N-NE of Hong Kong. Mao’s miserly father accumulated some means to educate his son who despised labor. His mother exposed him to Buddhism and his early education was in Confucian literature. Tse-Tung openly challenged his father’s authority often, but still managed to have his own way. Mao got out of Shaoshan as early as he could, but he claimed later, as chairman, that he had sympathized with the plight of peasants (a typical communist sentiment), but Chang says all the evidence points to a teenager who despised peasantry.
Mao received his education and exposure to competing worldviews at Changsha, the large city in his own Hunan province. During the years of his education, Republican sympathizers scored the toppling of the centuries-old Manchu dynasty based in Peking. The Manchu were a small ethnic minority compared to the 94 percent Han, over whom they ruled. Changsha enjoyed the fomentation of new national freedoms, so Mao (through a series of schools and teachers) wrote about and discussed powerful ideas with peers. “The nature of the people of the country is inertia…They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and narrow-minded.” A friend’s diary mentioned that student Mao proposed burning all the printed literature subsequent to the Tang and Sung dynasties. “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others.” “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.” “Some people say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself…I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.” His intemperate ideals for changing his nation centered around upheaval and violence. But Mao’s radical peers surpassed his abilities – he showed no leadership potential or academic superiority. He never even mastered any language other than his local dialect (picture the chairman requiring a common national language that he doesn’t even use). Mao put no effort into his (undesirable) first few meager library and teaching positions – sometimes he came bare-chested to class.
Mao did not have any CCP (Chinese Communist Party) ties until 1921, so the “official” history propagated by Peking (=Beijing) say the Chinese group was founded that year. Yet the Soviet records and the author’s personal interviews show that the party began in 1920 with a Marxist professor in Shanghai, a man who believed Marxist philosophy, but afterward came under Soviet influence. Soviets formed the “Comintern” to foster sympathies abroad that could spur revolutions from inside other nations, and China was high on the list. Mao met the prof on a return trip from Peking, and under his guidance, opened a bookstore back in Changsha to distribute communist literature. There Mao gave himself an important-sounding title and delegated the chore of running the store to someone else – a lasting trait of the future Chairman. Because Mao enjoyed the feeling of importance and the radical smell of Marxism, he rather pragmatically joined the bunch. This pragmatic alliance began Mao’s foisting his egotism on his country, leading to the misery of those precious people.
Chang’s (the author’s) next chapter is called “Lukewarm Believer” because Mao did not (apparently) personally embrace the ideals of communism – the worldview was a means to promote himself. Mao was much more passionate about sex. He had four different wives throughout his life, with the last being known as “Madame Mao” through her role in the Cultural Revolution and other brutalities. You would not expect such a self-centered man to respect marriage – and he did not. His string of “girlfriends” before he ever came to power is too long to number, and his totalitarian regime only multiplied his field of women he took for bed mates. The children born to his wives received no love from their father. Many died without knowing him.
The first CCP congress in 1921 passed with one notable – the Chinese participants learned that the Soviets intended to maintain a strong grip on the party’s activities. Though they did not like this set-up, better than 90% of CCP funding came from Moscow. Mao was not invited to the second CCP congress because he had done nothing for organizing labor groups in his province. Mao’s stock with Moscow skyrocketed when the inner ring of the CCP opposed Moscow’s order to join the new “Nationalist” group (led by Sun Yat-sen) that intended to topple the fragile government in Peking. Mao alone saw the pragmatic benefits, so he was given a higher rank by Russia’s emissary Borodin, sent to guide the CCP and the Nationalists. Russian money, military training, and supplies began to make the Nationalists and the CCP (who infiltrated into the Nationalists) reasonable contenders for control of China. However, Mao’s clandestine opportunism got him removed from his prominent position within a few years. He had another rise and fall before the next major event.
The Nationalist leader, Sun, died in 1925, and a friend of Mao’s, Wang Ching-wei, took over. Suddenly Mao was powerful again. It was then that he discovered, while watching peasants organize and use force against wealthy landowners (in the Marxist fashion) during a famine, that violence brought him pleasure. He grew to enjoy bloodshed. This love cost the Chinese population dearly over the next 50 years. It enabled him to outlast and to put down the idealists and his closer rivals for power. Not long after Wang's ascension, far away in Peking, the shaky republican government raided a Russian compound, finding documentation of the extent of Russia’s subversive plan. The Nationalists recognized the crisis they faced when the public heard that Russia was funding them. Then General Chiang Kai-shek began a cleansing effort to rid the Nationalists of the CCP and all Russian ties. Mao stuck with the CCP and Russia as means to his advance.
From 1927-31, Mao scratched his way from no power in the CCP to control of the Party and the army. He proposed plans for various uprisings and attacks, often violating the plans – just in order to get leaders of various militia and armed forces to move their people at his bidding. He maneuvered his way into control of various military units mostly by deceiving his own comrades. He took a small force into the mountains of Ninggang county to become bandits, eventually taking over the local government. Local leaders who resisted him even in these early years were publicly executed at rallies. Mao lived an exorbitant lifestyle while claiming publicly that he was fighting the ideological battles against the landed gentry. He seized upon the fact of poor communications with the CCP headquarters (Shanghai) and with Moscow to hold “official” meetings to promote himself. Though clearly a non-conformist, Mao’s reputation as victor grew on Stalin in Moscow. Mao's determination to dominate China empowered him to fulfill that ambition with the cautious support of Moscow.
Part 2 coming soon...
Our church's annual Fall Festival included a team of oxen that had been raised and trained by a great man who died suddenly earlier this year. Wesley seemed not so certain he could trust those horns.
Who knew Wesley's hair would have curls? He likes to walk behind his wagon and push - as long as there is a straight, clear path ahead of him.
Since the boycott of Disney has been lifted, I thought I might show you some of what Wesley has been reading lately.
Who does that guy look like? Folks around here aren't so sure whether he favors one of us or the other.
