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Bibliographic Details

The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies

Edited by: Sangeeta Ray, Henry Schwarz, Jos Luis Villacaas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak
eISBN: 9781444334982
Print publication date: 2016

Mao Zedong and Maoism

DANIEL F. VUKOVICH

Subject Imperial, Colonial, and Postcolonial History Postcolonial History

DOI: 10.1111/b.9781444334982.2016.x

Presently there are in print over a dozen English (and many more Chinese) biographies of Mao Zedong (18931976),
arguably the greatest (in terms of global reach and accomplishment) and certainly the most complex, radical,
controversial, and yet increasingly demonized (as monster and murderer) of all the twentieth-century revolutionaries.
Mao's fate, in at least the English-speaking world, may be to go down in history as a dictator. That was always the
dominant Cold War view, and to the victor go the spoils. But the actually existing, positive understandings of Mao in
his own time have been displaced by rightward shifts in Western and Chinese intellectual political culture on the one
hand, and by a slew of popular, if highly tendentious, pulp biographies and quasi-academic exposs about the
former chairman (e.g., Chang and Halliday 2005 or Diktter 2010; see Feigon 2003 and Quan 1992 for
alternatives). But what the sheer amount of such texts points to even in our very different climate than that of
1976, the year of Mao's death at 82 years is a fascination that stems not only from orientalism and nationalism but
from the political. If politics is conflict, struggle, and world-making, often in the form of friend-enemy schemes and
related oppositions; if revolution is fanshen or turning over the entire order of things from inside out, then Maoism
was the most political movement in history. Its all-encompassing vision was rooted in the peasant, rural, and specific
Third World contexts of the real world yet insistent upon the agency of the masses and the imminent possibility of
the future: that revolution is no crime and another world is possible. This also explains why Maoism far more than,
say, Trotskyism or anarchism has influenced so many different revolutionary movements in the last and present
centuries, from Peru and Chiapas to Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, and India. But one must note as well the Maoist
insistence on not simply copying any Chinese model of revolution; hence the variety and number of such
movements as well as their mixed but actually existing results. (They seem more successful the less tied to specific
Chinese doctrine they are.) Maoism was an event all across Asia and the developing world.

Yet any final verdict on Mao will depend on how much impact the comparatively positive, mainland views of Mao will
have. The latter understandings of his role and record, as well as of Mao Zedong Thought (understood in China as a
collective composition) are diverse, and range from hagiographic to excoriatingly liberal as well as Confucian, with
many socialist and heterodox appreciations in between. There have been Mao fevers (intense cultural fads of
appreciation and/or commodity fetishism) before and after the 1989 Tiananmen Square events (see Barme 1996).
His visage and slogans appear in strikes and protests (and were right there in 1989 too). Promarket leaders of the
Chinese Communist Party (such as the ill-fated Bo Xilai and current leader Xi Jinping) at times draw selectively on
Mao's legacy, albeit toward their own, far more capitalist roader, Deng Xiaoping ends. Mao serves as founding
father emblazoned on the currency, embalmed in Tiananmen Square. Yet he or the revolution is also a problem
for the CCP. Born in revolutionary violence and mass mobilization as well as mass chaos and even tragedy (e.g., civil
war, famine, imperial Cold War embargoes, life-and-death ideological and class struggles), the People's Republic of
China cannot yet bury the political Mao and what he stood for. A significant measure of the current party-state's
legitimacy is still bound up with having been a modern revolutionary entity and movement (not simply feudal/neo-

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Confucian) and therefore not a liberal capitalist democracy. It is only Mao's doing that it was not so.

The consistent and lifelong, Marxist egalitarianism and promulgation of the right to rebel, the severe critiques of
the party-state bureaucracy (bringing it to the brink of collapse in the 1960s by launching the Cultural Revolution),
of urban and elite dominance, and of capitalism and markets all of that sits awkwardly with a rising state
capitalist global power. As the unifier and national liberator of China, Mao came to be not only China's Washington,
Lincoln, and Lenin, as used to be said, but its Frantz Fanon and, say, Jos Maritegui (poet-prophets and theorists of
cultural revolution). Insofar as post-Mao China seems weak or even complicit in the face of US Western power and
globalization-homogenization, Mao can serve as an awkward reminder of the red, alternative modernity era.

As for Mao's biography, perhaps the less said the better. Given the exceedingly politicized and orientalized nature of
most of those biographies (vulgar Freudianism, Fu Manchuesque depictions of cruelty and sexual depravity, Cold War
screeds, life-of-Jesus-style hagiographies, Dengist banalizations, etc.) we have no good idea of the man. And
Maoism exceeds his biography in any case. But in sum: born to a landowning family in Hunan (the father having risen
from poverty), Mao went from anarchistic and liberal youth and teacher to communist organizer by 1921, attending
the Communist Party's founding meeting. By 1927 he carved out a unique and realizable path to revolution in China,
via the rural masses and their own radical movement aimed at smashing feudal political authority, carrying out land
reform and in effect enacting a cultural revolution. This view did not prevail until after the Long March and Yan'an
sagas (193447), where the Maoist guerrilla war strategies and mass line organizing methods were perfected and
found success during the War of Resistance against Japan (surrounding the cities via the countryside, grassroots
consciousness raising, vanguard rectifications, infusing a revolutionary sublime). Thence the Civil War and the
completion of the land reform. With the onus of full national power after 1949, his record as should not surprise us
given the odds and the lack of a blueprint is certainly mixed, as he seems to have noted himself on several
occasions. What he, the CCP, and the left achieved is truly remarkable in terms of human welfare and egalitarian
growth in poverty, to say nothing of fending off a Cold War imperium; this has to be weighed against their grave
errors and mistakes, especially the famine of 195961, which at a minimum resulted in about 4 million deaths and at
a maximum over 30 million. (The numbers here speak to how politicized the issue and data are today.) After
unification-liberation, the old Mao saw his second greatest contribution as the Cultural Revolution. For this the
intellectuals and post-1949 new class aristocracy have yet to forgive him. However, Mao's commitment to
consciousness and ideology (the superstructure and politics in command) was there from the beginning; this is,
arguably, impeccably Marxist but also stems from classical Chinese dialectics as much as Lenin.

Again one has to weigh this last Maoist period dialectically, pitting the chaos, violence, and virtual civil war aspects
of the Cultural Revolution (all of this eventually leading to its reversal after Mao's death) against the deeper,
redeemable politics of rural empowerment, mass participation (albeit within the state, not against it), massive
increases in industry, literacy, and life expectancy, and importantly even the state feminism of the Party. These
stem from the 1930s and 1940s but were brought out more in the 1960s and 1970s. The grassroots
authoritarianism of Mao (and the old Party) must be compared with the market authoritarianism of Deng and his like
and the very different, business-suit power-tie CCP of today. But such analyses are only beginning, and being a
Maoist in the PRC today can land you in jail. The official resolution on Mao in 1981, written by what he would have
termed rightists within the upper bureaucracy, said he was 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong. The math may not
add up, given their own repudiation of communist politics, economics, and values. Yet there are worse, and less fair,
estimations. And few informed people today would deny the economic base that was achieved for China under Mao
before the capitalist take-off after his death.

Mao Zedong Thought a spiritual atom bomb in his own time, as his contemporaries and followers put it has
become something else. Eviscerated of its politics it can appear on T-shirts and business manuals, but not in the
grand ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. It retains a spectral, haunting life in the political vocabulary of the PRC, in
its iconography, and in the reservoir of meanings and values that form the political culture of China. It is Mao's
practice, as opposed to his essays and articles, that for better or worse has to be the measure of Maoism and
Chinese Marxism. And yet some of those writings on politics and postliberation development still brilliantly pose the
fundamental problems of communism. And of modern China even in its current form.

For the postcolonial field, Mao might best be seen as the Ur-figure of Third World revolution beyond mere national
liberation; one who spoke to the global (and racialized) dispossessed, from Chinese peasants to Naxalites and Black
Panthers, in ways that Fanon or Csaire or Said actual theorists of colonialism could only dream of. He was a
bone-deep, deeply rooted Chinese who never left China aside from brief trips to Moscow in the early 1950s. To think
of Mao Zedong as having occidentalist or identity issues, in the manner of an ambivalent, postcolonial subject
(perhaps worried about his Chineseness), is comical. Revolutionary faith in the masses would preclude that, as much
as being authentic. For all his classical training and rural rootedness Mao was also most certainly a modern,
development-oriented thinker. He might even be pleased, in part, with China's overall progress since the late 1970s.
But where he parts ground from, say, a Gandhi or Nehru (or Deng Xiaoping) is in two or three things: the Marxist or
communist hatred of capitalism and inequality, on the one hand, but also the internationalism as well as the passion

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for the masses. The struggle against colonialism and imperialism, while epochal, was still just part of the longer
journey toward the communist horizon.

SEE ALSO: Chinese Culture and Society; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

REFERENCES

Barme, Geremie. 1996. Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of a Great Leader. New York: M. E. Sharpe.

Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday. 2005. Mao: The Untold Story. London: Random House.

Diktter, Frank. 2010. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 195862. London:
Bloomsbury.

Feigon, Lee. 2003. Mao: A Reinterpretation. London: Ivan R. Dee.

Quan, Yanchi. 1992. Mao Zedong: Man Not God. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

FURTHER READING

Deng, Xiaoping. 198081. Remarks on Successive Drafts of the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of
Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China. Accessed May 27, 2015.
http://english.peopledaily.com...om.cn/dengxp/vol2/text/b1420.html.

Knight, Nick, Paul Healy, and Arif Dirlik. 1997. Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press.

Kraus, Richard Curt. 2012. The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mao, Zedong. 1927. Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. (March 1927). Accessed May
27, 2015. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm.

Mao, Zedong. 1956. On the Ten Major Relationships. Accessed May 27, 2015. http://www.marx2mao.com
/Mao/TMR56.html.

Mao, Zedong. 1957. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People. Accessed May 27, 2015.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm.

Mao, Zedong. 196669. Directives Regarding Cultural Revolution. Accessed May 27, 2015.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_84.htm.

Cite this article

VUKOVICH, DANIEL F. "Mao Zedong and Maoism." The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Ray, Sangeeta, Henry
Schwarz, Jos Luis Villacaas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2016.
Blackwell Reference Online. 12 January 2017 <http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber
/tocnode.html?id=g9781444334982_chunk_g978144433498217_ss1-7>

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