Essay: Mao Zedong and Communist China

Modern Global History – 10
3/15/18
Mao Zedong and Communist China
Mao Zedong was, and still is, one of the most important figures in global history. From the time he became Chairman of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death in 1976, the movements and projects that he instituted, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution caused great suffering for the people.  They led to, directly and indirectly the deaths of tens of millions of individuals, as well as to severe social and cultural setbacks.  Mao’s destructive actions far outweighed his benefits for the people of China.
Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, to a rich peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan Province.  He began working on his family farm when he was 6 years old, and continued to do so throughout his time in school until he was 13.  He then managed his father’s prosperous farm full-time (Spence, p. 2-3).  In 1910, after reading a book on Chinese modernization, however, he decided to attend a new school in a neighboring town, where he was exposed to “radical” thought and “new knowledge” of the West (Spence 10).
In 1911, China’s Qin Dynasty fell, and China became a Republic.  As his country underwent radical political shifts, Mao voraciously read revolutionary newspapers, and famous works in Western political theory, such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and works by Rousseau and Montesquieu.  In 1920, he became a Marxist, managing a bookshop that sold Communist literature, and interacting with like-minded revolutionists (Chang 19-20).  He became an influential Marxist, and in 1921 he was invited to the first and founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Spence 52), where he was selected to the CCP’s ruling Central Executive Committee in 1923.  By 1936, he became the Chairman of the Communist Military Council in 1936 (Spence 89), and in June 1945, the Seventh Congress of the CCP confirmed Mao’s rise to power in the preamble for the Constitution of the CCP: “The Chinese Communist Party takes Mao Zedong’s thought – the thought that unites Marxist-Leninist theory and the practice of the Chinese revolution – as the guide for all its work, and opposes any dogmatic or empiricist deviations” (Spence 101).
On October 1, 1949, after the Communist Party had won its civil war against the Chinese Nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China, they named Mao Zedong as Chairman (Spence 102). Shortly after taking control of the country, the CCP instituted a series of land reforms from 1950-1953, where land was taken from the landlords and rich peasants, and redistributed to the poor peasants.  Peasants were encouraged to vent their anger at the landlords for past injustices.  These confrontations often became intense and sometimes violent, resulting in between one half to one million landlords being killed and creating a hatred for the landlord class (Defronzo 106 – 107).
Redistributing land to the peasants did not increase their agricultural productivity, however, since they lacked the resources to buy machinery.  Thus, Mao forced people into “lower-stage agricultural producers’ cooperatives” (Defronzo 107).  These new reforms severely limited the use of private plots of land to farm, increased the amount of collective land on which peasants were forced to farm, and controlled the amount of food they retained (Spence 126).
At around the same time, Mao launched his program for industrialization on June 15, 1953.  Mao wanted to make China a “superpower”, both industrially and militarily,  and optimally within fifteen years, and most especially before his death.  As a result, China’s first Five-Year Plan budgeted 61% for arms-related industries, whereas education, healthcare, and culture combined received only 8.2% of the budget.  Mao pushed higher goals and tighter deadlines of production from his people to guarantee more exports and products, causing great social strain (Chang, 373-374).
Due to a secret pact that Mao made with Russia, to exchange food for weapons, peasants’ agricultural workload increased, while their food rations decreased.  Mao thus instituted requisitioning, which resulted in the forced extraction of food from peasants through means of beatings, imprisonment and theft.  By 1955, due to the horrors of state violence and widespread hunger, peasant suicides approached a quarter of a million. Yet Mao would not be moved. CCP senior officials who invoked the traditional idea of conscience were told off by Mao: “On this matter, we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal” (Chang, 386-387).
Yet even though between 1953-1957, China achieved a healthy annual growth rate of 8% (Defronzo 108), in 1958, Mao launched a program called the Great Leap Forward, to increase the speed of completion of his program for industrialization and militarization.  His 15 year timeline that was instituted in 1953 was to be reduced, crazily, to 5 or even 3 years. Mao believed that his country could complete his goal of becoming an industrial and military powerhouse in one “big bang” (Chang 418).
The Great Leap Forward caused tremendous societal hardships, as concisely summarized in one quote by Mao: “Production First. Life takes second place.” (Chang 428).   Mao calculated his desired outputs not based on what the peasants could produce, but instead on what he needed to be produced, leading to crushing demands on the peasants (Chang 418).  In 15 provinces there were a total of 25.17 million starving people, yet still Mao made the provincial chiefs go along with his propaganda claims of high production of food (Chang 418-421). Mao then used this as a justification: “since you’ve produced more, we can take more”. With this tactic, Mao’s regime exported 4.74 million tons of grain, worth $935 million in 1959.  Following this same tactic, in July 1958, People’s Daily, the official voice of the CCP declared that “[China] can produce as much food as we want” (Chang 419), a claim that was given to Nikita Khruschev and the USSR to show that China could indeed pay for expensive nuclear submarines, one of Mao’s dear desires. Even more terribly, Mao converted grain into ethyl alcohol fuel for missile tests, each of which depleted the food supply for 1-2 million people for a whole year (Chang 420-421).
During his Great Leap Forward,  Mao also wanted to improve infrastructure by constructing dams, reservoirs and canals.  Yet, to do so, he relied on the labour of about 100 million starving peasants.  Since he wanted instant results, his plan and slogan for the projects was to “Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously” (Chang 421). Not surprisingly, these soon became a massive waste of time and resources, as many projects were either abandoned halfway through or those that were completed collapsed either during Mao’s lifetime or after his death.  In addition, the lack of safety precautions combined with Mao’s nonchalant attitude toward the peasants led to many accidents and deaths (Chang 421). In April 1958, when Henan province had promised to move 30 billion cubic meters of earth, Mao cavalierly said, “I think 30,000 will die”.  Not only did having laborers work in these poorly constructed projects take away labor from agricultural productivity, even the official account admitted that “not one plot of land had benefited” (Chang, 421).  The negative effects outlived even Mao himself.  In 1975, a reservoir collapsed drowning between 230-240,000 people, and in 1999, 33,000 of these projects were deemed a “risk to human life” (Chang 422).
Yet, in spite of these deaths, Mao continued making industrial plans.  In 1958, Mao set an ambitious goal of producing 10.7 million tons of steel.  Not only did he overwork the actual steel mills to the point that machines were breaking down and workers were getting killed in serious accidents, but Mao also instituted the construction of peasant “backyard furnaces” (Chang 423).  Here, peasants made furnaces to melt down all metal, regardless of its usefulness.  This project not only produced only 40% good steel, but it also took away about one-third of the productive time that would have gone to cultivating grain (Chang 424).
Furthermore, overworked machinery contributed to the production of bad quality equipment, and resulted in the completion of only 28 of 1,639 arms-centered industrial projects.  Mao thus ended up with planes that could not fly, tanks that could not go in a straight line, and ships that almost were a greater hazard to those within than to China’s enemies (Chang 425).
In 1958, Mao also put the entire rural population into 26,000+ larger units called “People’s Communes”, so he could more easily control them (Chang, 426).  In these dehumanizing communes, life revolved around labour, and the CCP cadres used horrific punishments to frighten people from wanting to escape. The overwork of the peasants (and resulting deaths), as well as egalitarian rewards such as “free supply” and eating in mess halls provided less incentive for the peasants to work in the communal environment. The results of the communes, along with poor weather conditions all lead to the Great Famine which lasted from 1958-1961. At its peak in 1960, 28.58 people per every thousand died (Bernstein 422-423).  The famine, which could have been prevented were it not for grain exports, was so severe that people resorted to cannibalism and eating dirt (Chang 429-430). Mao’s reckless leadership during the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine resulted in the deaths of 38 million people.
Terror from Mao’s regime caused the people to fear the government.  Starving peasants who stole food were punished by being buried alive, strangled, and having their noses cut off (Chang 427).  To maintain control of the people, Mao propagated his Cult of Personality.  Praises of Mao were everywhere both in the media and in the schools. Children, from a young age were indoctrinated that “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao”, which later fueled the movement of the Red Guards.  He also wished for “…the policy of ‘keep people stupid’ ”, to keep them ignorant of the happenings of the world (Chang 476).
Mao began to indoctrinate the young with the message that hate was good, during his Cultural Revolution (Chang 478).  Originally launched to  affirm Chinese Communist ideology in the country (MacFarquhar 12),  Mao explained that the Cultural Revolution had to “work through literature and the arts and in other areas to erode the harmful residue of ‘bourgeois culture’” (Defronzo 111).  First denouncing  “all art forms – opera, theater, … , ballad-singing, traditional storytelling and stage comics” (Chang 477) , these denunciations quickly spread to the universities.  The catalyst for the widespread nature of the Cultural Revolution lay in Beijing university, where the University president was denounced. The chaos of revolution soon spread through the students, who tried to find fault with their teachers to avoid criticism from their own peers for being not revolutionary enough (Macfarquhar 68). The most fervent supporters of the Cultural Revolution were China’s 13 million middle school students (MacFarquhar 104), who would eventually be known as the Red Guard.  Cultural Revolution small groups and committees were set up on school campuses to spread agitation, and all regular school classes were halted on June 13, 1966. (MacFarquhar 105).
The first job for these fervent youth was to destroy the “Four Olds”, which were “Old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting class” (MacFarquhar 108).  This process began with the looting of “bourgeoise” homes and destroying their property, as well as confiscating jewelry, gold, cash and other valuables, which the CCP claimed were used to cover the expenses incurred during the revolution (MacFarquhar 117).  In addition, many important cultural artifacts, such as genealogical records which had been kept for generations, were destroyed.
The Red Guards then moved on to destroy public property.  Out of the 6,848 “places of cultural or historical interest” in Beijing, 4,922 of them had been destroyed.  Even the temple and grave of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius was destroyed, and at his burial site, the Red Guards destroyed 6,618 cultural artifacts.  Confucius and his philosophies and ideals were thoroughly denounced, ideas which were basic tenants of Chinese society since his life in the 4th century BC. (MacFarquhar 119-120).  Buddhist temples, public libraries and more than 7 million library books could not escape the revolutionary fervor of the Red Guards (MacFarquhar 121). Citizens of “bad” (i.e. bourgeois) classes were lucky if they merely had their property confiscated (MacFarquhar 122).  Cooperation between Red Guards and authorities to repatriate the land of the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, hooligans, Rightists and capitalists, who were all denounced as “monsters and freaks” meant that they could be killed or exiled. The killing of innocent “monsters and freaks”, lead to the deaths of upwards of 3,000 people (MacFarquhar, 124).  Over 397,000 “monsters and freaks” were booted from their cities and forced to return to their ancestral villages, with many of them committing suicide (MacFarquhar 123).  Teachers were murdered by their own students in their fervor to show their revolutionary spirit (Chang 506).
Old street names were renamed. Homes with books and anything associated with culture were dangerous places to be, leading people to burn their own books as so not to be attacked, denounced, or killed by the Red Guards. (Chang 510).  By 1966, Mao and his No. 2 man, Lin Bao instructed Red Guards to target power holders within the Communist Party that were “capitalist roaders”, leading to the denunciation of between 700,000 – 800,000 officials, who lost their positions, and in extreme cases, their lives (Defronzo 112).
Violence, denunciations, and murders of teachers, “capitalist roaders”, the religious, the “Four Olds”,  and “monsters and freaks” left China bereft of its moral bearings as the Cultural Revolution ruthlessly tore through the fabric of trust in ordinary human relationships, and destroyed thousands of years of Chinese history through the destruction of priceless cultural artifacts.
Mao and his Cult of Personality, which fueled the fervor of the Cultural Revolutions is still seen in much of China today.  In his ambition to improve China’s economy, protect the rule of his own party and further his own interests, Mao Zedong disregarded the lives of tens of millions people, and caused a famine that killed millions more. The CCP  themselves ceded in 1981, that, “The Cultural Revolution … was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic” (“Excerpts from resolution on history” 12). In the destructive movements of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong caused more harm than good to the People’s Republic of China.