Mao: A Reinterpretation (review)

Lee Feigon is a respected China specialist with a major book, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party, to his credit, and also a book on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement and crackdown in 1989. In this slim new work Feigon seeks to present Mao Zedong sympathetically as a Trotskyist, anti-bureaucratic populist. The book does not pretend to be a biography. The passages about Mao's life are few, discontinuous, and often saccharine (as on p.18: "From the first day, his classmates noticed that he had a charming smile that made him appear 'genuinely sincere'"). Little attempt is made to portray the character of Mao the person. The book does not broach Mao's philosophy of life, egotism, literary interests, family life, or cruelty.

Rather, Mao: A Reinterpretation is a smoothly presented plea against the currently prevailing view of Mao's political record. "Nothing has damaged Mao's image as much as his role in initiating the Cultural Revolution," Feigon writes disarmingly, "yet few of Mao's actions deserve as much praise" (p.139). Was there perhaps violence and death in that period? "[S]ome violence was the consequence of the oppressive political culture that Mao was trying to renovate," answers Feigon (p.141).

According to Feigon, "not until the late 1950s" did Mao become "a genuinely creative and original thinker and actor" (p.4). The Cultural Revolution was a major achievement, Feigon believes, because it cracked the bureaucracy and "forced China to break with its Soviet past" (p.4). I do not fault Feigon for these views—which were prevalent in many circles in the 1960s—merely on the ground that they are unfashionable.

However, there are two problems with the book. Feigon's revisionism does not confront the myriad difficulties with its thesis. Mao's Fürherism is never discussed. To attack bureaucracy but loom over the people as a political god is hardly progress. Feigon says that during the Great Leap Forward "Mao's own information gleaned from visits to factories confirmed everything he was hearing" (p.120). This overlooks the social psychology of people at the grassroots level, who were often too afraid of both Mao and the bureaucrats to tell the truth. Feigon praises Mao for getting rid of 70 percent of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Cultural Revolution, but he does not analyze whether their replacements were better or worse (in many cases they were worse). Yes, Mao pulled down the bureaucracy. But Feigon does not acknowledge that by 1968 the military was called into take care of the resulting mess. Was Bonapartism preferable to bureaucratic socialism?

"Had the Communist bureaucrats who still rule China not aborted the changes that Mao promoted in the 1960s," writes Feigon, "China would probably have been much further along on the road to political reform than it is now" (p.4). But if there had been no resistance to Mao within the CCP, Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's post-Mao progress, might never have lived to take over the reigns after 1978. He would probably have been "persecuted to death," in the Delphic phrase used by the CCP to describe the shameful demise of Mao's number two, Liu Shaoqi. Or he might have been thrown onto the political scrapheap indefinitely, as were Peng Dehuai (whom Feigon unaccountably dismisses as a cantankerous person) and Chen Yi. If the Cultural Revolutionary ideas of the Sheng Wu Lian group in Hunan Province were as important as Feigon says, one would have expected a major revival of them in 1989. But, in fact, the pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square were far more inspired by non-Chinese sources than by Cultural Revolution leftism.

The second, even larger, problem in these pages is that Feigon presents no new data and instead merely offers Trotskyite opinion for his reinterpretation of Mao's career. He repeatedly says that Mao made a great contribution to China's educational system, for instance, but he never goes into the empirical evidence necessary...