Rethinking Mao: Explorations in Mao Zedong's Thought (review)

This book seeks to exploit two openings for defenders of state socialism who want to save Mao Zedong as a legitimate exponent of Marxist-Leninist thought. The first opening is the reappearance of severe forms of inequality and political corruption in the post-Mao reform era in China, while the second is the appearance outside of China in the last ten to fifteen years of several works that seemingly go over the top in denouncing Mao as an autocratic tyrant. These works include the memoirs of Mao's personal physician, Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994), and, most recently, Jung Chang and Jan Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer notes that his own work also looks at Mao within the prism of traditional Chinese autocracy and questions the utility of looking at him solely or even mostly as a sincere socialist.¹Mao: The Unknown Story, which as perhaps the last great work of hard-line Kuomintang (KMT) propaganda, whatever its other great value in exposing the harsh brutality of Mao's rule, does go over the top in denouncing Mao as a loyal follower of the Soviets who won the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek only because of the betrayals of a few top KMT generals who were secret communist agents. Thus, that latter work especially has provided an opening for academic writers sympathetic to state socialism to try "to restore the balance" about Mao. Nick Knight (Asian Studies, Griffith University, Australia) claims the "demonization of Mao" (p. 4) in recent years has gone too far and has unfairly obscured the "egalitarian socialist ideals" of Mao and his generation, "who sought to achieve socialism through revolutionary means" (p. 2). Based also on the first opening, Knight argues that to the extent that the reforms in the post-Mao era in China have amounted to a "retreat from socialism" (p. 2) and have progressed to the point of "massive inequality, widespread corruption, the widening rural-urban divide, and the deepening influence of capitalism in all sphere of Chinese society, including the entry of capitalist entrepreneurs into the ranks of the CCP" (p. 241), it is time to rethink Mao Zedong thought.

Ironically, for one who would seem to be so opposed to conservatives who see Mao as a loyal follower of orthodox Soviet Marxist-Leninist thought, Knight also defends Mao's Marxist orthodoxy, denying that he really added that much voluntarism to Marxist thought or that he elevated the peasantry above the urban proletariat. Instead of being a peasant revolutionary who turned his back on urban workers, Mao, Knight argues, genuinely worked to "entrench working class power" from the period of the Jiangxi Soviet onward (p. 93) and continued to believe in the "working class leadership of China's revolution" (p. 107). Instead of elevating politics over economics as other Mao scholars allege, Knight argues that Mao never gave up on the basic Marxist premise that "economics is ultimately the determinant factor in social change" (p. 188). Far from adding utopian elements to Marxist thought in his later years, Mao in fact retreated from the utopian vision of a future communist society of perpetual peace during the years of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, even as he never gave up on his vision of social equality. Finally, Mao's "sinification of Marxism" did not lead to subordinating Marxist thought to elements of traditional Chinese culture, as others allege, nor was Mao's thought just a series of tactical responses to political threats, such as that posed by the Returned Students Faction of the 1930s. In sum, Knight finds that Mao was a genuine Marxist thinker who should be examined first and foremost as one who tried to implement egalitarian socialism under the practical conditions of the...