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  • The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu
  • Rya Butterfield
The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People. By Xing Lu. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017; pp. xi + 261, $49.99 cloth; $49.99 e-book.

As Xing Lu demonstrates in her powerful new book, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People, “Mao was a master mythmaker” (7). Blending traditional Chinese symbolic resources, adaptations from the West, and populist modes of design, he constructed a “rhetoric of hope” that was compelling for its “mythic vision of what China, and the Chinese people, could be” (7). Lu exposes rhetoric as the source of Mao’s power and asks the reader to acknowledge the ongoing significance of Mao’s rhetorical legacy in the world today.

Lu explains that Mao spoke directly to the people by using the vocabulary of the masses. Through this adaptation, he demonstrated that he spoke on their behalf. Like other populist rhetors, his rhetoric was exclusionary, but inconsistently so. For instance, Mao cast aside the most stable of China’s elite institutions as pretentious. He said that classical writing was used to intimidate people but had no substance. Still, he drew on cultural tropes from the most well-known and vivid stories of classical literature. He was similarly inconsistent in his approach to foreign concepts. Although Mao originally stood among liberal reformers excited by Western ideas, as his attraction to socialism attests, his populist mythic vision of China did not include ideas from “foreign landlord[s]” (63). However, he accepted that foreign vocabulary could be quite useful if selectively chosen, stripped of original meaning, and applied to revolutionary ends.

The relevance of the kind of rhetoric that enables the transition from populism to authoritarianism cannot be overstated in either contemporary China or the contemporary West. The inconsistencies outlined here illustrate how simplifying language for popular appeal can quell argumentation. Lu observes, “As language was simplified, cognitive complexity was [End Page 464] reduced, and the ability to think critically was deprived” (67). By whittling down the reserves of classical literature to the most popular and lively stories that require little reflection, and by divorcing foreign language terms from the meanings that prompted their import, the people are neither asked to think critically nor given the tools to do so.

Though deprived of critical thought, the effectively propagandized person is still capable of rhetorical defense. For instance, Lu notes that people “were encouraged to fill their everyday language with quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book” (200). This was part of the “Mao-led ideological and rhetorical consolidation” that gave Maoist rhetoric its staying power (200).

Lu’s 1998 book, Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B. C. E.: A Comparison with Greek Rhetoric, prepared her to appreciate how Mao drew on Chinese symbolic resources to extend the Chinese rhetorical tradition. That work, and her many other contributions, have established Lu as a scholar of essential importance in comparative rhetorical studies. This work further demonstrates Lu’s ability to digest the nuanced intermingling of Chinese and Western perspectives that constituted the complicated rhetorical environment of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century China.

The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is exceptional because of the way it clearly situates the role of rhetoric in the process of social change. Scholars bridging disciplines, such as rhetoric and politics or rhetoric and economics, will appreciate Lu’s ability to thoroughly address issues in each field without folding them into one another. “Rhetoric serves as a foundation, an actuator, and an amplifier for the other sources of power Mao wielded” (7). It is not the sole force and it does not operate in a vacuum.

Lu identifies Mao as the most impactful leader in Chinese history and examines his political rhetoric as “the essential source of his power” (5). Lu understands “rhetoric” on the same grounds as James Crosswhite’s “deep rhetoric,” which she summarizes as having the “capacity to create consciousness and give rise to transformational change” (6). The transformative quality of Mao’s rhetoric is its use of “symbolic capital” to reshape social practice and mobilize social action...

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