Mao in History
Mini Teaser: During the first decades of Mao's China, a time of American self-confidence and strong sense of purpose spurred by the World War II victory, U.S. Sinology for the most part took on an "idealist" rather than a "realist" orientation: hopeful about s
Early one morning in the summer of 1972, John King Fairbank, my
senior colleague among Harvard's East Asia faculty at the time,
phoned to ask if I would look over a draft article for Foreign
Affairs summing up his first trip to China since the 1940s. The piece
was fairly indulgent toward Mao's regime. Over lunch that day, I said
to Fairbank, "This trip to China must have been moving." He nodded
and said, "Well, you know, I've been on their side ever since 1943."
In Fairbank's draft I queried the sentence: "The Maoist revolution is
on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people
in many centuries." The dean of American Sinology, to whom I owe
much, stuck with it. But he added the words: "At least, most Chinese
seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise."
During the first decades of Mao's China, a time of American
self-confidence and strong sense of purpose spurred by the World War
II victory, U.S. Sinology for the most part took on an "idealist"
rather than a "realist" orientation: hopeful about social progress,
benevolent in its view of human nature, open to strong leadership.
Since America was the chief bastion outside China of contemporary
China studies, this buoyant, progressive mindset influenced the
worldwide image of Mao Zedong. True, during the first years after
1949 Mao was viewed in a totalitarian framework as a junior Stalin,
but within a decade this view gave way to a more open-minded one of
the Chinese leader as a flexible Asian communist. The Sino-Soviet
split in the early 1960s and the subsequent Nixon opening to China of
1971-72 further softened Mao's image.
While he was serving as President Nixon's national security adviser,
Henry Kissinger, back at Harvard in January 1971 for a dinner with
international affairs faculty, remarked that whereas in the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations "Dean Rusk used to compare Mao
unfavorably with Hitler, in this administration we compare Mao
favorably with Hitler." A small change, strictly speaking, yet a
large change in political-philosophical terms.
Even after Mao's death in 1976, Sinologists, influential Americans
like Nixon and Kissinger, and many leaders of the Democratic Party
tended to defend the rationality and sincerity of the Chinese
leader's attempts at social engineering, while acknowledging his
excesses and errors in the Great Leap Forward (communes, backyard
steel furnaces) of the late 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution (Red
Guards, book burning) of the late 1960s. Distilled through U.S.
Sinological research, the popular image of Mao in the West--until the
1990s--was less bleak than those of Stalin and Hitler, which were
more shaped by the "realist" approach of European political science.
It took most of the Deng Xiaoping era (1979-97) to make Mao look
really bad.
American Sinology was traditionally more idealistic, too, than
Sinology pursued in Taiwan. Among American scholars there was well
into the 1960s a tenacious expectation of unity in the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), against mounting signs to the contrary and in
the face of evidence collected by China scholars in Taiwan that Mao
was in tension with his top colleague, Liu Shaoqi, and other senior
figures. As a student embarking on China studies, I adopted some of
this idealism--modified by Australian skepticism--and my early
writings lacked realism about Chinese politics. During the Cultural
Revolution, American analysts were more inclined than those in Taiwan
to see idealistic impulses behind the Red Guard turmoil. In general,
from 1949 onward American Sinology focused on what made communist
China tick, while Taiwanese analyses focused on cracks in the edifice
of the regime.
The loss of life during Mao's Great Leap Forward was estimated by
Richard Walker, a leading anti-communist scholar of the 1960s and
1970s, at 1-2 million. As a graduate student at Harvard in the late
1960s, I remember John Fairbank scoffing at Walker's "extreme views"
about sufferings during the PRC's first decade. Some indulgence
toward Mao's errors by Fairbank and others stemmed from resentment at
Senator Joseph McCarthy's potshots at China specialists. Still, the
picture we now have of the Great Leap Forward, based largely on
documentary sources available within China, is much bleaker than that
suggested by the hardest of anti-communists in the 1960s. A thorough
1996 study, Hungry Ghosts, by the British journalist Jasper Becker,
puts the loss of life at 30 million.
China specialists during the 1960s and 1970s could see a number of
evils and injustices in China; if pressed, few of us would have
denied that China harbored tens of thousands of political prisoners,
or claimed that the former Defense Minister Peng Dehuai--who
questioned the Great Leap Forward--got a fair go from Mao in their
confrontation of 1959. Yet an intellectual fascination with the
gyrations of Chinese communist politics operated to restrain our
judgment. This tendency toward a hands-off objectivity was reinforced
by the existence of polemicists who did only evaluation, wielding
totalitarian theory crudely or taking a purely moral stance toward
Chinese communism.
Who would have guessed at Mao's death in 1976, or even at the tenth
anniversary of his death in 1986, that by the twentieth anniversary
in 1996 much of the focus on Mao would have shifted to his personal
ways--indeed to that most personal of all realms, sexual life? But
then Americans of the Ronald Reagan era in the 1980s might not have
guessed that a U.S. president elected in 1992 would spend his first
months in the White House on the issue of homosexuals in the
military, the first weeks after his re-election in 1996 on the issue
of sexual harassment in the military, and much of early 1998
defending himself against rumors of sex in the White House.
In 1980, I was criticized in reviews of the first edition of my
biography Mao for paying too much attention to Mao's personality and
personal life. Professor Edwin Moise spoke for many when, in the
bibliography of his 1986 book Modern China: A History, he recommended
my book but warned that it "concentrates too much on details of Mao's
personal life." Yet a decade later, in a number of serious works,
details of Mao's personal life took center stage. Although my
suggestion of the possibility of intimacy between Mao and his
"confidential secretary" Zhang Yufeng had been rejected, later
revelations turned possibility into certainty. Today, indeed, Mao is
as often viewed as a conspirator and lecher as he is as a unifier of
China, philosopher of Asian communism, and major architect of the
collapse of the communist bloc.
A tendency to believe the best about Mao was not the only reason why
Western Sinology was for some years disinclined to see the
pathological in him. Another was the absence of authoritative
evidence of his willful and mindless ways. By the 1990s the material
base for viewing Mao's methods of rule has become much more extensive
than it was during his lifetime. More than any other single work in
English, it is The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) by Dr. Li
Zhisui that consolidates this new perception in the West. Despite
questions one might have about the reasons for Mao's physician's
sourness toward Mao and the CCP, the book is the only memoir we have
by a close associate of the leader who defected from China and then
told his story.
Li Zhisui was an elitist intellectual. Little in his background or
the working of his mind suggested sympathy for communist goals. But
Mao liked staff members who had been in the West or had a Western
education: Li had returned to China from Australia after the
communist takeover, seeking to make a contribution to his homeland.
When summoned to serve as Mao's doctor in 1954, he demurred on the
ground that his "class background" was far from working-class, but
Mao told him that "sincerity" was all that counted. Perhaps there was
an admirable root to Mao's embrace of the stubborn physician.
Sycophancy was the norm in Mao's court, but Dr. Li was a rather
arrogant man who sometimes declined to oblige, and something in Mao
may have recognized the authenticity of Li's independence of mind. Or
perhaps Mao liked the challenge of correcting a wayward intellectual.
The West is in a phase of skepticism about leadership, and it needs
China less than it did in the 1970s and 1980s. Both points have
affected the discussion of Mao, as they have affected U.S.-China
relations. Two or three decades after the death of the last titans of
the World War II era--De Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao--China studies
have become influenced by the anti-heroic lens now typically applied
to political leaders. Economists and sociologists, with their focus
on structure rather than will, lead the field in China studies. It is
revealing that Lucian Pye told us in 1996 that he pulled his punches
in his 1976 book Mao Zedong: The Man in the Leader in not stating--as
he says he believed--that Mao "was probably a narcissist with a
borderline personality." By 1996 he felt he could come out with his
long-held conclusion. The evidence for Pye's delayed conclusion of
Mao as a borderline personality mounts by the year. It includes his
youthful loneliness and fascist ideas, the constant psychosomatic
illness to which his doctor testifies (Li uses the term
"neurasthenia", which is no longer in wide professional use), his
treatment of family members, his addiction to barbiturates, his lack
of give-and-take with colleagues, and his suspiciousness.
Mental problems were not unique to Mao. The fear and tension of the
communists' pre-1949 military and political struggle, and later of
the pressure-cooker life within the Mao court, brought on similar
mental conditions in scores of people around him. The cause of the
anxiety differed as between Mao himself and his underlings. Mao felt
a gnawing anxiety that people around him might be secretly disloyal.
The underlings were simply afraid of dismissal, banishment, or death.
Dr. Li goes so far as to say, "In time, I came to regard neurasthenia
as a peculiarly Communist disease."
Here are Mao's words to Dr. Li just after his encounter with
Khrushchev in 1958 on the problems of the Taiwan Strait and dealing
with the United States:
"Khrushchev just doesn't know what he's talking about. He wants to
improve relations with the U.S. Good, we'll congratulate him with our
guns. Our cannon shells have been in storage for so long they're
becoming useless. So why don't we just use them for a celebration?
Let's get the U.S. involved, too. Maybe we can get the U.S. to drop
an atom bomb on Fujian. Maybe ten or twenty million people will be
killed. Chiang Kai-shek wants the U.S. to use the bomb against us.
Let them use it. Let's see what Khrushchev says then."
Indeed, these words, if seriously meant as Dr. Li took them to be,
are those of a borderline personality.
A second example shows the problem of the influence of drugs that
Mao's doctor saw as early as 1958:
"Even as he spoke about sending me to inspect the people's communes
[crown jewel of the Great Leap Forward], Mao was falling asleep and
his speech was slurred, his voice nearly inaudible. He had taken his
sleeping pills just before we started eating and had brought up the
idea of the investigation in the midst of that half-awake,
half-asleep euphoria he entered as the drug began to take effect. I
was not sure whether his suggestion was real or part of a
drug-induced dream."
There were an increasing number of pivotal moments after 1958 when
Mao may well have been mentally or physically unfit to make the
decisions he did. One of them, documented by eye-witnesses still
living in Beijing, was crucial to relations between China and the
United States.
It was 1971 and, after much discussion, a decision had just been made
in Beijing not to invite the American ping-pong team to visit China.
Premier Zhou Enlai had sent a message to Japan, where the American
team was traveling, regretting China's inability to receive the
Americans. But one night a heavily drugged Mao had second thoughts.
At midnight on April 6, he looked again at the document containing
the foreign ministry's recommendation not to invite the American
sportsmen--already approved both by Zhou and himself. In "drowsy,
slurred speech" he asked his nurse to phone Wang Hairong, the trusted
aide at the foreign ministry, to reverse the decision. The nurse,
without either a tape recorder or anyone to advise her, was in a
quandary. Possessed of doubts, she nevertheless decided to phone Wang
Hairong. The American ping-pong players were invited; Kissinger and
Nixon soon followed. History made a turn.
Everyone who came in close contact with Mao was shocked at the
anarchy of his personal ways. He ate idiosyncratically. He refused to
brush his teeth, offering as his excuse that tigers with excellent
teeth did not brush theirs. He became increasingly sexually
promiscuous as he aged. He would stay up much of the night and sleep
during much of the day; at times he would postpone sleep, remaining
awake for thirty-six hours or more, until tension and exhaustion
overcame him. He was the consummate outlaw, "without law and without
God." Said Dr. Li to me when I showed him around the Harvard campus
in 1994: "Three words did not exist in Mao's dictionary: regret,
love, mercy."
Yet many people who met Mao came away deeply impressed by his
intellectual reach, originality, style of power-within-simplicity,
kindness toward low-level staff members, and the aura of respect that
surrounded him at the top of Chinese politics. It would seem
difficult to reconcile these two disparate views of Mao. But in a
fundamental sense there was no brick wall between the personal and
the public Mao.
Early in Mao's career of cavorting with girls--despite the proximity
of his longtime wife Jiang Qing--some provincial leaders made the
mistake of supplying him with sophisticated beauties of mature years
and artistic accomplishment. Mao turned them all down; for his
private moments he did not want famous actresses and singers, but
inexperienced peasant maidens one third his own age.
One pretty young woman, Cui Ying, who worked in the office of
secretaries in Zhongnanhai in the late 1950s, caught Mao's eye. While
dancing with him, we learn in a memoir published in Beijing, she took
the opportunity to complain about the unjust labeling of good people
as "rightists" in the leftist campaign of 1957. A strict boundary had
been crossed. Cui Ying's body was needed, but not her mind. For
heaven's sake, she might quote Mao outside Zhongnanhai. Suddenly, one
afternoon before an upcoming dance party at which she was to see Mao
again, she found herself terminated as a staff member.
Mao's turn to young women was connected with the decline of trust in
the men around him. Sex became an avenue to a oneness that no longer
existed in the councils of party and state. The limitation was that
Mao could achieve oneness (whether sexual or philosophic) only with
innocent young men and women who adored him, or with staff members
and junior colleagues who accorded him total loyalty. "What Mao
thought, I thought", said his doctor. "It was not that I had contrary
opinions that I had to suppress or keep to myself. Mao's opinions
were mine. The possibility of differing with the Chairman never
crossed my mind." It need hardly be said that any attempt to
translate such oneness to the institutional and public life of a
nation of six hundred million people--a da tong ("great unity") based
on personal feelings--was an impossibility, and to essay it was to
court disaster.
The real shock in the "personal" revelations of The Private Life of
Chairman Mao was less moral than political: Mao did not believe a lot
of what he proclaimed in public. We find it in small matters and in
large. He sang the praises of Chinese traditional medicine, but when
it came to his own health he used Western medicine. The Soviet Union
disgusted him even as he lauded it for public consumption; he said
good things about America while telling the Chinese people that
America was the embodiment of evil.
Perhaps Mao did not "mean" some of the things he said in private.
Perhaps he was like Richard Nixon, who ranted about Ivy League types
and Jews, yet never took action against these sub-groups and went on
hiring them in substantial numbers for the White House staff. Yet the
two cases are not the same. In the cold light of day, after an
evening of uttering stress-reducing threats, Nixon could not easily
take action to reduce the influence of Ivy League types and Jews; he
was President of a country with laws, a vigorous Congress, and a free
press. But when old Mao murmured a judgment for or against a person
or a policy, the staff member who heard it set in motion steps of
implementation. In a democracy, the individual psyche of the top
leader is simply not reflected in public policy as it is in a
communist dictatorship.
Thus, the wife of Liu Shaoqi was about to be executed in 1969 when
Mao, giving final review to the papers on her case, scrawled, "Spare
her the knife." She lives on to this day. One day a male guard
touched one of Mao's girlfriends on the buttocks; Mao had the man
sent to prison and no one at Mao's court ever heard of him again. So
it went; Mao's whim was the law of the land.
The "late Mao" was different from the early and middle Mao. He had
not always been vain, insincere, vindictive, arrogant, or
duplicitous. In middle age, to take examples from the testimony of
his most impressive secretary, Tian Jiaying, Mao was not immodest.
When commended for his opening speech at the Eighth Party Congress in
1956, he said, "Do you know who wrote my speech? A young
scholar--Tian Jiaying." The Mao of 1949-50 read all of the many
letters that reached him from the general public. By 1966 he did not
even deign to address the general public; at Tiananmen Square as the
Red Guards gathered before him, he merely raised an arm and gave a
glassy smile. The Mao of 1950 could cry over the suffering of
individuals from the grassroots, but the Mao of the Cultural
Revolution did not. Tian Jiaying could testify that Mao changed, for
the change wrecked Tian's career and ultimately led him to kill
himself.
To gain perspective on Mao's career at the summit of power in China,
one may imagine a Ronald Reagan who not only ruled for the eight
years he was elected to office, but also long previously (when a
Democrat) and long afterwards (when afflicted with Alzheimer's
disease). This approximates the span and subjective variation of
Mao's decades-long "reign" in Beijing. Mao's career evolved through
an embrace of universal individualism (as a youth), to a phase of
belief in Soviet-inspired proletarian progress (in the early 1920s),
to peasant revolt (late 1920s), on to war communism (in Yanan),
socialist building (the 1950s), disillusion with the results of
socialism (from the late 1950s), a philosophical and moral coarsening
(1960s), and a final return to a highly subjective individualism
(1970s).
It would be nonsensical to say Mao did not change his views and ways
over this spectacular lifetime, no less than it would be to say that
the Reagan of the White House years was to be equated with the victim
of Alzheimer's disease living in retirement in California. But given
the Chinese system, most of the different "Maos" were part of the
single until-death political rule of Mao.
Hence the more we learn about Mao the person, the more we are driven
to analyze the system over which he presided. Because he exercised
power for so long, and held it until he died, Mao's personal doubts
and decline were translated into gyrations of the Chinese state.
Intrigue was unleashed. Uncertainty--the oxygen of Mao's
court--turned colleagues and staff into fearful conspirators. The
imperial-plus-Leninist system acted as a magnifying glass, giving a
huge dimension to each quirk of his personality. But in the service
of what vision of history and society did this personality enlist
itself?
There was a sharp dualism to Mao's political ideas. His political
methods and his notions of how China related to the non-Chinese world
probably owed more to Chinese traditions than to Marxism-Leninism.
There was little about the modern world--other than Marxism--that Mao
knew well; he reached into Chinese tradition for his instinctual
knowledge. Yet Chinese tradition did not provide Mao his goals. These
came from the social engineering arsenal of
Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. In its fullness, this meant nothing less
than the refashioning of the Chinese spirit away from balance and
nearer to polarization, away from harmony and nearer to struggle,
away from private values and toward the collective values of an
Eastern Sparta. The mismatch between goal and method caused many of
the tragedies of the Mao era. The clashes between the two began long
before the spectacular problems of the 1960s and 1970s, but they
intensified as Mao used stratagems from the old novels Dream of the
Red Chamber and Journey to the West to prosecute the heightened
Marxist class struggle of the Cultural Revolution. As his
subjectivism soared, "class" meant little more than a way to
demarcate friend and enemy of the moment.
It is surprisingly common for Western scholars of China, still today,
to assume that social engineering could have worked if the conditions
were correct and it were properly done. I will cite here not extreme
cases, but excellent scholars from the pages of The Politics of China
1949-1989, which is based on the recent monumental Cambridge History
of China, whose points of view are widely representative. My own
first two books on China--much earlier volumes--reflect the influence
of this same standpoint; my recent ones do not.
Frederick Teiwes says of the state dominance over society that issued
from the Three- and Five-Antis campaigns against anti-socialist
elements in the early 1950s: "As a result, CCP leaders had achieved a
position where planned economic development was genuinely feasible."
But surely the twentieth century has taught us that planned economic
development is never feasible, "genuinely" or otherwise. We have
abundant evidence, most of it from outside China studies, about the
disastrous unworkability of the command economy. (One of the best
arguments against central planning is Friedrich Hayek's The Road to
Serfdom, written before Mao's capture of power. Whatever criticisms
may be made of Hayek's thesis when applied to Western societies, his
title is an apt summation of communist China's journey and travails.)
Here, in the social engineering goals of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism,
lay the most profound flaw of the post-1949 Mao.
It is not satisfactory to laud the success of the Mao of 1949-57 and
say that, from then on, with the onset of the crusade against
"rightists" in 1957 and the Great Leap Forward soon after, he "made
mistakes" or fell into "excesses." Kenneth Lieberthal is able to call
the regime of the 1950s "a wholly legitimate CCP rule." Whence its
legitimacy? Communist rule continued in the 1950s for the same reason
that communist rule came into being in the 1940s: the power of the
gun. The Marxist self-righteousness that gave Mao a sense of his own
legitimacy was cut from the same cloth as the self-righteousness that
made him declare half the people around him "counter-revolutionaries."
"The specific reasons for the failure of the Great Leap Forward
remained unclear", says Lieberthal. But if the reasons for the
failure of the Great Leap Forward are not clear to us, then nothing
Mao did can be clear to us. Not only Lieberthal but other estimable
China specialists still write in the 1990s as if a continuance of the
Soviet-model years, without the lurch into the Great Leap Forward and
the Cultural Revolution, might somehow have led to the achievement of
Mao's stated goals. Nothing in the experience of the Soviet Union or
Eastern Europe suggests that this is valid.
Harry Harding even implies that the Cultural Revolution might have
"succeeded" if it had been fully carried out:
"The flaw in Mao's strategy, in other words, was that he waged only
half a revolution between 1966 and 1969. He failed to design a viable
and enduring alternative political order to replace the one he sought
to overthrow. . . . In this sense, the Cultural Revolution was the
second unsuccessful Chinese revolution of the twentieth century
[following 1911]."
But a "revolution" in 1966 would have meant the overthrow of the
Communist Party, and that was not Mao's intention. Indeed, the
Communist Party was his tool for the social engineering that provided
the raison d'être for his being in power. No, the "flaw in Mao's
strategy" was fully evident in the first half of the "revolution"--he
had not even correctly defined his enemy, and the reason was the
blindness to reality that social engineering induces.
Recent scholarship has pushed back in time the critical failures of
the CCP-in-power. The same process is evident in the case of the
Soviet Union, where a previous notion of Stalin "betraying" Lenin's
revolution has given way to a sense of Lenin as one with Stalin in
his essential social engineering objectives and their concomitant
dictatorial political methods--as shown in Richard Pipes' striking
1996 book The Unknown Lenin. Mao's crusade against "rightism" began
far earlier than the Cultural Revolution, earlier still than the
Great Leap Forward, earlier even than the acceleration of
collectivization of 1956. The Thought Reform campaign during the
Korean War bears the essential marks of the terroristic methods of
the Cultural Revolution. The united front tactics by which
businessmen were used and discarded in Shanghai in the early 1950s
were one with those pioneered in Yanan a decade earlier and practiced
in the use and misuse of allies by Mao throughout his communist
career.
Perhaps 1949 is the real watershed in Mao's career, and a more
important point of demarcation than any dualism in his own character,
not primarily because Mao deteriorated personally after 1949 (that
mostly came a decade later), but for reasons inherent in "socialist
construction." Benjamin Yang in From Revolution to Politics (1990)
aptly suggests that, prior to 1949, Mao's "revolutionary idealism"
was under the control of his "political realism", whereas after 1949
his "political realism" was at the beck and call of his
"revolutionary idealism." From his rich pre-1949 experience of the
practice of realism, often in struggle against doctrinaire pro-Moscow
colleagues, Mao knew the realist language, and he soothingly spoke it
from time to time.
Even as the Great Leap Forward soared, Mao reviewed a report from a
certain county in Shandong that ended by saying, "the county will
attain communism in two years", and scrawled on it, "add a zero
[making it twenty] and the country still won't attain communism." But
these flashes of realism were but an intermittent restraint on his
rampant leftism. They could not be more than that because Marxist
social engineering, Mao's chief post-1949 goal, is inherently
unrealistic about the human material that alone can constitute the
building blocks of a social order.
The flattering Defense Minister Lin Biao cried that Mao had dealt
with questions Marx and Lenin had not grappled with. This was another
way of saying that Mao--unlike Marx and Lenin--lived long enough into
the period of socialist construction to find out that Marxism in
practice was a disaster. Do we not grow suspicious when we find Mao
saying of Stalin that he confused the people with the enemy, and then
Deng Xiaoping saying the same thing of Mao? Does this not go to the
heart of the failure and arrogance of social engineering?
Since at least the anti-rightist drive of 1957, Mao fought two
phantoms he would never be able to vanquish: the refusal of the
Chinese Communist Party to simply be a Mao Party; and the failure of
socialism to take on the splendor he expected of it. Mao's war
against phantoms began, like a number of the pathologies of the PRC,
in the anti-rightist campaign against loyal, uncomprehending
Communist Party functionaries. He wanted the blooming of "a hundred
flowers" to result in the rebuke and correction of colleagues who
displeased him. He did not want the blooming to question the
socialist system, much less his own towering role in it.
But the flowers turned out to be weeds. The criticism from outside
the Communist Party did not follow Mao's desires by accomplishing the
correction within the party that he sought. Moreover, vociferous
anti-socialist attacks required Mao to make a tactical peace with
senior colleagues of whom he did not approve. In this respect, the
anti-rightist campaign may be regarded as the true start of the
Cultural Revolution. In between came the rise and fall of the Great
Leap Forward and the purge of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai. Mao's
vindictive struggle against Peng in 1959 was inseparable from his
growing willfulness and his strengthening doubts about the socialist
goal.
In the tragedy of Peng, the personal and public life of Mao were
conjoined. One of Peng's criticisms of Mao was of his philandering.
The connection between the Peng-Mao crisis and Mao's growing appetite
for young female flesh was that Mao had become more self-indulgent.
This resulted in behavior that heightened his isolation from senior
colleagues, and in an obsessive quest for rejuvenation at a personal,
as well as a political, level. Death crept nearer, and with it the
possibility that people would deliver a harsh verdict on his career
after he was gone, especially because of the Leap. Physical decline
was not to be denied, but clinging to young women, as the emperors
had done and the Daoists prescribed, kept the focus away from Mao's
own crumbling body. It was on the ashes of the experiment in social
engineering that there arose the neo-emperor's rule that Dr. Li
Zhisui and other staff members observed.
"Revisionism" came to be the term Mao applied to the alleged betrayal
that produced the double disappointment of the Communist Party
refusing to be a Mao Party and socialism turning out less pleasing
than expected. But revisionism was an illusion. Mao never clearly
defined it; hence, he never found a way to eliminate it. He knocked
down revisionists, but never revisionism; nor was it possible to do
so. No surprise that Mao changed his target several times, lunging
after an enemy that, because it did not exist in a form that could be
tackled, had to be re-imagined after each failed attack. In the end,
Mao simply said the revisionists were "zombies."