Pro-democracy activists don’t worry China. Rather, Beijing is more nervous about young Maoists
- Beijing’s raid on student activists and young Maoists reveals its anxiety about Mao Zedong’s legacy. Although Mao was dedicated to violent change, his legacy is more complex than that and he still commands respect among the Chinese
The Communist Party saw real danger in a group of twentysomethings who decided that the current regime had twisted beyond recognition the real intentions of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. That founder, Mao, is very much visible in China in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. Yet the arrests of the young Maoists in China suggest that the founder’s legacy is still fluid, and subject to interpretation.
Whether in China or in the West, it’s hard to make a final judgment on just where his significance lies. How should we explain his lust for violent change?
Make no mistake, Mao did not simply express regret at breaking human eggs to make socialist omelettes. Rather, from an early age he was influenced by a sort of social Darwinism that implied transformative violence was a positive good. “A revolution is not a dinner party,” he observed in 1927. “It cannot be so refined.”
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Mao’s celebration of violence is not in any doubt. However, it would be too simplistic to suggest this fully discredited his rule in the eyes of the Chinese population. The reason for this seeming contradiction lies in the role Mao is still seen to have played in creating a China that would no longer be the “sick man of Asia”, to use an expression common in the late 19th century.
China had, at last, a presence on the world stage; at the negotiations on the future of Vietnam in 1954, or the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian nations in 1955, China, represented by its suave foreign minister Zhou Enlai, played a crucial role. Of course, China was not recognised by the greatest power in the cold war, the US. Yet the refusal of the US to recognise Mao’s China came to seem petulant after a while.
Mao’s order to move significant amounts of heavy industry to the west of China in the 1960s to form what he called the Third Front may well have set the stage for industrial development in that region. Other research suggests that the collective farms set up under Mao may have been more efficient than retrospective accounts have suggested, and that the first attempts to create local markets were under way by the early 1970s, when Mao’s Cultural Revolution was still in full swing.
When I talk to Chinese people, including many who themselves suffered during the Cultural Revolution, they often express respect for Mao’s achievements. This adds irony to the fact that the Communist Party remains nervous about Mao’s legacy, refusing to allow open discussion of his life or record in China today. Mao was dedicated to violent change, but also to the politics of mobilisation, in which people would take on active roles in bringing about social change.
Rana Mitter is director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford, and author of “A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World” and “China’s War with Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival”