Maybe if the number of deaths on Mao's hands had broken 100,000,000, the Left might have started to feel uncomfortable? Fifty million is rather "moral purity."
Rather than opposing the Japanese invasion,
Mao had welcomed it. He hoped the Japanese would engage and destroy his
rival, Chiang Kai-shek, and would also draw Soviet troops into China. Mao
avoided armed conflict not only with the Japanese but also with the
Nationalists. Rather than being a champion of independence for his country,
Mao since the 1920s had been an agent of the Soviet Union, taking its arms
and money, doing its bidding, and accepting its control of the Chinese
Communist Party. He knew his only hope of gaining power in China was with
Soviet support, a belief ultimately confirmed in his takeover of the country
in 1949. Mao was no agrarian reformer. He redistributed no land and
liberated no peasants. His initial “red base” at Ruijin in Jiangxi province,
southern China, had been achieved not by a revolutionary uprising of the
masses but through military conquest by the Red Army, armed and funded by Moscow. His rule was identical to that of an occupying army, surviving by plundering the local population and killing anyone who resisted.
Much of Snow’s account of the Long March was also untrue. The march’s
objective was to establish a new base in the north, near the Mongolian
border, in order to have ready access to Soviet supplies and arms. Many of
Snow’s tales of outnumbered Communist forces bravely breaking through Nationalist lines were pure invention. Chiang Kai-shek, in fact, largely
determined Mao’s route by giving him free passage through selected regions,
while blocking alternative routes. Chiang’s aim was to use the arrival of
the Red Army in the territories of otherwise recalcitrant provincial
warlords to coerce them into joining him, thereby exploiting the Communist presence to unify the country under Nationalist rule. Some of the most
famous battles of the Long March never took place. The celebrated crossing
of the suspension bridge over the Dadu River at Luding, for instance, had
not been in the face of Nationalist machine gun fire. No Communists were
killed there at all. And Mao shared few of the privations of his troops.
Instead of trudging over mountains and through swamps, he and the other leaders were borne throughout most of the march in litters, shaded by tarpaulins, carried by long bamboo poles on the shoulders of their bearers.
...
The biggest single number of Chinese dead was the 38
million who perished in the famine of the four years from 1958 to 1961,
during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Westerners have known since Jasper
Becker’s path-breaking 1996 book Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine that
the famine killed between 30 and 40 million people. Becker attributed this
to Mao’s ideological folly of conducting an ambitious but failed experiment
in collectivization. Chang and Halliday produce new evidence to show it was
more sinister than that.
Mao’s regime confiscated Chinese harvests in these years so it could export
food to Communist-controlled Eastern Europe in exchange for armaments and political support. Food and money were also exported to support
anti-colonial and Communist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In
the first year of famine, 1958–1959, China exported seven million tons of
grain, enough to feed 38 million people. In 1960, a year in which 22 million
Chinese died of starvation, China was the biggest international aid donor in
terms of proportion of GNP in the world. Thanks to Chinese agricultural
exports, East Germany was able to lift food rationing in 1958, and Albania
in 1961.
...
The future Canadian
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited in 1960 and wrote a starry-eyed, aptly
titled book, Two Innocents in Red China, which said nothing about the
famine. Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery visited in both 1960 and 1961 and
asserted there was “no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas.” He did not regard the shortages as Mao’s fault and urged him to hang on to
power: “China needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.” The United
Nations was completely ineffectual. Its Food and Agricultural Organization
made an inspection in 1959, declaring that food production had increased by
50 to 100 percent in the past five years: “China seems capable of feeding
[its population] well.” When the French socialist leader, François
Mitterand, visited in 1961, Mao told him: “I repeat it, in order to be
heard: There is no famine in China.” Mitterand dutifully reported this
assurance to a credulous world. At the same time, Mao enlisted three writers
he knew he could trust—Edgar Snow, Han Suyin, and Felix Greene—to spread his
message through articles, books, and a celebrated BBC television interview
between a fawning Greene and Chou En-lai.
Among Western intellectuals, Mao’s most enthusiastic supporters came from
the French Left. Simone de Beauvoir visited China in 1955 and declared: “The
power he [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt
’s was. New China’s Constitution renders impossible the concentration of
authority in one man’s hands.” She wrote a lengthy book about her visit
entitled The Long March. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, her
consort Jean-Paul Sartre praised the “revolutionary violence” of Mao as “profoundly moral.” It is true, as Chang and Halliday argue, that in terms
of electoral politics, the Maoist parties China funded in Western countries
from the 1950s to the 1970s only ever gained miniscule support. But among
intellectuals, the story was very different.
In France, the intellectual center of Maoism from the late 1960s to 1976
was the journal Tel Quel. This publication was the focus of much of the
theoretical activity that emerged in Paris at the time and was responsible
for launching the careers of many of the luminaries of the French
intellectual Left, notably the cultural analyst Roland Barthes, the
post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the theorist of psychoanalysis Jacques
Lacan, and the radical feminist Julia Kristeva. Themes that emerged in Tel
Quel at the time were taken up by the influential British Marxist journal
New Left Review and from there spread to the rest of the English-speaking
world. Tel Quel began as a Marxist-Leninist journal but became influential
in shifting the Western Left away from old Marxism, with its emphasis on the blue-collar working class as the bearer of social revolution, and towards
the new Leftism of the post-1960s period, with its emphasis on feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and anti-colonialism.
The journal’s founder, the novelist and critic Philippe Sollers, in 1967
began pub- lishing Mao’s poems accompanied by sympathetic articles. By 1971
the journal had switched to an overtly Maoist political and theoretical
position. Although the editorial group flattered Mao as a serious thinker,
lauding in particular his essay “On Contradiction,” the only substantive
point they took from him was about the autonomy of the cultural sphere. Traditional Marxism held that the culture of a society was determined by its
mode of production. Taking their cue from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Tel Quel argued instead that culture was a relatively autonomous realm. This opened a space for them to endorse the notion of cultural politics—the idea
that literature, debates, lectures, performances, and artistic output could
effect social change—a position that was bound to be popular with writers, academics, and artists who had been previously consigned by Marxism to utilitarian roles. Intellectuals were thus elevated to major players in the
socialist revolution. Ideas and attitudes that survive today for which Tel
Quel can claim more responsibility than most include the theory of postmodernism, the academic field of cultural studies, the policy of multiculturalism, the sanctification of theorists as celebrities, and an
utter hostility to liberal-democratic capitalism, especially in its American
form, which the journal identified as the source of all oppression.
Tel Quel’s formal switch to Maoism in 1971 cost it the support of Derrida, Althusser, and a few other writers who did not want to break with the French Communist Party, which remained steadfastly loyal to the USSR. But most of
the editorial group went along with Sollers. The culmination of their
enthusiasm for Mao was a visit to China by Kristeva, Barthes, and Sollers in
1974. In his history of the journal, The Time of Theory (1995), the English
writer Patrick ffrench writes that its Maoism pushed it sharply to the Left.
The group wanted to emulate the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. This
was rather difficult, however, since none were students. They were the
teachers, lecturers, and writers who in China had been dismissed from their
posts and forced into manual work. Instead of going out into the factories
and fields, the Tel Quel writers made do with less arduous measures. They
printed the slogan “Vive la pensée-maotsétoung” in each edition of the
journal and decorated their offices with political graffiti copied from
Chinese walls.
...
From the 1950s to the 1980s, there was a great debate among economists about
the best policies to end the poverty and backwardness in much of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. By this time, enough information had emerged from
the USSR to show that its regime’s claims and statistics about industrial
success and agricultural output in the 1930s and 1940s were either largely
exaggerated or outright bogus. State control of the economy,
collectivization, and five-year plans should have been consigned to the
dustbin of economic history. Yet at the very time this was becoming apparent
to those with eyes to see, left-wing economists were lining up to offer
precisely the same advice to the Third World. Many used Mao’s Cultural
Revolution as confirmation of their case.
In Britain, the group of Keynesian economists at Cambridge University led by
Joan Robinson used its considerable influence with Social Democrat
politicians around the world to argue this line.
...
In the United States, other Keynesian economists took a similar line. In his
1973 book, A China Passage, written after a Potemkin-style tour of the
country, John Kenneth Galbraith gushed: “There can now be no serious doubt
that China is devising a highly effective economic system.” Despite the
complete absence of any credible statistics, Galbraith endorsed estimates by
other economists who traveled with him that Chinese industrial and
agricultural output was growing at 10 or 11 percent per annum: “This does
not seem to me implausible.”
