标题: 1959.12 毛泽东 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-20 02:28 标题: 1959.12 毛泽东 Mao Tse-Tung
MICHAEL LINDSAY is an Australian who lived in China for many years. During part of World War II he was with the Communist guerrillas and came to know Mao Tse-tung personally. Since 1951, Mr. Lindsay has been Senior Fellow of the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University of Canberra.
By Michael Lindsay
DECEMBER 1959 ISSUE
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by MICHAEL LINDSAY
WHEN a man has identified himself with a cause for the greater part of his adult life, that cause becomes part of his personality. Mao Tse-tung would certainly claim that his life was meaningless apart from the Chinese Communist Party. In attempting to portray the man, one can only trace the interaction between his personality and the movement of which he has become the leader, or go back to the original personality and the social environment which produced this identification with a cause.
One can trace family influences on Mao — a loving but unassertive mother and a conservative, narrow-minded, and domineering father, against whom the boy rebelled. This rebellion can explain Mao’s refusal to accept his father’s plans for his future — to settle down into the moderate ambition of developing a family business in the narrow environment of a Hunan village.
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Hunan was not a very remote or backward province, but it was conservative. From Hunan had come the armies which defeated the T’aip’ing Rebellion and the great officials who, a generation before, had tried to restore Chinese society within the traditional Confucian pattern. In Mao’s generation, the failure of this restoration was obvious. The Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion had shown China’s complete helplessness on the international scene, and internal problems remained unsolved. All sorts of new ideas were spreading, from revolutionary newspapers and from schoolteachers returned from Europe or Japan, and the foundations of traditional Chinese society were under criticism.
As a boy, Mao was exposed to a bewildering variety of influences. He had a basic Chinese classical education and was fascinated by the traditional rebellious literature of the old popular novels. Middle school in Changsha, the provincial capital, gave him some contact with Western learning. In a fit of enthusiasm for the 1911 Revolution, he joined the army for six months, and he spent the rest of the year reading in the provincial public library. His reading included a lot of Western history, political theory, and philosophy in translation — probably rather confused translation. It was only at the age of nineteen that he settled down to a regular course at the Hunan Teachers Training College, where the teachers included both Chinese classical scholars and students returned from Europe.
This period was probably decisive in forming Mao’s personality. He became the leader of a group of young men who were patriotic and full of exciting and visionary ideas. As Mao described them to Edgar Snow twenty years later, “ My friends and I preferred to talk only of large matters — the nature of men, of human society, of China, the world, and the universe!” Many of the particular ideas which Mao held then he was to change later. What has remained is the attitude of mind — looking at the world in terms of some broad general pattern and seeing it as a place in which men could realize their visions of an ideal society.
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The next great influence was a period at Peking in the winter of 1918-1919. Peking University was then the center of intellectual life in China. The prevailing atmosphere was strongly antitraditional, but every variety of political and social theory was hotly debated as providing the alternative to Confucianism. The most influential magazine was New Youth, edited by Professor Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who later became the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
To support himself Mao obtained a job in the university library. (He claims that he was paid only eight dollars a month, but men who were professors at the time say that the job actually paid seventeen dollars.) He also fell in love with the daughter of Yang Chen-ch’i, one of his teachers in Changsha, who had become a professor at Peking. They were married in 1920, and she was later killed during the Civil War.
Mao returned to Hunan in 1919 and engaged in revolutionary politics, editing a local magazine. It was only on a second visit to Peking in 1919 that he became seriously interested in Marxism, but by 1920 he considered himself a convinced Marxist, and in 1921 he attended the meeting in Shanghai at which the Chinese Communist Party was founded. For years Mao had been searching for a set of basic beliefs and a definite social ideal, and in Communism he felt that he had found them. He does not seem to have wavered from the “decision for Communism” which he made in the early 1920s. In later years he was to have his own ideas about the best means for establishing Communist power, but he never seems to have questioned the dogmas of Communism — the vision of a new, ideal type of human society to be reached through the power of the Communist Party and the acceptance of the Soviet Union as the guide to this new society.
WHAT makes Mao Tse-tung such a remarkable and complex person is the struggle between his ideals and his natural abilities. On the one hand, there is his identification with the Communist myth: the Communists see the world in terms of the most general theoretical system, from which they deduce the plans for building the perfect society, and they consider any sacrifices in the present worth while. On the other hand, he is a very practical man, and possesses shrewd common sense, and is slightly contemptuous of the people who take general theoretical systems too seriously.
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In the 1920s, Ch’en Tu-hsiu had serious misgivings about the Comintern policy of close collaboration with the Kuomintang because of his belief in Marxian theory, though he always in the end followed Comintern directives. To someone who took his Marxism seriously, Stalin’s analysis of the Kuomintang as a multiclass party was a theoretical monstrosity. Mao does not seem to have shared these theoretical misgivings. He was quite ready to collaborate with the Kuomintang so long as this seemed an expedient road to Communist power. He became secretary to Hu Han-min, one of the more conservative Kuomintang leaders, and was considered to belong to the extreme right wing of the Communist Party. His divergences with Comintern policy came on the practical issue of the extent to which Communist power could be based on the peasants and could develop without control of large cities. Mao’s strategy proved to be successful, though his rivals, who believed that a Communist Party must be based on the city proletariat, were more orthodox Marxists. But even while he was ruling Communist areas with almost no industrial workers in them, he did not try to modify Marxist theory to fit his practice, but continued to maintain that the Communist Party represented the workers rather than the peasants. In his view, the peasants were a means to serve the cause of the revolution; the revolution was not a means to serve the interests of the peasants. In terms of the Communist vision of the future, the peasants could only realize their ultimate true interests by serving the working class and finally becoming part of it.
This conflict between visionary Marxism and practical common sense is clearly seen in Mao Tse-tung’s writings. He is original and interesting when he writes on problems of military or political strategy; as a theorist of guerrilla warfare he is unrivaled. His writings on Communist theory show little originality. They are mostly orthodox and rather turgid Marx-Leninism.
In the beginning, the Russian Communists were suspicious of Mao’s peasant-based Communism. One article in International Press Correspondence actually listed Maoism as a heresy. But when Mao proved successful in the countryside while the Party organization in the cities became weaker, the Russian attitude changed, though Russian publications remained evasive about his exact status in the Party, even when they recognized his position as Chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic. In fact, Mao had a long struggle against rivals for the Party leadership. He became the recognized leader of the Chinese Communist Party only in 1935, after the policies followed by Russian-trained leaders had led to the loss of the Communist areas in South China and the evacuation of the Communist army on the famous Long March.
The new Communist base in Northwest China was much smaller than the areas which the Communists had controlled in the South. If Chiang Kai-shek had been able to continue the Civil War for a few more years, he probably could have won it. It was Japanese pressure on China which gave Mao his real opportunity; the Communists negotiated a truce after the Sian incident, and the agreement for wartime cooperation with the National Government followed.
THE wartime situation was exactly suited to Mao’s talents. The more doctrinaire objectives of Communist policy were officially put in cold storage for the duration of the war. The main efforts of the Party were concentrated on developing guerrilla warfare and on organizing the peasant support necessary for a common-sense reformist program. This was the field in which Mao’s abilities showed to best advantage. It is quite likely that, looking back, Mao would feel the Yenan period to be the most happy and successful of his life.
As the undisputed leader of the Party, Mao Tsetung at Yenan was a slightly aloof figure. His role seemed to be that of thinking out basic strategy, leaving its detailed execution in the hands of followers whose competence and loyalty he could trust. On the personal side, though life at Yenan was primitive by Western standards, it gave a higher degree of comfort and security than Mao Tse-tung had enjoyed before. He had divorced his second wife, who had gone to Moscow in the early years of the war, and his authority in the Party enabled him to marry a young and beautiful film actress.
It was in the Yenan period that the Chinese Communists got the reputation of being merely agrarian reformers, and there was evidence to justify this reputation. The Party was carrying out a very effective reformist program, and Mao declared to visiting journalists that it did not intend to return to the former, more doctrinaire agrarian policy. In the government organization, some non-Communists did have considerable influence. Practical policies were often incompatible with strict Marx-Leninist orthodoxy. Articles were published which raised the question that Communist orthodoxy always evades: How can one be sure that the Communist Party does represent the masses? And there was a widespread undoctrinaire attitude very unusual in a Communist organization and very different from anything one found after 1949. There was, of course, another side — the uncritical acceptance of the Soviet line on international affairs, the continued expression of Marx-Leninist orthodoxy in more theoretical writings, the doctrinaire attitude remaining in some key organizations. But it was not unreasonable to hope, on the evidence available in 1944 or 1945, that the Chinese Communist Party would develop away from Stalinism under Mao’s leadership.
One of the interesting “might have been” questions is: What would have happened if the Chinese Communist Party had ever faced a clear choice between Communist orthodoxy and a truly democratic system? What would have happened if, abiding by the rules of democratic process, the Party could have obtained a clear opportunity to continue reformist policies and gain power through genuine popular support? Either the Kuomintang or the United States government could have presented the Chinese Communists with this choice, which might have split the Party. But the challenge was never made. The policies of the Kuomintang and the United States never disproved the orthodox Marx-Leninist theory that a ruling class will always resort to armed force rather than make any surrender of power and a capitalist government will never mediate impartially between Communists and non-Communists.
Both General Marshall and other well-informed Chinese observers felt that some of the Chinese Communists really hoped for a settlement in the negotiations of 1945 and 1946. Mao seems to have been among them, though it is doubtful whether he ever fully faced some of the issues involved, such as the need for choosing between Chinese and Soviet loyalties. He was quite strongly criticized within the Party for having gone too far in concessions in October, 1945, and he defended his actions by arguing that it was worth taking considerable risks in the hope of sparing the Chinese people the horrors of a new civil war. There are some indications that his position in the Party was weakened in 1946 by the failure of the negotiations.
VICTORY in the Civil War came much sooner than the Communists expected, and after the establishment of the new government in October, 1949, Mao Tse-tung made his first trip outside China — a visit to Moscow. The next few years saw a process of political coordination with the Soviet Union, and most of the special features of the Yenan period disappeared. Agrarian policy went back to where it had left off in the Chinese Soviet Republic, and Mao came out in favor of a rapid transition to collective farming. He was now The Leader, receiving both modern and traditional honors. His portrait was displayed everywhere, and some publications treated his name like that of an Emperor, placing it always at the beginning of a new line, raised two characters above the rest of the text. For several years, like an Emperor, he lived a secluded existence, appearing in public only on ceremonial occasions.
By the end of 1956, the basic requirements for Mao’s vision of the new society had been realized, at least for its first stage of socialism. Private ownership of the means of production had disappeared with the collectivization of agriculture and the taking over by the state of all industry and trade. The opposition had either been liquidated or had accepted a place in the new system. But this formal realization of socialism can hardly have satisfied the common-sense, practical side of Mao Tse-tung’s personality. As socialism was in the interests of the people, the people ought to like it. Mao knew from the Yenan days what it was like to be a leader with real popular support, and he must have been shrewd enough to feel the difference in the synthetic popular support of a totalitarian system. As he began to be less secluded, he must have realized that many people were still dissatisfied. And he knew from his earlier experience that the Communist Party could make mistakes and that the comparative freedom of criticism and the real power of some non-Communists which had existed in the Yenan period had been a valuable means of enabling the Communist Party to correct its mistakes. Finally, if China could show that its socialist system had such a wide degree of popular support that it could afford to allow free criticism, it would be obvious that China was doing a better job in building socialism than the Soviet Union, which had suppressed the Hungarian revolt and was moving back toward Stalinism.
This is a speculative reconstruction of Mao’s thinking, but it would explain his action in 1957, when he took the lead in the movement for encouraging free criticism and made his speech, in February, on “contradictions among the people.” He probably expected that the criticism would show basic support for the regime but would indicate minor mistakes which could be corrected.
Criticism started slowly, but increased when people found that the promise not to penalize critics was apparently being observed. A great deal of the criticism was fundamental, attacking especially the privileged position of the Communist Party. What must have been most alarming was that fundamental criticism came not only from the older intelligentsia but also from Communist Party members of long standing and from the students, a group which had been the most ardent supporter of the regime in its early days. And criticism was strongest among the students of worker or peasant origin.
To admit that much of this criticism was valid and to meet its basic demands would have involved radical revisionism, going further, perhaps, than Tito’s or Gomulka’s. This, in turn, would have involved a purge of the Stalinist elements in the Party, who had been critical of the tolerance of criticism from the beginning. It might have involved a split with the Soviet Union, leaving China defenseless against American attack, and Mao probably believed that this was a real threat.
In fact, the critics were suppressed in the antirightist campaign, which started in June, 1957, but Mao must have wondered what had gone wrong. Why did it seem that Mao had less real popular support than he had had in the 1940s? To admit that people really did not like the Communist road to the perfect society of the future would have been to repudiate his basic convictions. The alternative explanation was that what China had got was not yet proper socialism, in which case the remedy was to advance more rapidly. Mao traveled more around the country and probably found that many local cadres were still enthusiastic and had visions about the possibility of a “great leap forward” toward the ultimate ideal of a Communist society. This, again, is a speculative reconstruction of Mao’s thinking, but it could explain his support for the communes program in 1958 and the extravagant claims which were made for it. If the communes succeeded and the great leap forward produced its results, Mao could feel assured that his lifelong dreams of the perfect future society were being realized.
Here again, Mao’s hopes were disappointed. It proved necessary to slow down and modify the development of communes. The experiment was regarded with considerable skepticism in the Soviet Union, and the more extravagant claims were not even translated in the Soviet press. The enthusiastic expectations of the great leap forward in 1958 have been largely disappointed.
Mao suffered a real setback when he retired from the presidency and was replaced by Liu Shao-chi, who had opposed the experiment in free criticism and who seems to favor following the experience of the Soviet Union in economic policy. While Mao still remains the leader of the Party and a world figure in the Communist movement, he is probably a deeply disappointed man. For nearly forty years he had been motivated by the vision of the new society which could be built in China, and he has found that the reality cannot be made to correspond to his vision.
毛泽东
MICHAEL LINDSAY是一位在中国生活多年的澳大利亚人。在第二次世界大战的部分时间里，他与共产党的游击队在一起，并认识了毛泽东本人。自1951年以来，林赛先生一直是堪培拉的澳大利亚国立大学国际关系系的高级研究员。
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接下来的巨大影响是1918-1919年冬天在北京的一段时期。北京大学当时是中国知识界的中心。当时的气氛是强烈的反传统，但各种政治和社会理论都在激烈地争论，认为它们可以替代儒家思想。最有影响力的杂志是《新青年》，由后来成为中国共产党第一任领导人的陈独秀教授主编。
