Mao's China Historiography

Frank Dikötter

Revisionist:

(Backyard Furnaces) “Those who failed to show enough enthusiasm [for making steel] were verbally abused, pushed around or even tied up and paraded.”

(GLF) “Coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.”

He identifies Mao as the “key architect” of the Great Leap Forward and asserts that Mao bears the “main responsibility for the catastrophe that followed”.

Evaluation:

He spent two years studying and researching in the PRC

Hu Qiaomu

Maoist:

(Ideology) “The Communist Party of China is the product of the synthesis of the Chinese working class movement with Marxist-Leninism.”

Evaluation:

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politician, apart of the CCP Central Committe, and propagandist. His book was backed by Mao and used as the official history of the CCP. He was also a adamant Marxist

John (Fair)bank

Western liberal:

(civil war) “Without the devastating Japanese invasion, the Nanjing government might gradually have led the way in China’s modernisation. As it turned out, however, resisting Japan gave Mao and the CCP their chance to establish a new autocratic power in the countryside, excluding the elements of a nascent urban civil society still developing under the Nationalists.”

(100 flowers campaign) “China’s intellectuals well knew that if you stick your neck out you may lose your head. For a year [of the Hundred Flowers campaign] they said nothing.”

(GLF) “By concentrating solely on Chairman Mao as the leader we would fail to convey the national mood of fervent self-sacrifice and frenetic activity that characterised the Great Leap Forward.”

(Mao’s position) “Mao had two careers, one as a rebel leader, one as an updated emperor. He had gained the power of the latter but evidently retained the self-image of the former.”

(GLF/CR) “Chairman Mao Zedong killed millions and millions of Chinese while calling it a class struggle for revolution.”

Evaluation:

Fairbank went to Beijing, where he taught himself to read and speak Chinese. He embarked on further study and research, including an examination of the recently opened Qing government archives. In 1936, he returned to Harvard, introduced courses on Chinese history and became America’s foremost expert on the subject.

Such was Fairbank’s knowledge of China that the United States government sent him there during World War II. During this time Fairbank served as a translator, gathered intelligence from locals and advised American military officers. After 1949, Fairbank urged Washington to recognise Mao’s government and work with them to advance American interests in the region.

In the McCarthyism of the early Cold War, this was enough for Fairbank to be accused of communist sympathies and activity.

Jonathan Fenby

(GMD control?) “If the revolution had been meant to assert China’s national rights, the new regime had within 18 months, acceded to foreign control never suffered under the Qing.”

(May 4th Mov) “[The May Fourth Movement] encapsulated the frustrations and ambitions of young intellectuals who despaired of the state of the country.”

Evalutation:

British jounalist,

Charles Fitzgerald

(Civil War) “If the Communists by their violence alienated the scholars, the [Guomindang] by its blind selfish indifference lost the peasants.”

Evaluation:

He lived in China during the Warlord, Nationalist and Civil War periods

Mobo Gao

Neo-Maoist:

(GLF) “Ironically, most of the ideas of the Great Leap Forward did not come from Mao himself. According to one version of events, the idea of overtaking Britain in 15 years in steel an iron… was inspired by Khrushchev’s slogan of the Soviet Union overtaking the United States in 15 years.”

“Mao should certainly be held primarily responsible for the consequences of the Great Leap Forward… But to identify Mao as the person responsible for a policy disaster is not the same as to say Mao was the murderer of so many people.”

Evaluation:

Grew up during the great famine and lived through the cultural revolution. He is a Neo-Maoist and places blame on urban and party elites

Li Zhisui

(medicine): “In all the years I worked for him, I was never able to educate Mao in medicine. His thinking remained pre-scientific.”

Evaluation:

Li Zhisui was Mao Zedong’s personal doctor for 22 years. While the cult of Mao depicted the Chairman as a political genius, Li’s account suggests he was paranoid, self-serving, manipulative and dishonest.

Michael Lynch

(100 flowers) “It is doubtful that he [Mao] was genuinely surprised by the reaction he had provoked [with the Hundred Flowers campaign]. Certainly, the speed with which he then acted suggests he was prepared for what had happened… It was transformed into another deadly rectification campaign, an assault on those who dared to say the unsayable … What had begun as a call for free expression had ended as a programme of thought control.”

(GLF/CR) “It was Mao Zedong who was ultimately responsible for the tragedy that beset his people … he created the policies and gave the orders.”

Evaluation:

Scottish historian, written many widly used textbooks, specialised in hitler, mao and stalin

Maurice Meisner

Marxist:

(Ideology) “For more than two decades the Chinese Revolution had grown in an insular national mold. It had developed independently of international revolutionary currents and was both physically and spiritually isolated from them… Unlike Lenin and Trotsky, Mao Zedong was an eminently national revolutionary leader, not an international revolutionary spokesman.”

(new PRC) “The power of the new Chinese government [The People’s Republic of China] rested ultimately on the forces of violence which all states wield over society: the army and the police.”

(power struggles pre CR) “The early 1960s were undoubtedly the most frustrating years in Mao’s political life… His attempts to inaugurate new revolutionary campaigns were repeatedly thwarted, distorted or ignored… Mao began to suffer from an uncharacteristic loss of confidence in the future of the revolution.”

Evaluation:

American historian, specialised in modern China and socialist ideology and regimes.

Edgar Snow

(civil war): “Once Japan was defeated, would Jiang Jieshi then destroy the Communists and their partisan allies? The Guomindang spent ten fruitless years in the attempt before 1937. Even with the use of American bombers and fighters on his side, the Generalissimo was not likely to secure greater success than the Japanese had had against these experienced guerrilla warriors. It had become a physical impossibility for the Chongqing Government to destroy this opposition in anything short of a long and bloody way…”

Evaluation:

He was invited into communist-held Yan’an and spent four months there, he was the first Westerner to interview Mao Zedong and his bulletins provided the Western world with its first information about the growing communist movement. Snow was supplied with propaganda and selective information by Mao and his cohort. As a consequence, Snow acquired only a superficial understanding of the Communist Party and its internal politics.

Sun Shuyun

(The Long March) “Few have challenged or even modestly questioned the myth. It is just part of who we are. But the questions remain… Books about the March fill yards of shelves but they rarely ask all these questions or provide answers.”

Evaluation:

Post-Mao revisionist, she grew up during the cultural revolution. in 2004 Sun spent months retracing the steps of the marchers. She spoke to 40 people who witnessed it, both Red Army veterans and the civilians who encountered them. Their testimony is often at odds with official communist histories.

Jonathan Spence

(Mao) Mao was a ‘Lord of Misrule’, a man of contradictions, “Mao’s beginnings were commonplace, his education episodic, his talents unexceptional. Yet he possessed a relentless energy and a ruthless self-confidence that led him to become one of the world’s most powerful rulers”.

(civil war) “[The rape of Nanjing] by the Japanese on December 7th 1937 brought a literal and symbolic end to any myths of Guomindang power in their own capital city.”

(100 flowers/GLF)“Both the Hundred Flowers movement and the launching of the Great Leap show Mao more and more divorced from any true reality check… and he himself seemed to care less and less for the consequences that might spring from his own erratic utterances.”

(CR) “Mao did not precisely orchestrate the coming of the Cultural Revolution, but he established an environment that made it possible and helped to set many of the people and issues in place.”

(Mao’s control?) “[Mao’s meting with Richard Nixon in 1972 was] an extraordinary shift in policy by Mao… and is proof of the extraordinary power that Mao knew he had over his people. But it is one of the last times we can see that power being utilised to the full.”

Evaluation:

Decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to history and academia. described by the Leigh Bureau as “the world’s foremost authority on Chinese civilization and the role of history in shaping modern China”.