This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Imperialists release long-awaited book on Cultural Revolution

Mao's Last Revolution
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Harvard University Press 2006, 693 pp. hb

Who is MacFarquhar?

"MacFarquhar was the son of Sir Alexander MacFarquhar, a member of the Indian Civil Service and later a senior diplomat at the United Nations where he eventually became Under Secretary for Personnel. He was born in Lahore, Pakistan. His father eventually became Director of Personnel for the United Nations secretariat. He was educated at the leading Scottish public school, Fettes College."(1)

By background, MacFarquhar was already an imperialist before entering China studies. It would be pointless to accuse Tony Blair or any British MP of having persynal CIA ties. Yet, in past articles, MIM drew attention to MacFarquhar's ties to the CIA as a point about area studies in general at elite universities in the united $tates. The CIA ties are also of interest to the extent that the Deng Xiaoping regime worked with him to release documents.

When MIM made the factually certain exposure of the Harvard area studies programs that MacFarquhar was typical of, we had the usual fools on the left-wing of imperialism saying MIM says "everyone" is CIA. Now CIA documents released prove exactly what MIM said. MacFarquhar himself has come forward to admit CIA ties.

Some of our readers will ask, here is a British imperialist now working for the CIA, "so why do you bother reviewing his book?" There may come a day when we can dispense with reading and dealing with MacFarquhars. It will be a day when the imperialist country population has been de-parasitized and pushed along into advanced stages of socialism. For now, the type of spy that MacFarquhar is is more numerous than communists, socialists and social-democrats combined in the united $tates. We have to handle what the enemy is saying in the media also, with MacFarquhar prominent there as well.

It's a laugh-riot that MacFarquhar accuses Mao of being "paranoid." (p. 320) MacFarquhar, the senior diplomat no less claims that he was fooled by the CIA when he took funding from CIA for his China Quarterly. That means MacFarquhar was not "paranoid" enough. When we say the media and universities are controlled by the federal government, it is by virtue of clandestine numbers.

For now, we have two errors that reinforce each other. On the right- wing side, we have dumb white Liberals (and it does not matter if they call themselves "Marxist") saying MIM is "paranoid." They echo exactly what the CIA wants people to say as proved by MacFarquhar's calling Mao "paranoid." (p. 320) On the other side, we have the ultra-left which pretends that at this stage in the struggle we can just ignore MacFarquhar, by virtue of the fact of his imperialist and specific CIA ties. The ultra-left acts as if there were billions of masses already beyond MacFarquhar's quirky and reactionary account.

The Liberals are so dogmatically opposed to judgment and so supportive of talk-as-a-panacea that they oppose even the minimal struggle necessary to have an accurate grip on reality. Unpleasant as it may be, we should struggle enough to know about CIA domination of area studies and the media in international issues. Unfortunately, there are few but MIM who will bother to set the bar for this question.

Now our stupid Liberals will say one is not "required" to be CIA to talk on international issues in the u.$. media or universities. Yet it hardly matter whether there is a legal requirement or not. By sheer clandestine numbers, the spy agencies place more people than there are total minted social science PhDs since 1979 as MIM has already pointed out. There does not have to be any special prisons for people who attempt to undertake international issues in the united $tates for the media to be controlled by the federal government through sheer numbers.

The problem is that those interested in the details of international politics are 10%. Within that, those who would offer any opposition to the exploiter view are a minority. Even if spy agencies did not dominate the discussion of China, the ex-Soviet Union etc., the civilian exploiter view would dominate.

Story-tellers

Mao's Last Revolution is an exercise in story-telling, bourgeois idealism. In discussing their sources, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals (M & S) even use the word "'story.'"(p. 480) The story is told more-or-less as a feud within the Politburo, with special attention to about 10 people.

In bourgeois terminology, "objective" history reports equally the evidence that could be construed as "good" or "bad" for Mao and the 10 people of interest. Yet we would say what is "good" and "bad" to begin with should be in question and should change from studying Mao's China. "Good" and "bad" are not the fixed quantities we can be sure of and need to ration out in our studies. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals end up taking Deng's side, but their idea of fairness is to report occasional details where one might conclude that Mao was a better ruler.

It becomes a matter of painting a picture and bragging that the artist had all colors of paint available to use. Painting such a picture of the Cultural Revolution may start as a series of factual questions but end in justifying post-modernism, not as the authors' intentions, but as the inevitable result of digesting how this sort of story is put together.

For the proletariat, the whole story-telling endeavor is futile. Tracking the struggles of a dozen people just cannot be a scientifically useful approach to 10 years of any country's history.

M & S spend all their time divining Mao's persynal motivations and then end up saying repeatedly that Mao is an enigma, who kept his cards "close to his chest." They end up blaming the "excesses" of the Cultural Revolution on Mao's "deliberate opaqueness."(p. 48)

Most of the problem is that Mao sought to engage his people to understand their own class interests. That meant partly debate-by- assignment-from-teacher-Mao and also armed struggle when enough was at stake. How to do this without just following Mao's orders was the crux of the problem. M & S stick to their bourgeois idealist agenda: "the process by which Mao translated high-level political intrigue into mass mobilization remains one of the many obscure issues of the Cultural Revolution."(p.54) Mao wanted a genuine revolutionary mobilization for principles that would outlive him. That's why "deliberate opaqueness" gave others a chance to do something themselves.

Mao gave the Chinese people an existential crisis well depicted in an experience of an English teacher at the Foreign Languages School:

"I asked my most intelligent grad student (from Shanghai) what was going on; 'I haven't a clue,' he said. 'Can't you sit on the fence until things are clearer?' I asked him. 'No,' he said; 'you have to choose one line or the other.' 'But surely you can sense which is going to win?" I asked him. 'No, it is quite impossible. You just have to jump.'"(p. 59)
There it is: Mao's crime is making people think for themselves, an approach that caused total "chaos."

M & S do bring us something of a first in reporting that Mao was actually there in Wuhan (p. 209) during what had been thought to be the bloodiest fighting of the whole Cultural Revolution. (M & S do not make light of the violence, but it appears there could have been less than 1000 dead in Wuhan total. This may justify the book jacket's rather restrained statement that tens of thousands of officials were humiliated or even killed during the Cultural Revolution. The book on the whole is rather restrained.)

M & S admit Mao had to flee Wuhan because of the fighting. Hence, the whole idea that all the violence sprang as some sort of bureaucratic plot from Mao's head is wrong. He wanted a genuine mobilization for revolution and took persynal risks to obtain it. He and Zhou Enlai were both at risk along with other central leaders in Wuhan. From reading about the bold organizing by Red Guard groups that involved factionalism, one should have no doubt that politicization was genuine.

In the imperialist telling, too much participation is mob rule and too much following orders is conformist dictatorship. MacFarquhar like most bourgeois Liberals has it both ways in the story-telling against Mao. Since M & S take the position that even top leaders such as Liu Shaoqi did not know what was going on, they should have painted the whole Cultural Revolution as an ultra-left to anarchist endeavor, instead of also trying to paint Mao as some kind of ultimate conformity-pusher: "the Chinese political system was first thrown into chaos and then paralyzed."(p. 2) In a quote that reviewer Orville Schell also points to, M & S refer to the majority of Red Guards as creating a "Lord of the Flies" catastrophe.(p. 131) Of the Red Guards M & S said, "their sense of discipline left much to be desired."(p. 144) On the other hand, the usual East Asia unit discipline was much in force and some Swedes passing by a rally were not allowed to join it;(p. 148) although of course it was supposed to be spreading the rebel line. So it was possible to see the Cultural Revolution both as "chaos" and yet not "spontaneous" enough--a product of Mao's bureaucratic machinations. MIM would say that such problems are in the eye of the beholder, an irrational hatred of Chinese communism, not something that can really be described in a consistent way.

We hear the same boiling down of political questions to narrow persynal motivations when it comes to northern Korea.

"By and large, the longevity of a dictator is a function of power and consumption. That is to say, a dictator stays in power by funneling his available resources into the maintenance of his power and his personal consumption. Some dictators tend to reduce personal consumption to maximize power, like those in the former communist countries, whereas others, like Somoza of Nicaragua and Marcos of the Philippines, concentrate available resources on personal consumption by keeping its power at the minimum level necessary. By the same token, the Kim Jong Il regime is spending the North's national resources on personal luxury and the maintenance of power." (2)
Yet when the time came and the accounts were unfrozen in 2007, the same media had to report that northern Korea just left the money there in the account and delayed closing its nuclear reactor, thus missing a deadline. So much for the value of a persynal motivations theory of history.

Likewise, now it is standard anti-communist reporting that luxury goods rule. So MacFarquhar and Schoenhals tell us about Mao's villas.(p. 30) We also learn about Mao's sex life in ever greater detail. Oddly enough the way bourgeois culture works, the sexual titillation will increase interest in Mao among people who would not otherwise pay any attention.

The climax of the new approach given life by Mao's physician occurs when MacFarquhar and Schoenhals inform the reader that the first real purge clearing the way for Lin's rise and the Cultural Revolution had a cat fight between military wives behind it. The number two leader of China issued a death threat against another military couple. The central document was:

"I certify that (1) when she and I got married, Ye Qun was a pure virgin, and she has remained faithful ever since;(2) Ye Qun and Wang Shiwei had never been lovers;(3) Laohu and Doudou are Ye Qun's and my own flesh and blood; and (4) Yan Weibing's counterrevolutionary letters contain nothing but rumors. Lin Biao, May 14, 1966."(p. 35)
We would say it is fine to have the military wives cat fight in a bourgeois revolution. It tends to stress that no one is just a yak anymore. So it's ugly individualism, but that can be an advance. For any claim to be going beyond capitalism, the cat fight and discussion of it was pornographic and anti-socialist. That Lin Biao had to say something like that to be on the correct side of the monogamy question--it is a problem that our communist movement needs to find a way around. (Take note though, when MIM says that serious revolutionary parties with great achievements thus far have had a heavy emphasis on monogamy, we can point to accounts such as this one.) In that context, we are pleased that Lin won victory and put the accuser on the defensive, but it should not have come up to begin with.

At some level, Mao's party did know there had to be a line drawn against individualist preoccupations somewhere, because in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, some party members knew they should support a womyn leader of the Cultural Revolution despite past disagreements with her. Famous Red Guard leader Nie Yuanzi was not well regarded persynally, not by right-wing party member Deng Xiaoping or left-wing party member Kang Sheng; yet, Kang Sheng said, "we will support her, even if she is a fucking turtle's egg."(p. 55) What they are referring to that made Nie Yuanzi a "bad person" in the pre-1949 period is not explained, but MIM would not be surprised to find out there was some sexual reference to it. Likewise, there was much commentary about Jiang Qing's past as an actor, and the sexual implications. Nonetheless, there was a Cultural Revolution poster that argued sexual lifestyles of individuals should be discussed in the big-character posters.(p. 70) (M & S do not characterize the overall line of the people who put up that poster.) On the other hand, work teams seeking to repress the Cultural Revolution, also charged that some "struggle sessions" turned into sexual groping sessions.(p. 74) Since the work teams ended up under criticism by Mao, one could argue that even in the 1960s, the Deng supporters were using sexual questions to their advantage.

In decadent imperialist culture, with its own tendency to turn everything into pornography, there is no progressive or political value to the cat fight struggle. The implicit message behind that cat fight was that monogamy was worth defending to the point of having a Politburo meeting about claims and counter-claims of two couples. MIM would say that the real revolutionaries have to see that built into the very structure of that situation is nothing of any value for advance. Unstated arguments for monogamy do not advance socialism and gossip only has a progressive value where romance culture has not taken hold among slaves. If someone on the Politburo wanted to raise the question of monogamy as a policy or had some original theory, she should have brought it forward.

On a related sexual politics point, contrary to what we often hear, Mao did not believe all his words sacred. M & S admitted that when imported tape recorders arrived, Mao was not in favor of their use on him all the time. Among the reasons that M & S offer aside from Mao not wanting to be serious and precise 100% of the time is that he also wanted to flirt with wimmin.(p. 36) So this again is an example, where no matter what Mao does he is going to be condemned. If he had wanted to be taped all the time, the critics surely would have said he wanted a persynality cult. (p. 262-) If not, then it was surely because he was flirting too much. The idea that there might be a right or wrong answer to the substance of the question of tape recording Mao all the time is moot in the bourgeois individualist approach. Just because the bourgeoisie cannot understand anything but the narrowest individual motivations does not mean that there are not larger forces in society that have to be weighed and gauged. The more time the Politburo spent discussing conflicts among individuals that were the same hundreds of years ago, the less time went into understanding how to change the structure of society.

Surprises for Amerikans

"The very first 'Tiananmen Square incident': on October 31, 1972, thousands of ordinary residents of the capital descended on the square and dug up and carted off more than 20,000 decorative flowers."(p. 376) Zhou Enlai was angry the police were napping on the job.

The evidence that Mao was the libertarian democrat of China is strong.

What would surprise most Amerikans simplistically brainwashed about "statism" is that the central administration of China under Mao was smaller than just the international spy establishment of the United $tates today. Today, the FBI by itself has over 28,000 employees. The central government of "totalitarian" China cut itself from 100 to 61 bureaus and a total of 32,000 employees in 1982, six years after Mao died.(3) M & S were so good to admit that the pro-capitalist Chiang Kai-shek opposing Mao before 1949 had 40,000 full time spies working for him.(p. 79)

Of course Mao's military did have millions in staff. Moreover, at any given time it was possible to put together spy teams of thousands, but centralized staff the size of the u.$. government was not to be found, which is even more significant because China was always three or four times the U.$. population.

M & S explained that contrary to "statist" images of Mao, Mao bitterly complained about the size of central government. Mao was talking about 400 senior people running 78 ministries. Here is what M & S had to say about the ministries:

"A large ministry might consist of between twenty and thirty departments and have a staff of anywhere from 500 to 2,000. The ministerial-level Department of Administrative Affairs was the largest, employing more than 2,500 people, but it had been without a functioning leadership since June 1966. Some small committees and central bureaus consisted of only a handful of offices and fewer than 50 staffers." (p. 157)
Then in 1968, Mao had 70 to 90% of those staffers sent to "May 7 Cadre Schools" (p. 160) for re-education and direct contact with peasants. Had Mao left those ministries to grow and have staffs staying in Beijing, the critics would have said he headed a huge "totalitarian" bureaucracy. Instead, as he cut the government and sent officials to the countryside, he received criticism in that direction as well. Many anti-Mao books published in the West are the wailings of such people sent down to the countryside. The substance of the question of whether it is true that socialist government is more bureaucratic than capitalist government will be sidestepped by most. If Westerners were not motivated by simple irrational hatreds, there would be libertarians stepping forward to defend some of what Mao did instead of always condemning no matter what he did.

With regard to the famous Beijing Spring massacre of 1989, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals make no effort to go back and cover for the people who carried it out; even though, it is clear that Mao had them purged. In 1965, Mao fired Yang Shangkun, who was in charge of the military in 1989 thanks to the counterrevolution after Mao died. Just before he died, Mao also purged Deng Xiaoping who was in overall charge of what the West calls the "Tiananmen Square massacre." In other words, the constant jibing about June 4, 1989 that we get from ignorant exploiters is completely laid to waste by MacFarquhar's and Schoenhal's account, without saying so. It was the losers of the Cultural Revolution, the most strident capitalist-roaders who carried out the June 4 1989 massacre. Those clamoring for capitalism are completely brainwashed on this point.

For that matter MacFarquhar and Schoenhals are good enough to back other accounts published a generation earlier showing that it was indeed the pro-capitalist wing of the party that was in favor of suppressing student demonstrations in the Cultural Revolution. So, yes, Amerikkkans have it all completely upside-down and backwards: their government supported the fascists and opposed those who defended the rules allowing big character posters on the streets and "power seizures" by the masses.

For that matter, M & S admit that the thing most likely to make Mao angry and the thing that Deng Xiaoping himself continued to say in self-criticism after Mao died is that Mao did not like having information kept from him.(p. 78) On the other hand, we often hear the same people, including MacFarquhar claim that Mao's subordinates were too intimidated to keep him informed. MIM has pinpointed this question as one worthy of deeper track theoretical comparisons--the advantages and disadvantages of a proletarian dictatorship relative to a bourgeois one, where private property concerns restrict the flow of information in the guise of profits, confidentiality or security.

M & S further admit that it was often Mao intervening in prison policy. In 1972, he cracked down on "fascist" means of interrogation in the prisons (p. 343) and he was also the one to announce mass prison releases. Among prisoners, M & S say that it was the ultra-left prisoners who spent the longest in prison (p. 345)--as makes sense since Deng came to power and mostly released rightists. When Mao became upset with the prisons, he took away their running from the army and gave them to the Minister of Public Security. This would also tend to undermine the argument that there was some kind of totalitarian conformity in the government. When the 1976 "Tiananmen incident" happened, M & S say there was brutal force, but not a single death (p. 427) in contrast with the 1989 incident, and contrary to rumors MIM has heard from those trying to deny that the capitalist-roaders are more repressive than Maoists when it comes to defending the people of China.

Surprises for bourgeois China-watchers

The way we read this book, the real excitement for the authors must have been to report those historical details that might shock the bourgeois China-watching community. Given what was already known about China, what did M & S have to add given access to interviews and Chinese language sources previously un-examined.

  • Typical and timely is how Mao called on the Soviets to send volunteers to fight imperialists in the Middle East--especially to shore up Iraq after 1958. Amerikan and British troops were in "Lebanon and Jordan respectively"(p. 5) at the time.

  • On the subject of Red Guard searches of homes, we are surprised to see M & S offer some numbers on the campaign against the four olds. What the capitalist-roaders would later refer to as looting referred to the following: "In Beijing, Red Guards in slightly more than one month confiscated 103,000 liang (about 5.7 tons) of gold, 345,2000 liang of silver, 55,459,900 yuan in cash, and 613,600 antique or jade pieces"(p. 117)--from 33,695 families. M & S and Deng Xiaoping called it looting. Documents at the time gave the so-called looting a more systematic appearance. By October 1966, Red Guards found a total of 65 tons of gold.(p. 117) When Amerikkkans think of looting they are thinking of rioters taking things out of shops and going home with them, say in an electricity blackout. The Cultural Revolution so-called looting was much more targeted at certain petty-bourgeois and formerly bourgeois families: it could be called class struggle and the gains did not go home with individuals.

  • On the question of the May 16 conspiracy, M & S show Mao having Zhou Enlai directly defend himself from May 16 attack. Simultaneously M & S say there really was no such conspiracy and that it involved millions of arrests.(p. 221) Apparently, the idea that Mao and Zhou could be attacked from the nominal left was beyond M & S. The political leaders lumped various anarchist and ultra-left behaviors under the "May 16" label and M & S objected.

    At the same time, M & S were aware of the ultra-left nature of the attacks at the Foreign Ministry. Their account of that really does not disagree with ours or other previous accounts which took May 16 style ultra-leftism seriously, and not just a manufacturing of bureaucratic minds. M & S are even so good as to inform readers that the burning of the British embassy that so much turned the tide against the ultra- left really had good reasons for it that even Zhou Enlai acknowledged. For example, the British had just shut down some communist newspapers in Hong Kong, so it was a typical tit-for-tat situation. It appears that the British imperialists actually considered leaving Hong Kong in the 1960s instead of 1997, because of ultra-left attacks.

  • On the Lin Biao crisis, M & S did not have any bombshells to drop. It appears to M & S that Lin stayed inside the leadership compound and did not get out much in his last few years. No explanation is given. M & S also discuss the Confucian things found in Lin's home. It turns out that Zhou Enlai carried out many of Lin's functions. Zhou also chaired the Cultural Revolution Group meetings.(p. 101) One surprise was that Mao suggested to Lin that he name Zhang Chunqiao Lin's successor.(p. 325)

  • Regarding the main claim to fame of M & S's colleague Jasper Becker, without saying so they landed a major blow against anti-communist arguments regarding cannibalism in China: "Nor can it be argued that communism impelled them to it: in the equally politicized environment of the KMT's persecution of suspected 'spies' and 'enemy agents' in China before 1949, agents and torturers of spymaster Dai Li on occasion also consumed parts of their victims."(p. 259)

  • M & S concur with Chinese and Russian scholars today that Russians started shenanigans with the border, but it was the Chinese who started the shooting war in 1969.(p. 309) As a result though, M & S suggest that Mao eventually took up the recommendations of a study of old generals such as Chen Yi. This resulted in an eventual leaning to the u.$. side in the super-power conflicts. At the end of life, Zhou Enlai was having to deny in the hospital that he was a "capitulator" for how far along relations had developed with u.$. imperialism.

    Surprises for Maoists

    We have to discount the book partly as it stands, because it rarely made issue of under what conditions the various people spoke. Did revolutionary Zhang Chunqiao really mean what he said or was he just saying what he was told to say, the kind of rumor Deng Xiaoping liked to spread: "'I ended up spending 90 percent of my time on two opera's and Yao Wenyuan's 'On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.'"(p. 17) The Dengists like to speak as if there were only 8 or 9 plays total in China thanks to the so-called Gang of Four, but what they really mean is that there were only so many central-government-sponsored plays. Of course the masses went on with their own artistic endeavors at the local level, but propaganda often leaves a different impression.

  • This is the first time that MIM has heard that the Cultural Revolution Group was at loggerheads internally to such an extent that Chen Boda and Kang Sheng argued with each other. M & S report that Jiang Qing said the group could hardly convene (p. 100)--a much more raucous image than the bureaucratic dispenser of Mao's will that we sometimes hear about. In fact, Mao seems to have objected to the chaos himself.(p. 188) It appears the leadership organization of the Cultural Revolution was not much better than the Politburo when Deng was on it with Jiang Qing. On the other hand, the charge rings true, because Mao obviously believed there was not a deep enough politicization and grasp of theory among the people. The Cultural Revolution leadership was so real that it reached ahead in purging major leaders without Mao's approval according to M & S.

  • Perhaps a surprise to both China-watchers and Maoists, M & S do the most to push that there was a struggle against Zhou Enlai, to the point where some Foreign Ministry officials actually thought Deng Xiaoping received an assignment from Mao to criticize Zhou. M & S discredit the story that Mao lit firecrackers to celebrate Zhou's death, (p. 418) but M & S do say that there was a Politburo meeting of several days where all were supposed to criticize Zhou--as the 11th two-line struggle in party history.

  • Mao's criticism of factionalism and cliques in 1975 did not apply just to the so-called Gang of Four. Even Deng Xiaoping admitted as much at the time. M & S say that in 1975 the so-called Gang of Four stopped meeting in order to mend their ways.

    Failing to get beyond bourgeois individualism

    Although Mao called the Chinese people a "blank slate" on which any communist picture could be painted, there turned out to be few painters if we are to believe M & S; although, the picture was surely not as bleak as what we read regarding the character of Khruschev-era leaders available upon the death of Stalin. Even in China's party leadership itself, one has the agonizing feeling that the France-returned-students such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping wanted to paint an imperialist picture for China and did not really have the imagination that Mao had. Others frequently referred to China's imperial history to understand the politics of the "emperor":

    "'When a man attains the Dao, even his pets ascend to heaven!' meaning that when an official gets to the top, all his friends and relatives get to there with him. Tao was able to bring numerous colleagues from southern and central China with him to Beijing, including no less than fifty-four county-level officials."(p. 45)
    The idea of cliques of officials moving around and also falling when the leader falls has often been reported. This too would seem to indicate too much of a persynalistic touch to the revolution and that when a new political line does not fill the vacuum, old ideas will continue to circulate. What was a "blank slate" will become painted with old ideas--either ideas about copying imperialist France or continuing with old imperial Chinese practices.

    MIM would say that the whole idea of individual promotion is a myth of the bourgeois revolution. Whether management promotions, Politburo determinations regarding "pure virginity" or individual educational achievement, the ability to select individual merit is a pre- occupation of class society that reaches the height of scientific pretension under bourgeois rule.

    M & S claim that once Khruschev fell in 1965, Mao insisted on loyalty to him as a persyn instead of to a line.(p. 10) If true, MIM would say we have to understand that such an approach is at best bourgeois. In his last years, Mao criticized cliques forming around the Politburo, and encouraged class issues to come to the fore by getting people out of their limited political ruts. Yet there just did not seem to be people able to do that.

    Mao himself said that he had planned to draw some successors from among the intellectuals. (p. 171) Yet in the end, even the most well- connected of the theorists had no military ties and were unable to win the class struggle. Once Lin Biao was gone, the military became a major reason it was impossible to promote a horde of radical intellectuals into the Politburo, according to MacFarquhar. Mao himself was saying that 75% of the officer corps supported the right.(p. 215)

    MIM would say that the difference between being in a bourgeois era of struggle against feudalism and a socialist era is that in a mature socialist era the country would be able to absorb the Lin Biao shock. From 1949 to 1966, Mao concluded that the People's Republic of China had bourgeois-led education. Perhaps it also follows from that that there was as yet no means for the public to handle the Lin Biao tragedy. Mao himself physically lost something from Lin Biao's betrayal,(p. 339) something insisted on by M & S and only hinted at by a previous author. It's odd, because the whole lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that Stalin had close-comrades-in-arms betray him and the socialist revolution. The lesson was not really that Mao was infallible. Mao's lesson was that there would be Lin Biaos, but still the Lin Biao coup destroyed the credibility of revolutionaries who up to that point benefitted from a crude concept of invincibility.

    M & S explain the way that it worked, once someone was discredited it became possible to undo all the previous struggles that persyn was involved with.(p. 340) The struggles proceeded as if an individual's essence were evil as opposed to there being class struggles. For this reason, MIM has stressed for example, that Zinoviev had a correct phase followed by an incorrect one. The practice of going back and finding everything wrong with someone in a zealous digging out of individual so-called roots is bourgeois individualist. Again, it fits an agenda of overcoming feudalism, but not capitalism. M & S correctly pointed out that Zhou Enlai took advantage of the fall of Lin and various ultra-leftists to put in all kinds of rightists in the bureaucracy in addition to those already in the military taking over from former Lin supporters.

    One difficulty for MIM's approach is that in China it could very well be that a certain clique would become used to following the orders of a head honcho, so it would be difficult to separate them from Lin in that case for instance. This has to do with Chinese culture, that there really is not the kind of totalitarian central government that Westerners fantasize about but in fact a kind of decentralized conformity to local units. The central government had so little impact that when one official went bad, hordes of his followers had to be tossed with him. Hence, M & S correctly believed that even in China's supposed totalitarian system, officials were more important than institutions.

    In Mao's China, it proved necessary to compromise with bourgeois Deng Xiaoping to ease military leaders out of the civilian sphere. In the end, the disappointing thing was that even Shanghai's militia did not use its leverage to get the so-called Gang of Four out of prison. Again it was a case where the center determined that a few leaders were bad and then hordes of other leaders capitulated. The revolutionaries sat in Beijing and the deputies were not up to their tasks, again a sad picture. Perhaps some bold Beijing intellectuals should have been sent down to Shanghai to lead the militia and close the gap between theory and the military. Even if the Shanghai militia could not defeat the entire Chinese military, it seems unlikely to MIM that a disruption of the status quo in the standing committee of the Politburo would have been risked by anyone if Shanghai had at least said, "no." It was a classic example of a local unit deferring to the central government, but it was not inevitable or unthinkable that the local would have trumped the central.

    Confirmations

    There are some subtle points of interpretation that MIM would also confirm.

  • M & S make an admission that contradicts the early pages of MacFarquhar's previous volume published. As MIM has argued and M & S now say, "In reality, significant segments of the rural population. particularly in impoverished areas, remained largely unaffected by such regulations and migrated as they had always done from one part of the country to another under the most adverse circumstances in search of a better life."(p. 374) Previously, MacFarquhar had rushed to give credence to speculations about provincial population figures to inflate Great Leap Forward death tolls. The provincial figures are used by opportunists precisely to avoid internal migration issues. Also to the credit of M & S, in this book, they start to approach public health data. They found data on spinal meningitis and industrial accidents (p. 375) to use against the Cultural Revolutionaries.

  • M & S present a version of Lin Biao in which he did not produce much by way of any arguments. "On all documents relating to U.S.-PRC opening that he was sent, he simply wrote: 'I completely agree with the Chairman's instructions.'"(p. 322) The impression was someone who would have had difficulty coming up with theory and policy. When the coup happened, M & S say that Zhang Chunqiao said "'there's nothing worth criticizing here,'"(p. 347) which would tend to confirm why the emphasis ended up being Lin's Confucian household items. MIM would say that much of the continuing mystery surrounding Lin Biao stems from the fact that he did not have much to say. What he said has been published--for People's War and the concept of an era of Mao--points MIM agrees with. Specifically as much as MIM emphasizes Lenin's teachings on decadence and parasitism in its own work, MIM Thought is not enough and we should not leave out the peoples who have experience with socialist construction, which is why Lin's point was a good one.

  • Likewise, going beyond the Lin case, M & S say that Jiang Qing complained in 1975 about the lack of theoretical capability on the Politburo (p. 393)--reminiscent to MIM of the Politburo in the USSR when Stalin died--dominated by "practicals" and "loyalists." The Politburo was not as bad as Khruschev's once Stalin died, but there were similarities. Mao managed to have a few radical intellectuals around, but they had no military power.

  • Losing Lin in the coup meant that bringing back Deng Xiaoping was necessary as part of a deal with the military, which cut its role in politics and shuffled some rightists around.(p. 379) By 1975, Deng was completely in charge only to end up purged again in 1976.

  • M & S present ideological insight into the 10th Party Congress. We agree with them that there was a slight difference in the remarks of Zhou Enlai and Mao's preferred successor Wang Hungwen. (M & S argue persuasively that most of the time Mao was pushing Wang, not Jiang and Zhang, to succeed himself.) Wang put more emphasis on the equality of the superpower imperialists while Zhou leaned more to the West.(p. 365) Even better, M & S notice that Zhou argued that we are still in the "era" of Lenin, not Mao as Lin had argued at the previous congress. In fact, Zhou and Zhang both said that they were instructed along this line by Mao himself according to M & S. (MIM has denied this point, because Lenin could not sum up socialist construction, so to say that we live only in the era of imperialism is not adequate; although it certainly reframes the discussion of opening to the united $tates.)

    Mao seems to have allowed and even ordered elliptical two-line struggle to be presented at the 10th Congress. One had to read between-the-lines to see it. For that matter, we should also confirm the importance of allegorical criticism and aesopian language to the Cultural Revolution--a point MIM has stressed for different reasons regarding the struggle behind enemy lines.

    Notes:
    1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_MacFarquhar
    2. http://www.upi.com/International_Intelligence/Analysis/2007/04/20/anal ysis_n_koreas_offshore_funds/ The New York Times paper the International Herald Tribune said Kim needed the $25 million "buy the loyalty of the country's elite."
    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/08/news/nkorea.php
    3. http://hdr.undp.org/docs/publications/ocational_papers/oc28a.htm

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