Forwarded from Brian Turner--Re: Mao's Dr.

[Saul Thomas <stthomas@uchicago.edu>]

Subject: Re: re-publish Manufacturing History? Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 
10:18:31 +1100

Hi

Frederick Teiwes might have written something. I once sent a piece to the 
China Quarterly which included a critique of the book by citing 
Manufacturing History; but it was knocked back.

Mobo

In addition to a CQ review article, Teiwes gave an interview on this topic 
(reprinted below).

------------

Re: Matt’s post

The view of Teiwes and Jonathan Unger (who reviewed the book in the BCAS) 
is that the book reveals nothing startling.  Li's personal recollections 
merely confirm Teiwes' longstanding 'imperial court' view of top-level CCP 
politics, and the idea that the Yanan comradeship had withered on the vine.
Other than Li's personal recollections, there is apparently (I haven't read 
the book) Li's summary of Andrew Nathan's view of PRC history, which is not 
new in that China scholars were familiar with Nathan's ideas before.

I would imagine that the book's enthusiastic journalistic and popular 
reception differs from the ho-hum scholarly reception (at least Teiwes and 
Unger) in that Nathan's contribution in supplying research for Li to 
summarize is probably not apparent to them, and most readers would not be 
familiar with Nathan's writings anyway.  Most educated Americans view Mao 
as China's Stalin, but know few if any details.  Those that know a few 
details view him as a killer of 30 million (often mistakenly assuming this 
was from the Cultural Revolution).  So, Li's book fills in the details they 
are missing and informs them how Mao killed the 30 million.  Probably the 
most controversial claim of the book, much more than the sex stuff, is -- 
assuming I have heard correctly (someone please correct me if not) -- Li's 
claim that Mao was knowledgeable about, and indifferent to the suffering 
during the GLF famine.  So I'm surprised the critique of Li's book doesn't 
mention that at all, focusing on the sex stuff, which even if true would 
mean Mao is not much different from Benjamin Franklin, John F. Kennedy, and 
Bill Clinton.  However, if Li's allegation about Mao's actions during the 
GLF is correct, this would mean Mao was guilty of crimes against humanity 
and not merely guilty of a tragic blunder rooted in self-delusions and the 
bad political structure borrowed from the USSR.

While one can't say for sure, at least based on the sources I know about, 
it seems most unlikely that Li's allegation against Mao is correct.  Mao 
was apparently very depressed during the GLF, and his eschewing meat while 
meaningless beyond symbolism, at least is inconsistent with the charge of 
callous indifference to hunger, a callousness Mao condemned when expressed 
by some official in Hunan when Mao was a young man.  One also wonders why, 
if Mao was so indifferent to the famine, he allowed his utopian dream to be 
completely dismantled in 1960 and 1961.  Stalin and Pol Pot certainly 
didn't do this in reaction to famine.  Then there is the comment--upon 
being informed that peasants were hiding grain--that he *hoped* peasants 
were hiding grain, so they’d have something to eat.  (Stalin endorsed 
torture, imprisonment, and terror to wrest every last hidden grain from the 
starving peasants).  I think I read this in Yang Dali’s book, but when I 
checked recently I couldn’t find it there.  Does anyone have this book and 
has seen this quote in it?  If so could they share the page number? Thanks.

---------------

Re: views of Mao and the Mao era represented in general public book stores.
It’s unrealistic to expect many academic type books at a Borders, Barnes 
and Noble, et al and those they have will tend to be from authors like 
Jonathan Spence, who have established reputations outside of academia, or 
an academic with unusually high name recognition like John King 
Fairbank.  Lee Feigon's, Mao book is in some (I saw it in a Honolulu 
Borders), mainly because it is not an academic type book so much, rather 
it’s a provocative extended editorial, making its point like a bull in a 
china shop (no pun).  And it’s more acceptable in that it pulls off the 
remarkable feat of being very pro-Mao yet at the same time not being 
pro-socialist (any type)!  As previously discussed, _Some of Us_ might have 
potential, but I'm afraid it would get lost in the tidal wave of memoirs, 
esp female memoirs, in that one has to look past the cover to discover its 
perspective is different from the pack.

Philip Short’s bio, which is widely available in ordinary bookstores, is 
very good, yet ultimately frustrating.  It’s thoroughly researched, and 
fair in that it doesn’t endorse the usual hyperinflated death tolls, and 
even directly argues against the usual Mao=Hitler=Stalin equation.  The 
frustrating thing about this book, to me, is that in its attempt to be 
balanced in the conclusion, he credits Mao only for modernizing China and 
making it strong again.  Why is that such a great achievement anyway?  Lost 
of despots have -- benevolent, evil, and in-between.  Chiang Kai-Shek 
probably would have if he hadn’t lost the mainland.  What made Mao 
different from other modernizing authoritarians is that he solved the land 
social justice problem once and for all that had plagued China periodically 
for most of its history, reversed centuries of anti-feminist culture, 
eliminated the industrial exploitation typical of early development, and 
instilled in people—despite hypocrisies--the idea that they have the right 
to question authority or rebel.  None of this appears in Short’s 
conclusion.  To him, on the plus side, Mao built a bunch of factories, an 
army, made Nixon come to Beijing to pay respect, and he’s not a mass 
murderer like Hitler and Stalin.   Great.  No wonder mainstream authors 
like Deng so much, he was even better than Mao in each of the above respects.

Re: the Open Letters criticizing Li’s book -- definitely it, and the other 
articles critiquing Li’s book should be available in an academic library.
It’s a shame if it isn’t.  I would say though, that the critique itself 
needs a critique.  I wish there were a better critique of Li’s book.
Consider the following passages:

1- “[Li is] a manipulative author who bowdlerizes his own work to suit 
different
readerships is no honest and trustworthy witness but a swindler out to make 
a name for himself and to hell with truth.”

Regardless of the merit of Li’s book, it’s a bit unfair to criticize him 
for speaking out only in the west considering the censorship and other 
potential adversity facing such writings in China.

If someone published a more balanced view of Jiang Qing than the 
“White-Boned Demon” view, they’d have to publish it outside of 
China.  Would this mean someone publishing such a book outside of China is 
a manipulative swindler?

2- “A group of so-called leaders of the democratic movement have coagulated 
around a project [Andrew Nathan] put together at Columbia's Institute of 
East Asia Studies called ‘China and Constitutionalism’. Never mind that 
hundreds of millions of Chinese people are working hard for a better 
future, in Andrew Nathan's eyes, he is the sole arbiter and judge of the 
Chinese people's enterprise. And he has condemned the path chosen by the 
Chinese people on the mere allegations of scandal by a physician whose 
track record has shown him to have no scruples whatsoever, capable of 
saying anything to curry favor with his actual or potential benefactors.”

It’s one thing to criticize Nathan for his actions re: the translations of 
Li’s book, and his wildly unbalanced view of the Mao era generally.

That said, what is this supposed to mean?  Because hundreds of millions of 
people are working hard for a better future inside China, it’s wrong for 
Nathan to argue for Constitutionalism?  Foreigners are not allowed to 
comment?  So Marx and Engels should have just shut up about every country 
except Germany?  And when did Nathan ever say he was the sole arbiter and 
judge of the Chinese people’s enterprise?  He has his opinion.  Non-Chinese 
in this group have our own.  Are we also claiming to be the sole arbiters 
of the Chinese people’s enterprise?  I suspect Nathan would say in his 
defense that he doesn’t want to be the sole arbiter of China’s political 
future, but wishes the Chinese people to have constitutional protections so 
they can work it out in public via debate, rather than in behind-closed 
door politburo sessions.  Who could disagree with that?

In Jiang Xueqin’s  “Letter From China” in The Nation (May 4, 2002), he 
mentions how workers have to meet in secret to discuss their plight, where 
he says they praise Mao.  Why do they have to meet in secret?  Obviously, 
because Nathan is right, they have no constitutional right to assemble in 
open to discuss their exploitation.  So why attack Nathan on these grounds?

3)  “Cultural imperialists need someone like Li Zhisui to help spread the 
gospel of the west in China and, alas, it's not hard to find Li's kindred 
spirits in China.”

Marxism is from the west.  Were Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu spreading the 
gospel of the west and were they cultural imperialists?  Kang Youwei called 
for constitutionalism, and it was mentioned Mao did to a limited extent.
Why is it cultural imperialism for Nathan do so as well?

And what if it was? Cultural imperialism is wrong most of the time, but is 
it *automatically* wrong? Not to me it seems.  Is it wrong to condemn 
Afghani, Saudi, and certain Pakinstani cultural norms towards women, and to 
align with those seeking to destroy this culture and replace it with gender 
egalitarianism, which is mainly a foreign concept?

4) “…perils loom ahead because imperialists do not relish China's 
reawakening and there are too many Chinese who volunteer to spearhead the 
cultural imperialists' invasion of China and denigrate nationalism as
Boxer mentality and treat socialism as a scourge”

I am aware this was written in the 1990s, but today this seems fairly 
ridiculous.  The Chinese government, at least under Jiang Zemin, treated 
socialism as a scourge, pretty much destroyed it, and the pro-business 
wings of the 2 major parties in the US are very pro-China because of 
this.  There is hardly a hostile “invasion” occurring, rather  was a 
collaboration in a mutually reorientation of China’s development path.  We 
should not construct any false victims here as a substitute for the above 
absurd and outdated excerpt.  The Chinese government is not being forced by 
outsiders to follow the path they are, they are voluntarily doing so.

As for nationalism, if Nathan denigrates nationalism, I applaud him.  A 
little nationalism is healthy, but the left, especially the Marxist left, 
has traditionally been skeptical of national and ethnic tribalism.  I have 
no use for Americans who think the US is blessed by god, and am equally 
skeptical of the value of rabid Sino-nationalism that seems to value (as w/ 
Philip Short) nothing but industrial growth and national power and prestige 
(social justice retreats and trashing the environment in the 1990s merely 
unfortunate cost of achieving these higher ends).

5) [this being from the Mao’s assistants’ separate letter]   “Li was not 
exactly of a high moral calibre. In one incident, his housekeeper caught 
him taking a bath with his daughter-in-law, and for decrying his beastly 
behavior she was summarily dismissed. During the Cultural Revolution, he 
was once caught in flagrante delicto by the police in a tryst in a park 
with the wife of a government official who had been
sent to the countryside. These were fully documented cases of misconduct.
Such a degenerate, such a moral reprobate, was certainly not above 
fabricating lies for pecuniary and political gains.”

So, given Li and Nathan’s cheap tabloidish insinuations, the proper 
response is to make equally low-blow baseless insinuations about Li?

And why did people have to have sex in parks on the sly anyway?  That 
raises more troubling questions than the allegation of adultery.

----------------------------------------------

http://nias.ku.dk/Nytt/Regional/EastAsia/Articles/maodoc.html

On the Memoirs of Mao's Personal Doctor Li Zhisu

An interview with Frederick Teiwes

by Børge Bakken

Frederick Teiwes, you are among those in the West who have analysed most 
closely the court of Mao Zedong from a scholarly point of view . Mao's 
personal doctor, Li Zhisui, has written a book which - at least in the 
media - has been seen as the book on Mao. Personally, I felt that the book 
was at its best when it described Zhongnanhai, the residences and offices 
of central leaders in Mao's time and still the centre of events, as an 
enclosure of an almost Kafkaesque character. At the same time I got the 
impression that Li Zhisui sometimes seems like the frog in the well who saw 
part of the sky and drew conclusions about the whole sky. Li himself said 
before he died last year that his book should be left to the historians to 
correct. Now I want you to do just that. How does the professional analyst 
evaluate this participant's work. My first question concerns the monopoly 
of truth. Anne Thurston, who interviewed the doctor and reworked the 
manuscript into the book we now read, recently described his memoirs as 
partly being 'an act of revenge'. How much is this Li's own story, and how 
much does it contribute to the field of history? How close does Li's inside 
account take us to the historical Mao?

FT: How much could Li Zhusui have known? It seems to me that Western 
influence on what appeared in the book has been substantial. Clearly, the 
most interesting and genuine part of Li's story is where he describes life 
within Mao's household in Zhongnanhai. The pictures he paints of leaders 
other than Mao are sometimes interesting, such as those of Jiang Qing and 
Zhou Enlai, although others are hardly mentioned at all. Deng Xiaoping, for 
example, seems nearly absent from Li's account. Other people are pictured 
much according to official stereotypes: Peng Dehuai is described in the 
well known cliché of the courageous soldier who stood up against Mao. What 
we know from historical research, however, is that at Lushan in 1959 Peng 
was trying to appeal to Mao to change his policies, provoking the Chairman 
in the process, but without wanting in any way to challenge Mao's position. 
Li's account contains an odd mixture of official views from different 
periods of post-1949 Chinese history and Western analyses moulded by such 
perspectives but out of tune with what he actually saw and heard. Li's 
descriptions are often marred by historical distortions and Western 
scholarship swallowing such distortions. Although he was Mao's doctor he 
was by no means the political intimate he claimed to be or someone who was 
close to Mao and present during important moments nearly as much as he 
asserted. Lin Ke, Mao's personal secretary before the Cultural Revolution 
whom Li cites as his friend, has been extremely dismissive of Li's claim to 
be an insider, stating that Li greatly exaggerated his alleged frequent 
contact with Mao. I also think Li Zhisui's knowledge is sometimes based on 
rumors and gossip rather than on any substantial knowledge. One should also 
not forget that Li is a hostile witness to events. However, what Li really 
does know are developments in Mao's household, and he provides fascinating 
details on how different factions within that household operated. 
Revealingly, during the very important political events at Lushan in 1959, 
Li did not pay much heed to those events because he was preoccupied with 
petty feuds within the household. But it is precisely when he is talking 
about his personal observations that Li is at his best. In spite of very 
significant faults, and his vested interest in trying to uphold a 
consistently negative view of Mao, the book is extremely valuable for the 
atmosphere it describes of life at the court, and by extension for elite 
politics generally. One aspect that is clarified in the book is the fact 
that Mao was treated like a precious treasure by everyone around him. The 
fact that air traffic in the whole country was stopped when Mao was on a 
plane himself and similar examples show us that Mao was treated as a 
god-like emperor.

BB: So what kind of a guy was this Mao Zedong? He has been both praised and 
condemned in the most extreme ways possible. He has been described as a god 
and a devil. Andrew Nathan claims in the Foreword to the book that no other 
leader in history has inflicted such a catastrophe on his nation! Does the 
book justify such conclusions?

FT: Few have been able to deal with the question of who Mao was in a 
dispassionate manner. The myths about the man have stood in the way of 
analysis. Even Li Zhisui, despite his biases, is actually more balanced 
than Andrew Nathan's Foreword. Another typical piece of demonization is 
Mirsky's monster (see Jonathan Mirsky, 'Unmasking the Monster', The New 
York Review of Books, 17 November 1994), a description of Mao as one of the 
most vicious political leaders in history. The opposite extreme, so popular 
in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, was to see Mao as the greatest 
revolutionary of all time, the Red Sun of Cultural Revolution rhetoric, and 
I could go on about this phenomenon... Now, this is interesting 
sociologically, and has more to do with life very far from China and 
Zhongnanhai than it has to do with Mao and his surroundings. The Western 
myths of the shining revolutionary example were nurtured by the Vietnam 
war, the decadence of the West, and the search for an alternative. I think 
interpretations of Mao must be seen in this historical and sociological 
context. Mao was lionized by a significant section of the Western China 
community at the time. This view was, as we all know, shattered to a large 
degree by the Chinese themselves, and the next passion was the reforms and 
a rejection of Mao. Now, disillusioned Westerners tried to make the Chinese 
more like us. Mao used to be the good guy, but soon turned into the bad 
guy. Deng took over as the good guy - until that story abruptly ended in 
June 1989 when he also turned bad. In the official Chinese view there exist 
certain 'stages of Mao'; interestingly leading reformers in exile share 
this way of describing the man. Thus Mao was assertedly a very good leader 
until 1949 and continued his sound leadership until 1956; this was still 
realistic socialism. Starting with the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and 
especially the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mao began to make mistakes of 
utopian socialism, although in the official view his foreign policy was 
still good. Then the Cultural Revolution was almost totally negative. Mao 
misunder-stood the situation, his colleagues, everything, and as one exiled 
reformer put it, the result was just crazy. The monster view, in contrast, 
implies that Mao was always a bastard, a vicious politician bent on 
spreading evil throughout his realm. It does not seem to me that the 
historical record or Li's book support that view. Yes, nasty things 
happened under his leadership, but we are dealing with a system with 
assumptions of threats from enemies within and without China. In the 
historical situation Mao lived in one had to be vigilant and deal harshly 
with enemies. This was of course the case during the period of civil war 
and revolution. That such attitudes extended to the post-1949 period is 
understandable if less than totally justified. But it is important to note 
the broader cultural context: even outside the Party Chinese society has 
long been a tough place to live.

We have to deal with concrete examples to evaluate how cruel a bastard Mao 
really was. One of the interesting things that comes out of Li's book is 
the light it sheds on Mao's character. Li often describes his master as 
totally evil and manipulative, a person making other people dependent on 
him, etc. The strange thing about Li's book is that these descriptions 
often do not conform to what he actually recounted concerning events in 
Mao's household. Mao is in fact shown taking a mediating role, trying to 
solve conflicts and save people's face. The picture one gets is rather that 
of a patriarch of an extended family feeling some responsibility for coping 
with the problems in his own household. Even in cases where he directly 
goes after members of his household nothing really serious happens to them 
as far as we can tell from Li's story. During one incident sometime during 
the 1950s Mao is extremely angered by a guard from the household staff who 
tries to protect the Chairman from himself by advising him against swimming 
in the treacherous Yangtze. The guy is dismissed for his troubles, but no 
heads are chopped off in any other sense than dismissal from the household. 
Meanwhile, beyond Li's account, at various times political 'opponents' - 
that is those Mao decided were balking his will - were also treated leniently.

BB: The book has, in my opinion somewhat unjustifiedly, become famous 
because of the descriptions of Mao's sexual escapades. Do you read any 
significance into these stories? Li uses such stories in his effort to 
portray Mao as a completely repulsive person. What do you have to say on 
this score?

FT: There is an open question of how much the doctor actually knew about 
these matters. Li mentions one staff member, Xie Jingyi, in several 
contexts without ever noting that she was, according to information from 
people who knew her, one of Mao's many mistresses. But let me say just one 
thing about this question: you could refuse to go to bed with Mao! If you 
didn't want to do it, you simply didn't do it. You could leave Zhongnanhai 
or stay on, and that would be the end of the story as far as we know from 
Dr Li. Mao was clearly a randy old bastard who abused his authority. But 
the more significant point here concerns Li's observation that going to bed 
with the Chairman was the greatest thing peasant girls attending Mao's 
dancing parties felt they could do for their country. This is a far more 
interesting comment than to express shock about the randy old bastard. What 
does this tell us about the worship of Mao? Again we see the picture of Mao 
the precious treasure that was a widely held attitude in China during those 
years. But to return to the question of political ruthlessness. Li does not 
provide personal evidence that Mao was a totally ruthless politician 
chopping off heads at will as he went along. Of course, we have the pecking 
order of evil here, the Hitler, Stalin, Mao story, but let me go beyond 
Li's book. The evidence is a lot more complicated, in crucial respects 
unclear, but nevertheless it requires some reassessment. In 1988 I wrote an 
article for The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs called 'Mao and His 
Lieutenants' (AJCA, no.19/20, 1988 pp. 1-80). I described Mao as a 'ruthful 
despot'. I have always regretted using that phrase which, despite an 
attempt to clarify my meaning in a footnote, remained misleading. I did not 
mean to suggest that Mao was full of ruth, i.e. concern and regret for 
others, only that his behaviour was not consistently ruthless in all 
political situations. Far from it. As a rule he did not use ruthless 
methods to get rid of his 'enemies', at least in the pre-Cultural 
Revolution period. But first, one has to see Mao in historical and 
sociological context. He was in a sense god to his subordinates as well as 
to the Chinese nation as such. He did not have real enemies - only 
followers. Those who harboured bitterness against him kept it well inside 
their hearts. Forgiveness was what they sought from their Chairman in cases 
where they had incurred his disfavour. The growing memoir literature we 
have seen over recent years has contributed to a deeper understanding of 
this phenomenon. Basically they all worshipped Mao even if, like the 
biblical god, this was linked to fear and trembling. In such a context 
there was no need for Mao to be 'ruthless' to protect his power, even if in 
his growing paranoia he often perceived imaginary threats as time wore on. 
Ruthlessness? Historically there is to the contrary lots of evidence that 
he was quite lenient with people he regarded as opposing his wishes. Take 
the example of Wang Ming. Wang truly was out for Mao's power, even if he 
was the last one to do so. At the 7th Party Congress in 1945 Mao lobbied 
delegates to the Congress to get them to elect Wang Ming to the Central 
Committee, even though he knew Wang was a real enemy. Mao in fact stayed at 
the vote counting (and this was a real democratic voting procedure) until 
it was clear that his enemy would be elected. This was, of course, a good 
symbolic gesture emphasizing Party unity, and it might have benefited Mao 
in the long run, but is something totally different from ruthless political 
behaviour. There are lots of other incidents where Mao's 'opponents' only 
had to make self-criticisms, often becoming less influential in the 
process, but they remained in the Party. Deng Zihui, for instance, 
committed the unpardonable sin - in Mao's view - of arguing with him after 
he had made up his mind on the cooperatives in 1955. Deng was called a 
rightist after this, he had to make a self-criticism, and he was not 
elected to the Politburo as he surely would have been otherwise, but he 
remained a vice-premier.

Of course, there are examples of people who ended up in prison - like Pan 
Hannian who was arrested in 1955 and remained in custody until his death in 
the late 1970s - but even here the situation was complicated. Pan had been 
involved in intelligence work in the late 1930s, and on one important 
occasion did not inform Mao and the Party leadership about a secret meeting 
with the Japanese puppet leader Wang Jingwei. Mao even cleared him of the 
accusations about this meeting which were rumored in the Guomindang press, 
but Pan kept his secret in the Chairman's presence and let Mao draw the 
wrong conclusion about the incident. When it was discovered more than a 
decade and a half later that he had indeed engaged in a secret meeting with 
Wang, it was of course looked upon as treason. My point here is that there 
was some understandable reason for Mao's action, and also that Pan was not 
killed. In saying that Pan deserved the death penalty but sparing his life, 
Mao was something short of being ruthless in a case where grave issues were 
at stake. Mao was extremely cautious about punishing members of the elite 
for long periods of his career. Up to the Cultural Revolution Mao's 
'ruthlessness' falls far short of that of someone like, say, Saddam Hussein 
to take a current example of a truly ruthless leader.

BB: Then what about the Cultural Revolution? Did Mao change his ways then, 
and has Li Zhisui anything substantial to say about this period?

FT: The Cultural Revolution is of course quite another ball game, and the 
full story is not in yet. Here Li Zhisui has little that is new to tell us. 
Li does not know, and in fact adopts Mao's line that things happened behind 
his back. And it is still unclear what 'happened behind his back', or to 
what extent he controlled the details of the game. Michael Schoenhals' 
research in his excellent recent article in The China Quarterly (no. 145, 
1996, pp. 87-111) demonstrates that he knew a very great deal about the 
Stalinist-style state violence used against many of his colleagues and 
lesser officials and in the largest sense controlled the game, and he 
clearly knew enough to stop such abuses but chose not to. But the 
assumption of total ruthlessness still requires modification. First of all, 
Mao protected certain people - it wasn't Zhou Enlai who should be credited 
for most of these cases. Zhou backed out when Mao withdrew his protection. 
Li Zhisui in fact describes Zhou Enlai in very negative terms, as Mao's lap 
dog. He isn't necessarily right about Zhou, or at least his view is 
probably too extreme. Zhou Enlai did have his own inclinations and when he 
saw an opening, he tried to find solutions. As he said: 'If not me, who 
else would go into the fire?' That is, if I don't stay here to tidy up the 
mess, who else would be in a position to do so? But if Zhou did what he 
could when the opportunity arose, he was also among the most vehement in 
attacking Mao's 'enemies'. So in part the dog analogy is valid. The 
stupidity of propagating the moderate Zhou because he obviously had a few 
good table manners or, to put the matter more seriously, was at home in 
sophisticated Western company, is something China specialists should 
reflect upon. Henry Kissinger was completely charmed by Zhou's style, while 
describing Deng Xiaoping as 'that nasty little man'. And, Li Zhisui tells 
us, Mao did not even brush his teeth... During the Cultural Revolution Mao 
protected some people and not others. Was Mao directly involved in the 
deaths of Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi, or did he just let them happen? In 
these specific cases more the former than the latter, I suspect. But he 
defended Deng Xiaoping, he definitely did! Mao was directly responsible for 
the fact that nothing physically threatening happened to this guy, and he 
protected him through Wang Dongxing, the leader of his own bodyguard. The 
picture advanced in some Western analyses of a cunning Mao who brought back 
Deng, one of the most forceful of his colleagues, in order to balance the 
'threat' (!) of the pliable Zhou Enlai just doesn't add up. The Chairman 
was obviously no angel, but my point is that something other than total 
ruthlessness is involved here. There is an element of the man meaning what 
he said, despite Li's assumptions to the contrary. In some twisted way, I 
think, he really did conceive of the Cultural Revolution as a test for 
Party leaders which at least some of them could actually pass. From the 
point of view of the evidence a much more variegated and complex picture 
than the monstrous leader must be made of the historical Mao. In terms of 
the results of recent research I am now prone to think of the Cultural 
Revolution Mao more as mentally disturbed, warped or sadistic than as a 
ruthless (or ruthful) despot. Mao had an ability to divorce himself from 
the reality of the situation. In one instance Ji Dengkui, who had been 
forced by Red Guards to stand in the painful 'airplane position', met with 
Mao in Beijing. Instead of seeing the obvious seriousness of the matter, 
Mao was amused by the story, jokingly wanted Ji to show him this 'airplane 
position', and tried it briefly himself as if it was some kind of game.

BB: There are lots of unanswered questions here. Should we focus on the 
person Mao Zedong, his thoughts, or his surroundings? Was he directly 
responsible for what went on in connection with the Great Leap Forward as 
well as the Cultural Revolution? How much was Mao aware of and responsible 
for what happened around him?

FT: There has been a tendency to over-analyse Mao's thoughts. After about 
1958 it is getting hard to tell what the guy is really talking about. 
Starting in late 1958 Mao seems increasingly contradictory, and one is 
struck by just how difficult it was for other leaders to grasp his meaning. 
His discussions of Stalin's economics, dating from the period during and 
immediately after the Great Leap, are a case in point. On the one hand, Mao 
uses Stalin's views to urge people to be more realistic, but at the same 
time he is sharply critical of Stalin's economic practice. In this period 
he is telling provincial leaders to 'cool down', yet he is completely 
charmed by the wildly optimistic thoughts presented to him by the radical 
Henan Party Secretary Wu Zhipu. One day he urges everyone to 'be 
realistic', and the next day the Great Leap gets completely out of hand 
because of totally unrealistic plans he supported and introduced. In 
January 1959 Chen Yun cautiously responded to Mao's invitation to speak out 
and said that targets were still too high, whereupon Mao suddenly told Chen 
to shut up because the question was one of political line. The political 
atmosphere at that time required doing whatever Mao wanted, and the tragedy 
was that nobody really knew for sure what he wanted. The gut feeling was to 
lean to the left whatever that meant in those days, and the consequences 
were the years of famine when millions of Chinese starved to death. There 
is, however, a difference between the Great Leap Forward on the one hand, 
and the famine Stalin created in the Ukraine on the other. While Mao's 
disaster was the result of a completely failed utopian programme, Stalin's 
famine was the result of a conscious and calculated policy. And on the 
topic of inflicting catastrophe, Hitler's policy of genocide would seem to 
be in another league altogether.

In any case, whatever you think about the 'bad guy Mao' or 'Mao the 
monster', what is really so pathetic is the system of yes-sayers around 
him, that nobody would say 'no, this is too much'. You could criticize the 
emperor if you were willing to pay the price. In reality they all refrained 
from doing just that both as famine descended on the country during the 
Great Leap and, in even more bizarre circumstances, during the chaos of the 
Cultural Revolution. To return to Mao, perhaps his most significant failing 
was that he could not admit that he had made a mistake. It is instructive 
to contrast developments in 1956 with what happened during the Great Leap. 
In 1956 Mao accepted that it was rational policy to cancel the little leap 
of that year due to the economic dislocations it caused. By 1959, however, 
he was faced with much greater problems, but nevertheless was unwilling to 
take the necessary steps to right the situation. Some of the explanation is 
that in 1956 he was coming off one of his most remarkable successes, the 
cooperativization movement. In one year he had socialized the countryside, 
a massive task that most of his colleagues and he himself had thought would 
take three full five-year plans to achieve. He was basking in the glory of 
one of his greatest successes. He said at the time that his two greatest 
moments were the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and the success 
of the cooperativization movement six years later, and the latter was the 
greater victory of the two! Thus secure, he could accept realistic policies 
in 1956. In launching the Great Leap in 1958 Mao arguably was driven by his 
inability to accept that he had made a mess of the Hundred Flowers 
campaign: he simply could not accept that he himself had been wrong. The 
best he could come up with was lashing out against Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun 
for the moderate economic policies he had also supported in 1956-57; but 
now, against all evidence, Mao blamed them for encouraging the 'rightists' 
during the Hundred Flowers period, and instead set out on his own unique 
developmental course. When insecure, the Chairman used the tactics of 
attack. Later, as the Great Leap ran into trouble in 1959, he again could 
not repudiate his initiative. Unhinged by a sense of failure he could not 
cope with the problems and attacked his colleagues instead. It was always 
someone else's fault. Li Zhisui's book lacks this kind of psychological 
analysis, and instead keeps chanting about the Chairman always being 
ruthless and manipulative.

BB: Li Zhisui's book seems to me to be more than a book. I sometimes see it 
as a sort of phenomenon. Many read it as the truth, while others read their 
own truths into the book. What is your final comment on this?

FT: Yes, people seem to be reading their own truths into the book. In some 
ways I do so as well, in fact I find tremendous support for my views here, 
but that support only concerns what Li Zhisui actually saw and experienced 
himself. The book is good when he describes such events. When he talks of 
what he personally experienced he is giving us the taste of truth. But 
often Li's personal observations do not fit the overall picture he paints 
of Mao, and too often he bases those evaluations on rumors, gossip, and the 
conventional wisdom of the Western China community which he consulted 
during the preparation of the book. Often he simply parrots that 
conventional wisdom. Moreover, in many reviews of the book commentators 
seek justification from the general glosses and not from the real stuff. 
The guy made himself bigger than he was, in reality he was peripheral to 
Zhongnanhai, but he did succeed in conveying a great deal of the 
atmosphere. That, in my opinion, is the main value of the book.

Reference: The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui. With the 
editorial assistance of Anne F. Thurston. Translated by Tai Hung-chao. 
Foreword by Andrew J. Nathan. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.