New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xxi, 369 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$27.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-521-71154-8.
This book is an important addition to the existing writings in English on Mao Zedong, Mao’s thought, the Chinese Revolution, and the various debates about them. As a collection of essays by 14 scholars, more than half of whom are historians, this book distinguishes itself in terms of scope, approach and inclusion of varied views and positions. Its purpose, as Timothy Cheek, the editor, states, is to “provide the general reader an opportunity to make sense of Mao and his role in modern Chinese history and the ‘socialist moment’ in twentieth-century world history, as well as his continuing significance both in China and beyond,” and its theme being that “there are multiple Maos, and to settle on one dominant image is to distort the whole” (4).
Structurally, the book is divided into two parts, part 1, “Mao’s World” and part 2 , “Mao’s Legacy.” Part 1 has nine chapters, with chapter 1 serving as the introduction to the entire book. Chapters 2 to 4 are organized chronologically from Mao’s early life to the mid 1950s. The other five chapters are issue oriented, focusing on “fragments of Mao Zedong” (chapter 5), “Mao and his followers” (chapter 6), “Mao and communist intellectuals” (chapter 7), “gendered Mao” (chapter 8), and “Mao the man and Mao the icon” (chapter 9). Part 2 includes chapters 10 to 14 that explore Mao’s legacy, ranging from contemporary China since the start of the economic reform in the late 1970s, to the spread of Maoism in the “Third World,” and its reception in the West. With each author working on different aspects of Mao-related history and debates, this volume not only offers a collection of varied focuses, perspectives and arguments, it also provides a rich source of bibliographic materials.
As the editor emphasizes, the book is intended for a general readership (in English). To that end, Cheek’s introduction is perhaps deliberately eclectic, allowing individual chapters to debate with one another, even if only indirectly. It is to the editor’s credit that against climate he includes the chapters in which the authors recognize the historical complexity of “Mao’s world” and examine his role as a modern revolutionary in conjunction with the historical significance of the Chinese Revolution. Along this line, some chapters are worth highlighting.
Chapter 2, appropriately titled “Making Revolution in Twentieth-Century China,” offers a rather sound account of the historical condition of late Qing to the 1920s in which Mao was born and grew into a Marxist revolutionary. Even though Joseph Esherick relies mainly on the existing scholarship in English, his analysis of Mao’s journey into a Chinese Marxist revolutionary recognizes “the central premise of China’s twentieth-century revolutionary movement: The national revolution for liberation from foreign imperialism should be combined with a radical reorganization of Chinese society” (60). In a similar move, Brantly Womack, in the next chapter on Mao from the 1920s to 1937, traces Mao’s path from an “urban radical” to a “rural revolutionary” with an emphasis on Mao’s “intellectual development” and the “learning process of the first half of his life [that] provided the foundation for his successful leadership of the Chinese Revolution” (86). While chapter 5, “consuming fragments of Mao Zedong,” in its postmodern playfulness leaves behind a strong impression of a caricatured political discourse, Hung-Yok Ip, in chapter 7, echoing the historical sentiments found in the two aforementioned chapters, offers a relatively rare look into the question as to why many modern intellectuals devoted their lives to a cause the way they did, arguing that “despite his conflicts with many communist intellectuals, Mao shared with them similar concerns and ideals” (169). While the key term “anti-elitist elitism” deployed throughout the chapter can at times feel somewhat overused, Ip nevertheless grounds her discussion within the historical context of the Chinese Revolution, which attracted generations of “communist intellectuals” and fellow travellers.
When it comes to debating Mao’s legacy, the prevailing tendency since the post-Mao era has been ad hominem attacks that essentially delink Mao from the historical significance of the Chinese Revolution. Most essays in part 2 argue for moving beyond that. Questioning the essentializing of Mao in an “Orientalist fashion” in many existing views of Mao as “emperor,” Geremie Barmé, in chapter 10, argues that “by laying too much emphasis on the weight of tradition and presumed cultural inertia, the revolutionary character of much that Mao and his cohort pursued is too easily overlooked and discounted” (247). Echoing this sentiment, chapter 13 offers a concise but fairly comprehensive look at the ways in which Mao and Maoism have been received in the West. Framing the different tellings of the Mao stories within the ideological clash between Western liberal tradition (represented by Woodrow Wilson) and proletarian revolution (represented by Lenin), Charles Hayford is able to highlight the changes and contradictions within the West in response to Mao and the Chinese Revolution. Chapter 12 expands the relationship between Mao and revolution into the “Third World” by focusing on the “three Maoist worlds”—Khmer Rouge, Shining Path and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)—and exploring why the first two have failed while the third appears not to have. “Maoism,” according to Alexander Cook, is interpreted differently when it is transmitted to different social and historical contexts. In the last chapter, two authors, Jiang Yihua and Roderick MacFarquhar writing separately, return to the relationship between Mao and the Chinese Revolution and both argue that without Mao and the Chinese Revolution, China would not have developed into a modern nation-state, which would eventually develop into an economic “miracle.” They differ slightly in that MacFarquhar insists that Mao failed in his ideology of continuous revolution without which “the Chinese miracle might have begun 30 years earlier” (352). Scholars, of course, will continue to debate on the validity of this argument as they continue to make sense of Mao’s legacy in relation to the historical importance and significance of the Chinese Revolution.
To understand Mao within the larger context of the Chinese Revolution, readers of this book can be further helped by reading recent publications on Mao and the Chinese Revolution including Was Mao a Monster?, Rethinking Mao, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, and The End of Revolution.
Xueping Zhong
Tufts University, Medford, USA
p. 747