Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xiv, 413 pp. (B&W photos., figures, tables.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-05815-6.
Was China’s socialist revolution derivative or distinctive? Was the Mao Zedong-led Chinese Communist Party disciplined or destructive? With China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed, sociologist Andrew G. Walder provides answers to these questions through an in-depth examination of modern Chinese history, starting with the era of military conflict between Mao’s Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, and ending with Mao’s death in Beijing on September 9, 1976.
The book is one of the first in English to make use of sources drawn from the Chinese Communist Party’s own organizational histories, while at the same time synthesizing nearly seven decades of scholarship on socialism in China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. In terms of wider impact, one of the lasting contributions made by China Under Mao is likely to be its portrayal of Mao Zedong as a limited and unoriginal ideologue whose Soviet-derived policies resulted in decades of internal strife and disaster for approximately one-fifth of the world’s population.
Walder’s core premise is that China’s post-1949 state was based on two institutional features to which Communist Party leaders had already committed prior to 1949: the first, a centralized and disciplined party apparatus, and the second, a Soviet Union-derived socialist economy. The context in which this governing style developed was not guerilla war, as has often been assumed, but rather the massive Chinese Civil War of 1945–1949. From this insight he develops three arguments which represent the book’s main themes. The first concerns Mao. According to Walder, Mao’s decision making was primarily influenced by dogmatic adherence to the political and economic tenets of early Stalinism, unswerving faith in the ultimate efficacy of mass mobilization and military power, and impatience with post-1930s models of socialist economic development. The book’s second argument is that the “new civilization” created by Communist Party leaders after 1949 was supported by “two pillars: a bureaucratically administered economy that utterly rejected market mechanisms, and a disciplined and unitary party organization that extended its reach deep into society and economy” (81). Thus, up until roughly 1956, the PRC was managed almost wholly according to the Soviet model. Finally, Walder argues that the transition from revolutionary (pre-1949) to bureaucratic (post-1949) socialism, while providing some gains in aggregate living standards and GDP, was a demographic and political catastrophe. The PRC’s population soared, and Mao’s frustrations with the downsides of Soviet-style planning—in particular its proneness to economic stagnation and creation of a large class of managerial experts lacking in revolutionary experience and zeal—resulted in the twin tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
China Under Mao is organized as a narrative; however, each chapter also contributes thematically to the larger analytic whole. In the book’s first chapter, “Funeral,” Walder unambiguously places Mao at the centre of the story that unfolds. Like many recent studies of Chinese elite politics, most notably Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’ monumental study Mao’s Last Revolution(Harvard University Press, 2006), China Under Mao refutes the notion that other leading Communist Party figures such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping ever mounted significant challenges to Mao’s policies. “From Movement to Regime” (chapter 2) builds Walder’s case that the context in which Maoism evolved was one of total war involving the massive mobilization of large swaths of China’s populace against the forces of Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek and his armies. “Rural Revolution” (chapter 3) and “Urban Revolution” (chapter 4) highlight the role of armed force and organizational control as key elements in both pre- and post-1949 Communist Party state making. “The Socialist Economy” (chapter 5) and “The Evolving Party System” (chapter 6) highlight the tremendous presence of Soviet influence in the design and construction of China’s political economy. By the end of the 1950s the “new state” (121) was basically complete; however, largely staffed by bureaucrats and other non-revolutionary experts it proved to be anathema to Mao’s earlier Stalinist vision of revolution as a process of perpetual “class struggle” between forces both internal and external to the party-state (26).
The book’s subsequent chapters thus tell a story more familiar to scholars of the People’s Republic of China: that of how Mao Zedong, disenchanted with what he perceived to be the failings of socialism in its post-revolutionary form, sought to reinvigorate China’s slowing economy and disaffected populace through frequent recourse to social purges, economic mobilization campaigns, and calls for revolution. This story is clearly described in chapters “Thaw and Backlash,” “Great Leap,” “Toward the Cultural Revolution,” and “Fractured Rebellion,” each of which is based on a remarkable summation of previous research—including Walder’s own—on the elite politics and social consequences surrounding Mao’s policies during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating with the spasms of Red Guard and “rebel” violence that followed the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 (200). “Collapse and Division” (chapter 11) follows in painstaking detail the organization, campaigns, and factional politics which comprised the Maoist leadership’s response to this initial outpouring of violent insurrection. “Military Rule” (chapter 12) makes the revelatory case that more than half of the deaths caused by the Cultural Revolution occurred amidst military-administered demobilization and campaigns such as the Cleansing of the Class Ranks, which alone killed a staggering 600,000 to 800,000 people in all (277).
The death of Mao’s chosen successor, Lin Biao, in September 1971 following an alleged coup attempt, marked a new period of political division for China, and resulted in a new outpouring of citizen frustration with China’s radical leaders. “Discord and Dissent” (chapter 13) sheds new light on relatively little-known episodes in China’s political history, such as the posthumous campaign against Lin, and quotes at length several scathing denunciations of China’s leadership (291–300) which circulated widely and, as Walder provocatively argues, became the ideological backbone of China’s post-Mao democracy movements in 1978 and 1979 (301). The Cultural Revolution not only created a fractured rebellion but, ultimately, engendered a fractured elite and society as well. China Under Mao’s final chapter, “The Mao Era in Retrospect,” demonstrates that these costs extended well beyond the destructive erosion of relations between citizens, civil elites, and the military; as Walder points out, other fruits of Mao’s Stalinist vision included unstable economic growth, barely manageable demographic expansion, a wasteful and inefficient industrial sector, and stagnation in living standards. To the extent that Maoism represented a coherent political system, this system was characterized by impatience, violence, reliance on bureaucracy, and Mao’s idiosyncratic, if not “extremely odd” 340 readings of the Soviet model and its limitations. Rather than lauding Mao as a creative revolutionary, Walder provides another epitaph: brilliant tactician, narrow thinker, and inhumane dictator.
Matthew D. Johnson
Grinnell College, Grinnell, USA
pp. 645-647