Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China

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Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China

Commentaries on Mao’s Last Revolution and aReply by the Authors

One of the most important and tragic events in the latter half of the twentiethcentury—an event that both inºuenced and was inºuenced by the ColdWar—was the Greater Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, inspired byMao Zedong. The Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966 and continuing un-til Mao’s death in 1976, reached its height from October 1966 through theªrst few months of 1969, at the very time that a Sino-Soviet military confron-tation was brewing. The Cultural Revolution was aimed at destroying muchof the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an entity that Mao had periodicallyscaled back through ruthless purges, and was also targeted against anyone sus-pected of being an “intellectual.” In 1967 the so-called Cultural RevolutionAuthority (headed by Mao, Jiang Qing, and Lin Biao) set up a RevolutionaryCommittee in Shanghai, which launched a chaotic wave of terror acrossChina. High-ranking ofªcials were subjected to public denunciations, ritualhumiliation, and severe physical abuse, and the same practices were replicatedat all levels of Chinese society, with a good deal of local initiative. An im-mense number of people were tortured and killed.

Despite the closed nature of Chinese society, horriªc accounts of crueltyand violence made their way out of China, and ofªcial broadcasts of publicdenunciations were widely available. Hence, the broad contours of the may-hem and bloodshed that engulfed China during those years have long beenknown. What has not been known until recently, however, is the precise na-ture of Mao’s objectives, the balance between supervision from above and ini-tiative from below, the interaction between central and local authorities, andthe radicalizing impact of events in localities on the highest leaders, especiallyMao. The proliferation of memoirs by those who lived through the CulturalRevolution (whether as victims, perpetrators, or observers) and the ofªcialpublication of formerly secret CCP and government documents have enabledscholars in both China and the West to ªll in at least some of the many gapsin the historical record.

Journal of Cold War StudiesVol. 10, No. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 97–130© 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology

The most comprehensive and authoritative account of the Cultural Revo-lution yet to appear, Mao’s Last Revolution, was recently published by TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press. The two authors of the book,Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, are among the world’s fore-most experts on Chinese politics under Mao. Their book is so meticulous anddraws on such a wealth of sources that it is likely to remain the deªnitive workfor many years to come. Although Mao’s Last Revolution focuses primarily oninternal events and deals only brieºy with foreign policy issues, an outpouringof recent scholarship by specialists on Chinese foreign relations has shownthat events within China and Mao’s domestic political goals had a crucial im-pact on China’s external policies. Similarly, external developments could inturn be exploited by Mao and others for their domestic purposes. Thus, Mao’sLast Revolution will be essential reading for those who want to study and un-derstand China’s role in the Cold War during these years.

Because of the importance of the book, the Journal of Cold WarStudies solicited commentaries on it from ªve distinguished scholars: LynnWhite, Steven I. Levine, Yafeng Xia, Joseph W. Esherick, and David E. Apter.Their commentaries are published here, along with a reply by RoderickMacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals.

—Mark Kramer

Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge,MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. xiii � 693 pp. $35.00.

Commentary by Lynn White, Princeton University

This book is at once a major academic contribution and a page-turner/thriller. It shows Mao Zedong in his old age as the master manipulator of Chi-nese politics. The personalities of the story—Mao, Jiang Qing, Liu Shaoqi,Peng Zhen, Zhou Enlai, and others—are shown here more vividly and withbetter documentation than in any other publication on the Cultural Revolu-tion (CR). The previous record in that respect was set by MacFarquhar in his3-volume Origins of the Cultural Revolution, of which this book is in effect thefourth volume.1

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1. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 1: Contradictions among the Peo-ple, 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins ofthe Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1983); and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 3: The Coming ofthe Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

Mao is shown here to be a nearly perfect Machiavellian prince, hiding hisintentions from those he chooses as enemies and lying to them until he canspring traps on them. Clearly he enjoyed such ªghts. Any semblance of moralprinciple in the effects of his actions was purely incidental. The book quotes acharacterization of Mao’s police operative, Kang Sheng, as “a man with a heartof stone, who did not know how to cry.” The same could be said of Mao.

The information base on which the authors drew for this book is spectac-ular. Contemporary reports from foreigners in China (Britons, Swedes, Amer-icans, and others) are combined with a mass of Chinese documentation aswell as interviews to provide an unprecedented scaffold of facts. The endnotesalone take 126 pages, and many refer to Chinese sources that have never beenpreviously cited in any language.

When Mao plotted against leaders as bright as Liu Shaoqi or DengXiaoping, why were they so slow to “get it”? MacFarquhar and Schoenhals ac-knowledge that the reason is “not that Mao had a strategy. Indeed, to have hada strategy for the mass movement and its ‘general offensive’ would have con-tradicted the basic premise . . . [that] the masses had to liberate themselves”(p. 161). Yet Mao’s concern for “masses,” excepting young women, was highlyabstract. Ordinary citizens were separated from what went on behind thevermillion walls of the Zhongnanhai section of the imperial palace, whereCommunist Party leaders lived, plotted, and often imagined or waged vendet-tas against each other.

It is unclear that Mao had as much foresight as the analysis here some-times suggests. As the book says, the Chairman always played his cards closeto his chest. For example, his text in the May 1966 “Notiªcation” mentioned“representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party. . . . Someof them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are stilltrusted by us . . . persons like [Nikita] Khrushchev, for example, who are stillnestling beside us” (p. 47). Because Zhang Chunqiao a year later admittedthat he “did not fully anticipate that Liu Shaoqi” would be one of these “rep-resentatives of the bourgeoisie,” perhaps Mao had just been trawling fornames. Whatever the case may be, the book makes clearer than any other howmuch Mao enjoyed catching people.

Mao’s Last Revolution neither claims nor needs to claim to be deªnitiveabout the CR. But the book will, for a long time to come, be the best oneavailable about the topic that its title speciªes. Very little happens in the bookoutside the Chairman’s broad purview.

This trenchant court drama is somewhat difªcult to present alongside so-ciological explanations of the reasons that struggles for political power becameso violent all over China, even in localities in which neither Mao nor his main

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enemies or allies knew anyone well. The story of the book is vivid because itsBeijing men and their wives are so crisply depicted, but nothing essential in itsuggests why the rest of China was so markedly similar. The authors admit inpassing (p. 54) that “the process by which Mao translated high-level politicalintrigue into mass mobilization remains one of the many obscure issues of theCultural Revolution.” Maybe so, but this issue is important. Without it, thetopic is just Mao’s last skullduggeries.

The clearest example of a central action that made China’s political potboil over was Lin Biao’s order to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA): “Don’tstrike back if hit; don’t talk back if abused” (p. 62), which was joined withsimilar orders to the police. These injunctions allowed resentment to fester inpublic, spurring many big-character posters. Yet the book says little about thereasons for such widespread anger at local Communist Party bosses. The formof analysis that has never been better pursued than in this book tells moreabout the CR’s timing than about its causes. Admittedly, fuel without a sparkmakes no ªre.

Red Guards and news traveling from Beijing brought the CR gospel toother places, but why was it so avidly received? Enthusiasts, especially fromsecondary schools, mimicked the violence and then used it zealously. Moresociological analysis is required to explain why the Red Guards inspired somany Chinese, scattered so widely, to behave so unusually. The “up to themountains, down to the villages” campaign of 1968 is treated as just an exten-sion of smaller xiafang campaigns in the early 1960s, without sufªcient atten-tion to the social backgrounds of youths who were “sent down” at these timesor their reactions to the experience (p. 252).

The book’s lengthy bibliography mentions articles that probe into theseissues, as well as books by authors such as Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, andJonathan Unger—but not their joint seminal article on the social origins ofstudent Red Guards in Canton2 nor books by researchers such as MarcBlecher and Gordon White about functional units (not to mentionpsychologizers such as Richard Solomon or Robert Lifton). The CR is a capa-cious problem. Despite material in the book from non-Beijing locations thatnational leaders visited, this study evinces a strong concentration on a fewleaders in the capital, almost as if China were a small country.

Where local units such as schools or factories are discussed in the book,they are mostly in Beijing. The authors write on p. 157 that “Mao’s ideal gov-ernment was a small one.” They usually seem to follow the Chinese habit ofseeing provincial power as unimportant (which it is not). Ambiguities none-

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2. Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger, “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots ofthe Red Guard Conºict in Canton,” China Quarterly, No. 83 (Autumn 1980), pp. 397–446.

theless arise, for example in the case of Tao Zhu, whose demise Mao viewedwith insouciance: “By bringing Tao to the center,” the authors write, “Maoseparated a dynamic leader with high-level connections in the capital from hispower base” (p. 190), especially in Guangdong. An exception to the book’sBeijing-centrism is its coverage of early 1968, when politics became conspicu-ously turbulent in China’s large military regions.

Mao’s Last Revolution depends on judgments about actors’ motives thatare hard to document fully, even though MacFarquhar and Schoenhals do amuch better job in this regard than anyone else has. Was Mao’s aim, in recall-ing Deng Xiaoping, in 1973 really “to restrain Zhou Enlai” (p. 358)? Perhaps,but the book gives more evidence that Zhou, who by then was suffering fromserious bouts of angina and cancer, was totally faithful to Mao.

Another question of motive has been debated by various scholars: Howambitious was Lin Biao? The assessment in Mao’s Last Revolution is somewhatdifferent from that in a previous analysis by MacFarquhar, as the current booksensibly concedes (p. 335, n. 53). When a prince is as Machiavellian as Maowas, the courtiers become equally scheming.

Was Zhou an exception to this rule? Lin’s demise gave more leeway toZhou, who is depicted here as having been devoid of any moral principles thatMao’s least intimation did not trump. Zhou apparently acted to preserve gov-ernmental order (not justice) only when Mao also wanted it. Zhou could beas unsympathetic as his boss toward old comrades, unless Mao also wantedthem saved. The discussion on p. 103 is among many passages showing thatMao “had no scruples about the taking of human life.” The level of detail thatMacFarquhar and Schoenhals have unearthed about tense personal relationsamong the dozen or so most powerful leaders of the CR era is unprecedented.Textual and photographic evidence in the book highlights the extent to whichMao and his henchmen arranged the physical torture of their previous com-rades, only some of whom succeeded in committing suicide. Schoenhals’spathbreaking research on the Central Case Examination Group, chaired byZhou, is reinforced by new information in this book to revise Zhou’s generalimage from mainly moderate to mainly lapdog.

Torture regularly elicited false confessions. Whole movements, such asthe “May 16 Conspiracy,” were conjured from such fantasies. Mao’s Last Revo-lution offers the best analysis anywhere of the political degradation wroughtby the CR.

Sex, and resentment stirred by sex, ªgure surprisingly often in this ac-count. Wang Dongxing (Mao’s bodyguard and bouncer and the closest equiv-alent to an imperial eunuch that a people’s republic could muster) chose aharem of attractive and politically reliable young women for the Chairman’sservice. Lin Biao’s wife, Ye Qun, is repeatedly described as having been “a

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woman of easy virtue” in Yan’an days, and her resentment of this reputationapparently fueled her important role in the early ouster of Mao’s chief of staff,Luo Ruiqing, thus letting Mao more freely use the PLA to crush those withinthe Communist Party whom he deemed disloyal. Many wives (Lin’s, Liu’s,Deng’s, and of course Mao’s) ªgure more notably in this account of the CRthan in any other.

Speeches and notiªcations, often edited by Mao, were always importanteven when vague. The dominant power of words, especially directives “emit-ted from the Center” (Zhongfa), is an analytic premise here. To say that thispremise can be documented is a truism; documents are words. The samepremise underlies most discourse within China about political causation, butit perhaps excessively downplays factors that are less subject to control by in-tellectuals, such as unintended material situations (e.g., China’s size, or anyother factor not subject to change as quick as thought). Mao’s Last Revolutionis nicely dedicated to “all Chinese whose works and words have enlightenedus, and to future generations of Chinese historians.” There is nothingdeªnitive in this ªeld, and the authors are sensible to admit that. But thisbook is as close to deªnitive as we will have for a long time.

The book will be translated and disseminated in China (no doubt on arestricted basis at ªrst). It will be readily appreciated there, and among schol-ars of China everywhere.

Chinese like to read about clever stratagems, and here Mao is much likeCao Cao. But there is also a Chinese saying, “Lao budu Sanguo” (“Eldersshouldn’t read the Three Kingdoms”) because interest in traps and deceit maywell subvert respect and kindness for elders. Mao at the last was puerile. Hiscompatriots should read this book and see his impulse to betrayal.

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Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. xiii � 693 pp. $35.00.

Commentary by Steven I. Levine, University of Montana

If the Cultural Revolution were a video game, it might seem so detached fromreality that even fantasy addicts would be hard-pressed to take it seriously.Unfortunately, the joystick that Mao Zedong manipulated was the leverof power in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the results of theCultural Revolution, his all-too-real fantasy game, were chaos, destruction,violent death, and cruelty on a scale fathomable only in the context of Chi-nese history. This epic chronicle of the Cultural Revolution by Roderick

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MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, based primarily on a multitude ofChinese published and unpublished sources and interviews, provides an unri-valed historical narrative of a decade-long tragedy that was in some measurethe “watershed in the history of the People’s Republic of China” (p. 459). Assuch, the book is a ªtting sequel to MacFarquhar’s magisterial three-volumeThe Origins of the Cultural Revolution as well as to Schoenhals’s numerous andvaluable earlier contributions to the subject. The authors are well-matchedwith respect to experience, angles of vision, and scholarly specialization, andthe result is a book that combines the minute dissection of elite-level politicalmaneuvering with a vivid sense of the terrible effects of the Cultural Revolu-tion on ordinary Chinese who became the targets and the victims of Mao’squixotic attempt to save “his” revolution from the supposedly baneful effectsof Soviet-style revisionism.

Like any good book, this one raises as many questions as it answers. Itscontribution lies in its rich detail and the skill with which the authors unravelthe tangled skein of Mao’s complex maneuvering and plot the cross-cuttingactions of a large cast of mostly unsavory characters in the upper reaches ofthe CCP as well as in the Red Guard and other mass organizations spawnedby the Cultural Revolution. Yet, the grand narrative does little to change ouroverall understanding of the contours of the “last revolution” and offers littlein the way of interpretation except at the micro level.

At the heart of the book is Mao Zedong himself. With the exception ofLee Feigon’s contrarian and unpersuasive attempt to redeem Mao’s reputationand Philip Short’s surprisingly uncritical biography that focuses on Mao’spath to the Forbidden City rather than how he exercised power, the GreatHelmsman’s stock has not fared well recently.3 The present book can onlyfurther depreciate the value of that stock. The authors amply demonstrate thearbitrary, cynical, and wholly self-serving manner in which Mao exercised hispower. If the traditional legitimacy of Chinese emperors came from theMandate of Heaven (tian ming), one might conclude on the basis of Mao’stwenty-seven years in power that his was the Mandate of Hell (diyu ming).

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals appear to take at face value Mao’s self-proclaimed motive for launching the Cultural Revolution, namely, to eradi-cate “revisionism” and restore the revolutionary purity that supposedly hadbeen lost during seventeen years of bureaucratic socialism. They argue that“the Cultural Revolution had always been about the rearing of revolutionarysuccessors” (p. 356) and cite Mao’s initial patronage of radical extremists likeNie Yuanzi and Kuai Dafu and Mao’s reliance on mediocrities like Wang

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3. Lee Feigon, Mao: A Reinterpretation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); and Philip Short, Mao: A Life(New York: Henry Holt, 2000).

Hongwen and Hua Guofeng as examples of his persistent concern to nurturerevolutionary successors. The authors do not probe beneath the surfaceof what Mao understood by “revisionism” and assume that his antipathy toSoviet-style socialism is self-explanatory. They depict Mao as a victim of hisown self-delusion until 27 July 1968, when Tsinghua University studentsªred on a work team Mao had ordered onto campus to put an end to factionalwarfare. “For Mao,” MacFarquhar and Schoenhals write, this event marked“the end of an illusion that if ‘revisionist’ party leaders could be swept asideand [Mao] could speak directly to the people, they would unfailingly followhim. The hearts and minds of his revolutionary successors . . . were not auto-matically synchronized with his own as he had hoped” (p. 250). Such a for-mulation tacitly accepts the notion that Mao in essence was an authentic pop-ulist whose attempt to liberate the revolutionary fervor and creativity of “themasses” had gone awry rather than seeing him as an utterly ruthless mastermanipulator of his comrades, his ministers, his generals, his intimates, and theChinese people in the interest of maximizing his own untrammeled power.After all, what did Mao do with his power? Did he create a just, prosperous,and powerful state that beneªted “the masses” in whose name the revolutionhad been fought? Hardly. Over the course of decades, the early idealism of theyouth from Shaoshan had transmogriªed into the insatiable power lust of aleader for whom revolution was an abstraction that had meaning only forhimself, not for the lives of the hundreds of millions of Chinese for whom hecared not a ªg. As Robert J. Lifton suggested in 1968, the aging Mao was con-cerned about “revolutionary immortality,” but the deaths of millions of realpeople meant nothing to him compared to the abstract death of his abstractidea of revolution. Mao inverted reality, preferring symbols to real life be-cause, apart from the squalid details of his personal life, revealed by one of hisdoctors, Li Zhisui,4 he dwelt in a symbolic universe in which people could bemoved about like pieces on a board game.

What really bothered Mao was not the rise of what Milovan Djilastermed a “new class” (of which Mao himself, of course, was the chief exem-plar), a class consisting mostly of privileged Communist bureaucrats in theform of the nomenklatura, but the emergence of real or imagined threats to hisown untrammeled authority from whatever point on the political compasssuch threats might come. Mao constantly pitted individual leaders and fac-tions against one another and manipulated his comrades with the dexterity ofa Chinese puppet master. He elevated Lin Biao and the People’s LiberationArmy (PLA) to the top of the heap, only to dash them to the ground soon af-

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4. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. by TaiHung-Chao (New York: Random House, 1994).

ter. (The treatment in Mao’s Last Revolution of the Lin Biao affair is rathersketchy, inconclusive, and less satisfactory than the masterful analysis of nu-merous other episodes.) After the Lin Biao affair, Mao recalled DengXiaoping in 1973 to avoid “a backlash among PLA generals” (p. 358) and re-strain Zhou Enlai. But did Zhou really pose a threat to Mao? That hardlyseems credible unless Mao completely misread the man whom Li Zhisui re-ferred to accurately as “Mao’s slave.”

Zhou’s reputation, at least in most Western historiography, is still as over-valued as Enron stock before its collapse. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals castZhou in his accustomed role of Mr. Moderate, who struggled to hold theparty, the state apparatus, and the military together amid mounting chaos,and who did what he could to blunt the worst of Mao’s excesses. But the re-cord shows that Zhou’s actual accomplishments amounted to very little.Moreover, during the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, he was busy man-aging the opening to the United States while dying of cancer. Instead ofunderstanding Zhou as a lone voice of sanity in the lunatic asylum of Chinaduring the Cultural Revolution, we should, in the language of addiction, viewhim as an enabler or facilitator who made it possible for Mao to act out hismurderous fantasies in the certainty that Zhou could be counted on to keepthings from falling totally apart. Even so, Mao distrusted Zhou and sought tohold him in check. When a man cannot trust his dog, the depth of his para-noia is self-evident. Zhou had been slavishly loyal to Mao, following everytwist and turn in the Chairman’s labyrinth, a one-man act holding China to-gether. Rather than being like a boy with his ªnger in the dike, he was morelike a hundred-armed Buddha.

The Cultural Revolution undoubtedly went deeply against the grain ofan urbane and cultured Communist aristocrat like Zhou, yet throughoutthis time he showed himself to be a supreme opportunist, perhaps the mostpathetic of the coterie of sycophants who clung to Mao like remoras on ashark. Among the handful of top leaders, Zhou alone, the indispensable manwith a reputation and authority second only to Mao’s, might conceivably havebeen able to dissuade Mao from his folly or at least might have been able tomobilize the party old guard and the marshals to strangle the Cultural Revo-lution in its cradle. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals only lightly touch on thispossibility.

The coup d’état that saw the arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October1976, nine months after Zhou’s death and four weeks after Mao’s, might havebeen attempted ten years earlier had Zhou been a man of sterner stuff. In thatcase, Mao and Jiang Qing might have suffered the fate of the Guangxu Em-peror at the hands of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi following the aborted 1898reforms and become prisoners of the palace or even of the dread Qincheng

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Prison. Certainly, China would have been better off if a real military coup hadbeen carried out in 1966 by the old marshals. Such a venture would have hadto proceed without the support of Lin Biao, a consummate toady doublytwisted by illness and ambition. Instead, Zhou viciously attacked men whohad been his closest associates including Ye Jianying, Chen Yi, and Zhu De.One wonders what Mao really thought of this man on whom he depended soheavily, a man who serviced the state with the suppleness and lubricity of thewomen who serviced Mao’s bed. If Zhou was not Mao’s slave, he was in effecthis court eunuch.

In the end, of course, it was Deng Xiaoping who turned out to be Mao’sposthumous nemesis, much as the Cultural Revolution radicals had indeedpredicted. The Great Helmsman, who knew only how to steer onto the rocks,spared Deng the fate of Liu Shaoqi, who died an excruciating death unat-tended in Kaifeng. Mao needed Deng to hold things together while Zhou laydying. Like Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, Deng, too, was the survivorof a wreck. Unlike Ishmael, who merely lived to tell the tale, Deng rewrote thescript of Chinese history just enough to liberate the Chinese people from thetyranny of Mao’s utopian Leninism but not enough to allow them to choosefreely their path to the future. Unhappily, the authors’ verdict that the Cul-tural Revolution was “truly the last stand of Chinese conservatism,” a ªnal ef-fort “to perpetuate a distinctly Chinese essence in the modern world,” seemspremature at best, although we may all be fairly certain that there will neverbe another Mao.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals argue that the Cultural Revolution was awatershed in the history of the PRC, but was it also an aberration? I thinknot. The Cultural Revolution was the distilled essence of the politics of theMaoist era. Moreover, it lasted a full decade, more than one-third of the pe-riod of Mao’s rule. None of its features were new. Vicious intra-party purgesof both high- and low-ranking cadres accompanied by intense psychologicalpressure and torture were part of the standard operating procedure of Maoand the CCP from at least the late 1920s. The same was true of the mobiliza-tion of the masses or, perhaps more accurately, the unleashing of the dregsof Chinese society in an atmosphere that not merely permitted but rewardedviolence, cruelty, and attacks on culture that exceeded any of the crimes of theTaliban in Afghanistan.

One wonders whether a more dysfunctional political system than that ofChina under the Great Helmsman has ever existed. The CCP Politburoand the Politburo Standing Committee increasingly came to resemble an in-stitution for aged criminals or the criminally insane. The authors’ struggle todelineate the logic of Mao’s contradictory behavior—for example, his simulta-neous support of rival factions—founders on the supposition that rationality

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underlay his actions. Why did Mao’s colleagues, not just the timorous ZhouEnlai, succumb so easily to his will? MacFarquhar and Schoenhals refer to“the fear and pusillanimity that gripped Mao’s colleagues, transªxed like rab-bits in front of a cobra” (p. 458). But this misses the point. These men andwomen were not merely pusillanimous. They were also complicitous in hiscrimes. These were not rabbits, but sharks in a feeding frenzy, feeding on theirwounded and bleeding comrades. One looks in vain for a hero in this story.Among the top leaders, only Peng Zhen, a member of the Politburo StandingCommittee and mayor of Beijing, who was an early victim of the CulturalRevolution, acted honorably and sought to protect his subordinates. Thesewere not Greek heroes, good men and women with a single tragic ºaw; theyare empowered gangsters, villains one and all, who mouth revolutionary slo-gans and feign devotion to the ideals of socialism. Meanwhile, in the lowerdepths, the Red Guards and other lumpen elements engaged in what was apoliticized and at least partly condoned form of gang warfare not unlike thatbetween the Bloods and the Crips on the streets of Los Angeles with the stakesnot dissimilar as well; namely, turf, prestige, and the power of life and death.

Contemporary Chinese who accuse Japan of historical amnesia and offailing to confront the historical sins of their grandfathers should look in themirror and ponder the horrors that their own parents and grandparentsinºicted on each other in the name of their blind loyalty to the Great Teacherand Great Helmsman. The terrible truth is that no foreign invader hasinºicted greater damage on the Chinese people and Chinese culture than theChinese have inºicted on themselves over the past 150 years. It is not some-thing to take pride in. China would beneªt from the appointment of a SpecialHistorian Prosecutor who would not merely chronicle but also judge the lead-ers responsible for the Cultural Revolution. Of course, this is really a task for afuture democratic China as a whole.

One hopes that someday Mao’s corpse, or whatever it is that lies on dis-play in his mausoleum, will be removed from its position on the central axisof power in Beijing and reinterred in his native village of Shaoshan, wheregrandparents may frighten children into obedience with stories of his mon-strosity. Then this ugly architectural monument to the megalomania, cruelty,vanity, addiction to violence, and destructiveness of an arbitrary and capri-cious leader whom too many Chinese and others mistook for a philosopherking might be transformed into a museum commemorating the countless vic-tims of his unhappy reign.

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Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. xiii � 693 pages. $35.00.

Commentary by Yafeng Xia, Long Island University, Brooklyn

Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, the two leading experts inthe West on China’s Cultural Revolution (CR) from 1966 to 1976, have donea great service in providing a masterly historical survey of the CR.MacFarquhar, a Harvard historian and former member of the British Parlia-ment, and Schoenhals, a Swedish expert on China, offer a full-length narra-tive of the Cultural Revolution from its eve to the arrest of the Gang of Four(including Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, and her close radical Shanghai al-lies Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan) in October 1976,a month after Mao’s death, marking the ofªcial end-date of the CR. Mao’s LastRevolution is the ªrst grand synthesis of the history of the CR.

Academic study of the CR in China itself started in 1986 when Gao Gaoand Yan Jiaqi, who went into foreign exile from China after 1989, published“Wenhua dageming” shinian shi, 1966–1976 (A History of the Ten-Year“Great Cultural Revolution,” 1966–1976). Relying mainly on ofªcial Chi-nese sources, Gao and Yan argued that the CR was “the brainchild and crea-ture of the Gang of Four and the Lin Biao clique.” In 1988, another majorwork appeared, Da dongluande niandai (A Decade of Great Upheaval), byWang Nianyi. Nonetheless, the study of the CR remained a sensitive topic inChina, and all publications dealing with it were strictly censored. In 1996,with the approval of the Central Committee apparatus of the Chinese Com-munist Party (CCP), Xi Xuan and Jin Chunming published “Wenhua dage-ming” jianshi (A Short History of the “Great Cultural Revolution”), a generalyet important study of the CR. But a truly comprehensive and full-lengthnarrative of the CR has yet to be published in Chinese.

In English, the literature on the Cultural Revolution is immense. One ofthe best previous publications on this topic is Barbara Barnouin and YuChanggen, Ten Years of Turbulence: The Chinese Cultural Revolution (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993). In an earlier trilogy, titled The Ori-gins of the Cultural Revolution (and published serially in 1974, 1983, and1997 by Columbia University Press), MacFarquhar thoroughly explored Chi-nese high politics from 1956, when Mao started to cast doubt on the revolu-tionary potential of the Soviet model, to the eve of the CR in 1966 when theChinese leader was busy removing “revisionists” from positions of power.

Drawing on a large array of Chinese sources that have become availablesince the early 1980s, including ofªcial collections, selected writings of lead-ers, documentary anthologies, personal memoirs, chronologies, and biogra-

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phies, plus many previously untapped documents such as handwritten diaries,privately published memoirs, Red Guard handbills, intra-party investigationreports, handwritten confessions, personal notes of meetings and speeches,and original mimeographs of party documents, this new book is likely to stan-d as close as we can get to a deªnitive narrative of the CR.

The ªrst two-thirds of the book (chs. 2–17) recount the events from1965 to 1969, the heyday of the CR. The 1965 campaign against the dramaHai Rui Dismissed from Ofªce, written by Wu Han, a renowned historian andvice mayor of Beijing, sparked the outbreak of the revolution. When Maostarted his assault on the bureaucracy he had set up since 1949, his real targetwas Peng Zhen, a CCP Central Committee Politburo member and mayor ofBeijing. In May 1966, not only Peng Zhen but also the chief of staff of thePeople’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Ruiqing; the head of the CCP CentralPropaganda Department, Lu Dingyi; and the head of the CCP General De-partment, Yang Shangkun became the ªrst high-ranking victims of the CR.The purge of the “Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang” clique inaugurated the ofªcial launch-ing of the CR (p. 39). The ouster and persecution of countless minor ofªcialsfollowed. “Suicides became increasingly common” for those “who refused toaccept such fates” (p. 43). Mao had won his ªrst major campaign.

In phase two, Mao’s real target was the head of state, Liu Shaoqi, who wasMao’s heir apparent. But even members of Mao’s inner circle were unaware ofhis true intention in May 1966 when he denounced “persons like Khrush-chev, for example, who are still nestling beside us” (p. 47). Mao was deter-mined to create “great disorder under heaven” so that he could eventuallyachieve “great order under heaven.” He “would manipulate a mass movementat China’s educational institutions to unseat the head of state” (p. 52). WithMao’s ofªcial endorsement of China’s ªrst Marxist-Leninist Big-Characterposter in early June 1966, chaos ensued throughout the PRC. The RedGuards beat their teachers and superiors and smashed “the four olds” (oldideas, old cultures, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes), andworker “rebels” seized power in factories. Mao had to mobilize the PLA tosuppress factional ªghting. With the paralysis of the party apparatus and gov-ernment bureaucracies, army-dominated “revolutionary committees” tookover the running of the country.

By July 1968 the glory days of the Red Guards were over. In the next fewyears, millions of Red Guards and urban youth were sent to the countryside(p. 251). At a CCP Central Committee plenum in October 1968, Liu Shaoqiwas formally labeled a “traitor, renegade, and scab,” expelled from the CCP,and dismissed from all his other posts (p. 277). This phase culminated withthe Ninth Party Congress in April 1969, when Lin Biao was designated Mao’s“best student, comrade-in-arms, and chosen successor” (p. 291). Although

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Mao had intended the Ninth Party Congress to be “the watershed, betweenold and new, bad and good, pollution and purity, revisionism and revolu-tion,” it did not work out that way. The Congress proved to be “a transitionalrather than a terminating event in histories of the Cultural Revolution”(p. 285).

The second part of the book (chs. 18–25) covers events from the end ofthe Ninth Party Congress to the ofªcial end of the CR. The focus of narrationis more on high politics than events in society. Mao became even more para-noid during this period, and in August 1970, at the Second Plenum of theNinth Party Congress, he turned against Lin Biao and his followers over theissue of who should succeed Liu Shaoqi as the President of the PRC. Lin, hiswife, and his son soon died in a mysterious plane crash while ºeeing to theSoviet Union (p. 335). At this point, Mao apparently regarded his own wife,Jiang Qing, and her Shanghai henchmen as his true ideological heirs. But heknew that his radical supporters were not experienced in running the country.In the wake of the Lin Biao incident, Mao chose to rehabilitate DengXiaoping and other “capitalist roaders” whom he had previously discardedduring the CR (p. 339). In foreign policy, Mao also reversed his longstandinganti-American orientation and achieved a rapprochement with the UnitedStates in 1972.5

Mao was tormented between maintaining his image as a world revolu-tionary leader and forming a tacit alliance with the United States, the “No. 1imperialist power,” to offset the perceived threat from the Soviet Union. Onthe one hand, Mao supported Zhou Enlai’s effort to improve relations withthe United States. On the other, he was ready to drop Zhou and make him ascapegoat. This explains why Mao instigated the torture of Zhou at a Novem-ber 1973 meeting of the CCP Politburo and in the 1974 “Criticize Lin, Criti-cize Confucius” campaign (in which Confucius served as a proxy for Zhou).

Mao’s succession plan failed after his death. The radical leaders were tooarrogant to tolerate the old guard, and Deng Xiaoping was unwilling to com-promise and form an alliance with the Gang of Four. In April 1976, barelyªve months before the end of his life, Mao removed Deng once again and al-lowed the Gang of Four to launch a series of political campaigns against otherleaders. Mao designated an ill-qualiªed new successor, Hua Guofeng. Lessthan a month after Mao’s death, Hua, with the support of some members ofthe old guard, arrested Mao’s wife and her radical colleagues. Hua himself wasable to rule China for only about two years until Deng Xiaoping emerged asthe paramount leader. In this phase of the CR, the aging Mao diluted military

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5. On this shift, see Yafeng Xia, “China’s Elite Politics and Sino-American Rapprochement, January1969–February 1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2006), pp. 3–28.

involvement in politics, got rid of Lin Biao, purged some military leaders, andreinstalled some old guards in power. As MacFarquhar and Schoenhals note,this phase marked “an ending [of the Cultural Revolution] so painfully drawnout, so tortuously slow, that it would last more than twice as long as the eventit supposedly brought to a close” (p. 281).

Writing in 1986, Lucian Pye highlighted three key questions about theCultural Revolution.6 The ªrst of these was the causes and origins. Spe-ciªcally, why did Mao decide to tear down what he had done so much to cre-ate, and why did Chinese society as a whole react in such extreme ways to theinitiatives of a small group of leaders? The second question is how individualsexperienced the CR. The third is the impact of the CR on the major institu-tions of Chinese society.

In discussing the causes and origins of the CR, scholars in China have ad-vanced more than a dozen explanations, but no consensus has been reached.MacFarquhar and Schoenhals offer two lines of interpretation. They claim,ªrst, that Mao was motivated by revolutionary ideals and was disappointedwith the Soviet experiment, which he believed had created a privileged bu-reaucratic class that abandoned revolutionary ideals. He therefore set out to“smash the old culture,” “weed out capitalist roaders in the Party,” and createa “new socialist man.” This explanation, however, is no longer convincing inlight of revelations over the past ten to ªfteen years about Mao’s extravagantlifestyle: multiple villas, private trains, and a string of mistresses.

The second line of interpretation put forth by MacFarquhar and Schoen-hals is that a power struggle was under way between Mao and Liu Shaoqi. Butthis argument, too, is unconvincing. If a real struggle had existed, Mao couldsimply have called a meeting to remove and arrest Liu Shaoqi, as he did withthe ultra-loyal Lin Biao.

A more plausible explanation for the origins of the CR pertains to Mao’sconcern about his earlier disastrous policies. Over the decades, the highestCCP ofªcials such as Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming were held accountable forserious mistakes, and their careers ended tragically. Mao knew that his GreatLeap Forward had inºicted catastrophic damage on the country. He thus re-treated from the political frontline, leaving the main work to Liu Shaoqi,Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. By the early 1960s, Mao sensed that his pres-tige in the CCP was declining and that he was no longer revered by many ofhis colleagues, including Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen. Thus, Mao worried thathe would be denounced by his colleagues after his death, much as Josif Stalinwas attacked posthumously in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev. Mao therefore set

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6. Lucian W. Pye, “Reassessing the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly, No. 108 (December 1986),pp. 597–612.

out to take drastic measures that would preempt any such action by his col-leagues. He never wholeheartedly trusted Lin Biao and used Lin and the armysolely to defeat his civilian colleagues. Once that goal had been achieved, Maoturned against Lin and sought to have Jiang Qing and her radical colleaguesinstalled along with his nephew Mao Yuanxin as his successors—an arrange-ment that he believed would be the only guarantee of his legacy. Fortunatelyfor China, this plan was stillborn.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have done a ªrst-rate job of assessing thedamage the CR did to all types of institutions: schools, universities, the CCP,government ministries and bureaus, factories, and agricultural communes. Inreassessing the effects of the CR on individuals, the authors do a relativelygood job of incorporating a large collection of personal stories, interviews,and memoirs of victims that have been published in the last 40 years. Disillu-sioned Red Guards and people with “bad class” backgrounds made their sto-ries known in the West as far back as the early 1970s.7 Over the last 25 years, aplethora of memoirs from those who were involved in the CR have been pub-lished in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Many of these memoirsare not cited in Mao’s Last Revolution. To be sure, memoirs almost always areself-serving and in some cases contain factual errors and personal biases.Scholars must exercise caution, comparing and double-checking sources. Butthe memoirs, if used circumspectly, can be an invaluable source.8 The recentoutpouring of memoirs can be grouped into the following categories:

(1) ofªcials who managed to stay in power and published their memoirswith speciªc chapters on the CR, including Marshal Nie Rongzhen;Marshal Xu Xiangqian9 (not cited in Mao’s Last Revolution); senior diplo-mats such as Wu Xiuquan10 (not cited) and Geng Biao11 (not cited); thesenior economic ofªcial Xu Muqiao12 (not cited); and provincial leaders

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7. For example, Ken Ling, Revenge of Heaven: From Schoolboy to “Little General” in Mao’s Army (NewYork: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972).

8. On the memoirs of the CR, see Chung Yen-Lin, “A Study on the Memoirs of the Cultural Revolu-tion: The Characteristics and Historical Value,” Dongya yanjiu [East Asian Studies], Vol. 37, No. 1(January 2006), pp. 134–159.

9. Xu Xiangqian, Lishi de huigu [Reviewing History] (Beijing: Jiefangjun Chubanshe, 1987).

10. Wu Xiuquan was deputy head of the CCP International Liaison Department on the eve of theCR. See Wu Xiuquan, Wu Xiuquan jiangjun zishu [General Wu Xiuquan’s Personal Account](Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 1998).

11. Geng Biao was Chinese ambassador to Burma on the eve of the CR. See Geng Biao, Geng Biaohuiyilu: 1949–1992 [Memoirs of Geng Biao, 1949–1992] (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe,1998).

12. Xu Muqiao was deputy director of the State Economy Commission. See Xu Muqiao, Xu Muqiaohuiyilu [Memoirs of Xu Muqiao] (Tianjin: Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe, 1996).

such as Jiang Weiqing13 (not cited), Zeng Sheng14 (not cited), and YangYichen15 (not cited);

(2) Mao’s radical followers, such as Chen Boda (his son Chen Xiaonongedited works on the father), Wang Li, Xu Jingxian, Nie Yuanzi, andother beneªciaries of the CR such as Wang Dongxing, Wu De16 (notcited), and Zhang Hanzhi (with books about her husband, Qiao Guan-hua, who was vice foreign minister and then foreign minister during theCR);

(3) prime victims, such as General Wan Yi17 (not cited), Liu Ying18 (notcited), Xu Zhucheng19 (not cited), Qian Jiaju20 (not cited), and Ji Xian-lin21 (not cited); as well as relatives of important leaders or victims suchas Zeng Zhi22 (not cited), Kang Keqing23 (not cited), Zhu Zhongli24 (notcited), Deng Rong (Deng Xiaoping’s daughter), Luo Diandian (LuoRuiqing’s daughter), and Zhou Bingde25 (not cited);

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13. Jiang Weiqing was ªrst party secretary of the Jiangsu provincial CCP committee. See JiangWeiqing, Qishinian zhengcheng: Jiang Weiqing huiyilu [Seventy-year Journey: Memoirs of JiangWeiqing] (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe, 1996).

14. Zeng Sheng was vice governor of Guangdong province. See Zeng Sheng, Zeng Sheng huiyilu[Memoirs of Zeng Sheng] (Beijing: Jiefangjun Chubanshe, 1991).

15. Yang Yichen was vice governor of Helongjiang province. See Yang Yichen, Yang Yichen huiyilu[Memoirs of Yang Yichen] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 1996).

16. Wu De was a leader of Beijing from 1966 to 1976. See Zhu Yuanshi, Wu De koushu, shinian fengyujishi—Wo zai Beijing gongzuo de yixie jingli [Oral Account of Wu De, A Record of Ten Years of Windand Rain—My Work Experience in Beijing ] (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo Chubanshe, 2004).

17. Wan Yi was deputy director of the State Science and Technology Commission for National De-fense in the 1950s and was purged after the Lushan Conference in 1959. See Wan Yi, Wan Yi huiyilu[Memoirs of Wan Yi] (Beijing: Zhonggong Dangshi Chubanshe, 1998).

18. Zhang Wentian was a top CCP leader in the 1930s and deputy foreign minister in the 1950s. Hewas purged together with Marshal Peng Dehuai at the Lushan Conference in 1959. Liu Ying wasZhang Wentian’s wife. See Liu Ying, Wo he Zhang Wentian mingyunyugong de licheng [Sharing theSame Fate—The Life Journey of Zhang Wentian and I] (Beijing: Zhonggong Dangshi Chubanshe,1997).

19. Xu Zhucheng was the creator of Wenhui bao [Wenhui Daily]. see Xu Zhucheng, Xu Zhuchenghuiyilu [Memoirs of Xu Zhucheng ] (Taibei: Shangwu Chubanshe, 1999).

20. Qian Jiaju was a noted economist. see Qian Jiaju, Cong zhuiqiu dao huanmie: Yige Zhongguojingjixuejia de zizhuan [From Pursuing to Disillusion: An Autobiography of a Chinese Economist](Taibei: Shidai Wenhua, 1993).

21. Ji Xianlin is a noted Beijing University professor. See Ji Xilin, Niupeng zayi [A Random Reºectionon Life at the Cowshed] (Beijing: Zhonggong Zhongyang Dangxiao Chubanshe, 1998).

22. Zeng Zhi was Tao Zhu’s wife. See, Zeng Zhi, Yige geming de xingcunzhe: Zeng Zhi huiyilu [A Survi-vor of Revolution: Memoirs of Zheng Zhi] (Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe, 1999).

23. Kang Keqing was Marshal Zhu De’s wife. See Kang Keqing, Kang Keqing huiyilu [Memoirs ofKang Keqing] (Beijing: Jiefangjun Chubanshe, 1993).

24. Zhu Zhongli was Wang Jiaxiang’s wife. See Zhu Zhongli, Mao Zedong, Wang Jiaxiang zai wodeshenghuozhong [Mao Zedong and Wang Jiaxiang in My Life](Beijing: Zhonggong ZhongyangDangxiao Chubanshe, 1995).Wang Jiaxiang was the ªrst head of the CCP International Liaison De-partment from 1951 to 1966.

25. Zhou Bingde is Zhou Enlai’s niece. See Zhou Bingde, Wo de bofu Zhou Enlai [My Uncle ZhouEnlai] (Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 2001).

(4) those who worked for the leaders, including doctors such as Li Zhisui;bodyguards such as Zhang Yaoci26 (noted cited) and Gao Zhenpu27 (notcited); secretaries such as Lin Ke28 (not cited), Tong Xiaopeng29 (notcited), Yang Yinlu (Jiang Qing’s secretary), Zhang Yunsheng (Lin Biao’ssecretary), and Zhang Tingdong (Ye Jianying’s secretary); interpreterssuch as Ji Chaozhu30 (not cited); and photographers such as DuXiuxian31 (not cited).

Although MacFarquhar and Schoenhals should be commended for theirinterpretations and their excellent mastery of Chinese sources, new materialsand publications have been coming out every year, and it will take time to de-termine whether some of the authors’ interpretations will hold up. As is inevi-table when dealing with subjects so complex, the reviewer is likely to ªndºaws or points of disagreement. For example, the authors write that “whenMao began his rise to supreme leadership from January 1935, Zhou recog-nized that here ªnally was a man with the vision for the party and countrythat he himself lacked” (pp. 10–11). But the latest evidence indicates thatZhou came to realize this about Mao only after the Yan’an Rectiªcation Cam-paign (1941–1943), when Zhou himself became a major target of the move-ment. Prior to that, Zhou was still angling for position. He had teamed upwith Mao’s rival Wang Ming ªrst at the CCP Politburo meeting in December1937 and then at the CCP’s Yangzi River Bureau in Wuhan in 1938, chal-lenging the CCP Center in Yan’an, to Mao’s great irritation. Zhou would havebeen expelled from the party had it not been for the leader of the CommunistInternational, Georgi Dimitrov, who sent a telegram on behalf of Zhou andWang Ming.32 Recently, Shaoguang Wang published an article about the

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26. Zhang Yaoci was Mao Zedong’s bodyguard. See Zhang Yaoci, Zhang Yaoci huiyi Mao Zedong[Zhang Yaoci Remembers Mao Zedong] (Xianggang: Sanlian Shudian, 1999).

27. Gao Zhengpu was Zhou Enlai’s bodyguard. See Gao Zhengpu, Zhou Enlai weishi huiyilu [Mem-oirs of Zhou Enlai’s Bodyguard] (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 2000).

28. Lin Ke was Mao’s secretary, Xu Tao was Mao’s physician, and Wu Xujun was Mao’s head nurse.They published a book on Mao to try to rebut Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao. See LinKe, Xu Tao, and Wu Xujun, Lishi de zhenshi—Mao Zedong shenbian gongzuo renyuan de zhengyan [LetHistorical Truth Be Told—Eyewitness Account of Mao’s Staff ] (Hong Kong: Liwen Chubanshe,1995).

29. Tong Xiaopeng was Zhou Enlai’s secretary. See Tong Xiaopeng, Tong Xiaopeng huiyilu [Memoirs ofTong Xiaopeng] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 1996).

30. Ji Chaozhu was an interpreter for Mao and Zhou. See Ji Chaozhu, Cong “Yang wawa” daowaijiaoguan: Ji Chaozhu koushushi [From Foreign “Doll” to a Diplomat: Ji Chaozhu Oral History](Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 2000).

31. Du Xiuxian was a photographer for the highest leaders. See Gu Baozi (articles) and Du Xiuxian(photos), Hongjingtou: Zhongnanhai sheyingshi yanzhong de guoshi fengyun [Red Camera Lens: StateAffairs in the Eyes of Zhongnanhai Photographers] (Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 1998).

32. Gao Hua, Hongtaiyang shi zenyang shengqi de—Yan’an zhengfeng yundong de lailongqumai [How

Wuhan Incident of 20 July 1967 that provides a much clearer and more con-vincing narrative and analysis of the incident than what we ªnd in Mao’s LastRevolution (pp. 199–220).33

The authors’ claim that “the PRC was voted into the China seat on theUnited Nations Security Council with U.S. support” on 25 October 1971 ismisleading (p. 347). The reality is more complex. It is true that the Nixon ad-ministration had shifted its position toward China’s membership at the UNfrom unconditional exclusion of the PRC to advocating dual membership forboth Taipei and Beijing starting in the fall of 1970. When Henry Kissingerwas in Beijing for a second visit in October 1971, the United Nations (UN)General Assembly took up the matter. On 22 October the General Assemblyplaced an Albanian resolution supporting PRC membership on the agendaahead of U.S. resolutions for dual representation. On 25 October, the Gen-eral Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to let Beijing have China’sseat at the UN and expel Taiwan.

Also, the main reason that Mao launched his campaign to castigate ZhouEnlai at an enlarged Politburo meeting in November 1973 was not the Tai-wan issue as MacFarquhar and Schoenhals claim (p. 361). Instead, Maosuspected that Zhou, during his latest talks with Kissinger, had discussedSino-American military cooperation and accepted U.S. nuclear protection inthe event of a Soviet nuclear attack. Zhou was thus accused of “rightistcapitulationism.” On p. 380, the authors allege that “in June [1974] a team ofdoctors had informed the Politburo that Mao had not much more than twoyears to live.” This statement cannot be supported by available Chinesesources. No one during the CR would have dared to say that Chairman Maohad only two years to live. Apparently, the authors misinterpreted the sourcethey cited, which says that “in June 1974, the second medical team was set upfor Mao Zedong. . . . This medical team would exist for more than two yearsuntil Mao’s death.” On p. 381, the authors note that “Deng [was] made aCCP vice chairman, [Central Military Affairs Commission] vice chairman,and PLA chief of staff, the ªrst civilian to be given the last post.” The descrip-tion of Deng as a civilian is not fully accurate. He was one of the highest-ranking political commissars in the Chinese Communist army from 1937 to1952 and was also a leading member of the Central Military Affairs Commis-sion of the CCP from 1952 to 1966. He was a politician with strong militarycredentials.

Finally, in a subsequent edition of the book, the authors should correct

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Did the Red Sun Rise? A History of Yan’an Rectiªcation Campaign] (Hong Kong: The Chinese Uni-versity of Hong Kong, 2000), pp. 136–153, 588–593.

33. See Shaoguang Wang, “The Wuhan Incident Revisited,” Chinese Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 2(Fall 2006), pp. 241–270.

some typographical errors and minor inaccuracies. The general who replacedChen Zaidao as the commander of the Wuhan Military Region was ZengSiyu, not Zeng Ziyu (pp. 213, 691). When Deng Xiaoping and his familywere in exile in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, they lived in a large two-storybuilding on the grounds of an old infantry school, not “a small apartment”(p. 358). Luo Ruiqing’s military rank was a senior general (“Dajiang” inChinese, equivalent to a ªve-star general), not a marshal (“Yuanshuai” in Chi-nese) (p. 471). The author of the article “The Background to the ‘Seizure ofPower’ in the Foreign Ministry” is Jin Ge, not Jin Xi (p. 628).

These caveats aside, the book will be of immense value for anyone inter-ested in recent Chinese history.

✣ ✣ ✣


Commentary by Joseph W. Esherick, University of California, San Diego

Forty years after the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution, we now have anauthoritative history of this momentous upheaval, a volume that is certain toremain the standard work on the subject for years to come. The authors cometo this project with unparalleled qualiªcations. Roderick MacFarquhar hasalready published three volumes on The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (in1974, 1983, and 1997), each one more detailed and compelling than the last.Michael Schoenhals has been collecting Cultural Revolution material for de-cades and brings to the project a remarkable command of rare sources and arare ability to read the hidden messages and human impact of Cultural Revo-lution rhetoric. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals also represent a particularlycomplementary pair for this project, the former focusing on elite politics, thelatter providing insight into how the Cultural Revolution affected ordinaryChinese.

Most of the existing Anglophone scholarship on the Cultural Revolutionwas written several decades ago, often relying on materials produced by RedGuards and the radicals who dominated the propaganda apparatus until MaoZedong’s demise in 1976. This volume is able to combine original materialsfrom the Cultural Revolution decade with insider accounts from survivorsand victims of the movement who reemerged to tell their stories during andafter the Deng Xiaoping era. The 47-page bibliography at the back of Mao’sLast Revolution reºects the extent of this new documentation—and also theconsiderable effort by the authors and their home institutions (Harvard Uni-

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versity and Lund University) to assemble it. One ªnds, for example, repeatedannotations in the form “Handwritten text. Available at the Fairbank CenterLibrary” or “Schoenhals collection.”

The new material and insights are presented here as a chronological nar-rative of “Mao’s Last Revolution” beginning in 1965, essentially whereMacFarquhar ended his three volumes on The Origins. The strength of the ac-count lies in the detailed yet judicious explication of the elite politics of theera. Step by step we are led through Mao’s orchestration of the early stages ofthe movement—working through his wife Jiang Qing and such henchmen asKang Sheng. The 1965 purge of the army chief of staff Luo Ruiqing, orches-trated by Defense Minister Lin Biao and his wife, is presented as “the lastchance for [the Politburo Standing Committee] to act together to restrain theChairman before themselves being divided and denounced during the Cul-tural Revolution” (p. 26). The next few years saw “confusion on campuses”(ch. 3) sown by party leaders acting through family members and personalconnections; the explicit condoning of Red Guard violence by the minister ofpublic security, Xie Fuzhi; the dramatic shredding of the central governmentso that by 1968 some 70 to 90 percent of the original cadres in central minis-tries had been sent for reeducation at 7th of May Cadre Schools; the realthreat of civil war in a standoff between rival military factions in Wuhan;the disbanding of the Red Guards; and the “cleansing of class ranks” carriedout in 1968 by the new revolutionary committees that were ultimately re-sponsible for the greatest number of deaths in the provinces. This initial andmost chaotic phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end with the NinthParty Congress in 1969, which installed a new group of Communist Partyleaders.

Many would end a history of the Cultural Revolution at this point,conªning their deªnition of the movement to the era of mass participation byRed Guards and open factional ªghting on campuses and in some factoriesand administrative units in large cities. But the focus in Mao’s Last Revolutionon elite politics makes the continuation of the narrative until Mao’s death in1976 fully justiªed. The obscure dynamics of the fall of Lin Biao in 1971 area case in point. The initial division between Mao and Lin was manifested in adebate over whether to restore the position of head of state, previously held bythe ousted President Liu Shaoqi. Mao expressed his opposition to the idea,and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals interpret Lin’s support for it as a case of“‘working toward the Chairman,’ the attempt by uncertain subordinates toºatter their leader by going beyond what the latter may have really wanted”(p. 327).34 This was a pattern of politics in Mao’s court, and the book contains

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34. This concept is modeled after Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working toward the Führer” in the Third

several other convincing examples. Mao, for his part, was anxious to use theaffair to limit the power of the People’s Liberation Army, another sign of hisconsistent desire to maintain ªrm control of the military. This concern lay be-hind the return of Deng Xiaoping and the progressive rehabilitation of oldcadres in the 1970s. In the end, the authors conclude, the failure of Mao’sutopianism is what led to the dramatic reforms in China over the last thirtyyears. As they put it, “no Cultural Revolution, no economic reform” (p. 3).

One of the hallmarks of all of MacFarquhar’s scholarship has been thedeft interweaving of domestic and international inºuences on Chinese (andespecially Mao’s) decision-making. The international dimension in this caserelates mostly to the Soviet Union. The abrupt removal of the Soviet Com-munist Party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in October 1964 represented a dan-gerous precedent for Mao, especially after an allegedly drunk Soviet defenseminister told the Chinese Marshal He Long, “We’ve already got rid ofKhrushchev; you ought to follow our example and get rid of Mao Zedong”(p. 9). That the opening to Richard Nixon and the United States was predi-cated on Chinese fears of the Soviet threat has long been evident, but MacFar-quhar and Schoenhals provide new details about the ªghting along the UssuriRiver and show that concern in Beijing was great enough to prompt an evacu-ation of party leaders from the capital.

The book contains more than just the high politics among party leaders.The authors estimate the extent of violence against people and property andassess the effect of the Cultural Revolution on the economy. Mao’s Last Revo-lution also offers telling selections from Red Guard diaries in the authors’ pos-session. The basic narrative, however, is driven by a Mao-centered elite poli-tics. Having just co-edited a volume on the Cultural Revolution,35 I wouldnote that when one looks at the local level, from the bottom up as it were, theCultural Revolution presents a somewhat different face. Because of the divi-sions within the central leadership and the deliberate obscurity of Mao’ssupervision of the struggle, other actors—Red Guards, local cadres, and ordi-nary citizens—were often forced to think and act on their own. One of thegreatest challenges in scholarship on the Cultural Revolution lies in explain-ing the unique combination of extraordinary attempts by Mao and his radicalallies to manipulate and control the behavior, thought, lifestyles, and aspira-tions of Chinese citizens on the one hand, and the remarkable empowermentthat many young people felt as they were freed from the ordinary institutionalconstraints on day-to-day behavior. This empowerment, of course, was brief

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Reich—the attempts by senior Nazi ofªcials to anticipate and carry out (with great zeal) what AdolfHitler would want. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

35. Joseph W. Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution asHistory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

and was followed by bitter disillusionment as Red Guards were disbandedand students were sent off to the countryside. But the independent agency ofordinary actors was real and is one of the legacies of the Cultural Revolutiondeserving of further investigation.

✣ ✣ ✣


Commentary by David E. Apter, Yale University

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a suc-cession of victories of consciousness over blind forces—in nature, in society, inman himself.

Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1932), p. 347.

In our great motherland, a new era is emerging in which the workers, peasantsand soldiers are grasping Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought. OnceMao Tse-tung’s thought is grasped by the broad masses, it becomes an inex-haustible source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of inªnite power.

Quotations from Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p iii.

It is not possible totally to disentangle Mao’s motives, but the evidence suggeststhat Mao’s ultimate dread—the image of extinction that stalk[ed] him—[was]the death of the revolution. He had to devise some new recipe for reinvigoratingit. He had experienced the morning-after epiphany common to all revolutionar-ies: in victory, the revolution dies. Shades of the prison house begin to closeupon the post-revolutionary state; after the initial transformative spasm, exhaus-tion replaces exhilaration, routine replaces voluntarism, responsibility clogs ide-alism. Many revolutionary victors are happy to settle for power and stability.Mao was not.

Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 3, The Coming ofthe Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 469.

I

Even in a century marked by extraordinary cataclysms, the Cultural Revolu-tion stands out. Perhaps antecedents exist, but one is hard-pressed to think ofan equivalent to Mao Zedong’s bid for ultimate authority. Modesty, of course,

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has hardly been a characteristic of left-radical revolutionary leaders generally,but no other such leader compares in scope and ambition to Mao. He was notsimply laying claim to power. The Cultural Revolution he initiated was de-picted as Aufheben, with the struggle itself as the necessary condition for revo-lutionary consciousness. The Jacobin phase of the French revolution, theBolshevik takeover in Russia (for which the Jacobins became the initialmodel), and the Stalinist “revolution from above” in the Soviet Union allclaimed victories over “blind forces” but were not aimed so single-mindedly attransforming “nature, society, and man himself ”—certainly not all at thesame time and to the same degree. Perhaps, as MacFarquhar suggests in hisComing of the Cataclysm, Mao learned from these earlier experiences that eventhough the revolution was “on the side of history,” there was always a riskthat “irreversible” change would reverse itself. In the Cultural Revolution,Mao was akin to a Chinese Canute, taking it upon himself to prevent the rev-olution’s demise, not least by turning the revolution itself upside down andprovoking total social upheaval.

Did Mao realize when he embarked on this ªnal revolutionary adventurewhat the scope and intensity of it would be? If MacFarquhar and Schoenhalsare right, complete certainty about the most terrible consequences of the Cul-tural Revolution would not have been enough to deter Mao. On the contrary,it probably would have made him even more determined to press ahead. Inthis regard, what Mao’s Last Revolution describes, in great detail, is Mao’s last-ditch attempt to create a revolution within the revolution.

How much Mao actually believed in the whole enterprise is impossible toknow. Did lingering affection for his anarchist youth perhaps spawn his thesisof permanent revolution? The succession of decisions that both followed anddetermined the course of events played factions and individuals off againstone another, as Mao had done throughout his political life. One of the ironiesis that the logic behind his call for permanent revolution was set out far morepersuasively by the arch-enemy Leon Trotsky than by Mao himself.

Whatever the complex of factors that led to and shaped the CulturalRevolution in all its tortured complexity, the events can be said to ªt betweentwo bookends, the quotation from the “Little Red Book” cited above andMacFarquhar’s description of how revolutions fail. These two comments pro-vide as good a framework as any for examining the dynamics of the CulturalRevolution.

It is precisely on these counts that Mao’s Last Revolution is a tour de force.We see Mao’s revolutionary abstractions as pretenses and his logic of transcen-dence as an exercise in instrumentalism whereby he personalized his leader-ship and depersonalized his role. This new style of leadership endowed him

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with intimacy, and his new role gave him agency—providing two forms ofmanipulative power at once. He depicted himself as the moving ªgure in Chi-nese history, the seeker after truth, the arbiter of right and wrong—a ªgureearning the adulation of the young through his direct appeals to strike theestablishment wherever it might be.

The lesson of Mao’s Last Revolution is how people can be made complicitin the afºictions they suffer. Such complicity was not limited to those directlyinvolved. The wishful thinking of a good many Western liberals, radicals, in-tellectuals, students, journalists, scholars, and ªlmmakers, in their passionateyearnings for social improvement by transformational betterment and in theirdesire to blend modernity with moral ambition, were roped into the enter-prise. As a phenomenon, the Cultural Revolution, despite its apparentuniqueness, reveals the mostly hidden human moral propensity to try to startthe world all over. That alone should induce us to continue studying theCultural Revolution and not allow it to be obscured by the achievements ofChinese economic growth. As the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989would suggest, future paroxysms are entirely possible.

Mao’s effort to cleanse people’s minds of capitalist and wrong socialistthoughts helps to explain why the Cultural Revolution began at a moment ofrelative political and social calm, a period between spasms, when the Com-munist regime had consolidated itself after so many twists and turns in theparty line and was shifting to the business of economic construction andgrowth. This “pragmatic” turn tended to sideline Mao as the main politicalactor. But, as MacFarquhar and Schoenhals demonstrate, Mao’s aim inlaunching the Cultural Revolution was not merely to restore himself to su-preme power. External as well as internal factors were involved. What hadbeen happening inside the Soviet Union over the previous decade, notablyNikita Khrushchev’s “exposure” of Josif Stalin’s crimes and the subsequent de-Stalinization campaign (as well as the polemical exchanges with China), wasanathema to Mao. He found these disturbing tendencies mirrored in the poli-cies pursued by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and their followers, who hadcome to dominate the affairs of party and state. Lin Biao, the designated suc-cessor to Mao, became more and more politically dangerous as order disinte-grated, leaving the army (under Lin’s command) as the main bulwark againstforeign threats and internal conºicts. The greater Mao’s dependence onthe army, the more urgent the need to subordinate Lin. But the Cultural Rev-olution during its initial stages increasingly spun out of control—so much sothat even the old guard Yan’anites drew back, except perhaps for Zhou Enlai.

Trying to decipher what “deep meanings” to attach to Mao’s words isalways hazardous, given his theoretical ªckleness and volatile shifts and turns

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of fancy. The Cultural Revolution was a high-risk venture for everyone. Noone could play it safe. An event that ostensibly started as a literary critique of aparable about imperial power in China’s history escalated almost immediatelyinto a totally unrealistic project for remolding the “mentalité” of revolutionitself. Nuclear bombs as “little red books” indeed.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have succeeded in making sense of thisextraordinarily complex moment in China’s political evolution. They delin-eate the mixture of motives and actions and institutions. Their analysis de-pends not only on factual information but also on deep knowledge, goodsense, and enough imagination to see the ridiculous in the sublime. In allthese respects, the authors are superbly endowed. To the extent that both ofthem have had something of an obsession (no other word will do) with theCultural Revolution, that is precisely what is needed to explore and recapture,almost on a day-by-day basis, the events, large and small, that affected every-one from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom. In a narrative at times grip-ping, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals bring to life the struggles over leadership,the mobilization of factions, and the plots and counterplots in national, local,and provincial venues. The narrative is replete with mystery, tension, and cli-max. So vivid are the portrayals of events that one can see the book as thescript of a play in three acts marked by the Ninth, Tenth, and EleventhPlenums of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. The play is atragedy in the interplay between moralism and sycophancy, the hypocrisy ofthe so called inner party struggles, the hollowness of spiritual claims that be-came so dangerous that the mere misuse of a word deemed inappropriatecould lead to banishment or death. The whole process involved not even apretense of legalism, none of the show trials that accompanied the Stalinistpurges in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Impromptu “tribunes of thepeople” in the name of public rage reduced and trivialized individuals andtheir fate—not least the men and women who made the revolution in the ªrstinstance.

So complete is the account in Mao’s Last Revolution that one might beexcused for calling the book (although I doubt that the authors would) a phe-nomenology. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals eschew explanation per se, specu-lation, or analytical commentary. So fastidious are they in describing whathappened in great detail that the effect is to challenge social science theory it-self and most particularly those claiming to deal with violence, revolution,and the games of power politics. Implied by the almost total absence of theoryin the book is either an indifference to it or a belief that especially in politicalscience, the more one knows about a situation the more theories, or at leastgrand theories, become simplistic or inadequate. That said, the book suppliesplenty of grist for theoretical mills—the question is what sort.

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II

My own answer would be that the Cultural Revolution lends itself to theapplication of interpretive theory. Whether called discourse analysis, narrativetheory, or symbolic interaction, the idea is basically the same. Such modes ofanalysis do not, of course, displace or replace others. What they can do is shedgreater light on some of the fascinating questions that turn up on almost everypage of Mao’s Last Revolution. Some of these questions are introduced almostcasually. How could Mao, “who loved upheaval (luan)” but “appreciated theservices of a well-oiled and obedient bureaucracy,” have assumed that hisheadlong restructuring of the bureaucracy (doing away with ministries and re-placing them by an entirely improvised “three-in-one formula” consisting ofso-called leading and revolutionary cadres and “representatives of revolution-ary masses”) could ever work? How could he have ever believed that theelected revolutionary committees he favored to supervise ministries, let alonethe Cultural Revolution itself, would be anything but utterly chaotic? Was itthe sinister instrumentalism hidden in the innocence of the formulation thatso appealed to his exercise of personal power? The authors make nice work ofMao’s control over revolutionary symbolism, alluding to the romantic aspectsof his appeals to the younger generation. They note, more or less in passing,that the so-called Shanghai Commune established itself on the anniversary ofthe Paris Commune, 27 March 1871. They describe how the old guard was,despite its misgivings, maneuvered into supporting Mao, who in turn becameincreasingly suspicious of the military as it was called on to restore local order(pp. 182–183). Other examples abound.

Taking a step back from the narrative itself, we can discern two “dialecti-cal” themes. One, a dialectic of political position and power, focuses on howMao always retained the initiative. The second, embedded within the ªrst, isthe usurpation of power by the Gang of Four (Five really if one includes KangSheng, who died before their overthrow). As for the substance of the CulturalRevolution, it is a ballet between those opposed to the Gang of Four andthose favoring it, marked by poisonous betrayals of friend against friend andof colleague against colleague, and of course of revolutionaries against fellowrevolutionaries. All sides engaged in pretense accompanied by an increasingcrescendo of celebratory acts of public humiliation, not to speak of the wan-ton destruction of property, of art, and of history itself. Other “dialectical” en-counters include the successful counterplot after Mao’s death. We witnesshow the Gang of Four were outºanked by the old guard of senior party cadresand arrested by the PLA, an account that reads like an adventure story.

One interesting side comment conªrmed something I had wonderedabout after interviewing a clerk in a factory in Shanghai in 1986—the accep-

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tance and apparent lack of desire for revenge and reprisal in the aftermath ofthe Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution the clerk was a rela-tively young man who had recently married and whose wife had just had ababy. His best friend, who shared his desk in the ofªce, denounced him. Afterthe clerk was sent off to a pig farm, divorced by his wife, and deprived of anycontact with his child, the “friend” took over his apartment. When I inter-viewed the clerk in 1986, he had been restored to his old job and was sittingonce again across from this “friend” every working day. I asked how he couldstand it. His explanation was that the Cultural Revolution was like a naturaldisaster. One accepted it. One survived. That was enough. The only thingthat seemed to bother him is that his erstwhile friend had expropriated hisfavorite sweater and continued to wear it to work every day.

III

Although the authors include little if any theory in the book, they do pointout how texts, their interpretation, and their realization in action played intothe contest between Mao’s own “theory” and the instrumentalism of “empiri-cism.” In a fascinating vignette, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals describe thestruggle over which faction would ultimately control the production of vol-ume ªve of Mao’s Selected Works, which was published posthumously. Whatcomes through in the narrative is the tension between what to believe, how tobelieve it, and facts on the ground—facts that in the end were decisive. As theauthors note, the Cultural Revolution cost China well over a year’s worth ofnational income. But not until Mao was already near death did he reluctantlyacknowledge that something drastic had to be done to restore the economy.At the ªnal CCP Politburo meeting Mao attended, he switched to the otherside, charging the Gang of Four, the “anti-empiricists,” with actually being“empiricists.” He cast doubt on the “authenticity” of their revolutionary cre-dentials and speciªcally singled out Jiang Qing as an example. In so doing, heset the stage for their demise.

This is a big book but difªcult to put down. One fascinating episode un-folds after another. Despite the cynical use of “Maoism” in battles over power,the book makes clear that a great many of those involved took ideologicalmatters very seriously. I have three copies of the Little Red Book, and one ofthem, an English edition bought in Oxford, appears never to have been read.The two others were bought in China. One appeared early, well before thedownfall of Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and the Gang of Four. This copy is full ofearnest underlining. The second, published after the demise of all three, is apatchwork of scratched out and restored names, words, and faces.

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MacFarquhar and Schoenhals help us to understand events that other-wise might appear as madness. They suggest the continuities behind the twistsand turns of party policy. Missing perhaps is reference to the Yan’an period,some of the events of which amounted to a dress rehearsal for some aspects ofthe Cultural Revolution. In these terms one might say that the Cultural Revo-lution happened twice, although no one would suggest that its second comingwas farce. I refer to the so-called rectiªcation campaigns. One could arguethat the ideological orchestration in Yan’an, not least by the notorious KangSheng, was in some ways a forerunner of things to come, although the contextand the times were too different to call Yan’an a full-ºedged precursor to theCultural Revolution. In both events one sees how the propensity to use Mao’stexts as a recipe for political power and to equate “truth” with revolutionarylegitimacy actually worked.

Perhaps Mao believed with Karl Marx that “the traditions of all of thedead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

Tradition now includes the Cultural Revolution itself. The current lead-ers in China have sought to exorcise the residue of its effects. In this regardone of the conclusions of the book is of particular relevance: “The CulturalRevolution and the Reform era had destroyed respect for the ideology thathad given the party legitimacy and glued the system together. Party memberswere for the most part careerists without a cause, and, more dangerously forthem, unrespected [sic] by their people” (p. 461). Nowadays, when mass pro-tests erupt frequently in China, one might wonder how the regime survived atall. The Chinese Communist Party today is hardly like the political parties indemocratic countries, but one might hope, if only tenuously, that the morethe CCP is held in popular contempt and the more it fails to exercise its re-sponsibilities in acceptable ways, the more receptive it will be to sharingpower with other parties if only to distribute the onus of governing. Staytuned.

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Response to the Commentaries36

✣ Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

First, we must express our warm appreciation to the editor of the Journal ofCold War Studies for arranging to have not just one but a bevy of distin-guished and knowledgeable scholars review our book, and for inviting us torespond. And of course our thanks go, too, to the scholars themselves for tak-ing the time from their own work to write the kind of review that makesauthors think hard about what they wrote. Needless to say, when such knowl-edgeable reviewers pay tribute, it is particularly welcome. However, we comenot to cite praise of our book, but to disinter its meaning where we have beeninsufªciently clear.

Lynn White asks why Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were so slow to un-derstand what was happening, and he then goes on to quote our contentionthat Mao Zedong had no strategy for the mass movement as if that were ourexplanation. What we evidently did not convey sufªciently was our vision of atwo-stage Maoist plan. In the ªrst stage, employing various stratagems, Maoplotted successively to remove senior colleagues in Beijing from power. Onlyby eviscerating the central party apparatus could the mass movement be un-leashed, and only Mao had the cunning and prestige to carry this through.

White later implies that our concentration on Mao’s court led us to ne-glect sociological explanations of why the struggles for political power becameso violent all over China. However, we did attempt to deal with this obviouslyimportant issue, even if not as extensively as he might have wanted us to. Onpp. 129–131, we argued that the youth of China had been brought up in aculture of class-struggle violence, notably the “four clean-ups” campaign in1965, and that once the party’s leading strings were cut these young peoplewere effectively empowered to make revolution their own way and indeed cre-ated a state of nature. Their actions stemmed not so much from their anger atlocal Communist party bosses as from Mao’s injunctions to them to bombardthe headquarters. Having been provided with this example of purging theparty headquarters in Beijing, they took as their natural targets the local partyofªcials.

In the case of “cleansing the class ranks,” which accounted for moredeaths even than Red Guard violence, we follow the argument of AndrewWalder that the leaders of the new revolutionary committees were inexperi-

36. This response was drafted by Roderick MacFarquhar and reºects the views of both authors.

enced and insecure and thought that the best guarantee of continued politicalofªce was to show the maximum zeal by executing their opponents (p. 256).Underlying all the violence, we feel, is the concept we learned from IanKershaw’s Hitler of working toward the leader (p. 48). Red Guards and newleaders all wanted to do Mao’s bidding and were prepared to go to any lengthsto do so.

We certainly did not mean to suggest that provincial power was unim-portant. In the chapters on Shanghai’s January storm, on seizing power, andon the Wuhan incident, which also dealt with other incidents elsewhere, aswell as the chapter on cleansing the class ranks, we covered events in the prov-inces with as much detail as we could unearth.

On the recall of Deng: The idea that Mao wanted Deng to counter Zhouis a theory we have heard from knowledgeable Chinese foreign service ofªcers,as we indicated (p. 366). However, as we also indicated, we are more inclinedto believe that the reason he was recalled was to allay the concerns of the Peo-ple’s Liberation Army (PLA) that the country might be left in charge of awhippersnapper like Wang Hongwen.

Steven Levine has understandably harsh words for Chairman Mao andthe Communist system over which Mao presided, and we agree with much ofthis. Levine seems disappointed that we did not write in similarly excoriatingterms. Our belief was that we should on the whole let the record speak for it-self because in that way we would be more likely to carry conviction with Chi-nese readers—a Chinese translation will be published, though obviously notin mainland China itself—than if we showered the Chairman or his party col-leagues with highly negative adjectives. Our book was designed as a politicalhistory rather than a polemic.

Levine’s Mao is concerned not with revisionism or with the rise of the“new class,” as we suggest, but with maximizing his own power and manipu-lating everyone like a puppet master. We heartily agree with the suggestionthat Mao manipulated his comrades and factions, particularly in the ªrst year,as Yafeng Xia notes in his comments. But if Mao had simply been concernedwith maximizing power, he could have called a halt and declared a victory inFebruary 1967. By then, he had vanquished those of his old colleagues whoconceivably could have been thought of as threats.

Levine may be right to complain that our treatment of the Lin Biao affairis not as satisfactory as our “masterful” analysis elsewhere. Despite Chinesememoirs and histories and two penetrating Western analyses of the affair, wedo not believe that enough of the facts have emerged to enable us, or indeedanyone in China to make a ªnal judgment—as Yafeng Xia comments, theplane crash that ended this episode is still “mysterious”—but we like to thinkwe got as close as is currently possible!

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We feel that Levine does not quite do us justice with respect to our treat-ment of Zhou Enlai, whom he states we conventionally characterize as “Mr.Moderate.” Lynn White got it right, suggesting that we revised “Zhou’s gen-eral image from mainly moderate to mainly lapdog.” Levine adds that we only“lightly touch on” the possibility that Zhou might have been able to mobilizethe old guard against the Cultural Revolution (CR). He presumably refers toour speculation (on pp. 194, 415–416) about what might have happened ifZhou had backed the February countercurrent or rallied his colleagues.Again, as with our treatment of Mao, we believe that our approach is morelikely to persuade Chinese readers of Zhou’s great failure. This is particularlythe case if one is uneasily conscious, as we were, that it is only too easy to ac-cuse leaders of cowardice from afar, not knowing how one would personallyhave behaved under those circumstances. It is better always to praise thosewho did take the risks and show courage. Sadly, during the CR, few at the topactually did show any courage.

Yafeng Xia ªnds unconvincing our argument that the CR was caused byMao’s desire to establish a more revolutionary China. Xia argues that Mao’sextravagant lifestyle indicated that he had no real interest in creating a new so-cialist man, but we believe that Xia is excessively idealistic about political lead-ers anywhere. How many leaders genuinely practice, in their private lives,what they proclaim in public? Mahatma Gandhi perhaps, but few others. Onone occasion during World War II a British civil servant looked askance atWinston Churchill’s luxurious eating and drinking, but the disapprovingofªcial was apparently told that if you have a Rolls Royce for a leader you haveto treat him appropriately. If Mao ever reºected on his imperial lifestyle, asopposed to taking it for granted, we suspect that he would have thought itjustiªed because ultimately he alone bore responsibility for the revolutionarytransformation of China.

Xia also rejects the suggestion that the CR was caused by a power strugglebetween Mao and Liu. But we never made that argument. Rather, we agreewith Xia that Mao was worried that his senior colleagues might unite againsthim. Indeed, we made that very point in our introduction (pp. 9–10). How-ever, we do not agree that Mao could simply have arrested Liu or Lin Biao.Mao was perennially conscious of the verdict of future historians and wantedprecisely to avert any possibility that he could be compared to Josif Stalin as aleader who arrested colleagues and sent them off to prison or worse.

Xia’s voluminous listing of Chinese sources exhibits his great knowledgeof this ªeld, and it will be a valuable aid to future researchers on this topic.With respect to some of the sources he mentions, we chose not to cite thembecause we did not believe they added much (e.g., Marshal Xu Xiangqian);but in other cases we either did not come across the sources or did not obtain

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them in time. We also faced a more fundamental dilemma: we wanted to pro-duce a “state-of-the-art” study, but we were also conscious that the more foot-notes and sources we added to the end of the book, the less likely we were toattract the intelligent general readers who were our target readership. As itwas, a number of otherwise complimentary reviews commented that thenumber of Chinese names meant that the book was only for specialists.

Xia makes numerous other speciªc complaints and adjustments, and onsome of these we will have to agree to disagree. But I would point out that inthe case of the Wuhan incident, we relied heavily on the account given byWang Shaoguang in his 1995 book on the subject.37 If Wang revised his nar-rative and analysis in a fall 2006 article, after our book was published, thatwas our bad luck. As for whether the doctors dared to say that Mao had onlyabout two years to live, we relied on Dr. Li Zhisui’s account in The Private Lifeof Chairman Mao.38 Finally, we are particularly grateful to Xia for his listing ofsome errors, which we will try to correct in the paperback version.

We were intrigued by David Apter’s comments because his RevolutionaryDiscourse in Mao’s Republic (co-authored with Tony Saich) does indicate someof the distant origins of the CR in the Yan’an Rectiªcation Campaign, inwhich Kang Sheng rehearsed his later, even more sinister role.39 Apter is rightto suggest that we should have referred to that campaign. The nearest wecame to it was our reference to the “culture of violence that class struggle rep-resented” (p. 131). The Yan’an Rectiªcation was the ªrst major instance of in-ternal class struggle after Mao attained a dominant position in the party.

Even more interesting is Apter’s comment that the almost total absence oftheory in our book suggests either that we are indifferent to it or that we be-lieve the more one knows about a situation, the more grand theories becomeinadequate. Actually, this is not totally accurate, even though he is right toimply that we saw our main task as giving the general reader an account ofthese extraordinary events that would be as factual and dispassionate as possi-ble. For us, a key question underlying our narrative was how Mao managed tobring about the chaos, a feat he achieved with much help but with little resis-tance. For this purpose, as indicated above, we adopted Kershaw’s concept ofworking toward the leader. Countless Chinese, both leaders and led, adoptedthis tactic, out of either fear or enthusiasm. In effect, this is what Apter delin-eates as one of the “dialectical” themes of the book. The theory that we need is

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37. Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995).

38. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. by TaiHung-Chao (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 380–385.

39. David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1994).

one that compares the most important twentieth-century dictators, Lenin,Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, something which I attempted in a brief appendix inthe ªnal volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (pp. 331–333), butmore at the empirical rather than the theoretical level.

Finally, to repeat, our warm thanks to the reviewers and the editor forgiving our book this splendidly extensive treatment.

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Documents

Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China