As the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, Mao Zedong worked towards transforming the country into an industrialised Communist utopia until his death. In history, the nature of Mao’s image and role as the Chairman has been widely debated. To discuss the assessment presented in the question, it is important to understand and evaluate the epithets of ‘absolute monster’ and ‘great visionary’ in a socio-political and economic context. Contrasting schools of thoughts label him as either a visionary, as the man who foresaw a unified future of China, Sinified Marxism and created the bedrock of the super power that the PRC has grown to become, while others render him a monster, a person with no regard for human life post the Great Famine and the course of the Cultural Revolution, driven by unrealistic ideals during the Great Leap Forward, willing to set an ideological path but unwilling to accept failure. The task of evaluating the entirety of his 25 year long reign is unprecedented in its magnitude and faces a myriad of obstacles. However, by adopting a careful balance between the juxtaposing perceptions of Mao in history, it is possible to draw a conclusion and assess if Mao was an absolute monster, a great visionary, or possibly, both.
Mao’s hopeful vision for a Marxist China started off being achieved with a series of extremely hostile and despotic policies that aimed to consolidated Mao’s power. Before becoming Chairman, Mao eliminated 4000 Red Army members to eliminate opposition during the Futian Incident which set the monstrous and despotic tone of his entire regime. In 1951, Mao announced the beginning of the ‘anti-movements’. Aimed to destroy remnants of ‘the bureaucratic capitalist class’, the ‘anti-movements’ turned into a political tool and an excuse to resort to terror and establish political purges. Anyone who showed signs of disagreement to the CCP and their policies was deemed as an Imperialist sympathiser. By 1952, all other political parties were banned and China had transformed itself into a single party state in which the Central People’s Government Council, was Chaired by Mao, an unchallengeable figure in government. It is at this point that one can trace out patterns of Mao being a ‘monster’. In the political context, a monster is a leader that can be deemed inhumane, one that is unwilling to compromise and executes poor decisions with no regard for human life. This trait is one that Mao frequently exhibits throughout his reign.
One could comment on the fact that Mao’s visions for China were dual in nature. Firstly, he wanted to establish it as a Communist state. And consequently, he wanted to ensure that he had all the power. Keeping this in mind, Mao worked towards realising this vision in any way possible, even if it resulted in him being rendered a ‘monster’.
Soon after his establishment as Chairman of the PRC in 1949, Mao began concretising his vision for a united China by expanding territory and taking back land that allegedly belonged to China. Examples of this include Tibet which was invaded in October 1950 followed by Xinjiang and the southern province of Guangdong. This expansion of territory, however, was in no way achieved through peaceful methods. Mao’s troops asserted their domination over the people of these regions who tried to resist the PRC’s attempts of a ‘reunification campaign’; however, the PRC succeeded in imposing a regime of terror aimed at wiping out all traces of separate Tibetan identity. During the process of expanding territory, thousands of locals in the regions taken over were killed and the PRC portrayed no regard for human life. A similar pattern was noticed during the time of the Korean War, 1950-53. Mao sent an army of 3 million men under the command of Peng Dehuai in 1950 to support North Korea against a war with South Korea and the United States. Despite the fact that he was aware that the US possessed far superior military skills and was also advised against participating in the war by Lib Biao, Mao insisted that China must enter this war. Ultimately, it resulted in the death of nearly a million of the Chinese troops and resulted in the extremely fragile economy of the newly untidied nation being impacted badly. The reasons that Mao pushed China to participate in the war are unclear, and as stated by Jonathan Spence, are a ‘study in ambiguity’. However, one can assert that the primary reason as to why Mao was willing to send millions of his troops was in order to support a fraternal socialist country and fight against the capitalist United States. He wanted to be a true Communist, promoting permanent revolution at home and abroad, and aid Kim Il Sung. China was inundated with propaganda that stated ‘North Korea’s friends are our friends. North Korea’s enemy is our enemy. North Korea’s defence is our defence.’ Essentially, one of the primary reasons for Mao’s decision to allow the sacrifice of his troops was so that he could realise his vision of a powerful China with Communist allies all across the eastern world, from USSR to North Korea. The Korean War, while it resulted in unprecedented calamities, also allowed Mao to strengthen his hold back home; the ‘resits America and aid Korea’ campaigned gained a large support base because this was the first time that China had fought an Imperialist power.
An essential embodiment of the dichotomy in Mao’s legacy of being a monster or a visionary can be seen through the Hundred Flowers Campaign, 1957. After the success of the First Five Year Plans, Mao decided that it would be an appropriate time for establishing freedom of expression in China, i.e., ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao was supposedly altering his vision for China, ushering it into a more free and open society where debate, criticism and discussion are welcome. However, the Hundred Flowers Campaign led to an unprecedented amount of criticism directed at the CCP and Mao, which pushed him to abandon the entire movement and instead, expand on the previously stated ‘anti – movements’. Mao then began to target all those who had spoken up against the party and its Chairman and submitted them to re-education sessions, thought reform centres and purged the country of any critical thinkers. As estimated by Michael Lynch, 250000 sources of western influences were purged. The debate surrounding the Hundred Flowers Campaign and its consequential abandonment crops up when trying to understand if it was a trick to trap those who were disloyal, or truly a miscalculation of Mao’s behalf. If it was a trick, as advocated by Jung Chang, it is an example of Mao’s abilities to realise his vision of transforming China into a hyper-centralised Communist state with no sources of opposition. In this scenario, the Hundred Flowers Campaign would be the prime example of his vision of being the undisputed leader of the country. However, if Mao truly miscalculated the impacts of the Hundred Flowers and only launched the anti-movements out of fear, one could question if he truly was visionary as for being a visionary, one must be far sighted and able to see the consequences of their actions. In the end, however, as concluded by Michael Lynch, it did not matter what his intensions were – if he intended the rectification from the beginning or only decided to pursue them after realising the extent of criticism. Ultimately, the impact was the same and Mao crushed all those who opposed him and came a step closer to achieving his overpowering vision of strengthening his single party state.
Followed by the failure of the Hundred Flowers, Mao established his second Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The Great Leap Forward, for Mao, was the best possible way two industrialise and collectivise China, to make it ‘walk on two legs’. Through the GLF and its policies of ‘backyard furnaces’ and ‘Lysenkoism’, Mao wanted to tap into the revolutionary zeal of the “pioneering peasants” (Maurice Meisner) and workers to usher China into overtaking all industrialised nations, including Britain, the US and the USSR. While Mao had this vision of China of being an industrial superpower, it is important to acknowledge that the vision itself was unrealistic. When it comes to industry, Mao, following a “a new feverish drive to accelerate the expansion of the already overheated economy”(Hsu), pushed China and because of this, the implementation of his vision was far from what he had dreamt. In realising this vision, Mao took unprecedented monstrous steps. In the agricultural sector, Lysenkoism was made an official policy in 1958 along with which Mao drafted an eight-point constitution consisting of theories of crop growth such as those of deep ploughing, close planting, over fertilisation and planting smaller plants and seeds amidst larger crops. The “Kill the Sparrows Campaign”, also called The Four Pests Campaign, was launched by in 1958 with the aim to decrease the amount of sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes so as to protect the crops from these vermin. However, the deaths of large amount of sparrow fractured the food chain and drove up the number of pests and insects, especially locusts. Opposite to the original plan, crops were instead damaged. Ultimately, this damage in crops resulted in the Great Famine in China that killed nearly 50 million people due to starvation.
The nature of this problem was further amplified due to the ‘conspiracy of silence’. Each commune, desperate for recognition and being in the good books of Mao, tried to please him with inflated and deliberately distorted unrealistic figures. They were scared of the consequences of the true impact of the Great Leap Forward and chose to conceal detrimental issues such as those of the failure of collectivization, food shortages and the failure of the backyard steel productions and thus, Mao was unable to take measures to rectify its failure. There was so much fear around Mao and his enigmatic personality with streaks of monstrosity that those around him, out of self-interest, decided to conceal the truth. On the other hand, this argument can be countered with the assumption that it was impossible for Mao not to know about the reality of the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Mao was the undisputed leader of the People’s Republic of China and had a nexus of loyalists and informers all across the country. If low level cadres and party officials thought they were convincing Mao about the success of the Great Leap Forward, it was only because Mao was allowing them to think he was being convinced. For Mao, he only wanted to hear the truth on his own terms. Mao’s inherent lack of foresight, unwillingness to accept failure and tendency to blame the messenger of bad news during a crisis stems from the typical streaks of a political ‘monster’, a paranoid megalomaniac. In the case of Mao, a prime example of his ignorance towards failure was seen in July 1959 when Defence Minister Peng Dehuai sent Mao a private memorandum containing guarded criticisms of the Great Leap Forward. Mao responded aggressively, publicising Peng’s letter, denouncing him as a Rightist and forcing his expulsion from the government. Mao’s resistance towards acknowledging the failure of the GLF and the consequential millions of deaths embodies the image of a ‘monster’ who has no regard for the cost of pursuing his aims and someone who constantly justifies collateral damage. While the Great Leap Forward set out with hopeful visions for the People’s Republic of China, its implementation was unplanned and disastrous and its consequences unprecedented, leaving Mao looking like a monstrous dictator who could not look beyond his personal ambitions.
After the August 18th rally in Tiananmen Square, the Red Guards took the streets of Beijing and other cities, guided by the Little Red Book and destroyed any symbols of the feudal past and bourgeois influences, from museums, old books, modern Beethoven recordings and ancient Confucian texts. The Red Guards wrecked unprecedented havoc and followed a method of ‘licensed savagery’, torturing anyone with ‘decedent tendencies’ through emotionally and physically painful struggle sessions. They went as far as to besiege foreign embassies in China and assault their staff and diplomats in order to ‘oppose revisionism abroad and prevent revisionism at home’ While the power of the Red Guards was contained after Mao realised they were out of hands through the ‘up the mountain and down the villages’ campaign, the Cultural Revolution continued to target land lords, reactionaries, revisionists, intellectuals and basically anyone willing to stray from Mao’s vision for China. The PLA launched mass pogroms in which they tried to cleanse the class ranks and kill nearly 22900 and maimed 120000 people in only inner Mongolia. They sent revisionist and intellectuals to laogai, an extremely infamous labour camp modelled on the Soviet gulags. While it is true that Mao’s vision itself was distorted because of its bizarre aims of an ideologically pure China, one cannot deny that he was a visionary for tapping into the power and potential of the Chinese masses, and more specifically, the youth, through the Red Guards. In choosing China’s youth to be the instruments of the Cultural Revolution, Mao showed an astute grasp of mass psychology. The young were made to feel that they had a special role to play, not only in the regeneration of the nation, but in the creation of a new socialist order.
Overall, the Cultural Revolution killed nearly 2 million people and one of the Chairman's secretaries, Li Rui, wrote, "Mao was a person who did not fear death, and he did not care how many were killed." Mao instilled in people's minds a philosophy of cruel struggle and revolutionary superstition. Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of 'It is right to rebel!' became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. However, one must keep in mind that those who write about the Cultural Revolution and its impacts are most of the time the political victims of the very time, and as argued by Morris Meisner, their political and emotional stake in portraying the cultural revolution decade as an unmitigated disaster is no less compelling than the political stake the Maoists once had in portraying it as the most glorious of revolutionary triumphs. Therefore, the popularized criticism and condemnation of Mao and his Cultural Revolution, maligning him as an absolute tyrant, a power-hungry monster, must be looked at with a pinch of salt, keeping in mind the source and purpose of these views.
While Mao Zedong was a great revolutionary with a vision of establishing a Communist utopia in China, he became increasingly despotic and ‘monstrous’ as a ruler. He organised peasants of China to destroy age old forms of oppression and authority only to replace them with the alien authority of his own defied image. He liberate the Chinese nation from the shackles of foreign imperialism and domestic turmoil only to shackle the people of the country to the onerous demands of the ideas of continuous revolution and revolutionary sacrifice. The two sides of Mao – the revolutionary and the tyrant, the social liberator and the political dictator, the visionary and the monster – cannot easily be reconciled. Both must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the history of the People’s Republic of China. In order to draw a final conclusion on the assessment posed in the question, one could say that while Mao truly was a visionary with dreams and hopes for his country, he took monstrous steps to realise his vision dragged China into decades of violence and economic stagnation; essentially, it is the last assumption that holds true, the one that renders Mao as both, an absolute monster and a great visionary.
