On Mao Tse-tung

January 14, 2023

First Encounter with Mao

Prior to reading the book “Mao: The Unknown Story”, my closest encounter with Mao, his life, and his behaviors was through the book “On China” by Henry Kissinger. In this book, Kissinger has considerable praise for Mao, describing him as a shrewd tactician & political strategist who plays the political game at a masterclass level. An example of his political skills provided in Kissinger’s book was the way he developed relationships with the Americans as a counterweight to the Soviets in order to preserve his own rule within China during the era of the Vietnam War & Nixon Administration - alternatively though, the biography provides a new interpretation of these events and places his outreach to the Americans in the context of his own desire for power and prestige on the world stage, something Mao pursued for decades.

Through Kissinger’s writings, I had an appreciation and understanding of what Mao accomplished in terms of raising China’s national power on the international stage in a realist sense and also developed a feeling of reverence towards his legacy, but didn’t have an understanding of what these accomplishments cost to the people he ruled over, the people who are ostensibly represented in the name of his country itself, “The People’s Republic of China”.

The Great Leap & Cultural Revolution

Simply put, my interpretation and understanding of Mao & his legacy has changed considerably when considering his attitude towards the people he represented, his disregard for their welfare, him viewing them as expendable automatons whose only purpose is to further his own interests - in other words, the complete lack of connection and empathy towards the hundreds of millions of people he ostensibly represented & spoke for. He continuously increased the grain taxes per capita, while vastly reduced the allotted food rations for peasants through fabricated harvest numbers, causing immense famine across the country, all in the pursuit of his goal to increase the military power of China through weapons industry development and the construction of an atomic bomb. What an incredibly blunt, explicitly careless, &vicious act it was to export much needed food for the basic sustenance of his population to western communist nations that were far wealthier than China in exchange for military technology, machinery, & knowledge - and political prestige, goodwill, and power relative to the Soviets.

The Cultural Revolution was started with the express intent to purge a large amount of senior Communist Party officials - specifically those associated with a man he’d known well for decades from before the Long March - Liu Shaoqi, the President of China, & who he now perceived as a powerful rival at the highest levels of power. While it’s more understandable, yet still reprehensible in a pragmatic sense, if a leader is jockeying for power purely on the basis of dominating his rivals & competition, the merits of whether this is good or bad depend heavily on the cost & other non-perceived externalities. In this case, Mao intentionally instigated & promoted the breakdown of social order, especially the relationships between students & their elders

This threw the country into utter chaos for ten years until his death, purely because Liu Shaoqi wished to end the reprehensibly policies of the Great Leap Forward, specifically the massive food exports and wasteful mass mobilization efforts in industry, military, and defense that were leading to mass suffering and starvation for hundreds of millions of people - something he witnessed with his own eyes that compelled him to risk his life on fixing. Instead of finding a way to work with Liu, Mao’s innate resulting vindictiveness towards him dominated any sense of empathy he may have had towards his own people - and as a result, this vindictiveness resulted in Liu being purged and subjected to a long, painful, and drawn-out death just for representing and advocating for the very basic welfare of the people in addition to tens of millions of others losing their lives & hundreds of millions suffering due to the societal breakdown. Surely there must have been a way to compromise here & improve the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people.

Mao’s Philosophy on Societal Control

Mao’s primary goals were to safeguard his own life, maintain his existing power, and expand his personal power. In the pursuit of these goals, he mobilized the people to fulfill his dream of building China into a military superpower capable of rivaling the old powers of Europe - Britain, France, & Germany, the Soviets, and the Americans. In his own words, his eventual dream was to turn the whole world Red - what an absolute travesty that would have been.

The book discusses a startling, yet in-character reaction that a young Mao had towards the induced peasant uprisings that occurred at the start of the Northern Expedition - the first movement to unify China by the Nationalists in 1926. Upon concluding a tour of the countryside and viewing the aftermath of the uprisings, Mao discovered the unsurprisingly monumental effects that uncertainty, anguish, terror, disgrace, and the loss of dignity can do to a population. In other words, he states that he felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before” about the brutality he witnessed - the torture, torment, abuse, violence, and killing that occurred throughout the countryside of Hunan Province. He continues in his journal - “It is wonderful! It is wonderful!” in a tone of ecstatic adulation. Clearly, he’d found a mechanism through which he could mold society to his own will in pursuit of his own goals of unrestricted power.

Another notable example later in life was to say in response to the somewhat Dharmic adage to “do to others only what you’d do to yourself” was to say “Nonsense, I only do to others exactly what I don’t want done to me”.

His approach to conquering and using China for his own purposes was to render the country a prison, both physically, mentally, and culturally - destroying the populations bodies in the Great Leap Forward, their minds through the continuous terror and purges, and the cultural essence of the nation he was to rule through the Cultural Revolution. In other words, the most effective way to control people was through pure terror in the same vein as Stalin - and this was his prescription both at the highest levels of power in the CCP Politburo where he kept his subordinates jockeying for his favor among themselves, all the way down to rural village cadres whom he encouraged sheer brutality and terror to keep people in line.

Concluding Thoughts - An Undeserving Mao

Mao was a tyrant driven by absolute selfishness, a lust for power, irresponsibility, the absence of empathy, and a literal enjoyment of suffering - and these traits led to utter misery for the people of China for close to 30 years. The CCP was purely his vehicle for attaining personal power, and if possible he would have changed his political allegiances based on whatever dogma was compatible with his unconditional pursuit of personal power.

His status in the West as a semi-revered pragmatic leader that approaches the level of philosopher-king is absolutely undeserved, especially when comparing the outcomes of the government in Taiwan, which was exceedingly less repressive & allowed democracy and freedom to eventually reign. His incessant replacement of the national interest with that of his own led to unfathomable turmoil, and in hindsight looks like a societal seizure, a complete and utter disease of the collective societal mind. Mao ruling China was a curse on the nation, & both the country & the world benefited greatly with his eventual death in 1976 & the subsequent consolidation of power under Deng Xiaoping.