The Days When Mao Shook the World A Retrospective Comment on the Cultural Revolution
Napoleon had said: "China sleeps; let her sleep, for when she wakes the world will tremble!" In the 1960's the world trembled to the march of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the man who launched this revolution, with a call to Chinese youth to "bombard the headquarters" was incredibly none other than Mao Ze Dong himself, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. A generation has passed away since those stirring events, and few, perhaps, now remember how the earth seemed to move beneath one's feet during what was called a "Great Proletarian Revolution." It failed to restrict itself to a quarter of humankind, and sparked various protest and civil disobedience movements throughout the world. America burned when at long last its blacks "stood up", as Mao said the Chinese had in 1949. The Irish defied the English in Belfast. Western students rebelled against their societies' sanctimonious hypocrisies in all major university campuses. "The Spirit of '68" became a turning point in the cultural development of Europe. Workers struck all over the world. Revolutionary movements in several small, poor countries took heart. In India, the naxalites brought back into popular imagination the exaltation of the times of the freedom struggle, of the times of the Rani of Jhansi, and of Bhagat Singh. The Cultural Revolution in its time was often compared to the Paris Commune, and it enthused young and old alike in distant lands, like the Paris Commune, which made even the aging Garibaldi to think of leaving his island of Carera in defence of the people. And like the Paris Commune it failed, not because of the lack of support or sacrifice of the people, but because of deficiencies in its leadership, and the preponderant power of the forces it challenged. From the days of Spartacus, history records the failure of revolutions, but no revolution has ended without leaving an enduring mark on the consciousness of people, and tangible enlargement of their liberties. If today China is counted the third most powerful economy in the world, it owes its pre-eminent position among third world countries, paradoxically, to the "great disorder under heaven" that occurred in those times.
Western China watchers are more or less agreed that the Cultural Revolution was essentially a power struggle between Mao and other party leaders, a destructive upheaval launched by an aging deluded leader who traded on his personal charisma to venture even to topple the structure he had built, in a vain attempt to preserve total personal authority. Romantics forgive the destruction for the sake of the idealist vision. Sir Charles Tennyson said in his nineties that only two men epitomized our times: his grandfather, the poet Alfred Tennyson, and the other, Mao Ze Dong!. The West, when it is not pathologically dreading the East, is equally absurdly wishing the Orient to be a repository of all wisdom, and all solutions for the torments of our times.
Perhaps China more than India has been a victim of the Orientalist vision, so well explored by Edward Said. The military superiority of the West led 19th century Western leaders, whether politicians, scientists, or artists, to hold all things oriental in contempt, and where they could not understand them, in fear. The sense of God-given superiority also led a few of them to think of themselves as the ordained leaders or spokesmen of the people they had defeated. Lawrence of Arabia is a typical example of such a Westerner. Such spokesmen of the Orient also saw themselves as holding a key to esoteric knowledge, and a mystic culture, that only the initiated could appreciate. Even today we find alienated Westerners wandering on the beaches of Goa seeking salvation. We find earnest bands of Western China watchers justifying every twist of Chinese political expediency as a logical and natural outcome of the past. Such analysts applauded the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago in all its aspects, and painted Mao's China as some sort of Camelot, outside of historical time. Today, many are just as eager to find explanations in line with present-day Chinese pronouncements.
Whatever our judgment on the momentous times of the sixties, it is inescapably true that none can attempt to understand the Cultural Revolution without attempting to understand Mao, whose second spark started a prairie fire that could be seen in Washington.
The West had dreamed of Mao, long before it came to know of him, in the figure of the fictional villain, Dr. Fu Manchu, tall, dignified, an extraordinary scholar, a visionary, a leader among men, the defiant spirit of China, an implacable foe of Western imperialism. But Mao was no sick figment of a frightened imagination that was incapable of appreciating the ancient culture it had enslaved, though realizing the enormity of the crime that would invoke inevitable retribution. Like many a leader of the colonized world, Mao was a solid scholar, having studied "Confucius for seven years, and Marx for six." His roots were in the land, and like Mahatma Gandhi, and unlike many a present-day leader, he was quite at home with the poor. He would toss his cap on the threshing floor, and call an aged peasant uncle even when he was leading the People's Liberation Army in its final victorious battles against the Japanese army and Kuomintang forces. Like Gandhi, he was hardy. The Long March has passed into the legend of our times. Again, like Gandhi, he knew that victory depended on getting the masses on to your side. His protracted struggle was conducted with a great degree of discipline, with the PLA scrupulously refraining from exploiting the people, and paying for everything, at least in promissory notes. The Yenan days were days of fighting, and of social service, of "constructive work", to use Gandhi's words. He also knew that victory would only be achieved if the struggle had firm roots in the cultural idiom of the people. Mao's insistence on giving a Chinese face to Marxism received wide acceptance only after the debacle that led to the Long March. All of the Chinese could see the futility of accepting Russian control of their revolution. From that moment, Mao was the supreme soldier-leader. He turned the Long March from retreat into defiance in Yenan, and from defiance into final victory in three famous battles. As a soldier, he knew his job was to win; he was no Duke of Sung; he could not afford to be "honourable".
Victory in 1949 brought Mao to head a shattered country, and an enfeebled people far worse off than us in 1947. All the leaders in India, China, Russia, Europe, and America shared the same economic vision of development. The Bretton Woods Conference of the '40s and the stunning success of the Marshall Plan in revitalizing the war-torn European economy seemed to lend proof to the belief that economics was a science like any other. Marxist qualms could be stilled by adding a socialist dimension to its figures, a "Pareto" optimum to produce maximum benefit for the maximum number. But development in Five-Year Plans required money, training, and technology. None of this would come from America, which had helped Chiang Kai Shek to massacre as many experts as he could before being evacuated by the Seventh Fleet to his threatening base in Taiwan. Mao made the long journey to meet Stalin, who was willing to receive the Chinese leader, after making him wait dutifully for a few days. Victory had rehabilitated the Chinese, and Mao was able to return after having "wrested a precious gift from the lion's mouth". Russian aid poured in for hundreds of projects in China, and in the '50s the Chinese settled down, as we did, for modern science to bring the benefits of progress.
Economists in the '50s believed the world over in "a take-off stage", and argued about the necessary amount of savings needed, technological priorities, educational reform, and planning. Political necessities had already been satisfied by revolutionary victories, or decolonization. The rest was scientific routine. While Prof. Mahalonobis charted our path towards prosperity, the Russians waited to bury the West, in Krushchev's words. The Chinese and the Yugoslavs were equally convinced of this inevitability. What was necessary was to maintain Party leadership of the people, and the iron discipline that had converted untold sacrifices into resounding victories. Marxists knew of the laws of history as almost an extension of Newton's laws of motion. Economic planning was a part of these laws, and even the arch romantic revolutionary, Che Guevara, undertook control of the Cuban economic ministry!
But this complacent belief could also be very easily a formula for hanging on to power at all costs. And ultimately this is what Tito settled down to do. A bonaparte among partisan leaders, Tito won a skillful guerilla war among the Balkan mountains. The terrain equalized the advantage of German armour, and the mountain people fought off the invader as they had any foreigner in the past. Tito owed no loyalty to Stalin, and the socialism of his workers' control could be traced without much effort to the traditional village self-rule of his hills. In any case it could be financed by regular flows of money from the West for his army, which he understood, and which was a bastion against Soviet expansion for America, and for him and his close circle of military friends a way of life, and a position of power. Also, perhaps, the Croat in Tito disliked the Russian in Stalin.
Analysts would have expected Mao to be a Chinese Tito. Communist victory had found China destroyed. Nothing need be expected from the country or its leaders, except embarrassment if they begged in international forums. Luckily, they had put themselves beyond the pale by defeating Chiang Kai Shek. They could be diplomatically isolated, brought to their knees, and concessions could be wrung from them as during the great days of the "Chinese open door policy" in the early part of the 20th Century. The fierce war-readiness of the Chinese army surprised the Americans, and threw them back, when they attacked along the line of the Yalu river in the Korean war. Such was Western consternation, that General MacArthur even advocated the use of the ultimate weapon, the atom bomb. The Americans now entered upon a serious encirclement of "Global Communism", which would lead them immediately to the McCarthy witch-hunts at home, and the ultimate bestiality of the Vietnam war.
Mao's role was pivotal. He had no more reason to be loyal to Stalin than Tito had. The Confucian in him could only scorn the uncultured "long-nosed foreign devils" that Europeans, including the Russians, had shown themselves to be. But the same Confucian training enjoined respect for elders. While Mao's philosophy shows that he disagreed profoundly with Stalin's methods, he never gave himself the luxury of criticizing him, just as he had only respect for Sun Yat Sen. This is part of the heritage of an ancient culture which those outside of the Sino-Japanese world will find hard to understand. The man Mao broke, the present supremo, Deng Xiao Ping, speaks of Mao as he would of a "revered ancestor", an honorific Mao emphatically refused to accept in life. It is an iron heritage, and once it forced the Boxers who broke into the sanctum sanctorum of the Dowager Empress to kill themselves at her orders rather than take her prisoner as was their intention. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao would force the youth to go against the training of five thousand years. They had to take the steps he would not take himself. Why? He could have ruled China to the end of his dotage in peace, security, and respect. There would be no challenge to his power. He could have done what everyone, including the elite Chinese leadership, expected him to do. He could cool the conflict with American imperialism. He could negotiate. He could beg in all honour as other third world leaders did. There was no need to escalate a conflict he could not win. There was every need to consolidate power at home. In spite of his heritage, Mao was also a Communist. He looked beyond the seizure of power towards the liberation of mankind.
The Soviet 20th Party Congress, while assuring the Russian intelligentsia and elite that the dreadful days of mass purges were over, also spoke of communism in terms of mass consumerism. The development of the socialist infrastructure would take care of all problems. The dachas and privileges of the Russian elite, their open contempt for workers, their pseudo-aristocratic hauteur in addressing subordinates, need not imply an upper class in formation. Class struggle had been abolished by the October Revolution. It was anyway convenient for a Communist leader to believe all this, and ask for more sacrifices from the people, in the style of World War I generals. But Mao was a consummate guerilla tactician. He never believed in fighting a battle he could not win. His rules of protracted war lay down that when the enemy remains unbeaten, you regroup and try a different tactic. The late '50s showed him a re-emergence of upper class values, attitudes, and interests even, and especially, among the upper echelons of the Party. He had never believed in mechanical progress or linear ideas. Dialectical thinking would be natural to a Chinese poet, particularly one whose poetry was shaped by the tragedies of struggle and the exaltation of a people finding their dignity. He remembered how ideas - the famous superstructure of the discourse of those times - could change history. The May 4th Movement early in this century had started with ideas, as intellectual indignation at the death of an innocent girl. Were revolutionary ideas of no importance because the Party had won in 49? Could they assume that poverty would be removed because Western economists told them so? Were the blatant privileges enjoyed by Party leaders, and their families, the just, merited, and needed rewards of leadership? The iron discipline of a communist and a soldier battled inside the man with the principles of a visionary. Mao had not followed the revolutionary's instinctual dislike of bureaucracy by alienating himself from power, as Garibaldi had done when he retired to his island with a bag of seed corn, or as Gandhi had done when he distanced himself from the Congress Party and identified himself with the voluntary movement. Nor would Mao accept the realities of power as Martin Luther had done when he broke the peasant movement, or as Cromwell had done, who destroyed the radical Levellers. He could have taken to massive purges of his colleagues as the egocentric and suspicious Robespierre or Stalin had done. Mao saw with the unerring eye of the poet that all these responses to power were not genuine alternatives, but more or less the same response of power that showed a profound pessimism about human nature and society. In another context he was to say he never understood what Engels meant by the negation of negation. He himself saw only affirmation after affirmation. Always affirmation. This is as close as he ever came to expressing a spiritual belief in people. He certainly once said that animals would rebel in their time to our exploitation of them!
The Cultural Revolution is a supreme act of trust in people, in their verdict, in their goodness, in their abilities. To them he wishes to pass the sceptre of power. Only a philosopher bred in the country would know this is more than wishful thinking; that this trust is not misguided but is an affirmation of lived experience. The Yenan years of struggle and victory had been experienced by him as a process by which the wisdom of the people had been taken "from the masses", and then consolidated and given back "to the masses". At the same time there would be no certainty. As the struggle intensified, as "great disorder under heaven" occurred, as the innocents sufferd, and the fundamentalists seized power, and perverted the course of the Cultural Revolution, he compared himself to a monk with a leaky umbrella. That is, a monk who first shaves his head, and then needs an umbrella, which inevitably leaks. But he was not given to futile gestures. He was a soldier, and he expected to win. But as a soldier, he could also taste the bitter reality of defeat.
The precursor of the Cultural Revolution is the Great Leap Forward launched by Mao in the late '50s as his tribute to people's knowledge. What the West now celebrates as a fashionable idea, and as a way of capitalizing on age-old wisdom, Mao saw as a sure way of breaking out of the poverty trap by depending on people's own capacities. They had helped him beat the Japanese and the Kuomintang. He had proof of their extraordinary tenacity, and the ability to survive under the harshest conditions. His Chinese sense told him it was not necessary to follow western experts blindly. More than all, he wanted to break the hold of the intelligentsia over the people. "The White Cat, Black Cat" debate, made into a great principle of State pragmatism by Deng Xiao Ping, raged even then. For Mao, as for Gandhi, technology was not value free. More important than the catching of mice was the question of which cat caught them. This insistence on the colour of the cat was not mere ideological dogma, but rested on the question who would ultimately control resources, and benefit from them. If the poor were left as mere workers who carried out the will and ideas of others, they would necessarily descend to form a subordinate class, while the intellectual workers would assume command of society, and the privileges that go with control and authority. An upper class would re-create itself, as happened in Russia, and was visibly happening around him in China. The division between mental and manual work was fundamental in the way society was ordered. This division could not be bridged by empty slogans of "peoples participation" as we do under World Bank instigation, nor could it be bridged by Yugoslavian methods of workers control. Workers could control only when they shared in the production of knowledge, and the intelligentsia could be controlled, and assimilated into society, only when they shared the manual labour of people. But was all this more than a romantic notion? The close investigations he had carried out into the conditions of the societies of the poor gave him the confidence a Great Leap Forward could be achieved. What three decades later the Western world has come to recognize as traditional wisdom, the science and profits of which can be stripped from the poor through processes such as the Dunkel Draft, Mao saw then as a force of liberation. But the pundits of the Western universities had already enslaved the Chinese mandarins with their overpowering assumption of knowing the only true science. The East was sunk in a sense of being inferior in the mind. We have felt the same self-contempt, and responded by raising images of Ram Rajya, or holding seminars on ancient Indian technology. Mao's approach was to start "backyard furnaces".
This initiative was loudly jeered in the West, in India, and by the intelligentsia. It was called wasteful, a leap backwards, and basically absurd. In 1950 China produced no more than half a million tonnes of steel, while India produced three times as much. Today, China produces 80 million tonnes annually, while India has reached 17 million tonnes production. And it must be remembered China's iron ore is far inferior to Indian iron ore, among the best in the world. A large part of Chinese production is due to its over 700 mini blast furnaces, of less than 50 cubic metre capacity, which find their origin in this great movement of making your own iron and steel.
It has been pointed out by communist commentators that the Great Leap Forward was initiated without careful preparation. It could not be otherwise. It was a leap into the dark, based on faith in the people's abilities. If Mao had allowed careful preparation, it would have been a Party-led movement, managed by the government. The initiative would have remained with the elite, and could never pass to the people. It would have been another propaganda measure, a socialist pacifier, which would have underlined bourgeois dogma that the people have capacities only for work, under the direction and domination of their betters.
There were many sporadic successes, many a tale of innovation and people's power. But the great disorder under heavens caused by the movement, particularly the too rapid establishment of communes, which consolidated the production brigades into units of self-governance, brought agricultural failure, and mass starvation. What the actual body count was will perhaps never be known. Figures were suppressed in horror by the Party. Figures these days are exaggerated to show the defect of Mao's policies. Prof. Amartya Sen, who has studied famines better than anyone else, accepts a death toll of several million. These are undoubtedly exaggerated figures supplied by the present Chinese leadership. Recognizing that the bourgeois class manipulates all structures of society, Communists have felt entitled to manipulate facts in turn, believing that the ends justify the means. Unfortunately, and predictably, their powers of manipulation have been weaker, and the distortions of fact, in direct philosophical opposition to their aim of empowering the people, have led to a corruption of the ends. The Chinese famine of the early 60's, like the Bengal famine of '43, or the Sahelian famines of the '70s and '80s, was not so much caused by a fall in production, as by a failure in management. Prof. Sen ably points out that during 72-73, the per capita availability of grain in Maharashtra was less than in the Sahel, but India avoided a famine by opening public relief works, and activating the public distribution system. The Sahelian countries which did neither experienced mega famine deaths. India of course has a well-tried experienced governmental system to avoid famines, designed first by Mohammed bin Thuglak, and used effectively since then, except during the disastrous second half of the nineteenth century, when the British government was in the process of assuming full imperial power. The famine of '43 was deliberately allowed to happen as the food stocks were held back for the use of the army. Panicked public reaction intensified a controllable problem. The government acted too late. Famine, then, is a management issue. The Chinese have also had sophisticated famine avoidance and public relief measures for several centuries. What stampeded the Party and government was the shaking up of the lines of control and authority that the Great Leap Forward produced. In vast countries like India and China, there are always regional food imbalances, since the bulk of agriculture is rain-fed. These production imbalances are promptly corrected by governmental intervention. During 1958 to 1961, people's energies were re-directed from food grain production into other channels. Poor agricultural seasons compounded the problem. Food production shortage coincided with the political movement aimed at by-passing governmental control. The system was bewildered. A delay in response, as during the Bengal famine, resulted in appalling tragedy. Mao, the liberator, had brought death to the people he loved.
Transcripts of the inner Party discussions that followed show his intense agony of mind. His followers punctiliously refused to criticize him. "Criticize me!" he cried, shunning as ever the role of "revered ancestor", even as he sat among them. He would sit for hours at table without touching food. He gave up meat. He himself had not spared his contempt for economism. Talking of the "White Cat, Black Cat" dispute, he had called pragmatism shit that was of no use to anybody, worse than dog-shit which could at least be used as manure. And now the Great Leap Forward had ended in death and disaster. The fault lay neither in the conception, nor the capacities of the people, though this was how it came to be portrayed. The problem lay in the hierarchical nature of the Party itself, the inured habits of iron discipline, the traditional obedience the Chinese give their superiors. The Chinese could have made the Leap, but they did not know how to dare to do so without permission from above. And those above were told to wait for initiatives from below. Even when faced with imminent tragedy the rigour of discipline and obedience held, and aborted the ambitious leap forward. The fault then lay in people's response to authority, in the traditions that had held the Middle Kingdom together for millennia. The fault lay in the "super structure" in Marxist ideological terms.
Mao had a choice. He could let the slow transformation of culture to occur as one generation passed into another. He was not an old man in a hurry. The man who thought, even in the late '40s, that the struggle for freedom would take a hundred years, and the man who had created the parable of the patient Old Man of the Mountains, was certainly not in a hurry. Mao's fear was of the corruption of the people's revolution through the hardening of the processes of economism. The dreadful example of the plight of the Russian people could not be forgotten. Nor, the legacy of Lenin's, who had made a simple equation that Communism equaled Electricity plus Soviet power. But despite all the energy of the black-leather coated bolsheviks, who lived on 100 grams of bread a day, the Soviets had not taking over power in the days of War Communism, after the 1917 revolution. At the end of his life, Lenin exclaimed in pain that all that was created was only the "Tsarist machinery painted red!" Mao saw the mantle of the Dowager Empress falling upon him, and the visionary in him revolted at the thought. No great leap forward in expanding the infrastructure with peoples control could be achieved without changing the way people recognized and respected authority. Did he dare to challenge the structure the Party had so painfully built up, and after so many hazards? Was it wise to jeopardize the achievements of the revolution in an attempt to reach even higher? The question that decided him was the health of the revolution itself. To hesitate was to condemn China to a slow degeneration into Statism and State- monopoly capitalism. He would call on the youth to "Bombard the Headquarters!".
The Great Character Poster was the idiom of those momentous days. The youth learnt to rebel, to question, to demand - in China, in America, in Europe, in India. The extravagances of youth and the energy of artists had full play. Challenge upon challenge shook the establishments. They were forced to think of answers when there were none. A French student poster exhorted: "Do something practical. Demand the Impossible!" The British playwright, Tom Stoppard, has one of his characters say: "It is best to be an artist. But if you can't, be a revolutionary!".
Modern capitalist society that had alienated the great majority was shown to be malleable to human intervention. In China itself age-old traditions of respect were overthrown. Violence and ugliness were inescapable, of course. Deng's son was thrown from a window and paralyzed. Many tradition-bound people committed suicide rather than face public ignominy. There was great disorder, but the Chinese have believed that "crisis" and "opportunity" exist back to back. Much enthusiasm was also created. The enormous Red Flag Canal was built with human voluntary labour. Western diplomats in Beijing were amazed to see young people in their hundreds, in the evening, pour out to offer free labour service for a few hours in building the Ming Tombs Dam. Such civic response is not unknown elsewhere. Our people have responded magnificently during the Avanigadda cyclone disaster, and the broken bridges over the Danube were re-built by the citizens of Budapest. The Cultural Revolution was unique in producing such enthusiasm in peace time, when there was no phenomenal crisis. When the dust settled and wounds were a memory, few among westernized overseas Chinese could bring themselves to condemn Mao, even for the suicide of their cultured parents. They sensed the Cultural Revolution as an inevitable extension of the older Chinese revolution. This term comes once again from Lenin, but while Russians sneered that what Lenin had meant was an education of the masses in cultural values, Mao was right in assuming that what Lenin had meant was the creative appropriation by the masses of cultural leadership. Marx's Grundrisse lays the intellectual foundations for Lenin's and Mao's assumptions.
Much happened during this period that strengthened the foundations of modern China. Most of the communes have by now been dismantled and the wind in China blows in favour of individual holdings. What should not be forgotten is the process through which China became such a successful agricultural country. With 30% less land under the plough than India, China produces more than double our annual yield of food-grains. And this in a country that knew cannibalism, during the countrywide starvation of the early '40s! Even before the victory of 1949, mutual aid teams had been formed from among the poor, and based on the traditional principles of clan support. But in the mutual aid teams, the poor helped each other, rather than worked on the lands of a rich "uncle", who would provide them jobs. These teams, later termed production teams, were consolidated into brigades, and these were later joined to form communes for self-provisioning and self-governance of a group of villages. The commune had administrative responsibility for all local production, agricultural and cottage industry, for education and health. By the early eighties, the communes managed farm machinery totaling 220 million horsepower; they had built 84,000 reservoirs with a total capacity of 400 billion cubic meters; and they ran 337,800 enterprises( on an average of 6.2 per commune), engaging over 31 million people, and producing around 12% of China's gross value of industrial production. This process of rural decentralization of power was sought after by Gandhi, who gave a call for "Gram Swaraj", and is the ideal of the European Greens and the Schumacher School. It is such decentralization as the commune movement produced that enables balanced regional development to take place. For a thousand years the dry regions north of the Huang river depended on food grain imports from the south. The slow process of latent development that the communes ensured ultimately produced enough food sufficiency in the north, through area planning and environment regeneration, for the food imports to be stopped at last in 1973. Skills, capital, and savings at the micro level were built up village by village. The process was unspectacular and inconspicuous. But the poor of China did build up savings, started to buy bicycles, watches, and radios. The aggregate purchasing power in rural China, that was built up by the communes, ultimately gave a massive boost to Chinese industry which started to surge ahead from the early '80s. Other third world countries, especially India, have depended on an export-led growth strategy which is doomed to failure since our industries have neither the state-of-the-art technologies necessary, nor the economies of scale, to compete in the open market with Western industrial giants. We cannot fuel industrial growth by supplying internal rural markets, since purchasing power in villages is restricted to around 10% of the population.
The only way is effective decentralization to produce this rural purchasing power, but we lack the political will, and the administrative machinery to make it happen. The Chinese displayed their political will by extensive land reforms between 1949 and 1951, when at least 30% of the land changed hands. The commune structure provided effective machinery for rural wealth to develop. A similar phase of rural cooperation was gone through by the farming communities of Scandinavia, Holland, and the French peasants of the Jura. If these European cooperative structures were gradually abandoned, it is because they had out-grown their usefulness. Perhaps, the Chinese communes have also outgrown their usefulness, but the political expediency of the moment has led Chinese leaders to portray them as a disaster so that their own positions of power could be consolidated.
If political styles are discounted, the example of Dachai has still a lot to teach the third world. All the slogans of the World Bank found their reality there in terms of people's participation, self-help, accountability , use of local knowledge and expertise, sustainable development, ecological regeneration, and gender sensitivity, under that commune's youthful woman leader. Most remarkable of all, this small, poor brigade in a remote part of Shanxi province, with around 50 hectares of light, poor, dry soils, broken up in small plots, took grain yields up from 750 kg./ha to over 6 tonnes/ha! This was a minor miracle of ecological farming and cooperative group action. While the West jeered at China, it secretly learnt from it, and it is one of the wry tragedies of our times that the present Chinese leaders should join the West in denouncing what is a great chapter in their history. The medical profession is one of the most select in an elite world. The Chinese "barefoot doctors" challenged the role of this orthodoxy, and their lead has been successfully copied elsewhere, by the ujamaa movement in Tanzania, and among others by Drs Arole in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, who were personally inspired by the Chinese example. Many of the Western post-modern stances of today had their creative social origins in the China of the Cultural Revolution.
The cultural revolution was not a break from the policies Mao had pursued since the Yenan days. In fact, it was the culmination of the ideological efforts of the Communist Party of China, and the goals that had been set in Chinese society by Mao from the very beginning. Again, despite the change in policies and political leadership, the China of today continues to contain within it many of the key elements that appeared to be so novel, and so striking, 30 years ago, and are seen as fearful by many western observers. The Communes established in rural areas where models for decentralization, and for giving administrative and planning authority to the poor themselves. Though the present policies are espousing the capitalist road of development, still about a third of the communes remain, and have resisted attempts at dismantling them. Nor would the present leadership be really keen to dismantle the very structure that produced purchasing power from among the poor to create a demand base in the great rural areas of China for the quickly strengthening limbs of Chinese industry. Perhaps, it is sufficient to the present leadership that it has convincingly established its authority to chalk out a new path of development.
One must also not forget that till very recently China adhered to the policy of the "iron rice bowl", as defined by Mao, which meant the right of every person to employment. It is only now that China is experimenting with rising unemployment, and its consequences. Similarly, right from 1949 till very recently all essential commodities including grain, wheat, cotton cloth, cooking oil etc. were regulated in price, as were rents and the cost of medical services and education. The cultural revolution reinforced the right of the poor of the China to have work, and the essential necessities of life at stable prices, and the right to housing, medicine and education. Again it is only in the recent past that China started experimenting with the consequences of inflation.
The regulation of prices and employment was not produced through a top-down high-handed structure. On the contrary, Mao gave life to the principle "from the masses to the masses", which he had followed from the early days in the 20's when he made a famous assessment of revolutionary possibilities in Hunan. What this principle meant was that a key role of cadres of the Party was to listen very carefully to the masses, and learn from them, not only about existing realities, but about possible ways of changing this reality for the benefit of all. Having learnt from the masses the party could consolidate its ideas, and present them back to the people as a working revolutionary manifesto. This approach was further strengthened by Mao's famous paper in which he stated that all great ideas of history come from the social practice of people themselves, and not from the heads of individuals belonging to the elite. This belief in the people he converted into a planning process popularly known as "Two up and two down". Planning was started at the village level even at the level, of production teams, and was taken all the way up in stages of consolidation right up to the centre. Modifications, and balances were attempted to be achieved at the centre, and these revisions again came down step by step to the very lowest level. A further revision took place at the grassroots, and these revisions once again went up to the top before the plan could be finalized.
Such a complex planning process, which was the essence of democratic planning, could not have achieved the successes it did without an administrative structure based on the "three-in-one" formula, i.e. at every level of decision making and management, the committee had to be composed of people drawn from the higher ranks, the middle ranks, and the lowest ranks. Committees were also composed of ordinary people, party cadres, and officials; of young people, middle aged people, and old people; and with a minimum 30% representation from women. Though many years ago Mao had said that women held up half the sky, it was only during the cultural revolution that a proper place was found for women in decision-making councils, and an early voice was heard of feminist principles. Public debate of the most detailed kind became the norm during the cultural revolution on all questions of development, human rights, planning and administration. The right to rebel which was enshrined in this period as a democratic principle did not mean a futile rejection of the status quo, but a creative participation by people in shaping their future. The commonly seen big-character posters of those days was a way by which anybody could initiate a discussion of far reaching national issues. No nation has seen such a level of democratic debate and disputation, since the days of classical Greece. Despite the many regrettable excesses that took place during that period one must not forget that the guiding principle and norm of these unsettled times was condemnation by public censure rather than through use of physical force or the curtailment of a person's liberties. That this principle was breached often is a regrettable fact, and a fact which ultimately brought an end to a progressive democratic movement.
As mentioned above many of the cornerstones of elite privilege and professionalism were challenged during this period. The barefoot doctor programme, reaching out medical services to the masses, has caught on throughout the world, and in fact had been made respectable by doctors such as a Werner who has written the now famous "Where there is no Doctor". Experimentations in the educational system were equally innovative, but unfortunately have not been long lasting. Mao condemned the examination system as similar to launching a surprise attack on the enemy. Chinese schools successfully experimented in getting children of a whole class to take responsibility for the education of all of the students so that the whole class would pass an examination without anyone being left behind. Learning through production was another innovation through which the age-old apprenticeship system was incorporated into modern education. Students from the universities were sent to serve in rural areas. But all of these far-reaching measures, extending the meaning and content of education, have unfortunately been lost in the present Chinese drive to acquire skilled technicians who can help China compete in world markets.
The period when this upheaval was launched was one of great threat to Chinese security with the US Seventh Fleet poised around China's coastline, and armed with nuclear weapons. Despite this great threat Mao launched the great experiment of removing the system of rigid heirarchal ranking, and symbols of power, from the officers of the army to level down differences between leaders and led in the most crucial sector that maintains the Party's power. Such a far-reaching measure did not undermine the discipline, nor the power of the army. This fact alone tells us that Mao was neither alone nor mad when he undertook such reforms. The army submitted to such reforms out of its commitment to the ideals they all shared in common. It was a signal that the defence of the country was not in the hands of the few, but depended on the people. As Mao said once even if the nuclear weapons of the imperialists destroyed most of China, the war would destroy the imperialists, and from some corner the Chinese people would be able to recreate a humane society.
The principle of trusting the people, and making the common person the prime subject of history was attempted through a creation of new art forms, of which the Peking Opera was the most spectacular. Unfortunately, the feudal and fascist tendencies that existed within the Chinese leadership converted these well meaning attempts into farce, with the result that opportunists and traditionalists could wreck a democratic movement unique for its time.
Those times also produced the "three worlds theory", which has left an enduring name for poor countries. Like a true revolutionary and an internationalist, Mao saw the common cause poor countries could make in their different fights against exploitation and imperialism. He recognized them as a world, held together in poverty, like the poor of a country, oppressed by imperial powers, exploited by the rich countries. He saw the rich countries as a club, as the G7 proclaims itself, and as the European Community wishes to weld itself. Above all others, he saw the imperial power of America, challenged for world hegemony by the Soviet Union, which itself ruled lesser powers within the domain of its influence. The destructive break-up of the USSR, and the dozens of conflicts and divisions this has unleashed, lend support to Mao's view of the world and its modern history. Clever disputations could argue these points for ever, but the common front the poor countries established as "the third world" remains a tribute to his revolutionary politics.
The "right to rebel" released excesses of behavior that continue to haunt Chinese leaders. They do not wish for a just assessment of the movement but merely its suppression during their time. Perhaps, they are right. Perhaps, the movement fulfilled its purpose. Mao tried to stem the tide he had unleashed. He exhorted the Red Book waving Red Guards to read a few books. He told them how he himself had studied for years. He wanted them to abjure violence. He warned: "A head is not like a leek. If you cut it off, it won't grow again!" Incidentally, and not too strangely, this remark was misinterpreted in the West by no less a commentator than Bernard Levin, to imply that Mao did want people to be killed! Such is the Western fear of, and detestation of, things strange and oriental. Around Mao grew the "Gang of Four", named so by himself when he warned them not to isolate themselves totally from the Party. The movement was intended to educate the Party through self-correction, not to destroy it from within. But all they, and Lin Piao, could see was the struggle for power. In an attempt to establish ascendancy over mainstream Party moderates, the gang moved towards extremist, even fascist positions. The only correct position was whatever they said it was. The reduction of debate through bully-boy tactics, and the general fear of consequences among the many, all reduced the Cultural Revolution to a parody of itself. The only safe author to quote was Lu Hsun; the only piece of music to play, the Internationale. The deification of Mao was part of this power play. Ailing and aged though he was, by the early '70s Mao had already put brakes on the Cultural Revolution, and had his statues taken down everywhere. Mao had attempted a daring act of empowerment. As in the previous attempt, he had failed, as he said himself, "to reach the very heights of revolution." The traditional responses to power could not be broken in a generation, or a life-time. The course of Nature could not be hurried. He asked people to celebrate the passing of old men, for how else would one get change?
While he failed to achieve the goal he set for his revolution, he helped achieve a prosperity and security for his people they had not known since the days of the Ming Dynasty. He had also left them a little legacy, the right to rebel, and this right was appropriated by Deng himself to dismantle the cult of Maoism. This is as Mao would have wished. In the year of his centenary, tourists to China are offered jewel-studded watches carrying Mao's picture, and records play once again the stirring notes of "The East is Red". Despite his will, Mao has become a revered ancestor. The Chinese will not assess him. For them, he has passed into legend. The world can do no better than to salute this great son of China, who during the heady days of the sixties gave hope and courage to the wretched of the earth.
