EPILOGUE
Chinese are famous for their energy and industriousness. In a country with just one time zone, hundreds of millions of people wake up at the same time, at 6 A.M., perform qigong breathing exercises, eat breakfast, and go about their daily business to offices, to shops, to fields, to schools.
The people of Beijing arise before dawn and crowd onto the subway, buses, and trains. Bells ringing, they pedal along on their bicycles while the richer among them ride in taxis or private automobiles. They mill about noisily on the shopping streets, stare at foreign tourists, and fly dragon kites above Tiananmen Square.
From early in the morning, city markets seethe with activity, and the aromatic odors of marvelous dishes waft from innumerable hole-in-the-wall restaurants. In the lanes, the hutong, that have miraculously survived, old men and old women warm themselves in the morning sun, and children play nearby. One can hear the sharp sounds of Beijing speech and the cries of peddlers shouting their wares.
On the stretch of Wangfujing, one of the main shopping streets, recently turned into a pedestrian mall, there are especially large numbers of people. Crowds move about in every direction, but if you walk south you will come out onto the broad avenue of Chang'an, the main street of the city. Turn right and you will pass the massive Beijing Hotel, and in ten minutes you will come to the historic center of Beijing, Tiananmen Square. On the right is the Forbidden City, and on the left is the square itself.
The first thing that strikes your eyes is an enormous portrait of Chairman Mao adorning the entrance to the former palace of the emperor, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. There are his penetrating eyes, the domed forehead, and the distinctive mole under his lower lip. The Great Helmsman looks calm and dignified. It seems that for a long time he has no longer been concerned with what is going on in the Chinese Communist Party, the country, and the world. He is not bothered by the fact that contrary to the wishes he expressed in April 1956, his body was not cremated, but instead embalmed shortly after his death. It reposes right there on the square in a majestic mausoleum in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The white and sand-colored building is 110 feet high and covers 300,000 square feet. The body of Mao Zedong rests in the central hall, in a crystal coffin set on top of a pedestal of black Shandong granite. The Chairman is dressed in a grayish-blue jacket and covered with a red flag with the hammer and sickle. Around the pedestal are fresh flowers in white porcelain vases with blue patterns. At the head of the coffin, inscribed on a white marble wall are the gold characters “Eternal Glory to the Great Leader and Teacher Chairman Mao Zedong!”
The renascence of a market economy in the PRC in the late 1970s and early 1980s, facilitated by the “reincarnation” of the “moderate” faction soon after Mao's death, and most of all the return to power in July 1977 of Deng Xiaoping, led to the commercialization of the Mao cult. Hawkers and sellers in the souvenir shops in various parts of the city, including Tiananmen, do a brisk trade in kitsch: Mao badges and posters, busts, and Quotations of Chairman Mao. The transformation of the former leader into a souvenir of history was aided by the more than condescending assessment of his rule by the new leaders of the CCP. “Comrade Mao Zedong was a great Marxist and a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theorist. It is true that he made gross mistakes during the ‘cultural revolution,' but, if we judge his activities as a whole, his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary,” the party leaders asserted in 1981.1 Since then they have not revisited this assessment, which, incidentally, fully accords with China's cultural tradition. Chinese, like Japanese, Vietnamese, and many other peoples of the East, lack a concept of “repentance.” For the West this is a great Christian sacrament without which there can be neither absolution nor purification. But for those who dwell in All-Under-Heaven, the main thing is not to lose face.
In Mao's case, a number of other factors likewise explain this attitude. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, who destroyed a great and powerful Russia that prior to the October Revolution had been one of the leading world powers, Mao transformed China from a semi-colony into an independent and powerful state. He was not only a revolutionary who transformed social relations, but also a national hero who brought to fruition the mighty anti-imperialist revolution begun by Sun Yat-sen, compelling the entire world to respect the Chinese people. He united mainland China after a long period of disintegration, power struggle, and civil wars. It was during Mao's rule that China was finally able to become one of the main geopolitical centers of the world, politically equidistant from both superpowers, and, therefore, attracting increased attention from world public opinion. Of course, during Mao's rule the Chinese people remained poor, and the Chinese economy backward, but it was precisely during this time that Chinese began to take pride in their country's present as well as its past. This is why the Chinese people will never forget the “Great Helmsman.”
Mao brought to the Chinese not only national liberation, but social servitude. It was he and the Chinese Communist Party he directed that, through deceit and violence, imposed totalitarian socialism upon the long-suffering people of China, driving them into the abyss of bloody social experiments. The lives of hundreds of millions of people were thereby maimed, and several tens of millions perished as a result of hunger and repression. Entire generations grew up isolated from world culture. Mao's crimes against humanity are no less terrible than the evil deeds of Stalin and other twentieth-century dictators. The scale of his crimes was even greater.
Still, Mao is distinguished from the ideologists and practitioners of Russian Bolshevism even in his totalitarianism. His personality was much more complex, variegated, and multifaceted. No less suspicious or perfidious than Stalin, still he was not as merciless. Almost throughout his entire career, even during the Cultural Revolution, in intraparty struggle he followed the principle of “cure the illness to save the patient,” compelling his real or imagined opponents to confess their “guilt” but not sentencing them to death. This is precisely why the “moderate” faction, despite the repeated purge of its members, was ultimately able to stand its ground and come to power after the Chairman's death. Mao did not cure the “illness” of Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, but neither did he eliminate them physically. He did not even order the death of Liu Shaoqi. The chairman of the PRC was hounded to his death by enraged Red Guards. Moreover, Mao did not take revenge on his former enemies. He neither killed Bo Gu, nor Zhou Enlai, nor Ren Bishi, nor Zhang Guotao, nor even Wang Ming. He tried to find a common language with all of them after forcing them to engage in self-criticism. In other words, he forced them to “lose face” but also kept them in power.
In all of this, Mao was an authentically Chinese leader and ideologist who was able to combine the principles of foreign Bolshevism not only with the practice of the Chinese revolution, but also with Chinese tradition.
A talented Chinese politician, an historian, a poet and philosopher, an all-powerful dictator and energetic organizer, a skillful diplomat and utopian socialist, the head of the most populous state, resting on his laurels, but at the same time an indefatigable revolutionary who sincerely attempted to refashion the way of life and consciousness of millions of people, a hero of national revolution and a bloody social reformer—this is how Mao goes down in history. The scale of his life was too grand to be reduced to a single meaning.
And that is why he reposes in an imperial mausoleum in the center of China, in the square adorned with his gigantic portrait. He will be there for a long time, perhaps forever. In essence, the phenomenon of Mao reflects the entire trajectory of twentieth-century China in all its complexity and contradictions, the trajectory of a great but socially and economically backward Eastern country that made a gigantic break from the past to the present over the course of eight decades.
The achievements of Mao Zedong are indisputable. So are his errors and crimes. However, the Chinese poured out all of their righteous anger vis-à-vis Mao's dictatorial socialism against the closest comrades in arms of the Great Helmsman. His wife was arrested one month after the Chairman's death by Hua Guofeng, who “betrayed” her. Jiang Qing and other leaders of the Cultural Revolution were brought before a court in late 1980 and early 1981. Jiang did not confess her guilt, and she loudly declaimed before the whole world: “Everything I did, Mao told me to do. I was his dog; what he said to bite, I bit.”2 She was given a death sentence, suspended for two years. The same verdict was handed down to Zhang Chunqiao. The other leftist leaders, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan, and Chen Boda, received respectively life, twenty years, and eighteen years in prison.3 After two years, however, the death sentences for Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were converted into life sentences.
Jiang was imprisoned until early May 1984, after which she was held under house arrest. But in 1989, after the suppression of the student protests on Tiananmen Square, she was returned to prison, this time for having criticized Deng for the killing of students. Yet she was soon let out again and placed under guard in a two-story villa in Jiuxianqiao, in the northeast section of Beijing. In mid-March 1991, when her health deteriorated, Jiang was taken to a hospital operated by the Ministry of Public Security. There, tiring of a meaningless life, she committed suicide late on the night of May 14, 1991. She made a rope out of handkerchiefs she had knotted together and hanged herself in her bathroom. Before doing this she penned a note, “Chairman, your student and co-fighter is coming to see you now.”4
Mao's previous wife, Zizhen, had passed away several years earlier, on April 19, 1984, in Shanghai. His sole surviving son, Anqing, died in Beijing on March 23, 2007. Mao's daughters Li Min and Li Na are still living in the Chinese capital. Mao's children have long since had their own children. Anqing and Li Na had sons, and Li Min had both a son and a daughter. Mao's niece Yuanzhi and his nephew Yuanxin also have children. The grandchildren are already grown up and among them is a direct descendant—Dongdong, Anqing's grandson. He is already nine years old. Symbolically, he was born on December 26, 2003, the 110th anniversary of the birth of his great-grandfather.
New life swirls around them. Chinese society is rapidly modernizing. Many young Chinese are acquiring the latest technology; they engage in business, and go abroad for their education. Mao's heirs are no exception. Li Min's daughter, Kong Dongmei, received an M.A. in the United States in May 2001. Li Min's son, Kong Jining, is a businessman.
None of the reformers of the post-Mao era is still among us, yet China continues to push forward. The era of social experiments is long since gone. China is developing a new society with a mixed economy. The face of this enormous country is changing with astonishing speed. The reforms begun after Mao's death stimulated an outburst of activity on the part of the Chinese people. The success of these reforms is a sign that the influence of Maoism on the political and ideological life of China, which is still rather strong for now, will not last long.
At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao sent Jiang Qing a letter in which he welcomed “complete disorder under Heaven.” At that time, he wrote,
I believe in myself, but in some things I don't believe. In my youth I said, “A human life will last two hundred years, and the waves created will roll on for three thousand years.” That is more than enough arrogance, but at the same time I am unsure of myself, I always have the feeling that if there is no tiger on the mountain, then the monkey will become the king of the beasts. I have become such a king, but this is not a case of eclecticism. I have the spirit of a tiger, this is primary, and the spirit of a monkey is secondary. In the past I made use of the following several sentences from a letter by Li Gu, who lived during the Han dynasty, to Huang Qiong [the biographies of both men are included in the 5th century CE chronicle of the Later Han dynasty]: “Solid things are easily broken, light things are easily soiled. He who can sing the yangchun baixue [an ancient melody that was very difficult to perform] may easily wind up in solitude. Will he merit great fame?” The last two sentences apply directly to me.5
Was Mao's self-analysis correct? Or was he simply playing his usual role? Perhaps he was sharing his innermost secrets with his wife? This we cannot know. The Chairman has long since gone to speak with Marx.
1 Resolution on CPC History (1949–81) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), 56.
2 Quoted from Terrill, Madam Mao, 9.
3 See A Great Trial in Chinese History, 128.
4 Quoted from Terrill, Madam Mao, 353.
5 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 6, 212–13, 214.