THE MYTH OF MAO

...On the one hand, he needed the administrative skills and professional expertise of the regular bureaucrats...

...And after Mao's death, the rival groups may be able to maintain for a while a pretense of compromise and set up a kind of collective leadership...

...For all the emphasis Mao always put on the "mass line," it should be remembered that this "mass line" was encouraged and allowed to develop only insofar as it remained directed against Mao's enemies...

...III Postscript: Maoism Mummified Ignazio Silone, who was for a time a leader of the underground Communist party in Mussolini's Italy, recalled a dialogue he had in Moscow, during the early days of Stalin's rule, with Schatzky, the head of the Soviet Communist Youth...

...Here lies his tragedy: he outlived himself by some 20 years...

...Such deep roots in the Chinese traditional universe accounted for his most brilliant achievements in the past: when waging guerrilla war in the remote peasant heartland of old China, he had no rival...

...and so on, ad infinitum...

...The Peking authorities have announced their decision to embalm Mao's body and to 18 display permanently the mummy to the devotion of pilgrims...

...Chiang Ch'ing reached for a short while the peak of her power when Mao, though still alive, became almost completely incapacitated: by isolating the half-paralyzed half-comatose, practically speechless old man, and making maximum use of her own privileged access to him, she could interpret and manipulate Mao's cryptic sputters to engineer Teng Hsiao-p'ing's downfall...

...The expression, in the form of a riddle, calls for the conventional answer "no hair (since monks keep their head shaven...

...In the celebrated interview he granted Edgar Snow, Mao Tsetung allegedly described himself as "a lonely monk walking in the rain under a leaking umbrella...

...There is little doubt that Mao's spontaneous inclinations generally favored radical policies, and yet, looking at the countless twists and turns of his entire career, leafing through many of his earlier writings, it would be easy to put together a file on the subject of his "revisionist capitulationism" and "rightist opportunism," thick enough to hang three dozen Liu Shao-ch'is and Teng Hsiao-p'ings...

...Once he had obtained the supreme control over the Party and the Army (1935), for the next 40 years Mao never, in any circumstance, allowed anyone to voice any criticism of himself and his policies, in whatever form...

...In order to secure power, no sacrifice was ever too big—and least of all the sacrifice of principles...

...He endeavored always to reduce new problems and issues into terms more familiar to him, those of the backward peasant hinterland, the nostalgic stage of his early victories...

...Schatzky was to commit suicide ten years later at the height of the Stalinist purges, while Silone, out of fidelity to socialist values, eventually felt compelled to break away from the Communist movement...

...Silone then jokingly suggested to his terrified Russian friend that they should get hold of a can of gasoline and make a "little revolution" of their own by burning the totem hut...

...It can be roughly summarized as a drastic questioning of the philosophy of the Cultural Revolution, restoration of the former bureaucratic apparatus, a progressive elimination of all radical elements and, in particular, of all the new leaders who had gained eminence through the Cultural Revolution—in a word, a veering away in fact if not in theory from all the basic tenets of Maoism...

...The kind of idealism, subjectivism, and voluntarism that inspired his most daring initiatives typically betrays the aesthete's approach...

...Today the radical faction—the so called "left"—appears in fact as the inheritor of the ultraconservative xenophobic circles of the Manchu court at the end of the empire: it has similarly adopted the stance that, in order to preserve China's ideological purity, one must keep her isolated from the outside world...

...he maintained an uncertain balance between them all—a balance that he could tip any time, one way or the other...

...This atmosphere of Shakespearian tragedy creeping into his Court could not overly upset Mao...

...Although Mao is genuinely impatient with bureaucratic practices, he nevertheless became both the architect and the cornerstone of the most gigantic 13 totalitarian bureaucracy this planet has ever known...

...Washington Post, 16 March,1976 II The main weakness of totalitarianbureaucratic systems is that they have no way of providing for the retirement or succession of leaders...

...Having thus squandered his resources, he would again find himself in need of the pragmatists, and temporarily dismiss the extremists...

...As Schatzky confessed his disappointment over having been born too late to have participated in either the 1905 or 1917 revolutions, Silone tried to comfort him: "There'll still be revolutions, there'll always be need of revolutions, even in Russia...

...they loved Chou En-lai for his patrician charm and selfless dedication to the service of the nation...

...Could it also be that, unwittingly yet logically, he paved the way for a Chinese Stalin...

...Following months of precious friendship both confirmed and contradicted his inscrutability...

...Since 1966, contending factions have been continuously at each other's throat...

...Despite that feminine quality in him, he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature...

...Not long before breathing his last, he observed sarcastically to his entourage that a good number of them must have been all too eager to see him on his way to meet Marx...

...However, since pressures and menaces from the outside world—albeit under new guises—did not abate, the old issues of how to deal with them became ever more pressing...

...Since the explosion of the Cultural Revolution, the regime has been unable for the last ten years to reconstitute a homogeneous unified leadership...

...Unfortunately, during the last part of his life, by stubbornly clinging to an outdated utopia, by becoming frozen in his own idiosyncrasies and private visions, less and less attuned to the objective realities and needs of a new era, he became in fact a major obstacle to the development of the Chinese revolution...

...That it has become inoperative as a political recipe was dramatically illustrated by the downfall of Chiang Ch'ing and the entire group of the Maoist radicals—an event so welcome to cadres and masses alike (it was the first time that rulers and ruled found themselves in spontaneous harmony) that it sent almost everyone dancing with joy in the streets...

...Not only are its leaders not popular—it is safe to say that Chiang Ch'ing is the most hated public figure in China today—but its austere and fanatical policies are feared by the masses...

...In imitation of the emperors of the past, he repeatedly chose for himself an heir-designate, but then, on ideological pretexts, dumped those unlucky reminders of his own mortality...

...as for its despotic and totalitarian aspect, they might well prove all too eager to salvage it...

...Will any young Chinese revolutionaries some day pick up Silone's idea...

...nevertheless, we should keep this in mind while watching the evolution of the situation in the near future...

...Thus, as we have seen, Mao's heirs were in a hurry to bury once and for all the "populist" and "antibureaucratic" element of the Maoist legacy...

...His world was still a ritual world, ruled by Ideology rather than laws, by dogmatic Scriptures—yesterday the Confucian classics, today the Little Red Book—rather than popular debate...

...in this situation a man such as Hua Kuo-feng, with his Public Security background and the full support of the Army, might very well be all too tempted to impose strict disciplinary measures...

...the shaky and brief republican interlude did not succeed in providing any convincing substitute for this, and Mao knew how to shrewdly manipulate to his own advantage this traditional legacy...

...some 30-odd years spent away from China had done little to improve it, and it is no wonder that he failed to recognize in this "monk under an umbrella" (ho-shang to san) evoked by the Chairman, a most popular Chinese joke...

...The inner dynathics of Chinese traditional politics are such that they will probably press irresistibly toward an early return to this orthodox imperial-Maoist practice, thus condemning the collective leadership to the fate of a short-lived and artificial experiment...

...This visionary quality accounts for most of the unexpected, dazzling victories of Mao's maturity...

...Mao himself was aware of it, and this turned him in his last years into a truly tragic figure...

...The few individuals who, on the strength of their own revolutionary credentials and intellectual integrity, ever dared to infringe upon this basic taboo, all met with a tragic fate...

...This was the main source of power for the group, whose political influence thus grew completely out of proportion with its actual strength...

...Sooner or later the hostilities will break out again, either in the open—a possibility rendered less likely now by the general weariness of the masses, whose mobilization would be difficult to achieve— or, more probably, behind the walls of the inner sanctum of the Peking ruling class...

...Although political power was the ultimate measure of all his actions, it would of course be foolish to assume that a man of such stature was merely pursuing power for power's sake...

...Though repeatedly interrupted by various accidents and setbacks in recent years (the death of Chou En-lai, fall of Teng Hsiao-p'ing on the one hand and, on the other, the promotion of Wang Hung-wen, 19 launching of the anti-Confucius campaign, continuing control by the radicals of the propaganda, culture, and education sectors), the process nevertheless kept on course...

...It is only in this light that it becomes possible to understand his alternations between compromise and ruthlessness, benevolence and ferocity, suppleness and brutality, and all his abrupt voltefaces: none of these were ever arbitrary...

...He was careful never to let one group win a decisive 16 advantage...

...despot who first unified the Chinese empire: Ch'in Shihhuang's achievements were both ephemeral and long-lasting: the inhuman character of his rule provoked a popular reaction on the very morrow of his demise and turned his dynasty into one of the shortest-lived of all Chinese history...

...In his latest years, however, because of old age and ill health, Mao became unable to attend the daily political routine...

...His calligraphy (one of the major arts of China) is strikingly original, betraying a flamboyant egotism, to the point of arrogance, if not extravagance...

...EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE need exceptional circumstances to give their full measure...

...Since he could deliver his oracles only during irregular intervals of lucidity, the radical faction, led by his wife, Chiang Ch'ing, and enjoying constant access to him, exercised a kind of monopoly on the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of those portentous utterances...

...In the mid- I 9th century, suddenly confronted with an outside world that was aggressive and equipped with superior technology, China had to make a dramatic choice: either borrow this new technology—and risk losing her own identity in the process—or retain her identity by isolating herself and thus risk being destroyed by the material superiority of the foreigners...

...Mao thought—and wrote—that this was the proper way of running the country: "one measure of Yin, one measure of Yang, this is the Tao," one step to the right, one step to the left, this is the way of Mao...

...However, as old age and illness weakened his ability to supervise the whole process, and forced him to loosen his control on the political life of the nation, each faction, weary of playing only a precarious half-part in this game of Maoist "dialectics," aspired once and for all to achieve a "synthesis"—at the expense of the other players...

...But she overreached herself in this exercise, lost balance and toppled after her one asset had disappeared with Mao's death...

...Keeping Pure Nobel-prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was banned from a Milton, New Hampshire, high school classroom and destroyed because of alleged obscene language...

...When already the master of China, he had himself photographed at his desk for an official portrait: it was not by accident that the collection of books stacked in front of him was not one of Marxist classics, but a famous series of 1 lth-century Chinese handbooks on imperial bureaucratic government...

...In this way he has continued to weigh tremendously on China's destiny—like a dead weight, hindering and postponing longoverdue readjustments, without being able to muster enough strength to propose any coherent alternative...

...but since he mistrusted them for their "revisionist" and elitist leanings, he kept them in check by unleashing from time to time the fiery zeal of the radical ideologists to whom in turn he would cede only limited power, since they had proved themselves to be inept administrators...

...When waged in the open, this fight entailed massive violence: for instance, even a propagandist as dedicated to the Maoist cause as Han Suyin admits that in one province only, the Cultural Revolution took 90,000 victims...

...niceties, as its mistaken and mawkish English adaptation by Snow is revealing of the compulsion for myth-making, of the demand for politico-religious chromos among a certain type of Western intellectual...

...His poetry, so aptly described by Arthur Waley as "not as bad as Hitler's painting, but not as good as Churchill's," was rather pedantic and pedestrian, managing to combine obscurity with vulgarity...

...Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete...

...One of his early admirers, the American journalist Agnes Smedley—a dedicated revolutionary who had the courage, during the war, to break through the Kuomintang blockade in order to join the Communists in Yenan—left a remarkably frank account of her first encounter with him: . . . his hands were as long and sensitive as a woman's...

...Mao repeatedly succeeded in foiling their attempts—in this respect, the launching of the Cultural Revolution was his last masterstroke—but, in the long run, the bureaucracy's efforts were largely successful, so much so that one might well say that in fact Maoism died even before Mao...

...unfortunately, it was also at the root of the increasingly erratic, capricious, and catastrophic initiatives of his late years when, more and more divorced from reality, ever more absorbed in his lonely dream, he repeatedly brought the very regime he himself had created to the brink of chaos and destruction...

...To reconcile such paradoxes, one must either learn the mental acrobatics of a very sophisticated game played by the enlightened vanguard and called "Dialectics," or, more vulgarly, face the fact that, rather than being the prophet-philosopher as described by his worshippers, Mao was essentially always and foremost a practical politician for whom what mattered above everything was power—how to obtain it, how to retain it, how to regain it...

...Let us hope that such a development will never eventuate...

...Having made clear during the famines that followed the failure of the Great Leap Forward that the welfare of the people should sometimes be given priority over ideological imperatives, they enjoy a real measure of popularity among the masses (this factor, however, presents only limited importance in a regime under which the masses do not have any say in the selection of their leaders...

...China has lost her "Great Leader...

...He had an acute awareness of his place in History...

...This victory might eventually prove quite illusory: the other faction, the more progressive-minded and pragmatic bureaucrats, followers of Chou En-lai and Teng Hsiao-p'ing—who remind us in a way, of the enlightened reformists of the late 19th century—still retain most of the key positions of the administrative and governmental apparatus, both at the central and the provincial levels...

...The only trouble is that after the storm, when they find themselves in a more routine situation, their very genius can prove extremely disruptive to the essential fabric in the everyday life of the nation...

...For a nation such as the Chinese, the loss should not be crippling: do truly great peoples ever need a "Great Leader...

...In these regimes, we often see senile or utterly ill statesmen still clinging desperately to power, or running the country from a hospital bed: for them, there is no intermediate status between the enjoyment of full power and the cold exile of disgrace . . . or death...

...School board chairman Joan Chase said the novel, an account of life in a Soviet concentration camp, contained "language you wouldn't allow to be used in the home...

...Not strong enough to keep creating, he could still paralyze everything...

...This faction, led by Madame Mao—who has turned into a kind of Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi reincarnate!—has lately made maximum use of the senile and weakened Mao to entrench itself at the top...

...But if he became a god for the masses, those who were in direct contact with him were somewhat put off by his aloofness, his secretive and devious ways, his utter lack of personal loyalty, the ruthlessness with which he could get rid of life-time companions-in-arms and faithful assistants, once they had become a hindrance or dared to voice criticism...

...in the course of such a study, Mao could provide one of the most exemplary cases...

...For the cadres, constantly exposed to criticism, harried, scared, worn out, Maoism meant permanent menace and uncertainty, continuous struggle, tension, and insecurity, and so they aspired to a stabler, safer, and more conventional system of government...

...at the same time it shows a total disregard for the formal discipline of the brush, and this contempt for technical requirements condemns his work, however powerful, to remain essentially inarticulate...

...And even when it is fermenting behind closed doors, the confrontation can be no less bloody: witness the Lin Piao episode: after plotting the assassination of Mao, the Chairman's "Closest-CompanioninArms" himself disappeared mysteriously, allegedly in a plane accident, but most probably as the victim of a counterassassination plot...

...He was a poor speaker, with a highpitched, unpleasant, and monotonous voice...

...In fact, the crude motto so naively misunderstood by Snow might provide us with one of the keys for understanding Mao's complex and contradictory personality...

...This phenomenon of the failed artist as a statesman, of political leadership as selfexpression, ought some day to be properly analyzed...

...Had he died before the mid50s, he could without doubt have gone down in history as one of China's most momentous leaders...

...An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me, and I became so occupied with trying to master it, that I heard hardly a word of what followed...

...Mao's political conception a strange mixture of half-digested Marxism and murky old Taoism was that of perpetual change, ceaseless metamorphoses, constant flow, alternance of opposites...

...The masses could easily relate to leaders like Chu Teh and P'eng Teh-huai because of their 14 simplicity and human warmth...

...His intellectual horizon was furnished not so much with Western Marxist writings— which he read belatedly, in a haphazard and superficial way—as with Chinese classical literature, historiography, and fiction, with which he developed a lively if patchy and unsystematic familiarity, typical of a selftaught provincial genius...

...Like a sculptor who submits the yielding clay to his inspiration, shapes it in accordance with an inner vision, an artist-statesman, using history and nations for his material, attempts to project in them the images from his mind...

...You can turn any man into a Cyclops by painting him with one eye...

...Such reaction was quite understandable: for the people, radical Maoism meant the substitution of an austere and fanatical political mysticism for the legitimate material, intellectual, and emotional demands of human nature—the imposition of a permanent state of quasi-military mobilization, the ruthless destruction of all traditional values, an all-pervasive drabness of life, the setting of a cultural desert, universal bigotry, aridity, and boredom relieved only by periodical explosions of violence and hysterical activism...

...The anti-Confucius campaign was but one more expression of the living anachronism he himself had become...

...If the fluctuating tactical imperatives make it very difficult at times to distinguish his actual policies from those of his successive rivals and scapegoats, his style remained unique...

...In adopting Marxism, an internationalist ideology aiming at universal application, China was able to 17 simultaneously enter the modern age and to remain faithful to her own most ancient and most essential vocation...

...Moreover, the fact that he devoted some part of energy to the uncertain pursuit of the aesthetic hobbies of a traditional gentleman and scholar is in itself quite revealing...

...The ultra-conservative faction (mistakenly labeled "Left" by some Western observers), bent on keeping China in tight isolation in order to preserve her ideological purity, used him as a buttress in their last and desperate stand against the long-overdue movement toward a true modernization and opening of the country...

...We can expect a measure of "liberalization" to take place in the cultural sphere—nothing ever could conceivably be worse than Chiang Ch'ing's philistine, venomous, and obscurantist rule in this field, and now that she is gone one imagines that the irrepressible creative talents of the Chinese people will at long last find some outlets once again...

...Nevertheless, it still managed to win a spectacular, if shallow victory in toppling Teng Hsiao-p'ing...

...In him was none of the humility of Chu Teh...

...Even some of his basic political utterances rest on artistic metaphors—like his famous observation on China's "poverty and blankness," which make her more easily available, like a blank sheet, for the free improvisation of a great artist's brush...

...Sensing what potential menace this entailed for the stability of the system, Chou En-lai is rumored to have wished to see China governed at last by a code of laws, but Mao, with his old ritual mentality, remained impatient and contemptuous of legality and bent on maintaining a more traditional rulebyideology-and-holy-scriptures...

...And for that matter, his record as "leftist adventurist" could without difficulty eclipse even Lin Piao's, Actually, in order to discourage such an exercise, the Peking authorities wisely refrained from publishing Mao's complete works: the authorized version of the Selected Works is a carefully censored one...

...This state of paralysis, uncertainty and fear, so damaging to the basic functioning of government, further confirmed the new leadership in its determination to eradicate the last active remnants of Maoism, while on the other hand confining the doctrine itself to the safe and prophylactic isolation of a glass showcase in a holy museum...

...Now at long last, taxidermy seems to have provided the Chinese leaders with the ultimate solution to the problem of what to do with Mao...

...he could still sabotage very effectively any policy with which he disagreed: one word from him, fdr instance, sealed the fate of Teng Hsiao-p'ing...

...In many respects, Mao's historical role can be compared with Lenin's...

...China is a concept of universality, a way for achieving humanity, an intermediary between man and the cosmic harmony...

...By emphasizing this sole facet, while neglecting to observe that Mao was at the same time the ultimate totalitarian despot, they failed to grasp his central contradiction, and thus condemned themselves never to understand the essential dynamics of Maoist policies...

...Similarly, Maoism itself is to be stuffed and relegated to the innocuous position of a formal State Religion—to serve the purpose of Confucianism as utilized earlier this century by warlord governments...

...In Maoist sailing, each lurch of the boat meant spilling half the crew overboard: in the end, after having been repeatedly thrown in the water and fished out, then thrown in again and again fished out, the wretched cadres, exhausted and terrified, just kept hanging on for dear life to the slippery ideological bulwarks without daring a single move or attempting the slightest initiative...

...Rather than focusing our attention on Court intrigues that might in the end prove utterly irrelevant, we would do better to follow as closely as possible developments among the masses who, though suppressed, have shown increasing lucidity in judging their rulers...

...In other areas, however, the new leadership may in fact apply increasingly authoritarian pressures: the sequels of the violence and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, especially among the youth, have brought the country to the brink of a general breakdown of law and order...

...By this method he could keep the bureaucratic establishment in a state of perpetual alert, constantly offbalance, never allowing it to sink complacently into any set routine...

...This should allow her at last to start again forging ahead, after an all too long and abnormal interlude of chaotic rule and cultural stagnation...

...During Mao's prolonged twilight, the factions observed an uneasy truce but kept jockeying for more favorable positions in preparation for the day when, with Mao gone, the power struggle would flare up again...

...I knew him too and have a very vivid recollection of him...

...This time the struggle must end with the complete elimination of one group and the decisive victory of the other, for there will be no arbitrator now to stop the fight before it reaches its definitive conclusion...

...Such a solution, however, can only be temporary: the two main factions are irreconcilable, between them there are too many accounts and blood-debts dating back to the Cultural Revolution that wait to be settled...

...But with Mao it was a different story...

...Such a "dialectic" process, albeit increasingly disruptive, remained still viable as long as Mao himself was alive: he—and he alone could uphold the principle of unity and continuity through all these turns and twists, switches and shifts...

...I was in fact repelled by the feminine in him...

...That he was in fact the main organizer of his own cult cannot be doubted: he justified the necessity of it to Edgar Snow by observing cynically: "Khrushchev did not build his own cult, look what happened to him...

...Later on, under Mao, China was actually able to salvage a central value of her civilization: China is not simply a country in the narrow nationalistic sense of the word—foreign powers once nearly compelled her to become one, and, had they succeeded, it would have meant her cultural death...

...At the heart of the factional struggle lies an issue that has in fact divided the Chinese ruling elite for more than a hundred years...

...With its mixture of humorous humility and exoticism, this utterance had a tremendous impact on the Western imagination, already so well attuned to the oriental glamour of "Kung Fu" TV series...

...Snow's command of the Chinese language, even at its best, was never very fluent...

...no sky" (it being hidden by the umbrella)—which in turn means by homophony (wu-fa wu-t'ien) "I know no law, I hold nothing sacred...

...moreover, they enjoy the always decisive backing of the military...

...to Mao, routine and stability were abhorrent, a middle-of-theroad course was anathema...

...His attacks against Confucius sprang from a pathetically Confucian frame of mind: he still lived in a world—utterly foreign to younger Chinese generations—where Confucius occupied the place and fulfilled the function he envisioned for himself, that of Supreme Teacher of an all-encompassing orthodoxy...

...Mao's posthumous fate might thus prove quite similar to his historical model's Ch'in Shih-huang, the 3rd-century B.C...

...q 21...

...He wished to institutionalize his own inner contradiction: he was at once a man of vision and a man of action thus he would in turn allow those responsible leaders whose efficiency satisfied the pragmatic half of his mind (the Chou Enlai type) to operate freely for a spell and achieve a certain amount of prosperity and material development—and then, on the strength of this accumulated wealth, he would indulge in a wild radical binge by letting loose all his favorite ideologues and whirling dervishes who would enact for a while his visionary fantasies at great cost to the country...

...More than 2,000 years of imperial tradition had created in the collective consciousness the constant need for a unique, supreme, quasimystical head...

...As Erica Jong observed: "There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist...

...Strangely enough for a leader of such stature, Mao had very little personal charisma...

...he could not exert a sustained control over government matters, and on policy issues he retained only a kind of broad ideological authority, which found expression in sporadic and negative initiatives...

...Pointing to the mausoleum of Lenin, which was still made of wood at the time and before which every day an interminable procession of poor ragged peasants was slowly filing, Silone continued: "I presume you love Lenin...

...Sometimes it drives a man into politics...

...The advantage of the democratic system is that it makes provisions for the shelving away of Providential Men once they have fulfilled their role and outlived their usefulness (remember Churchill, de Gaulle, etc...

...But, at the same time, he laid the ground for the next 2,000 years of imperial China...

...We can grasp it most clearly in some of his artistic creations...

...But when it came to confronting a new world and a new age, when he had to guide China into the modern era, his very strength turned into his worst limitation...

...a wellorchestrated propaganda imposed his image upon the people as that of a Sun-God...

...However, in order to regain revolutionary momentum, one wonders whether it will not be necessary for them to undergo first a cathartic experiment in de-Maoization: there are signs now of such spontaneous aspirations among the younger generation...

...The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul...

...The blunt cynicism shown by Mao in referring to such a saying to define his basic attitude was as typical of his bold disregard for diplomatic These two notes were written before and the postscript after Mao's death...

...The heroic "Long March" of the Chinese revolution has thus got bogged down in the depressing morass of palace politics...

...Written in 1943.] In complete contrast with the intellectual revolutionary elite of his time, which was sophisticated, urban, and cosmopolitan, Mao belonged to the old inward-looking peasant world...

...When he pronounced "the Primacy of the Red over the Expert" he was merely rephrasing a 2,000-year-old axiom from the Confucian Book of Rites: "What is achieved by technique is inferior, what is achieved by virtue is superior...

...Madame Mao's faction indeed has been waging a desperate struggle since it knew that, with Mao gone, its position would become increasingly precarious...

...Moreover there is no historical precedent in China for collective leadership: for more than 2,000 years, the country has always been subjected to the rule of one man...

...However dramatic and sudden this dismissal and dismantling of the Maoist orthodoxy might have appeared, with the disgrace of Mao's own wife and all his most dedicated followers and ideologues—while the rehabilitation of their opponents and, first of all, of Teng lisiao-p'ing may be expected any time it nevertheless fitted logically into a process that began at the end of the Cultural Revolution...

...this intense historical consciousness—which in our age he shared perhaps only with de Gaulle—made him also profess an unabashed admiration for the great tyrants of the past: Napoleon, Ch'in Shihhuang...

...Dating back from 1959, year of the Lushan conference, the Chinese leadership constantly endeavored to find some way of forcing Mao into a backseat: the idea was to enshrine him as a supreme totem—thus reducing him to the paralyzed status of a wooden image, and neutralizing once and for all, in this glorified manner, his frighteningly inventive talent with all its potential destructiveness...

...TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Party bureaucrats came to develop such a holy fear of Maoism, one has only to consider what kind of life Mao's policies concretely entailed for them...

...15 He attempted to move the fight back to his own old battlefield, away from the disquieting areas of contemporary ideas and technology that were the preserve of people of whose language he had only an uncertain grasp— those odious intellectuals, academics, specialists, and experts toward whom he demonstrated relentless and obsessive hatred...

...This seems to have been the mistake of those analysts who chose to see only the "antibureaucratic" and 20 "populist" character of Maoism...

...and yet, inside the framework of an obsolete form, it remains, in its very awkwardness, remarkably unfettered by conventions...

...You must admit that this superstitious cult of his mummy is an insult to his memory and a disgrace to a revolutionary city like Moscow...

...He always had a consummate skill for manipulating antagonisms, in order to impose his rule, as a supreme arbitrator, through the contradictions of warring factions...

...His thick Hunanese accent, of which he never could rid himself, did little to improve this...

...The sinister quality I had at first felt so strongly in him proved to be a spiritual isolation...