RED CHINA'S MAO
Brandt, Conrad
China's Mao—Neither Tito Nor Puppet By CONRAD BRANDT THE intense controversy on Amer-can policy toward China has revolved around conflicting images of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communist chief....
...It advocated that the role of revolutionary vanguard, hitherto reserved to the urban proletariat, be assigned to the poor peasantry...
...Unquestionably the police terror in Shanghai had its part in persuading the party leaders to move into the hinterland...
...It was also at this time that Mao initiated his "Marxism of the hills": the use of guerrilla bands in the back country to set up armed bases far from the centers of state control...
...Whether the Soviet leaders would rest content with such a show of harmony is, of course, somewhat doubtful...
...Henceforth it accepted Mao as the undisputed master of the Chinese party...
...But according to one account, their hand was forced by Mao's exclusive control of tax revenue from the coun~ tryside...
...After the Li Li-san line had proven its bankruptcy by a disastrous thrust into Changsha, the Kremlin decided to revive the Chinese party by grafting a new head onto its prostrate body...
...the prevailing assumption now is that he is a "puppet...
...He now followed this course of action, but changed his language to conform to orthodox preconceptions...
...Mao emerged in 1931 as the actual leader of his party not because but in spite of the strategy which Moscow pursued in China...
...II Faced with expulsion from the cities—the bases held essential to proletarian victory—the Communists sought to recapture them by putsches, terror, and even military assault...
...Whether this will ever come about depends, in part, on whether America's view of Mao can be rid of such stereotypes as "Tito" or "puppet...
...Unlike the Eastern European puppets who returned to their native lands after long exile, Mao is a "homebody" who had never left China before his trip to Moscow last year...
...At its best, this relationship was one of distant respect...
...Three months later, Stalin frankly admitted to the 16th Congress of the Bolshevik party that he had no idea whether a soviet government existed in China...
...It published his obituary in International Press Correspondence, lamenting him as a victim of tuberculosis...
...It is not easy for a good Communist to disassociate his faith from the cause of the Russian state...
...But Mao's fine political touch must eventually feel the hand of Soviet expansion inside the glove of proletarian world unity...
...The glory of the "Russia-returned clique" lasted not even a year...
...While offering passive resistance to Li Li-san's suicidal adventures, he covered himself by alleging and realleging his loyalty to the Li Li-san regime...
...The course which he took in 1927 led straight to the top post in Chinese Communism...
...Because of Mao's sudden rise from obscurity, any evaluation of his present status must contain a great deal of guesswork...
...Of course, the Kremlin may retain Mao's loyalty by leaving him, in the name of total unity, with at least some of the freedom which has marked his past...
...Assigned to the central committee in Shanghai the following year, he managed to have himself relieved soon after, and returned to his native Hunan...
...Already the Kremlin has been at pains to deflate Mao's wartime pretensions to theoretical originality, and has reduced him to the lesser role of a gifted disciple applying Stalinist wisdom...
...Early in his career, he showed reluctance to serve in top party posts which involved immediate contact with Comintern agents...
...Acheson's phrase, the dust had settled...
...How had Mao, in the mountains of Southeast China, achieved a position which made him in fact—though not yet to name—the top figure in the party...
...The Chinese Communist Party therefore had good cause when it decided, in November 1927, to expel Mao from its politburo and to place him on probation...
...Usually a capable organizer, he was openly uninterested, and therefore ineffective, in a propaganda job which he held in Canton during 1925...
...at its worst, one of silent opposition...
...To them, Mao must always remain under suspicion for holding his power unmortgaged and for aspiring to the leadership of all Communist Asia...
...In March 1930, the Comintern betrayed the full extent of its knowledge about Mao...
...It may seem surprising that such a report was favorably received not only in Chinese Communist quarters but by the Comintern itself...
...In that event, the Kremlin could expose his unorthodox career, just as the Indian Communist Party exposed him as a petty-bourgeois deviationist in 1949...
...This strategy of despair has come to be known as the "Li Li-san line," after the Communist leader who directed it at the instance of Moscow...
...Pavel Mif, an Oriental expert of the Comintern, personally supervised the installation of these greenhorns in the party headquarters at Shanghai...
...This decision was taken by a plenum of the central committee in which the Comintern delegates had a direct hand...
...It was at this juncture that Mao might have turned "opportunist," had he been a Trotsky with a flair for the beau geste...
...Actually, Mao had established such a government in Southern Kiangsi more than four months before...
...Historical records, however, do not bear out either assumption...
...in fact, as the Chinese Communists lost their urban footholds under successive attacks by the Kuomintang, Moscow called ever more stridently for an agrarian rebellion...
...But there is evidence that Moscow's acceptance of Mao's leadership was by no means final...
...These calls have often been taken for a direct sanction of Mao's "line," but to interpret them so is to lift them out of context...
...During the crucial period of Mao's rise to power, his association with the Comintern was—like marriage according to Oscar Wilde—the result of a mutual misunderstanding...
...The likeliest explanation is that the Kremlin had grown skeptical of Mao's chances of survival and was preparing to replace him, in case of need, by an exponent of the Li Li-san orientation, if not Li himself...
...In the autumn of 1931, the nominal party leaders turned up in Southern Kiangsi and placed themselves meekly at the disposal of Mao Tse-tung...
...Mao's successful breakthrough to the Northwest, and his establishment of a border government there, again presented the Kremlin with an accomplished fact...
...This strategy is aptly described in the Chinese phrase, "open respect, hidden rebellion...
...But he instinctively chose the road to power, not that to martyrdom...
...Thus, Mao is a stranger among the cosmopolites of international Communism who have long commuted to Moscow for instructions and inspiration...
...Having lost most of their urban followers, the party leaders could only fall back on Mao's peasants for support...
...In his report on the Hunan peasant movement, he had outlined a revolutionary course of action in language befitting the reality...
...The historical record cannot show whether Mao will choose to mortgage his power to the Kremlin...
...Russian aid to China in the war against Japan went exclusively to Chiang Kai-shek, while Russian support of Mao's civil war effort— whatever its exact extent—remained indirect and indecisive...
...Among Chinese Communists some CONRAD BRANDT is a research fellow on Chinese Communism at the Russian Research Center of Harvard University From 1944 to 1946 he was a United States Army intelligence officer in China knew the answer...
...Accused of drawing rural lumpen-proletarians into his ranks, he freely admitted the charge but emasculated it simultaneously by reciting the required article of faith on the in-dispensability of leadership from the cities...
...As the head of the Chinese state, Mao cannot afford to pick quarrels with a neighbor of much superior strength—especially while he faces a West which he believes to be hostile...
...In November of that year, he celebrated his victory by assuming the post of chairman of the "Chinese Soviet Republic...
...By this time, Mao Tse-tung had come to be known in the party as the head of the "real power clique...
...Li Li-san paid the price of failure—a failure basically not his own—by being forced out of power and shipped to Moscow for "study...
...Leading an uprising in Hunan, he promoted Soviets and a total break with the Kuomintang at a time when the Comintern still branded such moves as rank "Trotskyism...
...For a way out of this dilemma, Mao might well fall back on his well-tested strategem of "open respect, hidden rebellion"— that is, he might try to stay the Russian hand while continuing to kiss it...
...A close look at any Comintern dictum on Chinese peasant revolt leads inescapably to the conclusion that while Moscow was eager to have the peasants rise up, it never dreamed of having them do so without the leadership of the workers...
...Wang Ming, the secretary-general by appointment of the Kremlin, now found himself returning to Moscow in the glittering but empty role of Chinese Communist representative with the Comintern...
...Before the Korean war, a common assumption was that Mao might become a "Tito...
...Between 1931 and 1934, attacks by Kuomintang troops whittled away at the Communist mountain stronghold...
...This is fully borne out by actual Comintern policy as given effect by the Chinese Communist Party...
...The success of this venture was a miracle which no one—not even the Mos-covite prophets—-could foresee...
...Why was such an article published in the official organ of the Comintern at that particular time...
...Its full implications were obviously not understood at the time...
...To the orthodox Marxist, however, "rural idiocy" could hardly furnish proletarian leadership...
...From this time up to his seizure of power last year, he worked exclusively with the peasantry...
...In any event, Mao was, as of late 1931, the actual leader of Chinese Communism...
...After the breakup of the Communist-Kuomintang bloc in 1927, the Communists rapidly lost their hold on the city workers, who were most exposed to the terror of the Kuomintang purge...
...but its connections with him remained tenuous and intermittent...
...It led, by the end of 1930, to the ruin of Chinese Communism as a workers' movement...
...Mao's past relationship with the Kremlin has not been the simple idyll which Communist history forgers have been at pains to present...
...In exactly what circumstances Mao's "real power clique" absorbed the Shanghai headquarters is uncertain...
...From the perspective of the past, Mao emerges as neither "Tito" nor "puppet," but as a Chinese Communist who owes his power to independent action within the Communist philosophy...
...It replaced Li and his closest associates by the so-called "Russian-returned clique," a group of young students who had spent the critical years of the Chinese revolution absorbing Marxist wisdom in Moscow...
...It is therefore not surprising that in March 1935 the Communist International ran an article signed "Li" which was a full, emphatic restatement of the entire Li Li-san line...
...This was possible because the Comintern also favored peasant uprisings...
...Russia was no more willing than the United States to enter a final commitment in China before, in Mr...
...But this past may also be turned against him, should his ambition ever disrupt the discipline of Soviet imperialism...
...What had happened...
...It was, in fact, Mao's growing detachment from the centers of Comintern action which assured his final success...
...but it was not a course to be found on any Comintern chart...
...Moscow could only acquiesce in the accomplished fact—and claim the credit for it...
...As early as August 1927 Mao had begun to move ahead of the Comintern...
...But as a national leader, he can no more afford to bend to foreign dictation without risking his hold on his people...
...but Moscow was still in the dark...
...By implication, the "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" was a radical departure from traditional Marxism-Leninism...
...While this strategy never lost its Marxist objective, it also followed in the best Chinese tradition of rural banditry—in the tradition of perennial peasant unrest which had toppled old dynasties and put new rulers into power...
...But it is possible to minimize this guesswork by examining such historical data as are available...
...but it does show that he won his power without lien...
...In October 1934, the Communists made a desperate gamble: they pulled up the stakes of the "Soviet Republic" and struck out across 6,000 miles of enemy territory to resettle in the Northwestern borderland...
...In early 1937, Mao issued, in the form of a routine report, a strong statement of his views on revolutionary tactics in China...
Vol. 15 • March 1951 • No. 3
