Maoism for the Millions

...Even if optimistic, which it probably was, this estimate presented a gloomy picture...

...There are also sound political reasons for developing the cult of Mao...

...The Chinese leaders have already had to make concessions to these tendencies— most notably after the initial setbacks on the communes, when they once again allowed the peasants to tend tiny private plots, to raise private livestock, and to trade the produce at rural fairs—concessions that soon added greatly to the meager food supplies...

...Even allowing for the difficulties of dealing through an interpreter, they seemed baffled and bewildered and repeated slogans in a way that seemed to mirror their inner doubts...

...As China becomes more industrialized and enters the technological era, the Party must broaden its ideological base to encompass contemporary priorities...

...Later I asked the vice-director of the Printing Works, Chi Yu-jung, if there was ever any argument, or real discussion...

...So great is the pompous solemnity that it is often difficult to remember that behind such sober strictures, there often lies a commendable determination to uproot all the injustices of the past...

...Finally, the Korean War added a new dimension of patriotism, since opponents of the regime could be condemned as malingerers and even traitors...

...Far from confined to the massive street demonstrations, it is a daily theme in the newspapers, on the stage, in the movie houses, and the classrooms...

...And there is evidence to suggest that the people blame local officials rather than Mao for the follies and mistakes of the regime, just as they often absolved the emperors...

...Mao, after all, is the man who drove out the foreigners and restored to China much of its former power, status, and self-respect...

...In the giant factories of former Manchuria, so badly crippled by the Great Leap Forward and the cutting of Soviet aid, I strongly sensed a strange lack of conviction among many of the managers...

...Chou En-lai once told a Party conference that among the higher intellectuals (those in the arts, sciences, and professions) about forty per cent actively supported the Party and government...

...There are also certain limits to this cult of personality...

...Many of the shorter works are simple, straightforward, almost Biblical parables that hold up noble exemplars and teach the reader to persevere in the face of adversity...

...All the workers came from a Printing Works unit that turns out the weighty writings of Mao Tse-tung...

...If they can do that to Confucius, then nothing can be sacred...

...In a nation with a desperate shortage of scientists, engineers, doctors, economists, and other professionals, even a modicum of dissatisfaction among the intellectuals could slow Chinese progress to a serious degree...

...especially on the part of intellectuals there was a reservoir of good will for the Communists and a shared determination to get on with the job of making China great again...

...But this is only one part of the process, since thought reform aims at nothing less than total conversion, a thorough remolding of the whole personality...

...I am not arguing that there is no need for these bases or that China does not pose some sort of threat to Western interests in Southeast Asia and the Pacific...

...Like Sunday Christians, they were intoning their responses in a dutiful and practiced way, and nothing in the secretary's scribbled transcript could possibly prove compromising or be used against them...

...For the time being, it seems, the authorities have struck a compromise...

...In the context of the dispute with the Soviet Union, the Chinese propagandists have sought to build up Mao as the fifth great Marxist philosopher —after Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—and to denigrate Khrushchev and his successors as mediocre parvenus...

...At any rate, the same lack of humor is a mark of all their propaganda...

...Chi smiled with a sad politeness tinged with apparent pity for my ignorance...

...Proudly nationalistic, the Chinese people deeply resent their past humiliations at the hands of the United States and the European nations...

...From the summer of 1964, when a festival of Peking Operas on Contemporary Themes was held in the capital with great fanfare, it became evident that all Chinese culture was open to revision or rejection...

...In fact, by 1965, virtually the whole Peking stage had been won over for operas and plays and ballets on revolutionary themes, with the classics performed only for brief periods around May Day and National Day...

...Here, for all its extremism, Chinese propaganda seems to evoke a genuinely popular response...

...Taking up the chase, alert readers wrote in to protest against the names given to different varieties of chrysanthemums at a flower show—such as Old Temple in the Setting Sun, The Soft Hand Applies the Rouger and Dancing Madly When Drunk...

...Aside from the larger campaigns, the Chinese authorities keep a close check on even the most humdrum of daily activities as part of their constant search for the slightest sign of bourgeois or "revisionist" tendencies...

...This tension is embodied in the demand that intellectuals should be both "red and expert"—the recent emphasis has fallen strongly on redness, or loyalty to the Party line...

...Articles attacking his position would be written, not only by his colleagues and students, but also by peasants and factory workers whose only qualifications were political...

...There was some discussion of technical problems, but most of the speakers devoted themselves to repeating the slogans that fill the newspapers every day, urging each other to learn from those who are advanced, to take part in physical labor, to consolidate their experiences and make sound technical innovations, to be self-reliant, and above all—every speaker dwelt heavily on this theme—to study the Works of Chairman Mao...

...The offender's works were always discovered to be more "revisionist" than revolutionary...

...if you ask me what I've gained, it would be too much to say— so many ideas and so much encouragement...

...As related, it sounds simple, even simple-minded...

...The final ten per cent were counter-revolutionaries or other "bad elements...

...Speaking in turn for two to seven minutes each, the workers had virtually the same message...

...One Peking newspaper discovered a new subversive influence at work in China: the common joke...

...In brief, they have become yet another dynasty: better than most and perhaps better than any of their predecessors, but far from perfect in the eyes of the people...

...No intellectual is immune from these pressures, however highly placed, and no field of professional activity is ignored...

...Even if new Chinese leaders trim down their global ambitions to concentrate on developing Chinese power at home and in the immediate area, their foreign policies will surely continue to be militantly chauvinistic...

...It is much more difficult to judge the feelings of the great mass of workers and peasants...

...In terms of social justice and rising living standards, most still have good reason to honor the regime for its undoubted achievements...

...While Mao's picture, and sometimes his statue, adorns every office and institution, there are no cities, rivers, streets, or parks named after him...

...The Editors...

...Kill...

...It would also be callous as well as premature to rejoice over the demise of a revolutionary dream in which noble ideals and practical reforms are not entirely submerged by the needs of totalitarian tyranny...

...On a Saturday night in Shanghai, I attended a singing competition in a Worker's Palace of Culture...

...There is also a great determination to prove to the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that Mao's political and military theories, which proved so successful in the Chinese Revolution, are just as applicable to all the developing world and are, in fact, the only way for them to solve their problems...

...Collected in four volumes, his writings are held up as the Golden Guide for all Chinese and the moving force behind all Chinese achievements, whether it be the designing of a twelve-thousand-ton hydraulic press or the breeding of a new strain of rice...

...The newspaper observed: "The readers maintain that the names of these flowers are a poison left by degenerate feudal scholars and decadent bourgeois men of letters...

...I am simply stating that any Chinese can hardly be blamed for concluding that the United States is a very real and present enemy...

...In all fairness, however, certain qualifications must be made, and we must try to see the Cult of Mao in its particular Chinese context...

...They often showed indifference if not ignorance...

...Because these feelings run so deep, they are likely to survive any immediate changes in the Communist leadership...

...Yet for the time being it also seems that many Chinese are starved for the old classics, both Chinese and (in the case of ballet) foreign...

...Soon more readers were getting into the act, jotting down the names of streets, shops, mountains, and even railway stations...

...To a foreigner, or at least a Westerner, this seems as ludicrous as it Seems distasteful...

...Others were less culpable and might be retained, but only after extensive rewriting had brought out a "progressive" message...

...T eaning forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees, his blue tunic somewhat rumpled, the young Chinese worker with a great shock of black hair spoke in a low but earnest voice...

...It seemed to be a ritual to which they had long since become accustomed...

...And this was only typical: From the morning newspapers to the evening entertainment, there is no letup to the paeans of praise (with such dawn-to-dusk exposure, it is no wonder that another favorite ditty is called Last Night I Dreamed of Chairman Mao...

...Almost without exception, the competitors had chosen songs of praise to Chairman Mao...

...In general terms, the official attitude was summed up by the editor of the Kwangming Daily, the newspaper directed at intellectuals, who wrote: "Of course, not all our cultural heritage consists of bad things, but the greater part of this heritage and even much of it is nothing but dross...

...They seek nothing less than True Believers...

...they are retained instead as "negative examples," and people are urged to see them and to study their mistakes...

...True, in their intricate system of thought reform, it can be important at a certain stage to overwhelm the subject with a sense of physical fear...

...Whatever the legal merits of their case, the Chinese strongly believe that Taiwan (Formosa) is an integral part of China, and that only American occupation and the Seventh Fleet keep it from them...

...They must, after all, earn a living...

...Many movies are released to a barrage of criticism in the press, and are attacked for showing the exploiting classes in a sympathetic light and for failing to preach the doctrine of class struggle with sufficient fervor...

...Each clutched a volume of the Works of Chairman Mao as they sang Mao Tse-tung's Thinking is as Bright as the Sun ("If you ask me what I'm busy with, I'm reading Chairman Mao's writings...

...Nor is this true only of the great masses outside the apparatus of government and Party...

...At times the chairman struggled to stay awake...

...Even when under fire, these films are not withdrawn...

...Traveling through China, I have often seen whole shifts come off work in factories and march to their meeting, a stool in one hand, a notebook in the other...

...Another newspaper, in the same endless search for decadence, investigated scenic spots and found to its horror "a great deal of filth left over from the old era...

...This is certainly true of domestic drives, but it is much less so in terms of Chinese foreign policy, especially the virulent opposition to both the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Revisionism in China makes progress only slowly...

...There is something in this of Confucius' dictum, "When the common people study the Way, they are easily directed...

...Facing up to this problem in a fitful way, the Communists have blown hot and cold toward the intellectuals...

...At the same time many patriotic Chinese, Communist or not, have good cause to hate and to fear the United States...

...Kill...

...According to the newspaper, a comrade cracked a joke...

...It went something like this: "A nearsighted peasant mistook some chicken's droppings for jam and ate it...

...It is also worth noting that the prestige and authority of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party rest largely on their military and political success during the revolutionary period...

...As a Canadian, friendly to the United States although often critical of her policies, I have been sickened by the sight of little Chinese boys, not even in their teens, lobbing mock hand grenades at the gaping mouth of a wooden Lyndon Johnson or charging a similar effigy with fixed bayonets and shouts of "Sha...

...By now most Chinese are aware that since 1949, Mao and his colleagues have not proved infallible in their direction of the economy and their conduct of foreign affairs...

...But this time was different, because they were discussing Premier Chou's report on the government's work...

...Often there were differences of opinion when they discussed a particular plan or some technical aspect of their work...

...There is no doubt that in the early years political and propaganda campaigns were waged with great force and fervor, and were taken very seriously by the people...

...It said that in beautiful Hangchow, the resort area near Shanghai, many of the famous tombs "are the graves of poets, scholars, and courtesans and are, therefore, of no historical research value, serving merely the purpose of spreading the foul odor of the reactionary ruling classes among the visitors, and as such must be removed...

...When they look beyond their borders, the Chinese find themselves virtually encircled by a string of American military bases that reaches from Japan to Thailand, that is clearly devoted to "containing" China, and that could be used at any time for the destruction of her cities...

...His birthday is never celebrated, and in the press there are no adulatory articles describing his daily life...

...AH this has steadily changed...

...And while their techniques may be modern, there is nothing new about the Chinese Communists' aims...

...After repeated requests, I was attending my first "meeting" in China...

...In our times, the names of flowers and flowering plants should also spread the fragrant odor of the socialist era...

...And that, it seemed, was that...

...They are also under continual pressure' from Party officials who seek to cut them down to size...

...While it is impossible to deny that great numbers still show revolutionary fervor and genuine idealism, there is also a growing apathy to the demands of the regime that borders at times on cynicism...

...Somewhat to my surprise, I was also in the room, which was in the New China Printing Works on the outskirts of Peking...

...To the common people of China, if not to the intellectuals, such praises may sound only natural...

...They are a prime means by which the Communist regime drills and disciplines its people in the approved Party doctrines, and exposes latent heresies...

...But couldn't they express objections, however slight, to the government's record and policies...

...Most intellectuals are forced to expose themselves to constant risks...

...Some were sophisticated, others gimcrack...

...Confucius, whose ideas have dominated China through the centuries, poses a special problem, since he is too great to be ignored and too subversive to be accepted...

...Then we can solve many problems in our work...

...They came up with such examples of decadence as Jade Emperor Mountain, Watching Fairy Bridge, Good Deeds Done in Former Lives Lane, Many Blessings Hotel, and, worst of all, the U.S.Chinese Cooperative Hairdressing Salon...

...Then there was a solo act...

...His report on China's foreign policy, "The View from Peking," appeared in our May issue...

...While attacks on the Soviet leaders are generally limited to the vivid but rather formal polemics of speeches and pamphlets, anti-Americanism is everywhere and inescapable...

...If, in his last years, Mao is invested with all the grandeur of a Son of Heaven, this may be very much in the Chinese tradition...

...But few can be unaware of the regime's grosser mistakes and larger lunacies, especially at the time of the bungled Great Leap Forward...

...To a large extent the propaganda and political campaigns have been yielding diminishing returns—hence the recent convulsions in China...

...It would be wrong to say that only seventeen years after its final victories the Revolution has run out of steam or lost all its impetus...

...The chairman would indicate a speaker or someone would seem to volunteer...

...But while Communism has brought lasting changes to China, it can be said with some certainty that the Chinese people are adapting themselves to Communism as they have to many another dynasty, and are less and less stirred by the drives and demands of their latest rulers...

...Chi replied that there was...

...In the immediate aftermath of revolution everything seemed in flux, and the campaigns suited an atmosphere of purgation and rebirth...

...In fact, in all China, only one thing bears his name: the Mao Tse-tung Locomotive...

...On trips around the country, on visits to communes, schools, and factories, I often had conversations with Chinese, including senior officials, who seemed ignorant of many campaigns that were filling the columns of the People's Daily and exciting the attention of foreigners in Peking...

...It is, perhaps, a case of the baby and the bathwater...

...but in every case, it seemed, the worker owed his success to his intense study of the Works...

...Most important," he concluded, "we must all study the Works of Chairman Mao...

...With everyone—opponents, offenders, and potential converts—the Chinese Communists prefer to use persuasion rather than coercion...

...In my Peking hotel waiters and room boys paraded regularly through the bar on their way to the meeting room...

...Above all, it is the Thought of Mao Tse-tung that evokes the most fulsome praise...

...For the Chinese, with their proud feelings of racial and cultural superiority, there must also be a certain reluctance to acknowledge themselves to be disciples of a foreign, and especially Western, creed...

...Many intellectuals have been alienated by the regime's mistakes and excesses...

...the only exception is the occasional story on Mao the Swimmer, describing his plunges in the Yangtse River or the Ming Tombs Reservoir outside Peking...

...At times they have offered greater freedoms...

...While Western scholars still debate Mao's originality as a Marxist philosopher, many of his works may well succeed as inspirational tracts...

...With movies the squeeze is also on...

...more often they have sought to compel the intellectuals to honor their own political priorities...

...They also proclaim the virtues of hard work, modesty, plain living, honesty, and self-sacrifice which the Chinese Communists seek to implant in all their people...

...It should now be evident that, like most revolutionaries, the Chinese Communists lack any sense of humor (and this in itself is a most un-Chinese trait...

...While their listeners smoked cigarets and sipped tea, each of the workers spoke naturally, without embarrassment but also without animation or evident enthusiasm...

...Then it was resumed...

...Stripped of its jargon, this is what the People's Daily meant when it praised a woman eye doctor in Tsinan, who had credited Mao's Works for her success in many difficult operations: "Though the writings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung provide no prescriptions for eye diseases, they arm the reader with a correct class standpoint and a working method that enables him to alter and correct his ideological approach...

...Groups from different factories were performing on an open-air basketball court before a solemn panel of judges...

...The Chinese Communists are having their problems with intellectuals, too...

...Two were taking notes: a young girl secretary and the trade-union chairman of the workshop...

...Such meetings— to which many hours are devoted each week—are an important and time-consuming part of life for Chinese factory and office workers, students, artists, and intellectuals...

...It is certainly inescapable...

...There is an old Chinese saying—"Submission by mouth is not nearly as desirable as submission by heart"—which is the crucial point in understanding all the techniques of political persuasion favored by the Chinese Communists: the propaganda, the thought reform, and the political campaigns...

...He also mistook a teapot for a hen and drove it away from the table to the floor...

...Nothing, it seems, is too trivial to merit the attention of officials, especially newspaper editors...

...As one man exclaimed: "Chairman Mao's thinking is the moving force of everything...

...Piously proclaimed in every interview, shouted in slogans, sung in songs, splashed on banners and in newspaper headlines, his name seems woven into the very texture of Chinese daily life...

...It is evident that theater, like other arts, must always evolve or else atrophy, and it is not impossible that in future decades, when political pressures recede, Chinese theater may again startle us with its beauty and vitality...

...Hence it is necessary to claim that Mao "has enriched the treasury of Marxist-Leninist thought" and is its current greatest prophet...

...While it would be naive to accept the wilder claims made on behalf of Mao's writings, it would be almost as foolish to deny them any inspirational value...

...Knowledgeable Chinese, including some opponents of the regime, are convinced that Peking's double-barreled campaign against the Western "imperialists" and the Soviet "revisionists" has proven popular among the Chinese people and conforms to basic prejudices and traditional feelings of superiority...

...This will be especially important for the Party in the immediate aftermath of Mao's death...

...This is one main reason why the official line of virulent hatred does not seem as farfetched to a Chinese as it does to many Westerners...

...While the Communists have far from forfeited the Mandate of Heaven, they have certainly lost any aura of infallibility...

...In other words, while offering no real shortcut to technical proficiency, the dialectical method and the theory of contradictions may suggest a useful working approach...

...a young girl singing Chairman Mao is a Member of My Commune...

...Time and time again, on visits to factories, managers would proudly show me "technical innovations" made on the spot by by enterprising workers...

...There was a chorus line of eight young girls, very vivacious and pretty, despite their baggy overalls...

...Since hostility toward the United States is intimately linked with this chauvinism, China will be a difficult nation for Americans to live with for many years to come...

...All the evidence indicates that the reservoir of enthusiasm has been badly depleted...

...Summoned to discuss Premier Chou En-lai's "state of the nation" speech to the National People's Congress, they had all studied summaries of the report and were now gathered to relate it to their own work in the coming year...

...For weeks in advance they scramble and intrigue to secure a ticket, and some even take the risk of standing outside the theater, pressing money on any foreigner who seems to have an extra ticket...

...Another forty per cent, he said, formed an intermediate section—they gave their support, generally completed their tasks, but were not politically active...

...There was also a great incentive to settle old scores, and the early drives against landlords, capitalists, and other rightists were often marked by ruthless ferocity...

...Sha!— [Kill...

...But to the newspaper there are jokes and jokes, and this joke was a bad joke, "because it showed that our working-people were not able to distinguish fragrant odpr from foul, and was an attempt at telling us to despise our class brothers...

...By supporting the decadent and corrupt Chiang Kai-shek oligarchy, Americans convinced most Chinese that they were mainly concerned with perpetuating foreign domination of the country...

...These names, they pointed out, "were obviously not in keeping with the spirit of our times and, therefore, should be changed into meaningful and healthy names...

...In an atmosphere of tension and struggle, through Christian-like techniques of confession, repentance, and forgiveness, the Chinese leaders seek to produce genuine converts to the cause...

...Her encore: Song of Chairman Mao and the Party...

...Among the intellectuals of Peking the occasional visit of a European ballet company is an event of great excitement...

...Taylor recently returned after eighteen months in China as resident correspondent for The Globe and Mail of Toronto...

...But how could there be any different opinions on Premier Chou's report," he asked, "since it is based on the actual conditions of China...

...But it is also very much against the traditions of modesty and rough equality which the Chinese Communists proclaimed in their spartan years in the revolutionary wilderness...

...Another ten per cent were backward intellectuals who lacked political consciousness and opposed socialism...

...Backsliding among the cadres has long been an openly acknowledged problem...

...Although the meeting lasted for ninety minutes, there was little real discussion and no debate or disagreement...

...Much of the recent pressure on intellectuals reflects China's bitter quarrel with the Soviet Union...

...They are adapted from his forthcoming book, Reporter in Red China, to be published by Random House...

...Reverence is thus evoked through patriotism and chauvinism...

...Among all the absurdities of Chinese propaganda, nothing seems too farfetched and exaggerated—at least to the foreigner—as the constant adulation of Mao Tse-tung...

...Entertainment was suspended for a moment as the hundreds of spectators clapped the foreign guest to his seat...

...Yet for all these qualifications, it does seem at times that the Cult of Mao has got wildly out of hand...

...In their view, a man who obeys the Party through fear or merely through the desire for a quiet life is not only useless but is also a potential source of discontent...

...The Chinese leaders have generally regarded the peasants with deep distrust—even though the revolution was based on their discontent—being well aware of their conservative habits and of what Mao has called "the spontaneous tendencies toward capitalism on the part of small producers...

...Through 1964 and 1965 a series of philosophers, historians, and artists were under systematic attack, and in each case the People's Daily and other newspapers would devote whole pages for days on end to the sorry scapegoat...

...During his stay he was one of four correspondents from the West and the only North American...

...It must be galling for the leaders to realize that after all these years their revolution has taken only such tentative roots in the countryside, and in the summer of 1966 they were showing signs of preparing to deprive the peasants of their private plots...

...It was stated that with their romantic tales of emperors and courtesans, many traditional operas were out of place in a revolutionary era...

...The adulation of Mao and the cult of his writings seem part of a conscious attempt to make Maoism relevant to all modern endeavors, and hence to strengthen the Party's political appeal...

...Then we can raise the quantity and quality of our output...

...Around the table in the dimly lit room, under the portrait of Mao Tse-tung, fifteen men and five women, all dressed alike in blue or gray tunics, listened with solemn attention...

...Like the emperors of old, Mao lives in splendid seclusion, and we are told nothing about his family or his family life...

...Nor is the whole magnificent body of Chinese traditional culture immune from such criticism...

...By long barring China from the United Nations and refusing her diplomatic recognition, the United States is seen by the Chinese as denying them their rightful place in world councils...

...For most Chinese the campaigns were a new experience, and few knew how to react to the practiced techniques of the Communist cadres...