Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (107 page)

The summary conceals many nuances. But it confirms a downtrend in the recurrent cycle of interest in Africa. The first cycle, what might be called the Rhodes period, ran from the 1880s up to the First World War, when many believed Africa’s resources would be the mainstay of future European prosperity. This was briefly sustained in the early 1920s, then evaporated. A further cycle of interest began in the late 1940s and reached its peak in the early 1960s, during the
transfer from colonial rule to independence. It began to collapse with militarization in the late 1960s. By the early 1980s it was dead: that is, the interest of the outside world in Africa was confined largely to certain major primary producers, especially Nigeria and South Africa. By then it was apparent that the great bulk of the continent had become and would remain politically unstable and incapable of self-sustained economic growth, or even of a place within the international economy. Africa had become simply a place for proxy wars, like Spain in the 1930s. In Africa, the professional political caste and the omnicompetent state had proved costly and sanguinary failures. We must now examine to what extent the same pattern had been repeated in Asia, especially in the two stricken giants which housed nearly half the world’s population, China and India.

SIXTEEN
Experimenting with Half Mankind

In the summer of 1966, the official Peking press reported that on 16 July Mao Tse-tung, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, then in his seventieth year, had organized and led a mass swim in the Yangtze. Somewhat fuzzy photographs were published of what appeared to be his large round head bobbing in the water. Reports said he had swum nearly ten miles in just over sixty minutes and he was described as ‘radiant with vigour and in buoyant spirits’.
¹
This was merely one of the prodigies which appeared to have taken place in China in the quarter-century between Mao’s accession to power and his death in 1976. It was widely believed China was steadily overcoming the economic problems facing large, backward and heavily populated countries, and was doing so within the framework of an enthusiastic national consensus.

Visitors returned fervent admirers of Mao’s brand of Communism. China, one of them wrote, was ‘a kind of benign monarchy ruled by an emperor-priest who had won the complete devotion of his subjects’. Its people, another predicted, would be ‘the incarnation of the new civilization of the world’. Simone de Beauvoir testified: ‘life in China today is exceptionally pleasant’. The country had become, said another witness, ‘almost as painstakingly careful about human lives as New Zealand’. David Rockefeller praised ‘the sense of national harmony’ and argued that Mao’s revolution had succeeded ‘not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose’. Another American visitor found the changes ‘miraculous …. The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened to the Chinese people in centuries.’ What attracted most admiration was the improvement in moral tone. ‘Of the many communes I visited,’ Felix Greene reported, ‘all except one denied any knowledge of any children born out of wedlock.’ ‘Law and order’, another American visitor found, ‘… are maintained more by the prevailing
high moral code than by any threat of police action.’ Yet another insisted that government tax collectors had become ‘incorruptible’ and that intellectuals were anxious to prove their lack of ‘contempt for peasants’ by ‘lugging buckets of manure in their free time’.
²

These testimonies recalled the uncritical praise lavished by visitors on Stalin and his regime during the horrors of collectivization and the great purges. When taxed on this point, admiring visitors replied that the lessons of Soviet mistakes had been learnt, largely through the extraordinary genius of Mao. He was, Jan Myrdal wrote, ‘third in line with Marx and Lenin’ and had solved the problem of how ‘the revolution can be prevented from degenerating’. He ‘combined’, wrote an American political scientist, ‘qualities which rarely coexist in one being in such intensity’. Han Suyin argued that, unlike Stalin, Mao ‘is extremely patient, and believes in debate and re-education’, and had ‘an ever-present concern with the practical application of democracy’. When a problem arose, an American sinologist reported, Mao ‘invariably’ responded ‘in a uniquely creative and profoundly ethical way’. Felix Greene believed that the hunger for power had been eliminated and that there was ‘no evidence of that jockeying for power or of the personal rivalry that we have so often seen in the Kremlin’. Mao was not merely a soldier, a leader, a poet, philosopher, teacher, thinker and charismatic: he was also a kind of saint. What struck Hewlett Johnson most about him was ‘something no picture has ever caught, an inexpressible look of kindness and sympathy, an obvious preoccupation with the needs of others … these formed the deep content of his thoughts.’
³

Needless to say, these travellers’ tales, as in Stalin’s Russia, bore little or no relation to the truth, which was more interesting and infinitely more depressing. And Mao’s public image, too, was as remote from the reality as Stalin’s. Mao was not a saint. There was nothing of the scholar or the mandarin about him. He was a big, coarse, brutal, earthy and ruthless peasant, a
kulak
indeed; an educated version of his father. Khrushchev, not unjustly, compared him to ‘a bear, swaying from side to side as he moved, calmly and slowly’.
⁴
Talking to the Politburo in 1956, Mao warned: ‘We must not blindly follow the Soviet Union …. Every fart has some kind of smell, and we cannot say that all Soviet farts smell sweet.’
⁵
Three years later, admitting the failure of the ‘Great Leap’, he told the same group: ‘Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.’
⁶
Again, in 1974, reviewing the shortcomings of the Cultural Revolution he philosophized: The need to shit after eating does not mean that eating is a waste of time.’
⁷
A Belgian Communist described him, during the great Red Guards rally in Heavenly Peace
Square on 18 August 1966, retiring from time to time to take off his vest and wipe his chest and armpits, remarking, it’s unhealthy to let sweat dry on your body.’
⁸

Beneath this coarse exterior, however, there beat a strong – indeed a wild – romantic heart. It is probably true, as Stalin insisted in 1949, that Mao was not really a Marxist at all: ‘He doesn’t understand the most elementary Marxist truths.’
⁹
While he used the Marxist formulations, and indeed considered himself a great Marxist thinker, much superior to Stalin’s contemptible successors, he never in practice attempted to apply objective Marxist analysis. He did not believe in ‘objective situations’ at all. It was all in the mind: he might be described as a geopolitical Emile Coué who believed in ‘mind over matter’. On the basis of ‘the tremendous energy of the masses’, he argued, ‘it is possible to accomplish any task whatever’.
¹⁰
‘There is only unproductive thought,’ he said, ‘no unproductive regions. There are only poor methods of cultivating the land, no such thing as poor land.’
¹¹
This contempt for objective reality explains his willingness to accept the prospect of nuclear war, and his conviction that China would win it. ‘The East wind prevails over the West wind,’ he said in 1957. if imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no alternative but to make up our minds and fight to the finish before going ahead with our construction.’
¹²
The same year, in Moscow, he shocked his Communist colleagues by the same argument: ‘We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before’ (according to Khrushchev, he ‘used an indecent expression’).
¹³
He later took a similar view of war with Russia: ‘Even if it goes on for ever, the sky won’t fall, trees will grow, women will give birth and fishes will swim.’
¹⁴
He seems to have believed all his life that the true dynamic of history was not so much the maturation of classes (that might be the outward expression) as heroic determination. He saw himself as the Nietzschean superman made flesh.

In his artistic longings, in his romanticism and in his belief that will is the key not only to power but to accomplishment, Mao was an oriental Hitler. Though the cult of Mao bore a superficial resemblance to Stalinism, it actually had a far more creative and central role in the Maoist state. Like Hitler, Mao loved politics as theatre. The
décor
of his regime was far’ more striking and original than Stalin’s lacklustre imitations of Nazi pomp. He drew on and transformed the majesty of the imperial era. The crowds were trained to greet him with the ritual chant ‘Boundless life to Chairman Mao’. Like the emperors, he ploughed a symbolic annual furrow, used the Imperial City for his residence and gave calligraphic instructions for
monuments.
¹⁵
But to this he added a sun-culture of his own, reflected in his hymn ‘The East is Red’, which he imposed on China as a second national anthem:

From the Red East rises the sun:

There appears in China a Mao Tse-tung.

His round, sun-like face appeared on huge posters; and, like the sun, he appeared at dawn to inspect a million Red Guards in the summer of 1966.

These occasions, of which there were eight within a few weeks, allowing the sun to shine on over 11 million people, strongly resembled the Nuremberg rallies. The Red Guards rhythmically chanted Maoist slogans, while Lin Piao (rather like Goebbels) called out the litanies: ‘Beat down the capitalist readers in power! Beat down the reactionary bourgeois authorities! Sweep away all wicked devils and evil spirits! Do away with the Four Old Things: old thought, old culture, old customs, old habits. The Thought of Mao Tse-tung must rule and transform the spirit, until the power of the spirit transforms matter!’ (18 August 1966).
¹⁶
Mao’s thought was ‘the sun of our heart, the root of our life, the source of our strength’, ‘his thought is a compass and spiritual food’, it was ‘like a massive cudgel swung by a golden monkey’, a ‘brilliant beam of light’ exposing ‘monsters and goblins’, a series of ‘magic mirrors to detect demons’, and he himself was ‘the source of all wisdom’. The Revolution and its achievements were (in a manner of speaking) a gigantic thought-form of Mao’s, since ‘all our victories are victories of the Thought of Mao Tse-tung’.
¹⁷

The
Little Red Book
played a similar role to
Mein Kampf and
, like Hitler, Mao used military drill, massed bands and
son et lumière
to produce illusion and hysteria. For his 1966 rallies, 1,000-piece bands played ‘The East is Red’, and a film of the ninth National Congress of the
CCP
in 1969 showed delegates, holding the
Little Red Book
aloft, jigging up and down in frenzy, tears rolling down their cheeks, yelping and baying like animals, in the Great Hall of the People.
¹⁸
The virulently abusive language Mao and his henchmen used to evoke violent and intolerant activism was very reminiscent of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

The most important respect in which Mao recalled Hitler was in his imminent eschatology. Mao was, above all, a violently impatient man. He lacked the unhurried stoicism with which Stalin remorselessly pursued his objectives and his hatreds. Mao, like Hitler, wanted to speed up history. He thought his successors would prove poltroons and faint-hearts and that unless things were done in his own lifetime, they would not be done at all. He always heard time’s
winged chariot at his back, and his impetuosity found expression in his complementary and insatiable love of drama. In a sense, Mao never made the transition from revolution to administration. He lacked Stalin’s bureaucratic appetite. For him, history was a cosmic play, a succession of spectacular episodes, in which he was actor, impresario and spectator. No sooner had the curtain come crashing down on one scene – ‘the Long March’, say, or ‘the Fall of the
KMT’
– than he clamoured for it to rise again and the action to recommence, faster and more furious than before.

Hence Mao’s reign was a lurid melodrama, sometimes degenerating into farce but always, in the deepest sense, a tragedy: for what he caused to be enacted was not theatre but a gigantic series of experiments on hundreds of millions of real, living, suffering people. The first drama after the defeat of the
KMT
seems to have occurred towards the end of 1950. Initially, the land reform introduced in the south under the law of 1949 was not radical. A speech of Lin Piao’s as late as 14 June 1950 applied the brakes. The benevolent term ‘prosperous middle peasant’ replaced ‘rich peasant’ and new categories of ‘enlightened gentry’ and ‘small landlords’ were coined to keep efficient farmers in business.
¹⁹
Then the coming of the Korean War gave Mao the pretext for his first post-war cataclysm. In 1951 and still more in 1952–3, the land reform was continually accelerated and conducted with great savagery. There was ‘the Three-Antis campaign’, quickly followed by ‘the Five-Antis campaign’. On 21 February 1951 new ‘Regulations regarding the punishment of counter-revolutionaries’ provided death and life-sentences for a wide range of ‘crimes’. All major towns held mass rallies at which social ‘enemies’ were publicly denounced and sentenced. Over a few months, nearly 30,000 such meetings were held in Peking alone, attended by 3 million people. The papers published long lists of names every day of executed ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In October 1951 it was stated that 800,000 cases had been dealt with in the first six months of the year (Chou En-lai later said that 16.8 per cent had received death-sentences, which would mean 135,000 executions, or 22,500 a month, a high rate even by Stalin’s worst standards). The total number of killed during this first post-war drama of Mao’s may have been as high as 15 million, though a figure of 1 to 3 million is more likely.
²⁰