Mao's success in turning the world on its head was by no means fortuitous
wchao37  Updated: 2004-02-28 09:47

Mao's success in turning the world on its head was by no means fortuitous. As I said, the discussion of Mao will lead to deeper searches within Chinese civilization itself.

That should have been anticipated all along, and let me illustrate what I am driving at with a short story.

A company called Dell has been doing very well in the computer hardware industry and in a few short years has emerged as a fast-upcoming 40-billion-dollar transnational conglomerate. In contrast, many new start-up companies in this field have failed after trying to duplicate what Dell has done, but none has succeeded in a remotely comparable manner.

For years, this failure on the part of similarly motivated and equally talented aspirants had been an enigma wrapped in a riddle encased in a conundrum because it was assumed that Dell's model of success would have been easy to duplicate. Little do the competitors know that Dell has a unique corporate culture in addition to its thousand-plus innovations in the U.S. patent office to explain its success, and its is this irreplaceable combination that has kept the company ahead of the pack.

In a similar vein, though some are as well versed in Chinese history and revolutionary theory as Mao was before the Chairman arrived on the scene, many equally talented Chinese were not able to solve China's problems and bring the revolution to a successful conclusion. In retrospect, they had all read the same books and adhered faithfully to the same orthodox dogmas of Soviet communism; yet none of them were able to truly help China in extricating herself from the cobwebs and quicksand of her historical calamity. A hitherto leading civilization had by 1840 been reduced to a 'geographical expression,' and became further dilapidated in the quagmire of the first few decades of the Twentieth.

Western scholars are naturally intrigued by rags-to-riches stories whether they be in the case of individuals or nations, and China's phoenix-like rise being inexorably intertwined with the foundation laid by Mao over 27 years (1949-76) in the Twentieth Century, it is natural for these scholars to focus their attention on the great man himself in their study of the Chinese Revolution.

That's why your mention of Benjamin Schwartz (Professor Emeritus at the Department of History and Political Science at Harvard) did not come as a surprise to me. In fact, one of his more notable books is titled "Chinese communism and The Rise of Mao." Together with Zhou Tze-zhong at University of Wisconsin in Madison, he is well known for his study of the May Fourth Movement. His other books, "The World of Thought in Ancient China," and "China and Other Matters" also make the rounds regularly in East Asian studies in most U.S. universities. Still, as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that Western scholars are trying to scratch an itch through the boots when they attempt to analyze Chinese events through Western prisms without an in-depth study of Chinese classical literature like "Zhanguoze," especially those mentioned in "Guwen Guanzi." The orientation of the kaleidoscope is simply not the same.

By the way, the common focus of most of these Chinese scholars came to a head in the person of Yan Fu, who died eighty-three years ago (1921) in the same year that the communist Party was founded in Shanghai, China.

Yan Fu was a translator of the first wave of Western literature that arrived at China's shores and caused enduring repercussions to this day: "The Origin of Species," "Natural Selection," "Social Contract," and Mr. Science and Mr. democracy were both popularized and personified precepts in China. But as Mao observed with his trademark razor-sharp perspicacity: "why were the 'teachers' from the West always attacking and bullying their students in the East?" The hypocrisy of the West was exposed before the discerning eyes of the hoi polloi of China and it was not difficult for them to realize that the rapacious West was not to be trusted.

In fact, Yan Fu's conclusion that the West's prosperity was secondary to the superiority of its social institutions and cultural heritage was singularly premature, since in the eighty-three years since his death the West has shown unmistakable signs of decline while espousing the same social institutions and philosophical Greco-Roman foundations as in its heydays.

Furthermore, a visit to the building in Shanghai enshrined as the original meeting place during the Party's first congregation in 1921 would have revealed that it was not entirely certain that the majority of the early participants were communist revolutionaries at all.

Of the twelve original attendees at the conference, only Mao and a few others (including Dong Biwu) survived intact as Party stalwarts until the 1949 victory parade below the Tiananmen rostrum.

Specifically, Zhang Guotao sold out to the counter-revolutionaries during the Long March and led the Red Fourth Army astray. Zhou Fuehai and Chen Gungbo both became Hanjians when the Japanese launched a large-scale invasion the late 1930's and both worked as Japanese hat-in-hand stooges. Li Da and a couple of others died unnatural deaths even earlier on, and the Russian observer during that first meeting did not survive the Stalin purges in mid 1930's.

I am mentioning these historical tidbits because they are important hints in a timeline which purports to show that Mao's revolution was far from being a natural outcome of the struggle of the Chinese people against seemingly insurmountable odds as conceptualized by the aphoristic "Three Mountains." Even the vanguards of the revolution succumbed to historical eddies and failed to live up to their original aspirations. As we have seen, some even went to the other extreme and became out-and-out traitors.

Like Dell, Mao's success in turning the Chinese nation -- and by its extension, the world -- around was not fortuitous and deserves a much more probing scrutiny, and Western scholars cannot do it all alone.

The above content represents the view of the author only.

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