7 Key excerpts on "Maoism"

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  Chinese Ideology

  • Shiping Hua, Shiping Hua(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Within the field of Chinese history in Western academia, in the last 10–15 years, scholars have developed new approaches to the history of the Mao and post-Mao eras—usually subsumed under the name “New PRC History.” All these approaches share the stated need to “take Maoism seriously”; that is, to consider how the daily experiences of Chinese people after 1949 were informed by Maoist ideology and by the communist state, and how for many of these people Maoism, rather than being simply an ideological imposition, became a lived practice, an embodied belief, and a crucial determinant of social relationships. Accordingly, I propose here that we should try to “take global Maoism seriously,” and by that I mean, first and foremost, that we cannot ascribe its transnational influence simply to an inexplicable infantile fascination with an unknowable revolution, and we have instead to start precisely by asking what people in very different social and cultural contexts found so appealing about the experience of Maoist China—no matter how misunderstood, idealized, or reimagined it was. In this piece, I will only attempt to give a synthetic and very schematic answer to that question. I identify here four crucial and interconnected elements that contributed to the popularity of Maoism as political thought and practice outside China: decolonization and China’s positions as an economic and strategic model in the Cold War; the Cultural Revolution and the issue of the Party; the Maoist critique of knowledge production; and consciousness raising.

  A nonwhite revolution

  There was one defining characteristic of the Chinese Revolution that stood out, especially in the eyes of people in the Third World and oppressed minorities in the First: it was a successful peasant revolution, leading to a socialist state, conducted in rural areas by impoverished people who were not white

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  Mao

  • S.G. Breslin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  sine qua non for all policy.

  . . . 

  Mao's Political Ideas: Revolutionary Purity or Political Pragmatism?

  It is notable that Mao’s emphasis on ideology and politics reflected those areas where he was most able to set the political agenda. His ideas were not particularly strongly held within the party-state bureaucracy. As Lieberthal notes:

  Mao’s own position in the system would be affected by the type of economic development strategy pursued. The Chairman’s personal political strengths lay in the areas of foreign policy (especially towards the great powers), rural policy, and issues of revolutionary change.15

  It was thus to his advantage to maintain the primacy of the ideological debate and focus on those areas where his voice was most likely to be heard.

  Furthermore, Mao’s prestige was high amongst the rural masses and the young, partly as a consequence of the mass mobilisation campaigns and the development of the personality cult that will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Again, it played to his strengths to emphasise the primacy of rural development. With the Leninists dominating policy-making, subjecting them to supervision and control from the masses who were more sympathetic to Mao’s views was also to his political benefit. Similarly, promoting party entrance for those who were politically active created a new pro-Mao constituency in the party to challenge the existing status quo and the technocratic party membership.

  Another consideration here is the relationship between Mao’s goals for the Chinese revolution and the influence of Soviet Marxism. The extent to which Mao ever had a firm and good grasp of the canon of Marx and Engels is open to question. It certainly appears that he came to the original works after

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  The Transition to Socialism in China (Routledge Revivals)

  • Mark Selden, Victor Lippit, Mark Selden, Victor Lippit(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Maoism, Titoism, Stalinism: Some Origins and Consequences of the Maoist Theory of the Socialist Transition

  Edward Friedman

  Introduction

  Maoism, Titoism, and Stalinism are shorthand terms for the three broad notions which have legitimated the policies of the socialist transition in the People's Republic of China.1 I will try to clarify these three socialist projects by sketching contours of these notions as they were first drawn between 1948 and 1958.

  What has struck most observers is the struggle by Titoists and Maoists to avoid the errors, defeats and horrors of diverse aspects of the Soviet Union's experience. But the Stalinist path may have seemed more attractive in the 1950s when Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai and others were generally incapable of imagining swift economic progress without close ties to the USSR.

  The major theorist of the Maoist position was Chen Boda.2 By 1958, in developing a critique of how capitalism was restored in Yugoslavia, Maoism took the form of new policies to guarantee the transition through socialism to communism. The new commitment was to a mass campaign, labor intensive, anti-economic, change of consciousness approach to the socialist transition.

  The target of Chen's 1958 campaign was China's Titoists. Leading Titoists included Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and Sun Yefang. Since Chen Boda accepted and built on Stalin's notion of Titoism as capitalist restoration, his Maoism was not the antithesis of Stalinism. Yet because Chen's Maoism shared similar historical origins with Titoism, it also shared key Titoist concerns — a fiery nationalism, bureaucratism as a major obstacle to socialism, a need to positively woo the peasantry in the coming transformation.

  Maoism was theoretically unique. Yet it built on Stalinist notions and included Titoist concerns. The complexity behind analytic shorthands such as Maoism, Titoism, and Stalinism in China can best be comprehended by relating theoretical distinctiveness to actual historical evolution.

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  Contemporary China

  A History since 1978

  • Yongnian Zheng, Yongnian Zheng(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In the early 1960s, Mao began to have serious doubts about Liu. The “two-front” leadership arrangement led to a situation in which Mao perceived that he was increasingly marginalized in decision-making. By 1965, Mao had completely lost confidence in Liu and decided to have him removed. In 1966, Mao managed to install Lin Biao as the new successor with the support of another personal favorite whom he seemingly regarded as totally loyal, and the support of the army for the unprecedentedly disruptive CR. Once reluctantly installed as the successor, Lin essentially adopted the passive tactic of echoing whatever positions Mao adopted. This involved fulsome praise of the CR. Nevertheless, by 1970, Mao had come to doubt and took precautionary measures against his successor. Conflicts involving turf warfare and petty personal frictions unfolded between civilian radicals led by Madam Mao (Jiang Qing) and a group involving Lin’s household, particularly his wife and son, and top central military officials from among his revolutionary colleagues. Sensing that the military had gathered too much power, Mao sided with his wife at the 1970 Lushan Plenum and demanded self-criticisms from Lin’s group, which he found inadequate. This eventually forced a showdown with Lin that led to the latter’s fateful flight from China in September 1971.

  In the post-Lin Biao conflict of the radicals around Jiang Qing against the remaining pre-CR elite represented by Zhou Enlai, and after his 1973 rehabilitation by Deng Xiaoping, Mao considered a range of younger leaders as eventual successors, particularly the radical Wang Hongwen, and eventually Hua Guofeng, who also had support from veteran revolutionaries for such a role.

  Mao used power struggle as an incentive for other leaders in order to achieve his political goal. As a major player in all these power struggles, he was able to manipulate these political factions. He frequently changed his political alliances to eliminate any perceived political threat to his authority and move toward his goal. He was able to maneuver since his authority was absolute. With his passing, his political enterprise faded with him.

  Maoism: Experiment and Failure

  Maoism is undoubtedly one of the greatest experiments in human history. Like Dr Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek before him, Mao was aware of the import­ance of having a strong state. Nonetheless, it was never clear what form of a strong state Mao had attempted to build. He was never satisfied with the form of the state his revolution had brought about. Whereas states rest on bureaucratic systems, Mao’s form of the state was one without a bureaucratic system. He thus called for a continuous revolution to consistently remake the state.

  The Party-state was successful in establishing a hegemonic regime and an overall control over local society through its coercive organization and ideo­logy. The domination of the state, however, does not necessarily mean that the state is able to modernize the country. The state’s capacity to develop the economy and society depends on not only the will and skill of the top leadership, but also the lower-level state organizations and social institutions. Without the initiative of social institutions and the cooperation of lower-level organizations, leaders will have difficulties mobilizing people and getting them to rally behind them.

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  Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China

  From a Charismatic Mao to the Politics of Succession

  • Frederick C Teiwes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  I Chinese Politics 1949-1965: A Changing Mao

  The Cultural Revolution shattered the previous consensus view of Chinese politics—a view emphasizing a stable, unified leadership, the predominant authority of Mao Zedong, a close working relationship between Mao and his chosen successor, Liu Shaoqi, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the institutional embodiment of Mao's revolutionary values. In scholarly reinterpretations of the pre-Cultural Revolution period, a widespread tendency emerged which adopted, albeit with significant variations and modifications, concepts derived from Beijing's own "two line struggle" model of political conflict. The central assumption shared by proponents of this view is that Chinese politics was long marked by tension between two antithetical approaches. One, identified with Mao, sought modernization through mass mobilization and manifested a deep concern with the ideological purity of Chinese society. The opposing approach, ascribed to the gray Party bureaucracy and personified and led by Liu Shaoqi, was absorbed in the prosaic tasks of production and economic growth, wedded to rational strategies in dealing with China's problems, and obsessed with orderly development of the existing system.

  According to the "two line struggle" interpretation, these different approaches may have been only potentially divisive in the early 1950s, but in the post-Great Leap period (after 1958)—or earlier some analysts have suggested—they began to harden into polarized positions. Fluctuations in Party policies are seen in terms of significant and often bitter conflict between advocates of each position in which the political balance has often been delicate, with Mao sometimes suffering severe losses of power. This essay questions the adequacy of the above view and presents a different interpretation of political conflict and policy change in China prior to the Cultural Revolution.*

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  Maoism in India

  Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century

  • Bidyut Chakrabarty, Rajat Kumar Kujur(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is true that the land question continues to remain significant in the consolidation of left-wing extremism in India. What triggered the present radical Maoist movement, however, was primarily ‘forest rights’ of the tribal population and also forcible land acquisition for industrialization and the setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZ). In a significant way, globalization seems to have disturbed the economic balance in the country. With the adoption of the policy of liberalization of the Indian economy and its interaction with the processes of globalization, the rural market has now been integrated with urban commerce producing ‘new structures of power based on land and capital’ that will further marginalize the rural poor. By creating SEZ, the state seems to have created investment opportunities in industry and trade for the national and global capital. This process has begun to threaten the marginal farmers and those drawing on land with dispossession and displacement – money cannot compensate for their only source of survival, the land, presumably because they are emotionally linked with land and it will be difficult for them to adopt any other means for livelihood.

  Maoism is a contextual response to the socio-economic grievances of the peripheral sections of society who, despite the euphoria over the state-directed Soviet model of planned economic development, remain impoverished. Maoism is Marxism-Leninism in an agricultural context where national and global capital are strongly resisted by drawing upon an ideological discourse that has been creatively articulated to take care of the indigenous socio-economic and political forces besides local traditions. In Orissa, Maoism has struck a chord with the indigenous population. Tribals are opposed to the denial of their rights over forest lands and to ‘the complicity of the state’ and industrial magnates (both national and global) taking the forests away for agribusiness. Those opposing the corporate-led industrialization are considered ‘unlawful’ and often accused of ‘disloyalty’ and ‘treason’. What is implemented in the name of development is a model for private profit ignoring the basic requirements of the indigenous population. A report of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights into three mining projects in Orissa’s Kalahandi and Rayagada districts confirms the extent to which local people get marginalized due to ‘the application of such a model of development’. The report underlines

  the total dependence on depressed agriculture … low irrigation facilities … worsened by inequitable land relations, token and partial land reforms and extremely low educational and health facilities provided by the state. It is in these conditions that these mining projects are pushed through’.

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  Carl Schmitt, Mao Zedong and the Politics of Transition

  • Qi Zheng(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  102

  However, rebelling against the party does not mean that Mao totally denies the necessity of leadership and authority. The shift is that the leadership of the party organization had to be replaced by the leadership of Mao’s thought and its ideological authority. Young correctly points out that ‘throughout the Cultural Revolution, therefore, there was both a recognition of the need for Party leadership and the effective destruction of the role of Party organizations. In that case, “Party leadership” tended to mean the ideological leadership of Mao and his “proletarian headquarters.”’103 Therefore, the primary consequence of smashing the party organization was the establishment of a direct link between Mao’s personal authority and the masses.

  4.6   Conclusion

  The general picture of Mao’s political philosophy has exposed the nature of politics in both founding and protecting moments of a political order, the concept of homogeneity and the role of the individual, law, political power and the masses. After examining these various aspects of Mao’s theory, one can understand why many Chinese scholars criticize Schmitt and conclude that Mao’s and Schmitt’s political theories have many similarities.

  First of all, both of them perceive politics from the perspective of conflict. In Schmitt’s theory, the political resides in the friend/enemy grouping. It has the possibility of conflict and even physical killing. For Mao, politics is class struggle, the expression of contradiction in society. Second, in terms of the people’s homogeneity, Schmitt stresses its significance because homogeneity constituted by a common intense commitment of the people is the basis for the founding and protecting moments of a legal order, while the homogeneity constituted by their ordinary common commitment is important for ordinary politics. Mao’s theory seems similar; it also stresses the formation of a homogeneous people so as to found and protect the proletarian political order. Third, both propose an understanding of the role of the individual towards the state that is very different from the one proposed by liberal individualism. Finally, Mao and Schmitt also place similar emphasis on the importance of political power.

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