On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from atop Tiananmen. Sixty years later, the Chinese Communist Party retains its iron grip over a country that has changed immensely since its birth following a protracted civil war, brutal Japanese occupation during World War II and more than a century of humiliation at the hands of colonial foreign powers. Today, on the PRC's 60th anniversary, it's worth taking stock of the country's accomplishments since that fateful day.
Few leaders in world history have proved as controversial as Chairman Mao. Although he remains officially venerated by the Communist Party of China, Mao's grotesque failings as a statesman have been evident ever since his hugely ambitious yet tragically misguided Great Leap Forward. In an attempt to instantly propel a poor, largely rural nation to great power status through large-scale collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization, Mao took all the worst aspects of the Soviet experiment under Stalin and brutally enforced those radical policies on the Chinese people. Collectivization in the Soviet Union caused widespread famine in rural areas, especially the Ukraine, but what historians of the Soviet period referred to as the "man-made disaster" wrought even greater havoc in China, where it has been estimated up to 30 million people died in the worst famine in recorded history.
The Great Leap was constantly marked by boneheaded administrative delusions, such as Mao's desire to overtake the United States in steel production within ten years. To that end, he forced at least 90 million people to build backyard furnances in which all available metals - dining utensils, doorknobs, whatever was at hand - were melted down to create "steel", in reality useless slag that would later cause the collapse of bridges and other large-scale construction projects. Reality was never an impediment to Mao, and he was notoriously dismissive of human life. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography Mao: The Unknown Story, banned in China because of its unabashedly negative view of the communist leader, is rife with examples of Mao's callousness. Upon being informed that one county was doling out food to people too ill to work, he responded: "This won't do. Give them this amount and they don't work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they're hungry they have to try harder." He freely allowed that "half of China may well have to die" in order to fulfill his policies.
When the failures of the Great Leap Forward could no longer be hidden, Mao was largely thrust aside by the party apparatus, who aimed to reduce his influence and transform him into little more than a figurehead. That proved a disastrous decision as Mao used his burgeoning personality cult to destroy political enemies and bring chaos to China in the Cultural Revolution. Employing legions of teenage followers as his weapon, Mao turned the Red Guards on any and all manifestations of authority other than himself. The result was a virtual lost decade for China, as students killed their teachers, children turned in their parents, schools and hospitals shut down operations, and cultural life atrophied into banal revolutionary propaganda under the influence of "Madame Mao", Jiang Qing. The wave of violence intensified as Red Guard factions turned on each other, and it was only with Mao's death that the Cultural Revolution could be said to have truly ended.
Since then, the free-market reforms of Deng Xiaoping have turned the economy of China around through an embrace of once-taboo capitalist policies. Despite the fact that the country is suffering from an array of problems associated with capitalism - rising inequality between rich and poor, rampant corruption, ethnic uprisings, and severe pollution - the engine of Chinese economic growth has never been more powerful. China's rise, especially in the period following Deng's reforms, provides one of the more challenging refutations to conventional Marxist dogma. Under Mao's extreme version of communism, millions died and the country almost tore itself apart (a serious charge given Mao's reputation for uniting China after its disarray under various warlords and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek). It was only following Mao's death that a generation of more pragmatic leaders forged a new path in which, to paraphrase Van Jones, they could substitute the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.
Ultimately, what can we say about the China of today? The country is far more prosperous and stable than it has ever been, and yet the Communist Party is well-aware that its claim to power rests on its ability to deliver economically for its people. Unlike in the USSR, the Chinese communists were unable to disassociate themselves from a mass-murdering despot in the same way that Kruschchev embarked on his campaign of de-Stalinization. The Soviet leadership could portray Stalin's rule as a perversion of the communist ideal by pointing to his predecessor Lenin, who they claimed represented "true" communism. The Chinese leadership did not have this same luxury. The party had gained power through Mao and was indelibly associated with his name. To renounce Mao would be to dismiss the party's entire claim to legitimacy, and so they settled on a compromise policy in which Mao remains officially revered, though his flaws are acknowledged. In an approach characteristic of the post-Deng leadership, it is a highly...pragmatic decision.
We should not forget that there was much that was admirable about Mao's achievements. Aside from uniting a broken country and restoring its sense of national pride (a feat at odds with notions of proletarian internationalism), he also raised the overall standard of living - promoting universal education, increasing life expectancy by decades, serving as an outspoken opponent of Western imperialism on behalf of developing nations, and, it should not be forgotten, breaking down barriers to women in society and overturning repugnant, misogynist cultural traditions such as foot-binding. Mao famously said, "Women hold up half the sky," and Chinese women can surely count themselves as far more liberated since the foundation of the People's Republic.
But like so much of Mao's life, his views on women were fraught with contradictions. As documented in Jung Chang's biography, he treated his wives horribly and in old age had many dalliances with younger women. It's a microcosm of the larger contradictions of Mao and the People's Republic of China, a booming capitalist country administered by an entrenched communist party, founded by a prophet of equality whose ruthless desire for absolute power drove his country into totalitarian misery, horrific famine, cultural indoctrination and virtual slavery. Figures like Mao remain the most difficult obstacle to promoting socialism in capitalist countries where that ideology is viewed as synonymous with Maoism and Stalinism. Only when we reclaim socialism through a grassroots-organized, decentralized movement, dominated by workers and regular people, can we have a valid response to critics who raise fears of despotic, centralized, old-school "communist" tyranny like Mao's.
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