Notes On Mao: Jung Chang and Jon Halliday: "Mao, the unknown story"/Phillip Short: "Mao, a life"

Both biographies spend some time detailing Mao’s intellectual development as a student and as a young man adrift and penniless (like Hitler in Vienna) in Beijing. Short cites Mao’s intellectual influences as Darwin, Huxley, Mill, Spencer and Adam Smith, in addition to the influence of Chinese classics such as the Song Dynasty text on government: The Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Those Who Govern, and his favourite novel, the Chinese classic: Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Mao’s attitude to his culture was ambivalent. On the one hand, all his life, he was an extremely voracious reader of Chinese’s classics, believing them to be superior to anything the West had to offer; on the other hand he was motivated by desire to sweep the whole culture away and smash it in revolutionary fervour. Both Short and Chang cite at length from an early work of Mao’s, in which he sets out his theory of the relationship between the individual and history:
The truly great person develops and expands upon the best, the greatest of the capacities of his original nature. All restraints and restrictions are cast aside by the great motive power that is contained in his original nature…all obstacles dissolve before him… (Mmmm. Sounds rather similar to the dreadful Ayn Rand…)
Compare that with this classic of Confucianism, the Three Character Classic, which most Chinese people learn by heart (then as now) as part of their very early schooling.
People at birth,
Are naturally good.
Their natures are similar,
Their habits make them different.
And this fifteenth century commentary on them:
The wise and simple and the upright and the vicious, all agree in nature, radically resembling each other, without any difference. But when their knowledge has expanded, their dispositions and endowments all vary, thus perverting the correct principle of their virtuous nature. The superior man alone has the virtue of supporting rectitude.
The Confucian text sees conformity to a ‘radical resemblance’ as a way of rectitude, while Mao wants to cast aside all ‘restraints and restrictions’.

Jung Chang cites Mao’s comment that everything written after the Tang and Sung Dynasties is worthless and should be burnt. However, this sounds to me much like the kind of tongue-in-cheek conservatism that my father likes to indulge in when he says that no decent music has been written since 1828. Jung Chang also cites Mao’s rejection of the Confucian ideal of Great Equality and Harmony: Long lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace. When we look at history we adore the war, when dramas happened….. Chang’s interpretation of this is that Mao simply collapsed the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through them. I don’t see this at all: I don’t believe that Mao was so unsophisticated intellectually. I see this as the influence of Paulsen, a sub-Hegelian whom Mao was reading at the time. I think it’s more possible that the 24 year old Mao is stumbling towards a view of history as a forward progression caused by conflict, a view that has close parallels to the Marxist/Hegelian view of history as thesis/antithesis/synthesis, and which perhaps helped to make Marxism and Communism more attractive to Mao when he eventually encountered them a few years later.

While Jung Chang gives the impression that Mao was basically a thug, Short is much clearer on the fact that Mao was an intellectual, ironic, considering his purges against them during the Communist Era.

Short spends almost the entire first half of his 634 page book on this 1st phase of Mao’s life. He does an excellent job of describing the warlord era, focussing sensibly on one province, Hunan, and describing how the various changes in the wider political scene affected the province and Mao’s life and character. This period was a formative influence on Mao, and understanding it at least in part must give us a better understanding of Mao’s character. Chang and Halliday, on the other hand, whisk through all this in a mere 80 pages, skimming over much of the detail, and not making any attempt at all to present the reader with an understanding of why this period is so important in subsequent Chinese history. Short does an excellent job of describing in exhaustive (and often exhausting) detail the various power struggles and compromises within the early CCP, while Chang often gives the impression that it was all plain sailing.

Interesting. More comparisons come to mind. You mentioned Hitler briefly. I'm also struck by the parallel with Mussolini, who idealized war as the supreme field of achievement for manly and patriotic men. The following sounds very much like something Mussolini might say: Long lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace. When we look at history we adore the war, when dramas happened….. It would also be interesting to compare Lenin and/or Stalin with Mao.

I'm quite interested in the idea that Mao simply collapsed the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through them. I think this might be a genuine hazard, even for sophisticated intellectuals. It probably depends quite a bit on what books one reads. Some authors romanticize war while others concentrate on presenting its ugliness. Readers quite often gravitate to the former type of book, because they are more pleasant to read. I'm thinking of the furor over Chris Hedges' book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, an ugly but profoundly realistic book.

Thanks, Tomcat, for a comparison with much food for thought in it!