Mao Zedong

A good film about China's Cultural Revolution is Morning Sun. It is quite amazing to see and hear the story of China during that bloody period of history through the ears and eyes of Red Guards, Black Liners, heroes and bastards because it shows how not one person was left unscathed.


Considering how the Cultural Revolution panned out, it is quite easy to think of Mao Zedong as a crazy old bastard, bent on ruling China with an iron fist. In fact, it is ridiculously easy, considering the disaster that was the Great Leap Forward, and the various anti-rightist campaigns that dated from the Yenan period right through to the end of his life.

However, there is a recent book that seeks to reevaluate this position on China. Rather uselessly, I have forgotten the title of the book and rather lazily I can't be bothered looking for it. Nonetheless, I've been doing a bit of thinking about Mao myself. It is quite possible that Mao was a man who truly believed in socialist theory as a means of keeping China safe from foreign incursion and making it great once more. This ties quite closely into the "Century of Humiliation" and his insistence at the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 that China has 'stood up.' Despite the failures of that theory in agricultural and industrial sectors on their application, it was always going to be very difficult for him to relinquish what was his life's work and ideology.

One might find parallels with John Howard, who was unable to accept that his increasingly right-wing and conservative policies were no longer relevant to Australia, or indeed wanted. However because we have the ability as a democratic nation-state to remove outdated policy-makers at a convenient juncture, the balance can be restored. There was, and is, no such balance in China- remember Liu Shaoqi.