Mao's relations with classical Chinese intellectual traditions is at once
derivative and antagonistic.
My view is that Mao, like most modern Chinese, was intellectually
anti-Confucian yet inescapably conditioned by Confucianism culturally. (I
have more to say about Confucianism, but unless a request for posting on the
topic is received, I hesitate to impose it on this list.)
A strong case can be built to support the thesis that Mao is a modern
Daoist, though the paradox is that he was unquestionably a materialist.
But, as I have pointed out, paradoxes are the specialties of Daoism.
For example, gunpowder had been invented around the fourth century by Daoist
alchemist Ko Hong while seeking an elixir for immortality. It represents
the height of Daoist irony that the search for an elixir for immortality
only yields a substance that ends life abruptly. Gunpowder would not be
used in warfare in China until the tenth century, first in incendiary
rockets called feihuo (flying fire). Explosive grenades would first be
employed by armies of the Song dynasty in 1161 against Jurchens (Nuzhen),
ancestors of modern-day Manchurians.
In Chinese dynastic culture, the use of firearms in war is considered
cowardly and therefore not exploited by honorable warriors of self-respect.
Firearms would not develop in dynastic China, not because of the absence of
know-how, but because its use had been culturally circumscribed as not being
appropriate for true warriors.
It is interesting to compare this attitude with the American decision to
use atomic bombs on Japan. It says as much about the nature of Americans
as it does about their technological prowess.
In the history of human progress, willful rejection of many technological
inventions is traceable to cultural preference.
The oldest picture in the world of a gun and a grenade would come from a
painted silk banner found at Dunhuang, dating to mid tenth century, that
would come to be in the possession of Musee Guimet in Paris in modern time.
The museum on Place d'Iena would be founded by Emile Guimet, a
nineteenth-century Asian art collector from Lyon.
In the silk banner, demons of Mara the Temptress, evil goddess, are shown
trying to harm the meditating Buddha and to distract him from his pursuit of
enlightenment, with a proto-gun in the form of a fire lance and a
proto-grenade in the form of a palm-size fire bomb.
The fact that these weapons are shown to be used only by evil demons
illustrates the distasteful attitude of the ancient Chinese towards
firearms.
In ancient Chinese warfare, the code of honorable martial conduct requires
that combat be personal, bodily and frontal. Combatants are organized
according to rank, as per all other social activities in a class-conscious
and rigidly-hierarchical society. Zhangjuns (generals) are pit against
zhangjuns, captains against captains and foot soldiers against foot
soldiers. Social segregation is reflected in the proverb: "Earthenware does
not deserve collision with porcelain".
Expertise in corporeal martial skill is so highly prized that zhangjuns are
frequently expected to personally engage in one-on-one combat with their
opposing counterparts. Battles are sometimes won or lost depending on
outcome of high-ranking personal duels under the watchful eyes of troops on
each side.
By Tang time, however, the cult of martial chivalry in which individual
valor determines the outcome of battles already has become only a legend of
the past. Firepower is still considered cowardly. And its use are not
accepted by proud warriors who are respectable members of the social elite.
Until influenced in modern time by popular Hollywood films on the American
wild West, Chinese children playing war would prefer sword fights to gun
fights.
Gunpowder would remain unknown in the West until late tenth century.
However, Europeans would abandon outmoded rules of chivalry after the Middle
Ages and enthusiastically incorporate firearms and artillery into the
lexicon of their military arts beginning after late fifteenth century. In
contrast, due to Confucian aversion towards technological progress, Chinese
military planners would not modernize their martial code. They would
continue to suppress development of firearms as immoral and dishonorable, up
to the nineteenth century, much to their own misfortune.
As a result, European armies would arrive in China in the nineteenth century
with superior modern firearms. They would consistently and repeatedly score
decisive victories with their small but better-armed expeditionary forces
over the numerically superior yet technologically backward, sword-wielding
Chinese army of the decrepit Qing dynasty (1636-1911).
Mao Zedong, China's most influential revolutionary, would proclaim in modern
time his famous dictum: "Power comes from the barrel of a gun."
He would in fact be condemning the obsolete values of Confucianism (Ru Jia)
as much as stating a truism in modern realpolitik.
Confucian ethics notwithstanding, morality and honor would fail to save
China from Western imperialism.
The Boxers Uprising of 1900, the Chinese name for which is Yiwuotuan
(Righteous Harmony Brigade), would be an extremist xenophobic movement. It
would be encouraged as a chauvinistic instrument for domestic politics by
the decrepit court of the Qing dynasty (1636-1911), dominated by the
self-indulging, reactionary Dowager Empress (Cixi Taihou 1838-1908). The
Boxers Uprising would be used by the Dowager Empress as a populist
counterweight to abort the budding "100 Days" reform movement of 1869, led
by conservative reformist Kang Youwei (1658-1927) around the young monarch,
the weak Emperor Guangxu (r. 1875-1898), belatedly advocating modernization
for China.
The members of Yiwuotuan, in a burst of chauvinistic frenzy, would reject
the use of modern and therefore foreign firearms in favor of traditional
broadswords. They would rely on protection against enemy bullets from
Daoist amulets, their faith in which would remain unshaken in the face of
undeniable empirical evidence provided by hundred of thousands of falling
comrades shot by Western gunfire.
The term Boxer would be coined by bewildered Europeans whose modern
pragmatism would fill them with a superficial superiority complex, justified
on narrow grounds, over an ancient culture which stubbornly clung to the
irrational power of faith, in defiance of reason.
Non-Marxist historians often trace the source of national predicaments to
particular decisions taken by leaders based on personal character, rather
than to structural conditions of institutions. This convenient emphasis on
personal political errors at the expense of deterministic institutional
structure tend to nurture speculations that with wiser decisions, a
socio-economic-political order trapped inside an obsolete institutional
system would not necessarily be doomed to collapse under the strain of its
own contradictions. Such speculations are hard to verify, since it can be
argued that bad political decisions by faulty leaders are not independent of
a nation's institutional defects.
Ironically, the Boxers Uprising would so discredit the public image of the
stubbornly reactionary Qing court that, within a decade after its outbreak,
the democratic revolution of Dr. Sun Yat-sen would succeed in 1911 in
overthrowing the three-century-old Qing dynasty, despite the effective
reactionary suppression of progressive monarchist reform efforts in the
dynasty's last phase, or perhaps because of it.
Extremist reactionaries, in their eagerness to be grave diggers for
progressive reformers, usually becomes instead unwitting midwives for
revolutionary radicals. The Daoist concept of the curative potential of
even deadly poison would again be demonstrated by the pathetic phenomenon of
the Boxers Uprising. This theme repeats itself many time in the writing of
Mao.
All self respecting political leaders in Chinese history, up to modern time,
find it imperative to engage in poetry writing. Mao was a clear modern
example.
The reason for this is inherent in the verbal nature of Chinese culture.
The Chinese concept of civilization is centered on ideas, and the most
important ideas are those concerning the affairs of man, namely politics.
Power and glory are ephemeral, while ideas are perpetual. (To K: if you are
reading this, you now know why I think being deleted is serious.)
The Selected Biographies (Lie zhuan) section of the Old Book on Tang (Jiu
Tang Shu), compiled in 945, over 10 centuries before Mao, would contain two
chapters entitled: Literary Garden (Wenyuan), listing one hundred and five
biographical entries of celebrated literati.
Ideas are prisoners of language. That which cannot be spoken, or written as
recorded speech, does not assume an external form of existence outside the
mind. Language, rooted in the word: tongue, is the medium of communication,
while ideas are the content. Yet some may even argue that man thinks only
through speech and that without speech, there can be no intelligent
thought. Even the visual and audio arts are not exempt from dependence on
languages of their own for expressing visual images and musical ideas. Not
being able to hear oneself think due to excessive noise is indeed a very
profound epistemological statement.
That there can be no thinking without speech is analogous to the axiom that
there can be no music without sound. No musical expression can take place
in a vacuum because the air necessary to conduct sound waves is missing.
Learning to think without speech is like learning to swim without water.
Furthermore, writing music requires the adoption of musical scales of pitch
and rhythm, just as the visual arts require principles of spatial
organization, color and light. Similarly, language is the prisoner of
rhetoric which constitutes the rules and principles of speech, a convention
through which thoughts are communicated among humans.
The problem of rhetoric is that it tends to degenerate into expressions of
coded messages that obscure true meaning and stifle creative expression. He
whose thinking is trapped by rhetoric is also condemned to conventional
wisdom. Such a person would deprive himself of creativity, unable to
entertain original thoughts because the medium for original expression is,
by definition, wanting in rhetoric.
Confucian classics are all written in the most rigid form of rhetoric.
Being well versed in Confucian classics is to run the danger of emphasizing
form over substance or emphasizing style over essence. It is not much
different from trying to learn creative writing from the excessively flowery
language of the school-book Latin of Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the great Roman
orator whose famous First Oration Against Catiline skillfully condemned
Catiline as a conspirator based on hearsay testimony obtained from
Catiline's mistress. Cicero, despite his rhetorical eloquence, remained
unable to substantiate his legal authority to execute Catiline's five
associates, thus subjecting himself to exile subsequently for having put to
death Roman citizens without due process of law.
Escape from verbal imprisonment by rhetoric is possible only through poetry,
the grammar of which begins beyond the bounds of the established rules of
rhetoric. Poetry invents new grammar and syntax for expressing new ideas
indescribable by rhetoric. Notwithstanding the claim of romantics, poetry
creates truth of which beauty is but a function.
Poetic ideas and their prerequisite unconventional expressions are generally
the rhetoric of the future, when the once innovative syntax and original
concepts would have become unthinkingly commonplace through excessive use.
>From ancient emperors to Mao Zedong, all Chinese political leaders who
fashion themselves as original thinkers, write poetry.
If one examines Mao's writings, the style is purposely colloquial and the
logic anti-academic. Yet his poetry is highly literary.
Although some would succeed better than others, all self-styled thinkers in
Chinese politics would attempt heroic poem writing. Even Marshal Chu De,
the burly founder of the Chinese Red Army, whom few would list being
cultured as one of his many virtues, would publish two poems in his twilight
years to express his disenchantment with the protracted and relentless
post-revolution ideological struggle promoted by Mao Zedong. Poetry is the
medium for speaking the unspeakable and for thinking the unthinkable.
Emphasizing poetry and creative literary composition in place of Confucian
classics has been the foundation of revolutionary thought in China.
Contrary to misinterpretation in some American quarters, Mao never advocated terror, although, as Napoleon would observe: "there is a general rule that there can be no revolution without terror." As sad a commentary as that fatalistic observation is on the nature of human affairs, its validity would be repeatedly borne out by history. Every revolution is by its nature a revolt which success and the passage of time legitimize, but in which terror is one of its inevitable phases. Mao was Confucian in the sense that he believe that all people are good and what needed to change was the social system, and that one strand of Confucian social theory conforms closely to socialism (see below on Da'tong). A revolution is like a volcanic eruption. It can neither be started prematurely nor stopped before it has run its full course. Like a volcano, when it erupts, its burning lava runs in all directions, destroying indiscriminately the decayed as well as the healthy. Mao Zedong would insightfully point out that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is not a parlor game of the liberal rich or academic intellectuals. A revolution is a momentous event of gigantic dimensions where powerful historical forces clash. Millions of people die for it and generations are affected by it afterwards. Its occurrence is caused by irresistible social forces against unyielding established resistance. It creates general disruption and massive destruction. Its molten lava, however, produces rich minerals for future generations when it finally cools and a solid platform on which to build. In the name of saving the revolution, a reign of terror will strike at both the radical left and the reactionary right in order to hold the center against counterrevolutionary slippage. Paradoxically, while a reign of terror is the ultimate weapon against the counterrevolution, popular reaction against terror inevitably heralds the ultimate triumph of the counterrevolution. For terror, like all emotions of intensity, cannot be maintained permanently. It is the most agonizing affliction of the metabolism of revolutions. All political systems dislike dissidents. The degree to which a government tolerates dissidents is a function of its perceived security. A revolutionary government, insecure by nature, generally takes no political prisoners, frequently resorting to political terror. A few word about revolutionary political terror. A political terror in early Tang history had been staged by the secret police (kushi) which, like roaches, normally infesting only the subterraneous world, flourished into an open epidemic, fed by the apprehension of a court haunted by the mentality of a garrison state. At first, the victims of political terror are bona fide seditious reactionaries and other deserving criminals whose downfall delights the public, particularly the representatives of the emerging social forces. Later, the complexity of revolutionary politics gives rise to ideological polemics and esoteric sophistry that can be twisted at will to implicate anyone not popular with the secret police. Innocent men are then persecuted at the mirth of their political enemies and the frightened acquiescence of their friends. Finally, indiscriminate arrests becomes commonplace. As has been wisely said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for enough good men to keep silent. Typically, a reign of terror begins as a temporary political necessity. In time it inevitably degenerates into a dark age of arbitrary mass arrests amid an atmosphere of witch hunt. As the social destructiveness of the terror intensifies, the political purpose of the terror would become diffused and unfocused, while unbridled personal ambition and runaway greed of the secret policemen become its main driving forces. The reigns of terror follow the same predictable pattern across cultural and political borders.
Chinese political ideology has a history of protracted contest between the vision of Da'tong (General Harmony) and the pragmatism of Xiao'kang (Individual Contentment). In contemporary political terms, it is a struggle between the noble grandeur of communal socialist vision and the utilitarian efficiency of individual private enterprise. Mao's political rise had been predicated on his ability to skillfully manipulate the contention between these 2 ideologies for the benefit of an evolving new social order, and his post-humous fall was related to his failure to balance the same in a changing social-economic post-revolution context. Deng Xiaoping's ideology is officially based on xiao'kang. When Mao accused Deng of being a capitalist roader, he was not wrong.
More ... on part (2)
Henry C.K. Liu
James Farmelant wrote:
> I wonder if Henry (if it is not his intention anyway) will provide
> us with an analysis of Mao's relations with the classical Chinese
> intellectual traditions that he has been describing for this list.
> It seems to me that the most successful Marxist revolutionaries
> have been those who have been able to show how Marxism can
> be grafted on or incorporated into the longstanding cultural and
> intellectual traditions of their country. And it seems IMO that this
> is what Mao was able to successfully do.
>
> Jim Farmelant
>
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