China in the era of Mao Zedong

In the era of Xi Jinping, with China poised to graduate into a superpower and become the world's most powerful economy, it is only proper that one look back at the political tradition left behind by Mao Zedong for his successors to build on.

Certainly there have been the various sentiments expressed in these decades since the Great Helmsman, as his people called him, passed from the scene about the quality of his leadership in post-1949 China. His death on 9 September 1976 raised a number of question marks on where China would go from there, especially in light of the many upheavals which Mao presided over in his leadership of the country. There was the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, followed by the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s and extending well into the mid-1970s.

It would be naïve to imagine that mistakes were not made by Mao. The Great Leap Forward was in a number of instances a period of misery for China's peasants, for collectivisation led many of them to problems they were unable to overcome. Reports of deaths from the interior of the country were not unusual. And during the period of the Cultural Revolution many were the political personalities who bore the brunt of Mao's wrath, their sin being playing the role of 'capitalist roaders' and who therefore needed to be punished. Deng Xiao-ping was a victim who in the end managed to survive the humiliation heaped on him and other party leaders on a nation-wide scale by the Red Guards.

The Cultural Revolution did Mao little credit, for it revealed the extent of his suspicion of what he considered to be the capitalist activities of his rivals in the Communist Party. Liu Shaoqi, once touted as Mao's chosen successor and having served as the country's President, fell prey to the Red Guards' campaign against capitalist roaders and was swiftly stripped of his position in the state and in the party. Arrested in 1967, Liu died a tragic death in prison in 1969. But his passing would not be known till years later. And Liu was not the only former confidant of Mao to die in tragic circumstances.

In September 1971, the Chinese media revealed the death of Lin Biao, a leading figure in the party and government and one who had been in the forefront of the revolution that brought Mao and his comrades to power in October 1949, in a plane crash. Till before his death in what was given out as his attempt to escape in an aircraft once his intrigue against Mao had been discovered, Lin Biao was the man considered to be Mao's successor in the event of the chairman's death at some point. Lin, like everyone else in the Communist Party, was a dedicated believer in the party and in the idea that China ought to be a force for good in the world. To this day, unfortunately, owing to the opaque nature of politics in Beijing, no one is quite sure of the circumstances which led to his death in September 1971.

There is, therefore, little question that Chairman Mao made mistakes, one of them being a promotion of the Gang of Four led by his ambitious wife Jiang Qing. In its frenzy, the gang went after leaders they considered a threat to their power and influence. Not even Prime Minister Zhou En-lai was free of their attempts to paint him as an anti-Mao element. He escaped being tarnished by them, owing to the solid reputation he had gained since the guerrilla campaign against Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese militarists and all the way to the Communist triumph in 1949. Besides, Zhou was dying from cancer. Death came to him in January 1976. An intellectual force in the party, Zhou was the recipient of tributes by the young at Tienanmen Square, a happening not looked upon kindly by the Gang of Four.

But as one observes the anniversary of Mao's passing in September 1976, one will not and must not ignore the larger picture. And the picture is one of a leader whose determination to ensure China's primacy in the world mattered above everything else. While internally China went through convulsions, externally Mao succeeded in convincing the outside world that his country mattered, that it was indeed the Middle Kingdom that had defined it for ages. The Chinese role in the Korean War was an early instance of Mao's policy of informing the capitalist world that his country would not be a hermit kingdom but would assert itself in global affairs.

And then came the break with the Soviet Union. Mao was not pleased at Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Soviet Communist Party conference in 1956, which was a powerful reason for him to ensure that no such deviation from policy would come into Chinese politics. A singular act of courage by Mao Zedong was the decision to break away from the Soviet Union and go for a propagation of communism the Chinese way. Beijing's consistent argument against the revisionism which underlay Soviet communism gained support at home and abroad, though Mao and Zhou were unable to penetrate the Soviet-influenced Warsaw Pact communist states of eastern Europe with their propaganda.

Mao's foreign policy earned him friends in such countries as Albania, where Enver Hoxha ruled with an iron hand. It led to openings in Africa, where Zhou En-lai toured extensively in 1964. That China could not be ignored was acknowledged by French President Charles de Gaulle, whose government accorded diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1964, the very year in which the Chinese exploded an atomic bomb and so joined the nuclear club. And yet there were the flaws, grave ones, which defined Chinese foreign policy under Mao.

In October 1962, an unprovoked attack on and incursion into India by the Chinese military put paid to the friendship which till then had underscored relations between Beijing and Delhi. The consequences of that rash move are yet being felt, with India and China remaining wary in their approach to each other at every level. In 1971, for all their expressions of solidarity with nations struggling to free themselves of colonialism, Mao Zedong and his government singularly failed to identify with the cause of Bangladesh's freedom from Pakistan.

Unbridled opportunism was at work, with the Chinese unwilling to upset an opening to ties with Richard Nixon's Washington. Beijing did not endear itself to Bengalis by its veto of Bangladesh's application for membership of the United Nations. Nor did it do credit to itself by withholding recognition of Bangladesh's sovereign entity until the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. After September 1965, China suffered a setback in Indonesia, where it had enjoyed warm relations with President Sukarno's government, when General Suharto's pro-West regime went after Indonesia's communists ruthlessly, effectively shutting the doors to any dealings with Beijing.

Four decades and seven years after his death, Mao Zedong remains a formidable force in modern Chinese history. His detractors in the West have condemned him as a dictator, as one whose policies led to the death of millions of Chinese. The truth is larger, which is that Xi Jinping is where he is today because Mao Zedong prepared the ground for his successors.

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