Toward the end of his life, dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Mao Zedong claimed two achievements: leading the Communist revolution to victory and starting the Cultural Revolution. By pinpointing these episodes, he had underlined the lifelong contradiction in his attitudes toward revolution and state power.
Mao molded Communism to fit his two personas. To use Chinese parlance, he was both a tiger and a monkey king.
For the Chinese, the tiger is the king of the jungle. Translated into human terms, a tiger is a high official. The agency running President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign today likes to boast when it has brought down another “tiger.” By leading the Chinese Communist Party to victory in 1949, Mao became the top tiger.
The monkey king is an imaginary being with the strength of a superman, an ability to fly and a predilection for using his immense cudgel for destructive purposes. He is a sage. Ordinary humans and even spirits cannot defeat him.
In his earliest writings, Mao seemed to portray himself more as a Nietzschean superman, or a tiger:
The great actions of the hero are his own, are the expression of his motive power, lofty and cleansing, relying on no precedent. His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one’s lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped. All obstacles dissolve before him.
In his early 20s, roaming the countryside of Hunan Province with a friend, Mao convinced his companion that he saw himself in the tradition of the peasant founders of Chinese dynasties, in particular Liu Bang, founder of the first great Chinese Empire, the Han. By the time he was 42, shortly after the bedraggled survivors of the epic Long March had reached safety in northwest China, Mao went as far as to look down upon all the great emperors of the past. In a famous poem, “Snow,” Mao wrote:
This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage
But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang zong and Song zu
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan
Proud son of heaven for a day,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.
But however self-confident Mao’s early dreams of glory, his supreme leadership was far from preordained. On the eve of his coming out as a Marxist at age 27, he was an unsophisticated provincial nationalist. He gloomily dismissed the chances of the new Chinese republic surviving, wondered about Hunan becoming an American state and advocated that all of the Chinese provinces should become separate countries.
It was only in November 1920 that he admitted defeat: The Hunanese did not have the vision to appreciate his ideas. He wrote to his activist friends in the provincial capital to say that he would henceforth be a socialist. He was just in time.
Communist cells had been organized in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities, and in mid-1921, the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held. Mao, who had quickly organized a Communist group in Hunan, achieved the cachet of being one of only 12 delegates to attend. He was thus an early tiger.
The Soviet agents who funded and masterminded the organization of the early C.C.P. reported to the Comintern, the agency for spreading Soviet ideas and influence abroad. With memories of defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, and competing with Japan for influence in Manchuria, the Soviets needed a strong China as an ally against Japanese expansionism.
The fledgling C.C.P. was too weak. The Soviets decided to bolster the well known revolutionary who had helped bring down the Manchu dynasty but had then been pushed aside by warlords: Sun Yat-sen.
They provided him with funds, reorganized his Nationalist party, known as the K.M.T., and helped him to train an army. C.C.P. members were instructed by Comintern agents to back the K.M.T., and even become members, but to retain their allegiance to the Communists. The plan was for the C.C.P. to take over the K.M.T. from within after the Chinese warlords were conquered by this united front.
Most of the C.C.P. leadership opposed the Comintern policy; they thought collaboration with the “bourgeois” K.M.T. would demoralize their members. But the piper called the tune, and they joined the K.M.T., few more readily than Mao.
Two events set Mao off on a new, career-shaping course. The first was Chiang Kai-shek’s attack on the Communist Party. By 1927, after Sun Yat-sen’s death, Chiang Kai-shek had taken over the leadership of the K.M.T., and he had conquered much of the southern half of the country. Aware of the Soviets’ long-term aim for a C.C.P. takeover of the K.M.T., he short-circuited the plan in May 1927 by ordering the slaughter of Communists, mainly in Shanghai.
Communist leaders scattered in flight.
The other event was Mao’s experience with peasant power. After the death of their parents, Mao and his two brothers owned a valuable property back in their home village that had been built up by their father. The family had made the transition from poor to rich peasants. And though he had grown up surrounded by the miseries of rural life, as a fledgling Communist, Mao had been focusing on the urban proletariat until Moscow, realizing that China was different, ordered more attention be paid to the peasantry.
Mao became active in peasant affairs, and his transformative experience was witnessing and chronicling an uprising in his native Hunan. In a famous passage, he rejected allegations that the peasants had gone too far:
A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or embroidering a flower; it cannot be anything so refined, so calm and gentle.
Witnessing the bloodshed in the Hunanese countryside, Mao was discovering his other persona. As the scholar-diplomat Richard Solomon first pointed out, Mao reveled in “luan,” or upheaval. When young, Mao had written that for change to come about, China must be “destroyed and reformed.” He now realized that only the peasantry could bring that about. Mao would be the monkey king to lead that destruction.
The primary source for the monkey king is the classic Chinese novel “The Journey to the West.” Ostensibly about the famous Chinese monk Xuan Zang, who made the arduous crossing of the Himalayas to seek out original Buddhist scriptures in India, “Journey” is a fantastical tale in which Sun Wukong, the monkey king, plays a major role as the monk’s escort. In the early 1960s, when the C.C.P.’s quarrel with the Soviet Communist Party was underway, Mao praised the monkey king:
A thunderstorm burst over the earth,
So a devil rose from a heap of white bones.
The deluded monk was not beyond the light,
But the malignant demon must wreak havoc.
The Golden Monkey wrathfully swung his massive cudgel
And the jade-like firmament was cleared of dust.
Today, a miasmal mist once more rising,
We hail Sun Wu-kung, the wonder-worker.
Mao then rose from guerrilla chief in the late 1920s to a party leader in the mid-1930s on the Long March, the flight of the C.C.P. from the southeast to the northwest to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s attacks. This was an epic event in Communist annals because it took a year, covered some 6,000 miles and reduced the 85,000 who had set out to a mere 8,000 by the time they reached the northwest. He absorbed two lessons: All power grew out of the barrel of a gun; and most of the time peasants were very difficult to organize because they had fields to tend and families to feed.
From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, Mao played his tiger role. He led an increasingly strong and efficient party and army that survived the anti-Japanese war and then defeated Chiang and the K.M.T. in the civil war of the late 1940s. From 1949 until 1956, Mao presided over the installation of the Communist dictatorship in China, rooting out all opposition, real or imagined, and transforming the ownership of the means of production from private hands to socialist control.
It was then that he dabbled in the monkey business for the first time. From the point of view of a dutiful C.C.P. cadre, “monkey business” could be defined as any measure that would disrupt the party’s standard operating procedures. Cadres did not appreciate it when Mao in 1956 exhorted intellectuals to “Let a hundred flowers bloom” and a year later again encouraged intellectuals to criticize the conduct of the party. As members of the ruling elite, the cadres resented being criticized, and Mao, having promised that the criticisms would only be like a light rain, quickly wound up the campaigns when they turned into a typhoon, and purged the critics.
Mao truly became the monkey king by starting the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to dispel the “miasmal mist” of Soviet-style “revisionism” from the C.C.P. Now, it was the youth of China, not the peasants, who were to be his agents of destruction, as major party and government departments were trashed and their officials humiliated and purged.
For Mao, the Cultural Revolution ended in 1969 with the appointment of a new, and hopefully more revolutionary, leadership. But though he had dealt the age-old bureaucratic system of China a terrible blow, he knew that it could rise again from the ashes. He always emphasized that China would have to experience regular Cultural Revolutions.
But when Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, repeated that dictum, he sealed his fate. Deng Xiaoping and his fellow survivors did not want any more monkey kings plunging the party and the country into chaos again.
And yet today, China’s current ruler, Xi Jinping, with his relentless anticorruption drive to make officials more honest, has unleashed another Cultural Revolution against the bureaucracy, albeit one that is controlled from the center not from the streets.
This is the action of a monkey king. There is no chaos today, but there surely is widespread fear and resentment as his mighty cudgel claims more victims.
The 19th Communist Party Congress currently underway will confirm that Mr. Xi is top tiger, the most powerful ruler since Mao. But Mr. Xi will have to ensure that his alternate persona as monkey king does not loom too large. As the revolutionary founder, Mao could never have been toppled. But as a revolutionary successor, Mr. Xi could be.
PT
