The Mao Papers: A New View of China's Chairman

HE is the titular if not still the actual ruler of one-fifth of humankind; yet China's Mao Tse-tung remains the most shadowy figure among the leaders of 20th century Communism. There seems to be almost no middle ground between his reverential propagandists and his vituperative critics. As a result, the man who has altered the destiny of China --and the world--almost invariably appears two-dimensional. In the '30s and '40s, a few foreigners, notably the American journalist Edgar Snow, captured some titillating glimpses of Mao. But after the Communists gained power in 1949, Peking's Gate of Heavenly Peace closed fast behind him, and he has remained a mystery.

Now, at least some of the shadows around Mao are being dispelled. Recently, a cache of Mao's secret speeches, letters and other writings came into the possession of the U.S. State Department. Many of the documents were seized by zealous Red Guards who broke into highly secret Communist Party files during the 1966-68 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Others were leaked to the Red Guards by unnamed Chinese leaders. The papers were then smuggled out of mainland China and were obtained by U.S. officials from sources in Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. After a thorough preliminary check of the documents' reliability, the State Department released the majority of them to some top Western scholars of Chinese history and politics. The papers also became available to TIME.

The torrent of Mao's words that flow from these extraordinary papers reveals the long-obscure human dimension of the man. He emerges as a compelling personality, supremely confident of his ability to surmount China's immense domestic problems. In speeches delivered at secret meetings of the Politburo, he comes across as passionate and often earthy. All told, the documents amply demonstrate that Mao, now 75 and reportedly nearing death, left an imprint on China and its 750 million people that will surely prove ineradicable for generations to come.

Mao reveals himself best by his pungent use of language. Rather like Nikita Khrushchev, he likes to draw on folk tales and proverbs to contrive devastating metaphors against his opponents. He is also fond of quoting from classical Chinese literature. In a 1959 meeting, he cited a Han Dynasty poet to belabor his colleagues for their laziness and love of luxury: "When one travels in a carriage or sedan chair, the body begins to decay. Women with pearly teeth and false eyebrows are the axes that cut down the body's vitality. Delicious meats and fatty foods are the 'medicines' that corrode the intestines."

Mao occasionally balances gibes at his comrades by poking fun at himself. In a secret speech at Lushaa in 1959, he discussed the need to go slower during the Great Leap Forward: "One can't be rash. There must be a step-by-step process. In eating meat, one can only consume one piece at a time. One can never hope to become a fatso at one stroke." After a pause, Mao continued: "The commander in chief [Marshal Chu Teh] and I didn't get fat in a single day."

He also resorts to vivid metaphors in urging that counterrevolutionaries not be executed. "A head isn't like a leek," he said. "It doesn't grow again once it's been cut." Mao's most recurrent metaphors refer to the digestive process, which evidently fascinates him. In his Lushan speech, in which he characteristically called on his colleagues to join him in discharging their feelings of guilt for the failures of the Great Leap, he concluded with this scatological flourish: "Comrades, your stomachs will feel much more comfortable if you move your bowels and break wind."

Although the replies of Mao's comrades are not generally included in these papers, there is evidence that this style of polemic has been characteristic of secret meetings. When Mao seemed taken aback by the criticism leveled at him during the stormy Lushan conference, Peng Teh-huai, who had long received more than a fair share of abuse from the Chairman, lashed back at him. "You f--ed my mother for 40 days," Peng told Mao, "so why can't I f-- yours for 20?" Recalling the incident later, Mao wryly observed: "Even 20 days wasn't enough, and so we had to abandon our work at the meeting." The Chairman, of course, had the last word. After the conference, he sacked Peng as Defense Minister and Politburo member.

Under heavy attack at Lushan for the shortcomings of the Great Leap, Mao acknowledged that he had taken sleeping pills three times for tension. He was ready to shoulder the blame for his catastrophic scheme of building backyard steel foundries. Citing Confucius' Analects to the effect that the man who initiates something evil will be severely punished by God, Mao revealed that he had been struck down by the very punishment prescribed by the sage--the loss of his sons. He disclosed that one of his two sons had died in battle (presumably in Korea) and the other had gone insane. Then, in a cry approaching agony, he asked his audience: "Because of my guilt, should I be deprived of my posterity?"

Though Mao is well educated, he retains a country boy's contempt for intellectuals, for learning and for city ways. "The more one reads, the more foolish one becomes" is one of his favorite adages. "Being an unpolished man," he says, not without pride, "I am not too cultivated." Doctors are a frequent butt: "Medical education needs reforming. There is altogether no need to read so many books. How long did it take Hua T'o [the father of Chinese medicine] to learn what he knew?" Mao, who has succeeded in destroying the Chinese educational system in order to radicalize it, has this to say: "Schools are small tombs with great evil emanations and shallow ponds with many snapping turtles."

In a particularly pungent and often inaccurate diatribe against education, Mao said: "It is reported that penicillin was invented by a laundryman in a dyer's shop. Benjamin Franklin of America discovered electricity, although he began as a newspaper boy. Confucius got started at 23. What learning did Jesus have? Sakyamuni created Buddhism when he was 19. When Marx first created dialectical materialism, he was very young. He acquired his learning later." Mao's conclusion: "It is always those with less learning who overthrow those with more learning."

Mao fancies himself the champion of Marxist purity, combatting the "revisionist" heresies of Moscow and Belgrade. Yet his expositions of dialectics are sometimes primitive, to say the least. In a speech in Hangchow in 1965, Mao tried to explain the complex Hegelian-Marxist concept of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" by explaining that the Communists' victory over Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the civil war was due to the superiority of the Marxist digestive system: "Synthesis in the long run amounts to swallowing the enemy completely. How did we synthesize the Kuomintang? Didn't we take enemy personnel and reform them? Some of them we released, but the majority we took into our forces. Eating is also synthesis. When you're eating crab, for instance, you eat only the meat and not the shell. The stomach absorbs nourishment and expels waste. You gentlemen are all Western philosophers, while I'm a native philosopher. The synthesis we applied to the Kuomintang was to eat it up, absorb the greater part and expel the smaller part. This is what we learned from Marx."

In spite of Mao's crude and often ferocious rhetoric, the Mao papers show that the Chairman can tread prudently when faced with political and military realities. Several of his speeches also suggest that Mao feels there is a vital historical and ideological bond between the Soviet Union and China, in spite of what he considers to be betrayal by Stalin and Khrushchev. "In articles and speeches, don't criticize the U.S.S.R.," he instructed the Chinese High Command in 1958. "We learn from the good people and the good things in the Soviet Union as well as from the bad," he observed in 1966, after the quarrel between the two nations had flared into the open.

Mao offered that advice despite his deep resentment of Russia's attempts to prevent China from determining its own fate. "The Russians didn't allow China to make a revolution," he once said. "This was in 1945, when Stalin tried to prevent the Chinese revolution by saying that there should be no civil war and that we should collaborate with Chiang Kaishek. This we did not do, and the revolution was victorious." Mao later quarreled with Khrushchev. More recently, Moscow's border clashes with Peking and its attempts to organize opposition to Mao within China have encouraged the Chairman to permit even harsher criticism of the Soviets.

The qualities that have made Mao one of the century's most powerful leaders are apparent throughout the papers. One of his strengths is his conviction that the Chinese government must be at one with the masses. He hates the bureaucracy for having interfered with this sacred relationship. His "Twenty Manifestations of Bureaucracy," one of the papers acquired by the U.S., is among the fiercest diatribes of its kind in modern history. In it, Mao inveighs against those who are "divorced from the masses . . . rotten sensualists who glut themselves for days on end . . . engage in speculation . . . call a doctor when they are not sick." In sum, bureaucrats are "eight-sided and as slippery as eels."

Other sources of Mao's strength are his immense pride in China and his equally immense hopes for its future. In 1958 Mao observed: "Our country is so populous, it has such vast territory and abundant resources, a history of more than 4,000 years, and culture. But what a boast! We are not even as far advanced as Belgium. Our steel production is so low. So few people are literate. But now our nation is all ardor: there is a fervent tide. Our nation is like an atom. After the atom's nuclear fission, the thermal energy released will be so formidable that we will be able to accomplish all that we now cannot do." That was Mao's call to accelerate the Great Leap Forward, which soon turned into a great lurch backward. China is only now beginning to recover from the chaos created by the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. In large part its future depends on whether Mao's successors will be able to achieve his lifelong dream of harnessing the fervent tides of China to build a modern society.

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