Mao Tse-tung

By Henry Kissinger

Even in the brief meeting with Nixon, Mao could not escape the nightmare that shadowed his accomplishments and tormented his last years: that it might all prove ephemeral, that the exertions, the suffering, the Long March, the brutal leadership struggles would be but a brief incident in the triumphant, passive persistence of a millennial culture which had tamed all previous upheavals. "The Chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world," said Nixon. "I have not been able to change it," replied Mao, not without pathos. "I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking."

To Mao, Communism was the truth. But he--alone among all the fathers of 20th century Communism--espied a deeper truth. Millions had died for a classless society, but it dawned on Mao that the enthusiasm of revolutionary fervor and the stifling controls necessary to transform a society would both in time run up against the traditions of his people, whom he both loved and hated. The country that had invented the civil service would turn the Communist bureaucracy into a new mandarin class. The nation whose institutions had been shaped by Confucius into instruments for instilling universal ethics would before long absorb and transform the materialist Western philosophy imposed on it by its latest dynasty.

Unable to bear the thought that the new was turning into a confirmation of what he had sought to destroy, Mao launched himself into ever more frenzied campaigns to save his people from themselves. Many revolutions have been made to seize power and to destroy existing structures. Never has their maker undertaken a task so tremendous and possessed as to continue the revolution by deliberate systematic upheavals directed against the very system he had created. No institution was immune.

Each decade he would smash his own work, forgoing modernization, shaking up the bureaucracy, purging its leadership, resisting progress in order to maintain undefiled values that could be implemented, if at all, by a simple peasant society.

One of history's monumental ironies is that probably no one better understood the inherent dilemmas of Communism than the titanic figure who made the Chinese Revolution. Pragmatic Communism leads to mandarinism, nationalism and institutionalized privilege. His critique of Soviet Russia was so wounding to the Russians because it was essentially true. But truly revolutionary Communism leads to stagnation, insecurity, international irrelevance, and the continuing destruction of disciples by new votaries who prefer purity to permanence.

Until his death Mao resisted modernization because it would destroy China's uniqueness, and he fought institutionalization because it banked China's ideological zeal. It has been said that revolutions destroy their makers. The opposite was true of Mao; he was the maker who destroyed one revolutionary wave after another. He fought the implications of his own revolution as fiercely as he did the institutions he had originally overthrown. But he had set a goal beyond human capacity. In his last months, bereft of speech, able to act only a few hours a day, he had passion strong enough for one last outburst against the pragmatists. And then that great, demonic, prescient, overwhelming personality disappeared like the great Emperor Qin Shihuang-di (Ch'in Shih Huang-ti), with whom he often compared himself while dreading the oblivion which was his fate. And his words to Nixon, like so much of what he said and attempted, had the ring of prophecy: "I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking."

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