Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

1984

SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS acquire historical dimensions. In the celebrated interview he granted Edgar Snow, Mao Zedong allegedly described himself as “a lonely monk walking in the rain under a leaking umbrella.” With its mixture of humorous humility and exoticism, this utterance had a tremendous impact on the Western imagination, already so well attuned to the oriental glamour of the Kung Fu television series. Snow’s command of the Chinese language, even at its best, was never very fluent; some thirty-odd years spent away from China had done little to improve it, and it is no wonder that he failed to recognise in this “monk under an umbrella” ( heshang da san ) evoked by the chairman a most popular Chinese joke. The expression, in the form of a riddle, calls for the conventional answer “no hair” (since monks keep their heads shaven), “no sky” (it being hidden by the umbrella) — which in turn means by homophony ( wu-fa wu-tian ) “I know no law, I hold nothing sacred.” The blunt cynicism shown by Mao in referring to such a saying to define his basic attitude was as typical of his bold disregard for diplomatic niceties as its mistaken and sentimental English adaptation by Snow is revealing of the compulsion for myth-making, of the demand for politico-religious kitsch among certain types of Western intellectual.

In fact, the crude riddle so naïvely misunderstood by Snow provides us with one of the keys for understanding Mao’s complex and contradictory personality. There is little doubt that Mao’s spontaneous inclinations generally favoured radical policies, and yet, looking at the countless twists and turns of his entire career, leafing through many of his earlier writings, it would be easy to put together a file on the subject of his “revisionist capitulationism” and “rightist opportunism” thick enough to hang three dozen Liu Shaoqis and Deng Xiaopings. And for that matter, his record as “leftist adventurist” could without difficulty eclipse even Lin Biao’s. Actually, in order to discourage such an exercise, the Peking authorities wisely refrain from publishing Mao’s complete works: the authorised version of the Selected Works is a carefully censored one. Although Mao was genuinely impatient with bureaucratic practices, he nevertheless became both the architect and the cornerstone of the most gigantic totalitarian bureaucracy this planet has ever known.

To reconcile such paradoxes, one must either learn the mental acrobatics of a very sophisticated game played by the enlightened vanguard and called “dialectics,” or, more vulgarly, face the fact that rather than being the prophet-philosopher as described by his worshippers, Mao was essentially always and foremost a practical politician for whom what mattered above everything was power —how to obtain it, how to retain it, how to regain it. In order to secure power, no sacrifice was ever too big — and least of all the sacrifice of principles. It is only in this light that it becomes possible to understand his alternations between compromise and ruthlessness, benevolence and ferocity, suppleness and brutality, and all his abrupt volte-faces: none of these were ever arbitrary.

Although political power was the ultimate yardstick of all his actions, it would of course be foolish to assume that a man of such stature was merely pursuing power for power’s sake. He had an acute awareness of his place in history; this intense historical consciousness — which in our age he shared perhaps only with de Gaulle — also made him profess an unabashed admiration for the great tyrants of the past: Napoleon, Qin Shihuang… If the fluctuating tactical imperatives make it very difficult at times to distinguish his actual policies from those of his successive rivals and scapegoats, his style remained unique. We can grasp it most clearly in some of his artistic creations. His calligraphy (one of the major arts of China) is strikingly original, betraying a flamboyant egotism, to the point of arrogance, if not extravagance; at the same time it shows a total disregard for the formal discipline of the brush, and this contempt for technical requirements condemns his work, however powerful, to remain essentially inarticulate. His poetry, so aptly described by Arthur Waley as “not as bad as Hitler’s painting, but not as good as Churchill’s,” was rather pedantic and pedestrian, managing to combine obscurity with vulgarity; and yet, within the framework of an obsolete form, it remains, in its very awkwardness, remarkably unfettered by conventions. Moreover, the fact that he devoted some part of his energy to the uncertain pursuit of the aesthetic hobbies of a traditional gentleman and scholar is in itself quite revealing. As Erica Jong has observed: “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.” And sometimes it drives a man into politics.

This phenomenon of the failed artist as a statesman, of political leadership as self-expression, ought some day to be properly analysed; in the course of such a study, Mao could provide one of the most exemplary cases. The kind of idealism, subjectivism and voluntarism that inspired his most daring initiatives betrays the aesthete’s typical approach. Even some of his basic political utterances rest on artistic metaphors — like his famous observation about China’s “poverty and blankness,” which make her more easily available, like a blank page for the free improvisation of a great artist’s brush… Like a sculptor who submits the yielding clay to his inspiration, shapes it in accordance with an inner vision, the artist-statesman, using history and nations for his material, attempts to project in them the images from his mind. This visionary quality accounts for most of the unexpected, dazzling victories of Mao’s maturity; unfortunately, it was also at the root of the increasingly erratic, capricious and catastrophic initiatives of his late years when, increasingly divorced from reality, ever more absorbed in his lonely dream, he repeatedly brought the very regime he himself had created to the brink of chaos and destruction.

Strangely enough for a leader of such stature, Mao had very little personal charisma. He was a poor speaker, with a high-pitched, unpleasant and monotonous voice. His thick Hunanese accent, of which he never could rid himself, did little to improve this. The masses could easily relate to leaders like Zhu De and Peng Dehuai because of their simplicity and human warmth; they liked Zhou Enlai for his patrician charm and selfless dedication to the service of the nation. But with Mao it was a different story; well-orchestrated propaganda imposed his image upon the people as that of a Sun-God. More than 2,000 years of imperial tradition have created in the collective consciousness the constant need for a unique, supreme, quasi-mystical head; the shaky and brief republican interlude did not succeed in providing any convincing substitute for this, and Mao knew shrewdly how to manipulate this traditional legacy to his own advantage.

That he was in fact the main organiser of his own cult cannot be doubted; he justified the necessity of it to Edgar Snow by observing cynically, “Khrushchev did not build his own cult, look what happened to him!” But if he became a god for the masses, those who were in direct contact with him were somewhat put off by his aloofness, his secretive and devious ways, his utter lack of personal loyalty, the ruthlessness with which he could get rid of lifetime companions-in-arms and faithful assistants once they had become a hindrance or dared to voice criticism. One of his early admirers, the American journalist Agnes Smedley — a dedicated revolutionary who had the courage, during the war, to break through the Kuomintang blockade and join the communists in Yan’an — gave in 1943 a remarkably frank account of her first encounter with him: