Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Educated persons were considered unfit by nature to join the party; especially at the local level, resistance to accepting them was always greatest, as the old leadership felt threatened by all expressions of intellectual superiority. Official figures released in 1985 provide a telling picture of the level of education within the Communist Party, which makes up the privileged elite of the nation: 4 per cent of party members had received some university education — they did not necessarily graduate — (against 30 per cent in the Soviet Union); 42 per cent of party members only attended primary school; 10 per cent are illiterate…

The first casualty of Mao’s anti-intellectualism was to be found, interestingly enough, in the field of Marxist studies. When, after fifteen years of revolutionary activity, the party finally felt the need to acquire some rudiments of Marxist knowledge (at that time virtually no work of Marx had yet been translated into Chinese!), Mao, who himself was still a beginner in this discipline, undertook to keep all doctrinal development under his personal control. In Yan’an, like an inexperienced teacher who has gotten hold of the only available textbook and struggles to keep one lesson ahead of his pupils, he simply plagiarised a couple of Soviet booklets and gave a folksy Chinese version of some elementary Stalinist-Zhdanovian notions. How these crude, banal and derivative works ever came to acquire in the eyes of the entire world the prestige and authority of an original philosophy remains a mystery; it must be one of the most remarkable instances of mass auto-suggestion in the twentieth century.

In one respect, however, Mao Zedong Thought did present genuine originality and dared to tread ground where Stalin himself had not ventured. Mao explicitly denounced the concept of a universal humanity; whereas the Soviet tyrant merely practised inhumanity, Mao gave it a theoretical foundation, expounding the notion — without parallel in the other communist countries of the world — that the proletariat alone is fully endowed with human nature. To deny the humanity of other people is the very essence of terrorism; millions of Chinese were soon to measure the actual implications of this philosophy.

At first, after the establishment of the People’s Republic the regime was simply content to translate and reproduce elementary Soviet introductions to Marxism. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had a department of philosophy and social sciences but produced nothing during the 1950s, not even textbooks on Marxism. Only one university in the entire country — Peking University — had a department of philosophy; only Mao’s works were studied there.

When the Soviet Union denounced Stalin and rejected his History of the Communist Party — Short Course , the Chinese were stunned: this little book contained virtually all they knew about Marxism. Then, the Sino — Soviet split ended the intellectual importations from the USSR, and it was conveniently decided that Mao Zedong Thought represented the highest development of Marxist-Leninist philosophy; therefore, in order to fill the ideological vacuum, Mao’s Thought suddenly expanded and acquired polyvalent functions; its study became a reward for the meritorious, a punishment for the criminal, a medicine for the sick; it could answer all questions and solve all problems; it even performed miracles that were duly recorded; its presence was felt everywhere; it was broadcast in the streets and in the fields, it was put to music, it was turned into song and dance, it was inscribed everywhere — on mountain cliffs and on chopsticks, on badges, on bridges, on ashtrays, on dams, on teapots, on locomotives; it was printed on every page of all newspapers. (This, in turn, created some practical problems: in a poor country, where all paper is recycled for a variety of purposes, one had always to be very careful, when wrapping groceries or when wiping one’s bottom, not to do it with Mao’s ubiquitous Thought — which would have been a capital offence.) In a way, Mao is to Marx what Voodoo is to Christianity; therefore, it is not surprising that the inflation of Mao’s Thought precluded the growth of serious Marxist studies in China.[2]

No tyrant can forsake humanity and persecute intelligence with impunity; in the end, he reaps imbecility and madness. When he visited Moscow in 1957, Mao declared that an atomic war was not to be feared since, in such an eventuality, only half of the human race would perish. This remarkable statement provided a good sample of the mind that was to conceive the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.” The human cost of these ventures was staggering: the famines that resulted from the “Great Leap” produced a demographic black hole into which it now appears that as many as 50 million victims may have been sucked. The violence of the “Cultural Revolution” affected 100 million people. If, on the whole, the Maoist horrors are well known, what has not been sufficiently underlined is their asinine lunacy. In a recent issue of the New York Review , Jonathan Mirsky quoted an anecdote (from Liu Binyan, Ruan Ming and Xu Gang’s Tell the World ) that is so exemplary and apposite here that it bears telling once more. One day, Bo Yibo was swimming with Mao. Mao asked him what the production of iron and steel would be for the next year. Instead of replying, Bo Yibo told Mao that he was going to effect a turn in the water; Mao misunderstood him and thought that he had said “double.” A little later, at a party meeting, Bo Yibo heard Mao announce that the national production of iron and steel would double the next year.[3]

The anecdote is perfectly credible in the light of all the documentary evidence we have concerning Mao’s attitude at the time of the “Great Leap”: we know that he swallowed the gigantic and grotesque deceptions fabricated by his own propaganda, and accepted without discussion the pleasing suggestion that miracles were taking place in the Chinese countryside; he genuinely believed that the yield of cotton and grain could be increased by 300–500 per cent. And Liu Shaoqi himself was no wiser: inspecting Shandong in 1958, and having been told that miraculous increases had been effected in agricultural output, he said: “This is because the scientists have been kicked out, and people now dare to do things!” The output of steel, which was 5.3 million tons in 1957, allegedly reached 11 million tons in 1958, and it was planned that it would reach 18 million in 1959. The grain output which was 175 million tons in 1957, allegedly reached 375 million tons in 1958, and was planned to reach 500 million in 1959. The Central Committee solemnly endorsed this farce (Wuchang, Sixth Plenum, December 1958) — and planned for more. Zhou Enlai — who never passed for a fool — repeated and supported these fantastic figures and announced that the targets laid in the Second Five Year Plan (1958–1962) had all been reached in the plan’s first year! All the top leaders applauded this nonsense. Li Fuchun and Li Xiannian poured out “Great Leap” statistics that were simply lies. What happened to their common sense? Only Chen Yun had the courage to remain silent.

Graphic details of the subsequent famine were provided in the official press only a few years ago, confirming what was already known through the testimonies of countless eye-witnesses.

As early as 1961, Ladany published in China News Analysis some of these reports by Chinese travellers from all parts of China:

All spoke of food shortage and hunger; swollen bellies, lack of protein and liver diseases were common. Many babies were stillborn because of their mothers’ deficient nutrition. Few babies were being born. As some workers put it, their food barely sufficed to keep them standing on their feet, let alone allowing them to have thoughts of sex. Peasants lacked the strength to work, and some collapsed in the fields and died. City government organisations and schools sent people to the villages by night to buy food, bartering clothes and furniture for it. In Shenyang the newspaper reported cannibalism. Desperate mothers strangled children who cried for food. Many reported that villagers were flocking into the cities in search of food; many villages were left empty… It was also said that peasants were digging underground pits to hide their food. Others spoke of places where the population had been decimated by starvation.