Mao in history.

• Author: Terrill, Ross
• Position: Chinese's perception of Mao Zedong

Early one morning in the summer of 1972, John King Fairbank, my senior colleague among Harvard's East Asia faculty at the time, phoned to ask if I would look over a draft article for Foreign Affairs summing up his first trip to China since the 1940s. The piece was fairly indulgent toward Mao's regime. Over lunch that day, I said to Fairbank, "This trip to China must have been moving." He nodded and said, "Well, you know, I've been on their side ever since 1943." In Fairbank's draft I queried the sentence: "The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries." The dean of American Sinology, to whom I owe much, stuck with it. But he added the words: "At least, most Chinese seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise."

During the first decades of Mao's China, a time of American self-confidence and strong sense of purpose spurred by the World War II victory, U.S. Sinology for the most part took on an "idealist" rather than a "realist" orientation: hopeful about social progress, benevolent in its view of human nature, open to strong leadership. Since America was the chief bastion outside China of contemporary China studies, this buoyant, progressive mindset influenced the worldwide image of Mao Zedong. True, during the first years after 1949 Mao was viewed in a totalitarian framework as a junior Stalin, but within a decade this view gave way to a more open-minded one of the Chinese leader as a flexible Asian communist. The Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s and the subsequent Nixon opening to China of 1971-72 further softened Mao's image.

While he was serving as President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, back at Harvard in January 1971 for a dinner with international affairs faculty, remarked that whereas in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations "Dean Rusk used to compare Mao unfavorably with Hitler, in this administration we compare Mao favorably with Hitler." A small change, strictly speaking, yet a large change in political-philosophical terms.

Even after Mao's death in 1976, Sinologists, influential Americans like Nixon and Kissinger, and many leaders of the Democratic Party tended to defend the rationality and sincerity of the Chinese leader's attempts at social engineering, while acknowledging his excesses and errors in the Great Leap Forward (communes, backyard steel furnaces) of the late 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution (Red Guards, book burning) of the late 1960s. Distilled through U.S. Sinological research, the popular image of Mao in the West - until the 1990s - was less bleak than those of Stalin and Hitler, which were more shaped by the "realist" approach of European political science. It took most of the Deng Xiaoping era (1979-97) to make Mao look really bad.

American Sinology was traditionally more idealistic, too, than Sinology pursued in Taiwan. Among American scholars there was well into the 1960s a tenacious expectation of unity in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), against mounting signs to the contrary and in the face of evidence collected by China scholars in Taiwan that Mao was in tension with his top colleague, Liu Shaoqi, and other senior figures. As a student embarking on China studies, I adopted some of this idealism - modified by Australian skepticism - and my early writings lacked realism about Chinese politics. During the Cultural Revolution, American analysts were more inclined than those in Taiwan to see idealistic impulses behind the Red Guard turmoil. In general, from 1949 onward American Sinology focused on what made communist China tick, while Taiwanese analyses focused on cracks in the edifice of the regime.

The loss of life during Mao's Great Leap Forward was estimated by Richard Walker, a leading anti-communist scholar of the 1960s and 1970s, at 1-2 million. As a graduate student at Harvard in the late 1960s, I remember John Fairbank scoffing at Walker's "extreme views" about sufferings during the PRC's first decade. Some indulgence toward Mao's errors by Fairbank and others stemmed from resentment at Senator Joseph McCarthy's potshots at China specialists. Still, the picture we now have of the Great Leap Forward, based largely on documentary sources available within China, is much bleaker than that suggested by the hardest of anti-communists in the 1960s. A thorough 1996 study, Hungry Ghosts, by the British journalist Jasper Becker, puts the loss of life at 30 million.

China specialists during the 1960s and 1970s could see a number of evils and injustices in China; if pressed, few of us would have denied that China harbored tens of thousands of political prisoners, or claimed that the former Defense Minister Peng Dehuai - who questioned the Great Leap Forward - got a fair go from Mao in their confrontation of 1959. Yet an intellectual fascination with the gyrations of Chinese communist politics operated to restrain our judgment. This tendency toward a hands-off objectivity was reinforced by the existence of polemicists who did only evaluation, wielding totalitarian theory crudely or taking a purely moral stance toward Chinese communism.

Who would have guessed at Mao's death in 1976, or even at the tenth anniversary of his death in 1986, that by the twentieth anniversary in 1996 much of the focus on Mao would have shifted to his personal ways - indeed to that most personal of all realms, sexual life? But then Americans of the Ronald Reagan era in the 1980s might not have guessed that a U.S. president elected in 1992 would spend his first months in the White House on the issue of homosexuals in the military, the first weeks after his re-election in 1996 on the issue of sexual harassment in the military, and much of early 1998 defending himself against rumors of sex in the White House.

In 1980, I was criticized in reviews of the first edition of my biography Mao for paying too much attention to Mao's personality. and personal life. Professor Edwin Moise spoke for many when, in the bibliography of his 1986 book Modern China: A History, he recommended my book but warned that it "concentrates too much on details of Mao's personal life." Yet a decade later, in a number of serious works, details of Mao's personal life took center stage. Although my suggestion of the possibility of intimacy between Mao and his "confidential secretary" Zhang Yufeng had been rejected, later revelations turned possibility into certainty. Today, indeed, Mao is as often viewed as a conspirator and lecher as he is as a unifier of China, philosopher of Asian communism, and major architect of the collapse of the communist bloc.

A tendency to believe the best about Mao was not the only reason why Western Sinology was for some years disinclined to see the pathological in him. Another was the absence of authoritative evidence of his willful and mindless ways. By the 1990s the material base for viewing Mao's methods of rule has become much more extensive than it was during his lifetime. More than any other single work in English, it is The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) by Dr. Li Zhisui that consolidates this new perception in the West. Despite questions one might have about the reasons for Mao's physician's sourness toward Mao and the CCP, the book is the only memoir we have by a close associate of the leader who defected from China and then told his story.(1)

Li Zhisui was an elitist intellectual. Little in his background or the working of his mind suggested sympathy for communist goals. But Mao liked staff members who had been in the West or had a Western education: Li had returned to China from Australia after the communist takeover, seeking to make a contribution to his homeland. When summoned to serve as Mao's doctor in 1954, he demurred on the ground that his "class background" was far from working-class, but Mao told him that "sincerity" was all that counted. Perhaps there was an admirable root to Mao's embrace of the stubborn physician. Sycophancy was the norm in Mao's court, but Dr. Li was a rather...