Abstract
Andrew Walder has written a clear, concise and authoritative political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao’s leadership (1949–1976). China Under Mao sets the standard for future surveys of PRC political history. Originally released in hardback in 2015, it was published in paperback in 2017. Walder’s focus is less on what happened (even if, at slightly over 400 pages, there is a good deal of that) and more on why things developed the way they did. At the centre of the narrative is Mao Zedong. The core theme, stated in page 6, is that the consequences of the Great Helmsman’s initiatives were ‘often unintended, unanticipated, and unwanted, not only by the broad population, and the party leadership, but by Mao himself’. In the author’s view, ‘Mao’s personal failings’, which are covered in vividly tragic detail, ‘do not take us very far’ in accounting for the history of this era (p. 6). According to Walder, we need to focus our analytical attention on how Mao’s interventions were transmogrified by the PRC’s institutions: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the centrally planned economic model which the party transplanted from the Soviet Union.
After a quick preface and a first summary chapter, subsequent chapters are broadly arrayed in a chronological order. There is an overview chapter focusing on how the CCP went from being a movement to seizing power in 1949. The author discusses the intra-party purges during Second World War, the ‘extremely modest’ (p. 22) CCP contribution to the victory over the Japanese, and the civil war between the CCP and their Guomindang rivals. In the successive chapters, Walder proceeds to describe how, over the course of a decade, the party consolidated power in rural and urban China. Through land reform, the CCP extended its power to the village level, marking a departure from Chinese imperial dynasties, whose governing structures had previously stopped at the county level. By means of a series of mobilisation campaigns, the party also consolidated power in the cities. In both the rural and urban spheres, violence and death rates escalated well beyond the party’s intentions.
A valuable chapter on how a socialist economy operates is followed by one that discusses the party system. This sets the context for the heart of the book, which covers the various events and campaigns that rocked CCP-led China: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the consequences this had for China, the resulting Hundred Flowers’ Movement; the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s subsequent retreat from politics and his re-emergence, the Socialist Education Movement, the Sino-Soviet split, and finally, the decade long Cultural Revolution which only ended with Mao’s death. There is a particularly useful concluding chapter that summarises the book’s findings. There are some major events involving Mao that are not covered. There is no discussion of the escalation of the Sino–Soviet conflict that resulted in a border war in 1969 and which continued even after Mao’s death in 1976, or the complexities of reconciling the Cultural Revolution with the imperative of establishing a Sino–American rapprochement in 1972 aimed against the Soviet Union.
One of the virtues of reading an expertly written survey book is that it illuminates major themes. Two interrelated ones stand out. The first concerns the costs inflicted on China during this period of CCP rule. Walder’s book drives home to the reader the astronomical human and economic costs that the CCP advertently and inadvertently inflicted on the country. To take only the two most egregious examples, approximately 30 million people died as a direct consequence of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). As Walder highlights, this is nearly three times the 12 million Chinese deaths in the war against Japan (1937–1945). The estimated total number of deaths during the most intense phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1971) was between 1.1 and 1.6 million. The costs of these fundamentally politically based excesses were compounded by their futility. As Walder poignantly points out, ‘these lives were sacrificed for a cause that was badly misconceived and accomplished nothing of lasting value’ (p. 334).
A second identifiable theme in the book pertains to Mao’s agency in PRC politics from 1949 to 1976. Here, there would appear to be a discrepancy between the significant amount of emphasis placed in the narrative on Mao’s role in determining outcomes and the theoretical attention devoted to him. In short, Mao is under-theorised. This point requires elaboration. Walder’s central thesis focuses our attention on the structures that determined outcomes, the CCP and the centrally planned economic model which the party transplanted from the Soviet Union. However, organisations require leadership. Also, leadership choices inevitably invite a consideration of how power was wielded by the leader and how power considerations interplayed with ideology. Did Mao’s personal power concerns always complement his ideological goals? What happened when these imperatives clashed? This is another way of saying that agency matters a lot in this particular story and would appear to merit a similar level of attention as a causal factor as the organisations emphasised by the author. Mao was the catalyst in unleashing much of the destruction chronicled in the book. A chilling 1927 report authored by Mao shows that his predilection for violence in the service of personal ambition and revolution predated his leadership of the PRC (p. 44). His fingerprints are present everywhere one sees turmoil and carnage. Mao was the person who overrode his colleagues in initiating the Hundred Flowers Movement (p. 135–139). He initiated the Great Leap Forward and, to compound this error, his intervention prevented a mid-course correction (p. 167). Mao owned the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which the CCP itself unambiguously criticised in 1981 (p. 314, 319).
The obvious counterfactual question to this book is whether there would have been as much violence and destruction if some other member of the Chinese leadership had been in command of the policy. The answer almost certainly is a no. That said, this point should not detract from what is an outstanding work of political history which can function equally well as an advanced undergraduate text. China Under Mao is a book for the layperson seeking insight into the struggles that contemporary China has had to negotiate as well as offering a valuable perspective for specialists in the debate on the politics of the CCP under Mao.