Mao Zedong Thought
Author: Wang Fanxi
Editor / Translator: Gregor Benton
Wang Fanxi, a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, wrote this book on Mao more than fifty years ago. He did so while in exile in the then Portuguese colony of Macau, across the water from Hong Kong, where he had been sent in 1949 to represent...See More
Copyright Year: 2020
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Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-42156-1
Publication date: 18 May 2020
Hardback
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ISBN: 978-90-04-35890-4
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Contents
Author: Wang Fanxi
Editor’s Introduction Author: Gregor Benton Pages: 1–39
Mao Zedong Thought
Preface
Foreword
Chapter 1 The Personality Cult
Chapter 2 The Sources and Components of Mao Zedong Thought
Chapter 3 Mao Zedong Thought and ‘Mao Zedong Thought’
Chapter 4 A Brilliant Tactician
Chapter 5 A Middling Strategist (Part 1) New Democracy and Permanent Revolution
Chapter 6 A Middling Strategist (Part 2) Armed Revolution and Revolutionary Strategy
Chapter 7 Theory and Practice
Chapter 8 Literature and Art
Chapter 9 Self-Reliance and Communism in One Country
Chapter 10 Mao in History
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Appendix 1 Seven Theses on Socialism and Democracy (1957)
Appendix 2 Thinking in Solitude (1957)
Appendix 3 On the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1967)
Appendix 4 The ‘Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius’ Campaign (1974)
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Bibliography
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A classic analysis of one of the most discussed political figures of modern times, newly available in English
About the Author
Wang Fanxi (1907 – 2002) was a leading Chinese Trotskyist revolutionary. Born in 1907, he was imprisoned during the 1930s, and for the last decades of his life lived in Leeds in the United Kingdom.
Gregor Benton is Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. His books include Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934–1938 (University of California Press, 1992), honoured by the University of California Press as ‘a special book in Asian studies’ and by the Association of Asian Studies as the Best Book on Modern China.
His most recent book is Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820-1980 (University of California Press, 2018; co-authored with Hong Liu).
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An outstanding critical analysis of Mao Zedong’s political thought.
- There have been many books on Mao Zedong, but few match this indispensable study by Wang Fanxi, a leading Chinese Trotskyist and contemporary of Mao.
- Written more than fifty years ago during Wang Fanxi's exile in Macau [1970's],
- this outstanding analysis has stood the test of time as a critical appraisal of Maoism as a political current from within the Marxist tradition.
- Wang Fanxi himself was forced to live out his life in exile.
- His book remains indispensable to anyone interested in a serious appraisal of Mao Zedong.
326 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2020
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Mao Zedong Thought - book review by Sean Ledwith
June 23, 2022 Published in Book Reviews
https://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/23280-mao-zedong-thought-book-review
A Chinese Trotskyist during the country’s revolution, Wang Fanxi’s Mao Zedong Thought shines valuable light on the nature of the Chinese state, finds Sean Ledwith
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Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought, ed. and trans. Gregor Benton (Haymarket 2021), viii, 326pp.
In 2018, China’s ruling class officially designated its current economic and political goals as ‘Xi Jinping Thought’. Named after the eponymous dominant figure in the Beijing elite, the doctrine is an attempt to legitimate the ever-tightening grip of the Chinese Communist Party on the planet’s most populous country and its second superpower. With a few references to historical materialism and the ideas of Marx and Engels thrown in as window dressing, Xi Jinping Thought is actually nothing more than a shallow pretext for the authoritarian neoliberalism being implemented in a state synonymous with oppressive working conditions, the suppression of democratic freedoms and racist social policy in regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet.
The doctrine makes Xi the third of China’s postrevolutionary leadership to be honoured as the personification of an ideological strategy to guide the country through a particular phase of its modern development. ‘Deng Xiaoping Thought’ in the 1980s legitimated the incremental opening up to global capital that characterised that period along with a growing acceptance by the elite of internal disparities of wealth. The first of these three doctrines is the subject of Mao Zedong Thought by Wang Fanxi, a Chinese revolutionary who participated in the epic struggles of the mid-twentieth century that climaxed with the coming to power of the CCP in 1949.
Wang and the Chinese revolution
Wang was born in Zhejiang province a few years before the downfall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and spent the last years of his life in the rather incongruous setting of Leeds, the consequence of his forced exile from his home country. The reason Wang died thousands of miles from China was that he was an unrepentant supporter of Leon Trotsky and the tradition of working-class self-emancipation associated with the great Russian revolutionary. Wang’s Trotskyist perspective enabled him to perceive the world-historical achievements of the Chinese Revolution in terms of its expulsion of colonial powers and setting the country on the path to industrial modernity; but it also highlighted the crucial limitations of 1949, especially the absences of inner-party democracy in the CCP and proletarian activism in major urban centres.
As Wang puts it with characteristic even-handedness:
‘Mao’s determination was laudable. He was able to put his strong points, and weak points made strong, at the service of the revolution, to which he contributed mightily so, he was still not a great revolutionary strategist. The path he took was an extension of the Chinese tradition of peasant revolt, a pragmatic and unintended choice forced on him by circumstance’ (p.157).
The background to both Wang’s conversion to Trotskyism and Mao’s ascent to power was the failed Chinese revolution of 1927. In that year, the CCP had been instructed by the increasingly Stalinised Comintern to collaborate with the bourgeois nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Guomindang party. The consequence was a calamitous massacre of thousands of CCP activists in Beijing and Guangzhou as Chiang sought exclusive control of the anti-colonialist movement. Wang was lucky to escape to Moscow where he encountered the dissident views of Trotsky, and came to accept the latter’s critique of the emerging bureaucracy in the USSR and its attempt to hold back revolutionary movements in other countries. Wang was impressed by multiple aspects of Trotsky’s alternative to Stalinism:
‘After October, Trotsky showed himself to be wise, capable, meritorious and a literary talent, a head above the other old Bolsheviks and Lenin’s equal. In some fields, especially in the eyes of the people, he surpassed even Lenin. As Lenin’s right-hand man, everyone expected Trotsky to take over when Lenin died’ (p.54).
The authoritarian gloss of today’s CCP with its massively choreographed congresses and parades makes it easy to forget that in the 1920s, China was the cradle of the world’s most dynamic and militant revolutionary movement outside Russia. Even after the eclipse of Trotsky’s role in Moscow, his supporters in China, including Wang, made a heroic but doomed attempt to keep the flame of authentic proletarian self-emancipation alive in the face of overwhelming odds. The triple threat posed by Mao’s Stalinised CCP, Chiang’s Guomindang and Japanese invaders would cumulatively grind Chinese Trotskyism into oblivion, but not before its adherents had developed an incisive critique of the forces contending for power in the country.
In the dark days of the 1930s and beyond, Wang and his fellow revolutionaries looked to the leadership styles of Trotsky and his greatest collaborator for political inspiration. Lenin embraced the cut and thrust of inner-party debates over theory and practice and would never resort to the crass compliance of the CCP in both the Maoist era and today:
‘He was not afraid to let his peers compete with him in ability, learning and hard work. He welcomed the fight, for truth becomes clearer the more it is contested, and nine times out of ten times truth wins; and if truth is on the other side, then one must say so and adjust’ (p.52).
Wang’s critique of Mao
In stark contrast, Mao Zedong cultivated a grotesque personality cult as a means to secure his control of the CCP as it gradually recovered from Chiang’s slaughter in 1927. Gigantic images of ‘The Great Helmsman’ became pervasive in post-1949 China and were supplemented by absurd gimmicks such the staging of hagiographic operas about his life or the spectacle of the elderly Mao swimming in the Yangtse River. Lenin and Trotsky would have scorned such nonsense, as does Wang:
‘For the infallible and the divine are lifeless, whereas human beings who are both right and wrong, particularly those who are less wrong and more right than most, live life to the full … today’s CCP seeks not to establish the content and maturation of Mao’s becoming but to make him a god, to turn a being of flesh and blood into a dead or incorporeal thing and his ideas into myths’ (p.46).
Wang persuasively argues that Mao’s willingness to promote the ridiculous notion that he was essentially infallible, and the fount of revolutionary wisdom, was partly rooted in his youthful unfamiliarity with the key texts of Marxism. Growing up as the son of a peasant in Hunan province in the early years of the twentieth century, Mao’s primary intellectual influences were the philosophy of Confucianism and the archaic Robin Hood-style stories of altruistic Chinese bandits, such as ‘The Water Margin’. From the former, Mao internalised a preference for political hierarchy and an instinct that authority should always be respected. From the latter, he learnt how the discontent of China’s massive peasant class could be channelled into challenges to the status quo.
Any revolutionary should always seek to develop strategies that relate to the specificities of a national culture, argues Wang, and in the context of China’s ancient and predominantly rural civilisation, elements of Confucianism and the swordsmen cycles of stories can be justifiably appropriated. However, without substantive immersion in the works of the founding fathers of Marxism, a revolutionary movement can lack direction towards the overriding objectives of challenging capitalism itself and installing a system of workers’ power in its place.
For reasons partly outside his control, this crucial ingredient of a revolutionary’s skillset was not available to the future Chinese leader:
‘Mao knew only Chinese, and not many Marxist books were translated into Chinese until after the defeat of the revolution of 1925-27, starting around 1930, so he can’t have read much between 1920 and 1930. In any case, people like Mao devoted their time and effort to the revolution, especially after 1927, when the switch to armed struggle left even less time for theory’ (pp.82-3).
The defeat of 1927 fundamentally altered the nature of the CCP. Up to that point, under Lenin and Trotsky’s guidance from the Comintern, the party had focused on building support primarily among the working classes of China’s major urban centres, while also reaching out to the country’s far bigger peasantry. A revolutionary conjunction of these two social forces would have made a Chinese version of October 1917 feasible. The calamity of 1927-precipitated by Stalin - forced the survivors of the CCP, including Mao, to retreat to the countryside to avoid the death squads of the Guomindang. The following decade was characterised by undoubted courage and heroism on the part of the CCP leadership and thousands of its supporters, not least on the legendary Long March of 1934-5.
Losing the revolutionary path
This period, however, was also marked by two tendencies within the organisation that took it away from the revolutionary tradition embodied by Lenin and Trotsky. Firstly, an unavoidable prioritising of military activity in order to endure the relentless assaults of both the Guomindang and Japanese army; and secondly a political and physical detachment from the urban proletariat as the CCP retreated to China’s vast rural hinterland. The combined effect of these reorientations, plus Mao’s personal proclivities discussed above, fatally led Chinese communism away from the template of 1917. In Wang’s words:
‘Mao is not a thinker but a political pragmatist … he first embraced revolutionary goals and then, during long years of revolution, investigated and discussed and learned through struggle, forming his thought thus. Thinking of that sort has its merits but it lacks system, it cannot be consistent, it puts expediency above tactics, and tactics dictate strategy - these are its inevitable consequences’ (p.73).
It would be an exaggeration to suggest the authoritarian and pro-business nature of Xi’s China today is explicable entirely in terms of strategic decisions taken in the 1930s. Wang highlights the Trotskyist critique that any attempt to construct socialism in one country, whether in Russia, China or anywhere else, is doomed to failure by the pressures of the global system. However, Mao’s over-centralised and regimented rise to power goes someway to explaining why the regime that came to power in Beijing in 1949 lacked the democratic credentials of its equivalent in Moscow and Petrograd in 1917.
The slogan that perhaps best encapsulates this hyper-militarised nature of Maoism is ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. As Wang observes, this line is catchy and memorable but it is not an idea that would have appealed to Marx and Engels, or Lenin and Trotsky. For them, the use of force is highly likely to be one aspect of socialist revolution, but only alongside a militant and mobilised mass movement:
‘Violence has a role in revolution but to reduce all revolution to violence is wrong. At its fullest point, class struggle, particularly the struggle for state power, must resort to violence and depend on force but that does not mean that all problems of revolution must be settled by war’ (p.112).
Mao’s slogan, in contrast, reflects how the CCP’s conquest of power in 1949 was based on the military achievements of the Red Army and not on widespread insurrections in the major Chinese cities. In fact, Mao and other senior leaders of the party explicitly discouraged workers’ resistance to the residual Guomindang forces as they approached the big cities. Wang notes that another pre-modern Chinese figure who hugely influenced Mao was the legendary military theorist, Sun Tzu, author of the classic textbook The Art of War. Sun’s axioms such as, ‘avoid the enemy when he is fresh and strike him when he is tired and withdraws’ (p.116) undoubtedly sustained Mao in his guerrilla battles with the Guomindang and Japanese on the road to power, but they are less useful when it comes to the challenges of a workers’ revolution in the modern era.
Anyone wishing to understand why China in the twenty-first century no longer provides an attractive model for most of the left can learn a lot from this volume. The translator, Gregor Benton, should be commended for bringing to light an author whose insights otherwise would be lost to the English-speaking world. No reader could fail to be moved by the courageous if largely forgotten struggles of Chinese Trotskyists ranged against some of the most ruthless forces of the twentieth century. Wang cites one such revolutionary whose defiance in the face of a death sentence was awe-inspiring. Zheng Chaolin was:
‘like a Buddhist priest who had attained the Way and who knew beforehand the date of his achievement of nirvana. Even if we leave aside Zheng Chaolin’s other strengths, his Peter-like spirit of martyrdom alone will ensure him a lasting place in the history of the Revolution’ (p.14).
Sean Ledwith is a Counterfire member and Lecturer in History at York College, where he is also UCU branch negotiator. Sean is also a regular contributor to Marx and Philosophy Review of Books and Culture Matters
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Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought
Reviewed by Fabian Van Onzen
About the reviewer
Fabian van Onzen received his PhD from the European Graduate School and is author of the …
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There has been a lot of interest in Maoism in recent years. A number of recent books have appeared that seriously engage with Maoism such as J Moufawad-Paul’s Continuity and Rupture and Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History.
One of the more critical books to recently appear is Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Trotskyist Wang Fanxi, which has been translated for the first time into English by Gregor Benton. The book – first published in Chinese in 1973 – offers some brilliant critical insights into the cult of personality, the influence of Confucianism on Chinese Marxism and Mao’s role in the Chinese Revolution. This work is as much the product of Wang Fanxi as it is of Gregor Benton’s phenomenal editorial work, who has also edited a sourcebook of Chinese Trotskyist writing, Unarmed Prophets.
The introduction by Benton provides a helpful overview of Wang’s life and his relationship to the Chinese communist movement. Wang became politically active in China during the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, which was a major anti-imperialist workers’ uprising in Shanghai. During this time, he joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) and sought to help the party’s theoretical development, which Wang thought was lacking because only a few Marxist texts were available in Chinese. Wang spent time studying in Moscow in 1927 at the Communist University of the Toilers. Benton points out that he was disappointed with it because his education was mostly military rather than political. As a result, Wang affiliated with Trotsky’s left-opposition, which he thought was better grounded in Marxist theory and had a much better understanding of the mistakes of the CPC.
Between 1925 and 1927, the dominant Stalinist faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union viewed the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) as an anti-imperialist people’s movement and believed that they shared similar goals to the communists. As a result, they argued that Chinese communists should become members of the KMT and organise its left-wing. Although the communists did become influential across China, the KMT leader Chiang Kai-Shek later ordered the execution of many Chinese communist leaders and purged the party of CPC members. Trotsky argued that the CPC’s mistaken policy of subordinating its own forces to the KMT made them unprepared for the offensive against the communists by the party’s right-wing. Instead, he argued that the twenties were a revolutionary situation in China and that the CPC should have organised workers councils (soviets) in order to prepare for an insurrection. As Wang explains, Trotsky thought ‘the communists should take an independent class line, leave the Guomindang […] and wage class struggle’ (132). Along with other Chinese Trotskyists such as Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuizhi, Wang secretly organised in the CPC and sought to win the party to a revolutionary Marxist position. He was later sent by his comrades to Hong Kong so he could lead the Chinese Trotskyist movement in exile, but was deported to Macau by the British authorities in 1950. After Wang came under attack by Maoists operating in Macau, he was brought to England in 1975 with the help of Gregor Benton, Tariq Ali and Ralph Miliband. Wang wrote Mao Zedong Thought at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1974 in order to make sense of Maoism from a Trotskyist perspective.
Wang provides a good analysis of the cult of Mao in the sixties, which he thinks was related to economic underdevelopment in China, the influence of Confucianism on Chinese Marxism and the bureaucratic deformation of the CPC. In a way similar to Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism in the USSR, Wang argues that the personality cult was able to exert such a strong influence on the CPC because China had a low level of industrialisation and was still largely a peasant country, factors which oriented the party towards the peasantry rather than the working class. As he points out, ‘any political party […] born in such an environment can become bureaucratised and acquire a personality cult’ (63). Despite this, Mao often urged his followers to be modest, avoid arrogance and follow the ‘mass-line’. Wang notes that Mao’s modest attitude sought to ‘detoxify’ the bureaucracy by keeping his supporters humble and denouncing critical voices as immodest or sectarian. Although the personality cult may have created some initial enthusiasm for the Chinese Revolution, Mao’s deification and other such personality cults ‘destroys creativity, speeds the bureaucratisation of party and state, and is the surest way to destroy the revolution’s true leaders’ (65).
Wang notes that Mao did not receive a thorough Marxist education until 1937, during the truce between the CPC and the KMT. Although Mao had read a few Marxist texts, his main influences were Confucian writers who advocated political pragmatism, the need to honour the ruling bureaucracy (i.e. kings, emperors, state officials, etc.) and moral excellence. Wang points out that although Mao sought to fuse Confucianism with Marxism, he neither subjected it to an internal theoretical critique nor did he entirely abandon it. Although workers, students and peasants were encouraged to criticise corrupt party leaders during the Cultural Revolution, they were not able to question the Maoist faction in the CPC and its political line. Wang argues that this was due to the Confucian approach of Maoist leaders, which encouraged criticism within the framework established by the ruling bureaucracy. Wang points out that unlike Lenin or Trotsky, whose politics were guided by Marxist theory, Mao was a Confucian pragmatist who ‘acts first and thinks later’ (193). An example of this is Mao’s theory of the principle contradiction, which holds that the principle contradiction in capitalist social formation is not always that between labour and capital but changes according to the political situation. In opposition to Mao, Wang states that contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie ‘continues to occupy the main position […] to which other contradictions are subordinate’ (189).
Despite being highly critical of Mao, Wang nonetheless is able to perceive some of his strengths. He notes that although Mao lacked a grasp of the strategic questions of socialist revolution, he was an intelligent tactician who knew how to outmaneuver his enemies, exploit their vulnerabilities and maximise whatever strengths he had in a particular situation. Wang compares Mao’s ten principles of war with Sun Tzu’s thirteen principles and finds many similarities. His theory of ‘protracted people’s war’, which sought to win power through seizing power in villages in order to encircle the centres of power, was an example of a modern adaptation of Sun Tzu’s ideas. Wang notes that Chiang Kai-Shek was unable to replicate it because it assumed the unity of the army and the masses, which was not the case with Chiang who was opposed to the masses. The result of Mao’s military leadership was that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was able to make many advances and eventually seize power in 1949. Wang notes that one of Mao’s greatest weaknesses was his view that all ‘political power comes from the barrel of a gun’, which often resulted in reducing political questions to military ones. Although the PLA did offer political education in the villages where it was active, it tended to centralise power in the hands of a few leaders and emphasise military training over ideological consolidation.
Wang notes that the means used to achieve a socialist revolution will have an effect on the future socialist society. Since the CPC tended to equate war with revolution, it developed strong centralist tendencies that relied on undemocratic methods of handling contradictions and sometimes unpopular measures such as rapid collectivisation. Furthermore, Wang thinks that the CPC’s reliance on the peasants in the countryside rather than the urban working class alienated the party from its class base. Between 1927 and 1949, Mao and his comrades were separated from the proletariat, organising almost entirely in rural villages amongst peasants. Wang points out that the long-term effects of this separation generated bureaucratic attitudes among party leaders, corruption and the continuation of Confucian ideas in the party, which all contributed to the political battles during the Cultural Revolution.
The book contains an appendix of articles, one of which is Wang’s assessment of the Cultural Revolution. Wang notes that the Maoists perceived that young people in China were discontented with socialism. Instead of publicly making a self-criticism and addressing problems in the Communist Party, Mao ‘turned to young people, and directs their discontent against his opponents, the capitalist-roaders’ (294). Wang argues that the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to ‘deflect popular discontent’ (296) by utilising students and giving them a personality cult with which to identify. As Wang was living in exile at the time of the Cultural Revolution, it is understandable that he would view it this way. However, his bitterness somewhat prevents him from seeing its positive effects. Mobo Gao, Dongping Han and Charles Bettelheim note in their works that the Cultural Revolution enabled Chinese workers to experiment with stronger forms of collective management of production, and empowered peasants to confront corrupt bureaucratic officials in the countryside. Furthermore, land reforms, rural education and improved healthcare in the countryside gave many peasants a decent standard of living for the first time in Chinese history.
Because Wang tends to only focus on the ideological elements of Mao Zedong’s thought, he is sometimes unable to perceive the progress that was made in the Mao era. Although Wang is limited by his hyperfocus on Mao’s political line, he is very perceptive to its strengths and weaknesses. Mao Zedong Thought is a must-read for anyone studying Maoism and the Chinese Revolution, and is likely to become a classic in the near future.
13 September 2021
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19605_mao-zedong-thought-by-wang-fanxi-reviewed-by-fabian-van-onzen/
This review is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
One comment
Gregor Benton says:
13 September 2021 at 5:47 pm
Thank you, Fabian, for an excellent and very generous review
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