How Mao Changed China - Wang Gungwu

How Mao Changed China - Professor Wang Gungwu

Keith Yap

16,198 views  Mar 18, 2025

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Wang Gungwu is an internationally renowned historian famed for his scholarship on the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, as well as the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia. 

In his illustrious academic career, Wang has held eminent appointments in various universities and organisations around the world. 

He was a history professor at the University of Malaya (1963–68) and the Australian National University (1968–86), and the vice-chancellor at the University of Hong Kong (1986–95). 

He is currently a professor emeritus at the Australian National University and a University Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the highest academic title conferred by NUS.

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In this clip, he talks about what how Mao was crucial in the development of modern China. 

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Transcript

if we go to 1949 when uh chairman ma was

at kman Square he had this idea of the

China

dream it was like kind of a birth the

birthing of a new nation or an attempt

of trying to birth a new nation what are

some of the things that you know Western

media kind of they demonize him as like

a you know a totalitarian or maybe a

dictator in a sense but uh what what is

it about that interpretation that is

meold or

incomplete I think mad's position almost

Godlike position in China comes from the

fact that he was a man who enabled the

people's Liberation Army to win the war

against the nationalists of China and he

brought about the possibility of a

unification of all the territories that

was part of the Empire that became the

Republic of China in 1912 and is

inherited by the People's Republic of

China in 1949 that is a continuity that

territory is China and the people's

Liberation Army under madom was able to

take back and control that territory

with the exception of Mongolia R

Mongolia declared its independence and

with Soviet help and so on managed to

keep its independence but every

everything else became part part of a

United

China and he was the first of all the

political leaders to actually succeed in

doing that because by

19 within 10

years all of that territory except

Mongolia was United and except for

Taiwan which the Republic of China had

moved to the rest of it was United and

that

unification was regarded as a greater

success of M so he was seen as a kind of

the Great Hero who brought about the

unification of China and that gave him

immense power and he had tremendous

skills of his own to dominate the

Chinese Communist party and try to steer

the Communist Party towards his ideal of

what this future People's Republic of

China should be like and at that point

his model was the Soviet Union because

they they took from the communism that

the Stalin and Lenin and had created and

the Communist party was modal on that

but in his own

mind it was not Chinese enough so he in

a way he was trying to create a Chinese

version of that Revolution and in the

end of course he turned out that he

was this disillusion by what the Soviet

decision after Stalin's death and

considered them to be revisionist by

being more and more Western and less and

less able to be

independent developing a a separate kind

of uh people's Revolution that he

imagined so in his own mind he was

trying to create a new kind of

Revolution what you call continuous

Revolution that ultimately took the

shape of the great proletarian cultural

revolution which turned out in the end

as as we all know to be an economic

disaster

and the whole China's economy just

essentially diminish its in value and

incredibility thereafter so it took a

different move by Den Shing to try and

restore that so as you

see the difficulties of trying to create

a nation state based on a different set

of ideology different set of Ideal that

maong imagine should be the future of

China it didn't work that's

fundamentally true it didn't work so D

shabin came along to try and make it

work and that is D Shin's creation he

did not deny the Communist Revolution he

accepted it he thought the maish

Revolution was successful just a ma

himself had made terrible errors and

therefore led to the failure of his

experiment but then Shing was really

going back to what the Communist Party

really achieved in 1949 and the early

50s and to go back to the what the

Communist Party really stood for which

was to make a a successful

powerful recovered revolutionary state

which has Chinese characteristics as as

he uses the phrase so that's the new

phrase but shaing never really rejected

the MA's goal that there's a Chinese

Revolution based on the peasantry

created out of Chinese conditions should

have a distinctive Revolution which

would stand by itself and I think that's

what the Chinese people are still

thinking

about

and throughout modernity maybe following

their independence or the birth of the

PRC we see this constant grappling with

history or the concept of History

itself uh you kind of detail it in in

your book where there was this idea of

the the need for history to look of the

past to reflect on the past but the

maybe the earlier stages there was kind

of a certain dis disillusionment as well

that they had to Grapple with how did

how did the Chinese Communist party or

the CBC use history as a way to kind of

build the nation

state this is much more complicated

process even for them they themselves

didn't really know how to do it because

when you've had a revolution and in the

and one of the goals of your re

evolution is to overturn the past

when during the May Force movement for

example after the Republic was created

was to do away with the confusion State

this has failed we must now learn from

the west and they did they set out

deliberately to learn from the west but

what they discovered was the West was

much more complicated there were

actually more than one West there was a

west of what might be called the liberal

economic West that represented by the

capitalist system and the European

socialist West that was adopted was you

know succeeded by by the Russian

Revolution under Lenin and Stalin but

they both come from the same Source they

come from the same Enlightenment project

when the enlightenment created the two

revolutions the American and the French

revolutions they set up a you might say

three ideals for this new world in which

there's liberty equality fraternity as

you I mean to put it very bluntly put it

in the simplest terms and then the

revolution would then completely destroy

all these old monarchies Church based uh

authority of the Pope and all the other

religious based principles and

aristocratic feudal systems of the past

replace it all together and Marx did not

deny the role of capitalism Marx

actually praised capitalism as a

necessary step before you achieved

socialism so Marx actually was quite

clear about that just a question of

timing and who who wins in the end kind

of thing so it became an ideological

battle among in the west so there was

actually two wests the West represented

by you might say the capitalist side and

the West represented by the Russian

Revolution side which might be call the

Socialist side or communist side and the

Chinese people when they say learn from

the West they in the end they had they

were two West to learn from and part of

the leadership took West one I will call

it which was the

liberal economic capitalist site the

coastal Chinese more or less followed

that model led by the Nationalist

leaders from jik onward whereas The

Peasants did not appreciate that and

maong drawing from Chinese history

drawing from the fact that he came from

a rich peasant background and understood

the the nature of the peasantry he said

the majority of the Chinese people

probably 90% of the Chinese people were

peasants if you want to have a

revolution they must be involved in that

Revolution you cannot have a revolution

led by a bunch of intellectuals and

capitalists living on the coast of China

the interior of China was just as

important if not more so because they

had the majority So within China the

civil war between those two forces

develop gradually by adopting West one

and West two as the ideological base to

to fight each other with but underneath

it all it was a division within the

Chinese Society itself of Highly

elitist

Shu

class and Merchant classes and then the

vast majority peasantry with some

Artisan people supporting them vast

majority and mong's great success was he

was able to mobilize and win over the

peasantry larly thanks to the Japanese

invasion actually it helped them a lot

because in during that period they were

able to stand up against the Japanese in

the rural areas in a way which they

theing dang wasn't able to do so they

won

and having won then he pointed that this

is the road to the revolution but this

is nothing like the Soviet Revolution

the Soviet Revolution was workers of the

World Unite they were depending on Urban

workers forming trade unions and from

there to start the revolution there were

no Urban workers to speak of except

along the coast and there were to few of

them anyway to start any Revolution so

the revolution ISO was peasant

Revolution there therefore it draws upon

the Chinese tradition of peasant

rebellions which have been going on many

many times hundreds of times throughout

Chinese history he was drawing upon that

inspiration including for example the

typing Rebellion the typing rebellion

was very much a peasant Rebellion with

an ideological thing Which derived from

the west of being who CH being the the

Son of God the brother of Jesus Christ I

mean these are extraordinary things were

not western or or Chinese in particular

they were peasant creative imaginative

way of justifying their Rebellion

against the Ed so say m would say that's

a class struggle the class rebellion and

he was inspired by that and in that

sense that it was within the Chinese

tradition I mean the in other words the

Chinese Revolution led by maong was part

of that tradition of the PE through

determining the nature of the the rule

of of of of of a

country but just not just without an

emperor the Chinese Communist party has

now become the emperor

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