Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

by Robert Jay Lifton

Robert Jay Lifton offers a new conceptual framework for our understanding not only of Chinese convulsion, its causes, its surprising potency and its consequences, but of evolution in general and the strange urgency, which can become paramount, of revolution never to proclaim itself successful, never to say its job is done and its goals attained. . . . [Dr. Lifton] has made a signal contribution to the understanding of the relationship of individual psychology to historical change, and especially of the vicissitudes of human continuity . . . .Revolutionary Immortality is, I would judge, an essential study of Communist China; more than that, it is an original, intellectually exciting, gracefully written and wholly accessible essay on an aspect of human individual and mass psychology as it operates in contemporary revolutionary circumstances around the world. Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times

Genres: China, History, Psychology, Nonfiction, Politics

178 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 26, 1970

About the author

Robert Jay Lifton was an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.

Reviews

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite uneven, and does not fully live up to its promise - which does not mean it should not be read.

There are passages here on the psychology of totalization - and hence, of fascism - that are stunning in the clarity and brilliance. On the other hand, the author seems not to be able to sustain this level of analysis for more than a few pages at a time, before resorting to jargon, to his own use of neologism and other analytical contrivances, or to the diverting of attention to less urgent topics. In other words, while brilliant, this little work lacks discipline and maturity.

That said, students of these matters will profit enormously, especially from the discussions of purity and power in Ch. V, and from the general idea of revolutionary millenarianism which is, ultimately, Lifton's obsession.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in 1968 by Vintage Books, this study came out when Mao was a very real figure and China a very different nation on the world stage. I thought to peruse this briskly, even cursorily and pop it into my Little Free Library. However, its psychological study of the man and his people drew me in, especially thinking back on Trump a would-be charismatic demagogue who would like to have Mao's canvas to create on.

Part of that presidency seemed to be an intensification of a latent anti-intellectual tendency to even self-destructive ends as it melded with identity and a rural versus urban divide.

A related issue is the heightening during the Cultural Revolution of the longstanding Chinese Communist preoccupation with being "Red" as distinct from "expert." This seemingly simple polarity reflects a crucial confrontation between revolutionary purity and modem technology. Without pausing just yet to explore this confrontation, we may say that the extreme Maoist glorification of "Redness" and undermining of "expertness" (the latter including not only professional skill but learning itself) for a time so threatened the last vestiges in China of dispassionate intellectual endeavor as to virtually eliminate "the intellectuals" as a functioning group. ... Involved here is the implicit assumption that the special revolutionary combination of purity and power could in itself completely nourish the individual mind, and that any additional intellectual needs were suspect.

In the delineation of purity great stress was placed upon what could be considered rural and "Chinese" as opposed to the threatening impurities of the urban and the foreign.

In here I see two cases of hero worship separated by decades and hemispheres with "worship" not being allegorical as witness by the reverence seen from QAnon and less radical corners.

This is by no means the first time that a political leader has been made into a divinity. But few in the past could have matched Mao in the superlatives used, the number of celebrants, or the thoroughness with which the message of glory has been disseminated. Even more unique has been the way in which the leader's words have become vehicles for elevating him, during his lifetime, to a place above that of the state itself or its institutional source of purity and power...

Trumps MAGA push and "America First" view presented a vision, rally of the national commune and became, to me, a case when the extreme right meets the extreme left around the bend.

The psychological and socioeconomic reverberations of the Great Leap are undoubtedly still being felt in China, and one might view the Cultural Revolution itself as a kind of "second Leap" in response to a Maoist need to vindicate the first one. Motivated in part by the urge to outdo Russian and Chinese ideological rivals, the Great Leap Forward was an extraordinarily bold plunge into the communist future. Yet in its reliance upon a psychistic conception of reality, it had a dreamlike premodern, even prehistorical aura.

We live at a time of ephemeral folk devils like antifa and border-crossing rapists. These illusive enemies resonated with me in the techniques of Maoist China in rallying concerted effort and thus herd behavior against unseen enemies.

Ghosts and demons must be slain again and again as fear for the fife of the revolution becomes associated with fear of the dead. To remain calm, to act with measure in the face of such a threat, can be perceived as an intolerable form of inactivation and stasis. The psychological stage is reached in which one cannot dispense with one's hatred. One cannot give up one's enemies.

Still trying to work out the meaning and impact of the Trump era I feel some resonance with this concept of "psychism" used here which I don't fully understand but I feel seems to echo a national-scale neuroticism that I can relate to.

The Cultural Revolution utilized such standard thought reform elements as criticism and self-criticism, group-mediated shame and guilt, and the by now classic Maoist subject matter. But pubhc demonstration was substituted for internal experience, activism for psychic work, violence for persuasion—and ultimately, one suspects, uneasy obedience for significant inner change.

We see now the full paradox of psychism: there is the insistent substitution of the psychic state for the machine; but the psychic work required for authentic inner change is in turn replaced by an image of the change having already taken place. So predominant does the vision of revolutionary immortality become that confusion exists not only between mind and thing but between mentation and external action.

Also, understanding the formative history of modern China should be important to us.

We do well to recognize our ignorance of China. That ignorance has been perpetuated by two decades of virtual absence of either diplomatic or journalistic contact between the United States and China—a situation which, in the not too distant future, will surely be regarded as a historical oddity of the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, even those Westerners and other non-Chinese who have been permitted extensive residence on the mainland have rarely had an opportunity to observe closely the actual states of mind of individual Chinese. Nor has the regime been interested in revealing much more than its own ideal image of what that state of mind should be.

It is nonetheless possible that we have become too accustomed to a stance of ignorance.

Having recently re-read The Analects, I was intrigued to see China's philosophical roots resurgent even during this era in explaining potentially reckless population growth.

Also contributing to a general disinclination toward population control are such divergent influences as the old Confucian stress upon large families and upon the absolute filial obligation to produce posterity...

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I don't know how much time is left before I go see God, or Marx". Mao Tse-tung to Edgar Snow, 1965. What if Mao was one of us? just a slob afraid of death, like one of us? Robert Jay Lifton, magical combiner of the personal and political (DEATH IN LIFE: HIROSHIMA) offers a startling suggestion in this slim book. Suppose Mao launched Chinese Cultural Revolution not to combat "revisionism" or prevent capitalist restoration in China but to rejuvenate himself, not politically or symbolically but literally. His apotheosis at the hands of the Red Guard youth would guarantee him "revolutionary immortality" by destroying his rivals inside the Communist Party, who personified death itself. Reading into the mind of men is always fraught with the danger of overreaching, which is why psychohistory, once so in fashion in Western circles (STALIN AS REVOLUTIONARY, GANDHI'S TRUTH, A PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER: T.E. LAWRENCE) has lost so much clout. If taken, not as revealed truth but more a series of provocative questions on what motivates political action, in this case involving millions and countless casualties, REVOLUTIONARY IMMORTALITY can stimulate new thought on totalitarianism and the wish of some despots to defy humanity itself.

[Don Heiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1976 Robert Lifton, Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale, published a second edition of his 1968 work entitled "Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution." The book chronicles the history and philosophical foundations of China's Cultural Revolution as well as the 1958 Great Leap Forward collapse. Lifton explains how Mao influenced the populism of his day, pitted the Chinese notions of a socialistic mandate from heaven against the individualism of the West (America), and promoted the philosophy of social-communistic transformation in the context of survival and death.

[Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting little survey of the Maoist form of revolutionary thought and hyper-motivated will, called 'psychism' by the author, leading up to and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the late 60's and early 70's in China.