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An Anthology of His Writings
LC ID 62-14315
319 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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About the author
Mao Zedong
712 books585 followersMao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung, and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, statesman and leader of the Chinese Revolution. He was the architect and founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949, and held control over the nation until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism–Leninism, along with his military strategies and brand of policies, are collectively known as Maoism.
Mao rose to power by commanding the Long March, forming a Second United Front with Kuomintang (KMT) during the Second Sino-Japanese War to repel a Japanese invasion, and later led the Communist Party of China (CPC) to victory against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's KMT in the Chinese Civil War. Mao established political and military control over most of the territory formerly contained within the Chinese Empire and launched a campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries. He sent the Communist People's Liberation Army into Xinjiang and Tibet but was unable to oust the remnants of the Nationalist Party from Taiwan. He enacted sweeping land reform by using violence and terror to overthrow landlords before seizing their large estates and dividing the land into people's communes. The Communist Party's final victory came after decades of turmoil in China, which included the Great Depression, a brutal invasion by Japan and a protracted civil war. Mao's Communist Party ultimately achieved a measure of stability in China, though Mao's efforts to close China to trade and market commerce, and eradicate traditional Chinese culture, have been largely rejected by his successors.
Mao styled himself "The Great Helmsman" and supporters continue to contend that he was responsible for some positive changes which came to China during his three decade rule. These included doubling the school population, providing universal housing, abolishing unemployment and inflation, increasing health care access, and dramatically raising life expectancy. A cult of personality grew up around Mao, and community dissent was not permitted. His Communist Party still rules in mainland China, retains control of media and education there and officially celebrates his legacy. As a result, Mao is still officially held in high regard by many Chinese as a great political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation. Maoists promote his role as a theorist, statesman, poet, and visionary, and anti-revisionists continue to defend most of his policies.
Mao rose to power by commanding the Long March, forming a Second United Front with Kuomintang (KMT) during the Second Sino-Japanese War to repel a Japanese invasion, and later led the Communist Party of China (CPC) to victory against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's KMT in the Chinese Civil War. Mao established political and military control over most of the territory formerly contained within the Chinese Empire and launched a campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries. He sent the Communist People's Liberation Army into Xinjiang and Tibet but was unable to oust the remnants of the Nationalist Party from Taiwan. He enacted sweeping land reform by using violence and terror to overthrow landlords before seizing their large estates and dividing the land into people's communes. The Communist Party's final victory came after decades of turmoil in China, which included the Great Depression, a brutal invasion by Japan and a protracted civil war. Mao's Communist Party ultimately achieved a measure of stability in China, though Mao's efforts to close China to trade and market commerce, and eradicate traditional Chinese culture, have been largely rejected by his successors.
Mao styled himself "The Great Helmsman" and supporters continue to contend that he was responsible for some positive changes which came to China during his three decade rule. These included doubling the school population, providing universal housing, abolishing unemployment and inflation, increasing health care access, and dramatically raising life expectancy. A cult of personality grew up around Mao, and community dissent was not permitted. His Communist Party still rules in mainland China, retains control of media and education there and officially celebrates his legacy. As a result, Mao is still officially held in high regard by many Chinese as a great political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation. Maoists promote his role as a theorist, statesman, poet, and visionary, and anti-revisionists continue to defend most of his policies.
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December 30, 2018
It is never a good sign when the Introduction is the best part of the book. Perhaps some of Mao's other writing has more spice or interest--I'm certainly sad this anthology neglected to include any of his classical poetry, besides a single piece quoted in the Introduction--but what is here lacks both.
First, the good: the Introduction. It covers Mao's life and work up to the point of this book's release, in 1962, though it skims over the recent years, barely mentioning the Great Leap Forward and completely leaving out the Great Chinese Famine in 1959-1961. The editor, Anne Fremantle, definitely has a positive view of Mao, though her introduction does not descend to pure propaganda. The major portion of it is mainly derived from an earlier work, the famous Red Star Over China (1937, with later revisions) by Edgar Snow, the result of the author's travels with the Red Army and interviews with its major figures, including Mao. Fremantle made use of other sources too--such as a biographical work written by Emi Siao (Xiao San), a poet and childhood friend of Mao's--but Snow is, self-confessedly, the main source. That means that much of the account is really Mao's view of his early life, so he will, of course, paint himself in a good light. Despite the obvious bias, the introduction is still an interesting, and often quite detailed, account of Mao's life and rise to power, as well as the Chinese Civil War.
After the interesting introduction, though, the book immediately leaps into Mao's dry, excessively-detailed strategic works, often meticulous analyses of battles and conflicts. True, the very first writing--"Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society"--is not so, but it is still dry, mainly describing how the Chinese society of the 1920s fit into the Marxist paradigm of class struggle. A few pieces in this first section--"Political and Strategic Writings"--delve a little more into Marxist thought, but, at least to me, most of that felt cliche. The one interesting point is one I also found in the writings of Lenin, that, at least for some countries, they cannot jump straight to full-blown communism; instead, they must pass through a capitalist stage first, the "bourgeois-democratic revolution." A simple view of Marxism would lead to the idea that all societies just flip a switch--via proletarian revolution--to become communist. Yet more-detailed Marxism will posit the necessity of a gradual change, looking at the concrete, relative situation of each society. Thus Mao says that "It is only through democracy that socialism can be attained--this is the fundamental truth of Marxism...It would be a sheer illusion to try to build socialism on the ruins of the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal order, without a united new-democratic state, without the development of a new-democratic state, without the development of private capitalist and co-operative enterprises...in short, without pushing to the end the democratic revolution which is bourgeois in character," though, of course, "led by the Communist Party" ("On Coalition Government", 159).
After slogging through almost 150 pages of detailed conflict analysis, with a few bits of fairly basic Marxist political analysis, the reader finally reaches the section that should be more interesting: "Philosophical Writings." Why this section was not put first, I don't know: perhaps the idea is to save the best for last. Certainly, there is more interest in this section, but not much, at least for me. When the cover lauded Mao as "the most influential Marxist philosopher alive," I hoped for more. Most of the long essays in this section are easy to summarize. "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature" basically says: we need specifically Marxist art; it should have good artistic quality as well, but artistic quality does not excuse a non-Marxist work; this art should be written for the proletariat. "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" basically says "each conflict has its own resolution," and then it discusses a number of conflicts in Communist China, with detail that did not attract me. "On Practice" is supposed to describe Marxist epistemology, but it seems little different from most epistemology, at least since the Enlightenment: our knowledge starts with sense perception ("social practice"), then, using reason, we abstract concepts from our repeated perceptions, and, finally, we mold our actions based on those concepts ("revolutionary practice"). I don't see how Mao can possibly say that "Such a dialectical-materialist theory of the process of development of knowledge, based on practice and proceeding from the superficial to the deep, was not put forward by anyone before the rise of Marxism" (203). He claims it rejects the "'rationalist' school which admits only the validity of reason, but not the validity of experience," and that is so, but Marxism is not unique in that (207). Mao seems to be expressing a basic epistemology, but he claims it is uniquely Marxist; certainly the focus of using concepts for revolutionary action is unique, but not the rest.
The only essay I found remotely interesting was "On Contradiction," written as a companion piece to "On Practice." This analyzes the "metaphysics," if you will, of Marxism, that, at the center of everything, there is not an unchanging essence, but an endless conflict, or contradiction. This is why it is called dialectical materialism, influenced by Hegel's theory of dialectics. However, there is a fundamental confusion here. In Hegel's dialectics, the two contradictories--the thesis and the antithesis--are resolved in a higher synthesis; from this synthesis, new antinomies, or contradictions, arise, but that synthesis exists all the same, elevated above the original conflict. What I can't seem to understand is the role of the synthesis in Mao's thought. On the one hand, he seems to describe processes as having an end: "The basic contradiction in the process of development of a thing...will not disappear until the process is completed," "All processes have a beginning and an end" (225, 237). On the other hand, he says that "the struggle within the contradiction is ceaseless," and that "the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and relative, while the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute" (240, 237). He speaks of how there is always a "principal aspect" in a contradiction, that is, the side that is dominant, and that this can change, with the other aspect becoming dominant, but it sounds like a constant cycle; it is the new (the newly-dominant) aspect that supersedes the old, changing the quality of the thing, or process, into a new quality, reflecting the new aspect. That seems like progress, a sort of "synthesis," though more antagonistic: in Hegel's view (if I recall correctly), the synthesis partakes of elements of both the thesis and antithesis, while, in Marxist dialectics, it seems that one side of the antinomy merely overcomes the other. Yet shouldn't such constant domination and transformation eventually lead to rest, an end of contradictions? Isn't that the goal of communism: the perfectly content society? Isn't the goal to advance towards "the higher stage of abolishing all state systems" (236)? But once that goal is reached, shouldn't contradiction cease? This is the key point that troubles me in Mao's philosophy: the basis of all things is contradiction, but that contradiction aims for a final goal, free of contradictions; what would be the basis of things in that perfect Communist society? Will there never actually be peace, but endless contradiction and conflict? Or will all philosophy cease to apply? It is the conflict between the process and the goal that seems unresolved, at least in Mao's writings presented here. Still, even with this frustration, I still found the essay "On Contradiction" to be an interesting read.
In the end, I'm sure part of the reason I disliked this book is because I reject Marxist philosophy, though I honestly try to understand it--hence my frustration at "On Contradiction." Someone more agreeable to Marxism might find the "Philosophical Writings" section more interesting, or at least the pair of essays ("On Practice" and "On Contradiction"). Someone interested in the detailed military or political history of the rise of Communist China could find plenty of material here, especially in the strategic writings and--regarding the issues of Communist Chinese society--"On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People." I think the Introduction is worth reading for a historical summary supportive of Mao, and I did find "On Contradiction" somewhat fascinating. However, I think the total work is really only applicable to certain groups: detailed historians of the Chinese Revolutionary Wars, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the rise of Communist China, as well as Marxists who are interesting in Mao's take on the philosophy. To a general reader, though, I cannot recommend this work; for them, perhaps the best works of Mao would be his poems, such as "The Snow," quoted in the Introduction (xliii):
"All the scenery in the north
Is enclosed in a thousand li of ice,
And ten thousand li of whirling snow.
Behold both sides of the Great Wall--
There is only a vast confusion left..."
First, the good: the Introduction. It covers Mao's life and work up to the point of this book's release, in 1962, though it skims over the recent years, barely mentioning the Great Leap Forward and completely leaving out the Great Chinese Famine in 1959-1961. The editor, Anne Fremantle, definitely has a positive view of Mao, though her introduction does not descend to pure propaganda. The major portion of it is mainly derived from an earlier work, the famous Red Star Over China (1937, with later revisions) by Edgar Snow, the result of the author's travels with the Red Army and interviews with its major figures, including Mao. Fremantle made use of other sources too--such as a biographical work written by Emi Siao (Xiao San), a poet and childhood friend of Mao's--but Snow is, self-confessedly, the main source. That means that much of the account is really Mao's view of his early life, so he will, of course, paint himself in a good light. Despite the obvious bias, the introduction is still an interesting, and often quite detailed, account of Mao's life and rise to power, as well as the Chinese Civil War.
After the interesting introduction, though, the book immediately leaps into Mao's dry, excessively-detailed strategic works, often meticulous analyses of battles and conflicts. True, the very first writing--"Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society"--is not so, but it is still dry, mainly describing how the Chinese society of the 1920s fit into the Marxist paradigm of class struggle. A few pieces in this first section--"Political and Strategic Writings"--delve a little more into Marxist thought, but, at least to me, most of that felt cliche. The one interesting point is one I also found in the writings of Lenin, that, at least for some countries, they cannot jump straight to full-blown communism; instead, they must pass through a capitalist stage first, the "bourgeois-democratic revolution." A simple view of Marxism would lead to the idea that all societies just flip a switch--via proletarian revolution--to become communist. Yet more-detailed Marxism will posit the necessity of a gradual change, looking at the concrete, relative situation of each society. Thus Mao says that "It is only through democracy that socialism can be attained--this is the fundamental truth of Marxism...It would be a sheer illusion to try to build socialism on the ruins of the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal order, without a united new-democratic state, without the development of a new-democratic state, without the development of private capitalist and co-operative enterprises...in short, without pushing to the end the democratic revolution which is bourgeois in character," though, of course, "led by the Communist Party" ("On Coalition Government", 159).
After slogging through almost 150 pages of detailed conflict analysis, with a few bits of fairly basic Marxist political analysis, the reader finally reaches the section that should be more interesting: "Philosophical Writings." Why this section was not put first, I don't know: perhaps the idea is to save the best for last. Certainly, there is more interest in this section, but not much, at least for me. When the cover lauded Mao as "the most influential Marxist philosopher alive," I hoped for more. Most of the long essays in this section are easy to summarize. "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature" basically says: we need specifically Marxist art; it should have good artistic quality as well, but artistic quality does not excuse a non-Marxist work; this art should be written for the proletariat. "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" basically says "each conflict has its own resolution," and then it discusses a number of conflicts in Communist China, with detail that did not attract me. "On Practice" is supposed to describe Marxist epistemology, but it seems little different from most epistemology, at least since the Enlightenment: our knowledge starts with sense perception ("social practice"), then, using reason, we abstract concepts from our repeated perceptions, and, finally, we mold our actions based on those concepts ("revolutionary practice"). I don't see how Mao can possibly say that "Such a dialectical-materialist theory of the process of development of knowledge, based on practice and proceeding from the superficial to the deep, was not put forward by anyone before the rise of Marxism" (203). He claims it rejects the "'rationalist' school which admits only the validity of reason, but not the validity of experience," and that is so, but Marxism is not unique in that (207). Mao seems to be expressing a basic epistemology, but he claims it is uniquely Marxist; certainly the focus of using concepts for revolutionary action is unique, but not the rest.
The only essay I found remotely interesting was "On Contradiction," written as a companion piece to "On Practice." This analyzes the "metaphysics," if you will, of Marxism, that, at the center of everything, there is not an unchanging essence, but an endless conflict, or contradiction. This is why it is called dialectical materialism, influenced by Hegel's theory of dialectics. However, there is a fundamental confusion here. In Hegel's dialectics, the two contradictories--the thesis and the antithesis--are resolved in a higher synthesis; from this synthesis, new antinomies, or contradictions, arise, but that synthesis exists all the same, elevated above the original conflict. What I can't seem to understand is the role of the synthesis in Mao's thought. On the one hand, he seems to describe processes as having an end: "The basic contradiction in the process of development of a thing...will not disappear until the process is completed," "All processes have a beginning and an end" (225, 237). On the other hand, he says that "the struggle within the contradiction is ceaseless," and that "the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and relative, while the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute" (240, 237). He speaks of how there is always a "principal aspect" in a contradiction, that is, the side that is dominant, and that this can change, with the other aspect becoming dominant, but it sounds like a constant cycle; it is the new (the newly-dominant) aspect that supersedes the old, changing the quality of the thing, or process, into a new quality, reflecting the new aspect. That seems like progress, a sort of "synthesis," though more antagonistic: in Hegel's view (if I recall correctly), the synthesis partakes of elements of both the thesis and antithesis, while, in Marxist dialectics, it seems that one side of the antinomy merely overcomes the other. Yet shouldn't such constant domination and transformation eventually lead to rest, an end of contradictions? Isn't that the goal of communism: the perfectly content society? Isn't the goal to advance towards "the higher stage of abolishing all state systems" (236)? But once that goal is reached, shouldn't contradiction cease? This is the key point that troubles me in Mao's philosophy: the basis of all things is contradiction, but that contradiction aims for a final goal, free of contradictions; what would be the basis of things in that perfect Communist society? Will there never actually be peace, but endless contradiction and conflict? Or will all philosophy cease to apply? It is the conflict between the process and the goal that seems unresolved, at least in Mao's writings presented here. Still, even with this frustration, I still found the essay "On Contradiction" to be an interesting read.
In the end, I'm sure part of the reason I disliked this book is because I reject Marxist philosophy, though I honestly try to understand it--hence my frustration at "On Contradiction." Someone more agreeable to Marxism might find the "Philosophical Writings" section more interesting, or at least the pair of essays ("On Practice" and "On Contradiction"). Someone interested in the detailed military or political history of the rise of Communist China could find plenty of material here, especially in the strategic writings and--regarding the issues of Communist Chinese society--"On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People." I think the Introduction is worth reading for a historical summary supportive of Mao, and I did find "On Contradiction" somewhat fascinating. However, I think the total work is really only applicable to certain groups: detailed historians of the Chinese Revolutionary Wars, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the rise of Communist China, as well as Marxists who are interesting in Mao's take on the philosophy. To a general reader, though, I cannot recommend this work; for them, perhaps the best works of Mao would be his poems, such as "The Snow," quoted in the Introduction (xliii):
"All the scenery in the north
Is enclosed in a thousand li of ice,
And ten thousand li of whirling snow.
Behold both sides of the Great Wall--
There is only a vast confusion left..."
August 20, 2011
Although informative, I was quite frankly bored. I normally find history exciting but this was dry, repetitive. I wanted to hit the snooze button a time or two. Mao was a character and while I learned a bit about his tyranny and political descriptions...I was not impressed. :/
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews