The World: Mao’s Attempt to Remake Man

The thought, culture and customs that brought China to where we found her must disappear. The thought, customs and culture of proletarian China, which does not yet exist, must appear.

—Mao Tse-tung to French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, 1965

MERELY gaining effective control over China’s 800 million people —a population twice the size of the British Empire at its zenith—was an epic achievement. But Mao Tse-tung’s ambitions did not stop there. A few months after his conversation with Malraux, Mao launched the cataclysmic Cultural Revolution. It was the climax, perhaps the final one, in what M.I.T. Sinologist Lucien Pye describes as an effort to remake completely “the thoughts and sentiments of a people who have already been molded by the oldest civilization on earth.” Mao wanted to do nothing less than transform the traditional Chinese peasant—passive, materialistic, instinctively dependent on a ruling elite —into a new Maoist Man. He would be self-reliant but unswervingly loyal to the state, a faithful fanatic who would “neither seek fame or gain nor fear hardship or death, but toil body and soul for the people.” Only such a man, the Chairman believes, can prevent the Chinese revolution from sliding into Soviet-style “softness” and “revisionism.”

Beware Impetuosity. It was a fantastic undertaking. One measure of how far Mao is from success is the state of the 17 million-member Chinese Communist Party, which marked its 50th anniversary last week. Mao demolished the party during the Cultural Revolution in his effort to wipe out the “capitalist readers” and others who did not share his own mystical concept of the revolution. He hoped to replace them with freshly radicalized, totally Maoized youth who would be prepared to spend their lives in permanent struggle. But they have yet to appear.

In the 25 provincial-level administrations where the Communist organization has been restored (out of a total of 29), things are controlled by the same army pragmatists who stepped in to run the country when the Red Guards went haywire. One exception is Shanghai, which is still in the hands of the educated urban activists who dominated the party before the Cultural Revolution. Of the provincial bosses, 18 are old-line generals, five vintage bureaucrats, two veterans of service in the state security apparatus. Rural, poorly educated, untraveled and just plain old—their average age is 62—they are hardly the sort of men to heed Mao’s call to “take in the fresh.” In fact, a dominant theme of the 25,000-word anniversary editorial that appeared in the Peking press last week was a warning against the evils of “impetuosity.”

Speaking Bitterness. The condition of the party aside. Westerners who have been admitted to China since Peking launched its venture in Ping Pong diplomacy report that in other respects, Mao has made remarkable strides toward his goal. Their dispatches tell of orderly cities where threadbare but smiling millions echo Maoist slogans, of shopkeepers who leave their goods out all night without fear of their being stolen, of a military establishment whose $150-a-month generals uncomplainingly accepted a sizable pay cut in 1969. Maoist thought, some of the travelers reported, has done away with corruption, enabled the deaf to regain their hearing, and inspired peasants to complete herculean engineering projects with tools no more sophisticated than their bare hands. “No one who has not lived here before,” writes Canadian Diplomat Chester Ronning, “can fully appreciate the almost miraculous transformation.”

Maoism was always grounded more in a naive spiritualism than in psychological or even political theory. Though the Communist rule of China proceeded conventionally enough in the beginning, by the mid-1950s Mao decided that the great necessity was not to institutionalize socialism but to institutionalize revolution. To prod the country’s historically passive masses into a ceaseless struggle for the new world, writes University of Michigan Political Scientist Richard Solomon, Mao made virtues of hostility and aggression, the two human characteristics most deeply suppressed by the Confucian ethic. “The more one hates the old society,” Mao reasoned, “the more one will love the party and the new society.” Notes Solomon: “Mao believes the intense sentiment of aggression is the only force powerful enough to sustain the involvement of China’s peasants and workers in the tasks of social revolution.”

Party cadres still regularly instruct groups of peasants in the cathartic pleasures of “speaking bitterness” about the bad old pre-Mao days. Provincial newspapers and radio stations (about half of China’s towns and villages receive broadcasts) blare endless polemics against U.S. imperialists, Soviet revisionists and home-grown “class enemies.”

The Headmaster. Rituals are used to submerge individualism and stress loyalty to the state. “In no other political culture.” notes M.I.T.’s Pye, “has use of the theater been so widespread and intensive. Strip away the dance teams, the theatrical groups, the mass parades and the gymnastic formations, and one of the most distinctive features of the Chinese brand of Communism would disappear.” The main feature, perhaps, is the military-style organization of Chinese life. In one way or another, says Premier Chou Enlai, “we are all connected with the army.” Factories, communes and schools are organized into squads, companies and brigades. “All China is a great school of Mao Tse-tung Thought,” writes Journalist Edgar Snow, “and the army is its headmaster.” The Chinese press is full of human-interest vignettes showing how this emphasis on spiritual transformation works —and foreign observers do not doubt that occasionally it does work. There is, for example, the $25-a-month woman factory worker who turned down a prize for repeatedly overfulfilling her quota. “I am already being paid for serving the people,” she protested. “This in itself is not quite correct. To give me something extra would not only be superfluous, but would actually be a misuse of public funds.”

Nevertheless, reports TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan. “No matter how antlike the masses of China might seem at times, they are very human beings. Their culture provides some special characteristics, but they have the usual complement of emotions, drives, ambitions. Most of them want an orderly society, a good job, good food, shelter, a happy family and a little fun out of life. It is this value system that Mao has tried to replace with a taste for unrelenting struggle and turmoil.” Not even Mao pretends that he has-completely succeeded. During a visit to a commune north of Peking this spring, New York Timesman. Seymour Topping found “the same gentle civility of the people” that he had encountered in China two decades ago. “Old family shrines have been replaced by portraits of Chairman Mao,” he noted, “but parents are still obviously revered, and small children, as always, are left in the care of grandparents who live with the family.”

A Lot of Action. The Chairman’s New China, argues Michigan’s Solomon, is still bedeviled by “the age-old Confucian distinction between thought and action, theory and practice.” In Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture, a new study to be published by the University of California Press this fall, Solomon maintains that “China remains largely a traditional peasant society.” The Chinese peasant, who represents 85% of the population, is motivated primarily by the desire for a secure and prosperous life for himself and his family and only secondarily by feelings about China as a whole. Mao seems unable to entirely fend off the “sugarcoated bullets”—the term he uses to describe material pleasures and temptations—that threaten to push China down the Soviet road.

The regime has raised wages an average 17% since the Cultural Revolution, but now mining and railway workers are agitating for even more. Last month postal workers in Canton appealed, unsuccessfully, for higher pay. Money is not the only sugar-coated bullet either. Mao favors those good gray (or blue) unisex styles, but rare is the young Chinese girl who does not have a fancy embroidered-silk jacket or a flowered dress tucked away somewhere. Sex is supposed to follow marriage but, as a Swede who frequently visits China pointed out, “If you walk around in the parks in the summer, there is a lot of action.”

Favorable Winds. Provincial radio stations are forever scolding errant Chinese for a variety of venal sins. One recent broadcast complained that “class enemies” at a commune in Kwangtung province “have whipped up a sinister capitalist wind of ‘going it alone’ in sideline production.” Translation: some miscreants are spending too little time down on the commune and too much tending the few vegetables, pigs and chickens they are allowed to raise and sell for cash.

If Mao thus has not succeeded in changing human (or Chinese) nature, if Maoist Man remains a vision, he has nevertheless established an amazing degree of at least surface unanimity and loyalty. The ordinary citizen can hardly do less than try to get along with the state, which in a totalitarian system like China’s is the source of all rewards —and all punishment. After all, says one 30-year-old party-educated intellectual who recently fled to Hong Kong, the Chinese peasantry has always been like “the grass on the hilltop”—ready to blow with the prevailing political winds. The winds, it must be conceded, have been generally favorable. Despite such Mao-inspired aberrations as the Great Leap Forward of 1958-59 and the Cultural Revolution, the country is now relatively stable. Jobs are available, the yen is firm, and the kind of famines that used to wipe out 20 million people at a time are a fading memory.

A European diplomat who has served in Peking finds Mao’s China “a very self-contained country. It doesn’t owe anybody a cent. It has one of the most stable currencies. The people can’t possibly long for the time when they pulled rickshas for white people.”

Pleasing Prospect. It has not been lost on Defense Minister Lin Piao and the other moderates who run China these days that the Chinese economy moves ahead only when Maoism, with its disruptive emphasis on “struggle” and its relative indifference to rates of production, is throttled. Last year China harvested a record 240 million tons of grain; many more such crops will be needed if Peking is ever to feed its population (which is still growing at 2% a year) and industrialize as well. Thus the prospect is for an extended pause in the effort to remake the Chinese mind—a prospect that might please the masses, but not the impatient revolutionary of 77 who once protested almost fearfully that

The world rolls on,

Time presses.

Ten thousand years are too long!

Seize the day! Seize the hour!