China is the only major communist power that has never junked Joseph Stalin. The Soviets started the process when he died in 1953; Eastern Europe followed suit. But China has stuck with the Boss through thick and thin. Even today, China’s censors ban criticism of the long-dead Soviet dictator. And from time to time, a portrait of the mustachioed communist leader (with very Asian-looking eyes) glares out over official Chinese functions.
This position makes little sense if you’re of the opinion that the shadow of Stalin no longer darkens the path of the People’s Republic of China. In a few weeks China will try to make it through another peaceful political transition. Its mixed economy, its puckish digital world, the growing sophistication of its middle class — none of these suggests a nation living with the legacy of a Stalinist past.
(Simon & Schuster) - ’Mao: The Real Story’ by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine
But a new, important history seeks to explain China’s curious safeguarding of the Stalinist cult. The reason, argue Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, is that Stalin’s best student was none other than Mao Zedong.
For decades Mao’s reputation in the United States, cultivated by many American China watchers — from Edgar Snow to John K. Fairbank (and stoked by Party Central in Beijing) — was that of an independent-minded revolutionary who creatively adapted leftist theories to China. Some influential Americans made the case that Mao was merely an agrarian reformer. Others argued that at root he was a nationalist who clothed himself in Leninist garb for purely pragmatic reasons — to cadge money and materiel from his erstwhile comrades to the north. For years there was even a theory that if only the United States had been smart, it could have enticed Mao away from the Soviet bear hug.
But over the past two decades, documentary evidence from Soviet archives and some Chinese sources has dunked those cockamamie notions in what Levine has called the “acid bath of reality.”
“Mao was a faithful follower of Stalin who took pains to reassure the Boss of his loyalty and who dared to deviate from the Soviet model only after Stalin’s death,” Pantsov and Levine assert near the beginning of their 700-plus-page tome. Mao’s rise to the leadership of the party was backed by Stalin and funded by the Communist International. During China’s civil war against the Nationalists from 1945 to ’49, Mao solicited and often followed Stalin’s advice — even to the extent of concocting the veneer of independence from Soviet control that bamboozled a large percentage of the American diplomatic and military corps. “It is amazing how easily Mao, Zhou and the other [Communist Party] leaders were able to deceive . . . experienced American intelligence officers,” Pantsov and Levine write. “There was nothing they didn’t promise them.”
After the communist victory, Mao’s war against China’s peasantry, his murderous collectivization of China’s agricultural sector, and his elimination of capitalism and the capitalist class were cribbed from Stalin’s playbook. Finally, even Mao’s fateful decision to enter the Korean War, the authors write, appears “at least in part to have been a conscious demonstration of [China’s] leaders’ devotion to the Kremlin boss.”
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments