Quote of the Day (Chairman Mao, on Prior ‘Enemies of the People’)

“During the War of Liberation, the U.S. imperialists and their running dogs -- the bureaucrat-capitalists, the landlords and the Kuomintang reactionaries who represented these two classes -- were the enemies of the people, while the other classes, strata and social groups, which opposed them, all came within the category of the people. At the present stage, the period of building socialism, the classes, strata and social groups which favour, support and work for the cause of socialist construction all come within the category of the people, while the social forces and groups which resist the socialist revolution and are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies of the people.”— Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976), Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Speech at the Eleventh Session (Enlarged) of the Supreme State Conference, Feb. 27, 1957

You know, I thought I had heard that phrase “enemies of the people” somewhere, before it was used in a recent speech  in which Donald Trump lambasted the media. It turns out that Chairman Mao had employed it. He really hated the idea of contradiction and constant internal questioning of his policies. In this speech, given 60 years ago today, he set out how he would like terms of debate in his country to work.

“Nonantagonistic” contradictions, he explained, could be dealt with by nonviolent persuasion,  but “antagonistic” contradictions—well, The Party (i.e., Mao himself) would have to be the judge of that.

Except for that little bit about “U.S. imperialists and their running dogs,” I don’t think there’s an awful lot that the Trump administration would disagree with about this approach by Chairman Mao. After all, the new President has spoken of Vladimir Putin being a “strong” leader, and by that yardstick, Chairman Mao may have been even stronger—not to mention Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

Oh, by the way: Did I mention that millions of people died in China under the eyes of this “strong” leader? Just something to think about the next time you hear a President refer to “enemies of the people.”

This Day in Chinese History (Death of Chairman Mao, Propagandist-Tyrant)

Sept. 9, 1976—Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, who cultivated a cult of personality that led many to overlook the dismal economic record and millions of deaths under his leadership, died at 82.

The physical decline of Chairman Mao was, in its way, of a piece with his crimes: the evidence scattered, but lying about in such profusion that an unbiased, reasonably attentive person could have surmised that something was amiss. He had not been seen in public since 1971, and the consensus of China watchers was that he had suffered from a neuromuscular disease, probably Parkinson’s.

In fact, his deterioration had been even more rapid than supposed. China’s leader had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 1974. His condition, dire enough with that diagnosis alone, was even worse because of a longtime addiction to cigarettes that left him vulnerable to bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema and congestive heart failure, his personal physician Li Zhi-Sui finally revealed in The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994).

Similarly, the strong-arm tactics of the Chinese leader were not impossible to divine, as in one of the principal maxims in Quotations from Chairman Mao (aka The Little Red Book): “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But many in the West were so excited at the wholesale transformation of the world’s most populous country after the 1949 revolution that they paid little attention to the strong signals of human-rights abuses.

In 1955, to quell any notion of revolt against a regime still only in existence a half-dozen years, Communist China formed what were known euphemistically as “re-education through labor” camps meant to house “counter-revolutionaries.” In time, they would house not only dissidents but also petty criminals, drug addicts and prostitutes—about 400,000 people in more than 300 facilities by 2007, according to an NPR report. Only two years ago did the current post-Mao overlords close what had become symbols of detention without trial and other legal abuses.

Even that did not begin to describe the extent of human-rights violations under the Maoist regime. Before he even seized power from Chiang Kai-shek, Mao had indicated his general indifference to human life on his so-called “Long March,” the 368-day, 7,000-mile retreat of Chinese Communist forces away from Chiang in 1935. As I mentioned in a prior post, less than 5% of his original 86,000 men survived the trip. If he remained unmoved at the thought of losing so many supporters, is it any wonder that he would be less so by opponents?

The estimates may vary concerning those who lost their lives because of Mao’s rule, but the arithmetic is unswervingly grim. Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikotter, when allowed access to government archives, estimated that at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in the laughably named “Great Leap Forward,” the nation’s attempt to catch up with Western economies from 1958 to 1962 through collectivization. In the “Cultural Revolution” of 1966, another two million may have lost their lives at the hands of students mobilized into Red Guard units who attempted to purge China of institutions and individuals regarded as insufficiently revolutionary.

The new understanding about Mao may have been best expressed by Australian man of letters Clive James, who has written:

“In China Mao Zedong went to war against the evil landlords and the imperialist spies. Neither group actually existed. The death toll of his countrymen exceeded the totals achieved by Hitler and Stalin combined. They all died for nothing. Dying innocent, they have their eternal dignity, but there are no profundities to be plumbed in their collective extinction except the adamantine fact of human evil.”

Quote of the Day (Bob Haldeman, Behind the Scenes With Nixon in China)

“One building issue is the problem of [Secretary of State William] Rogers. He called me today to say that he was concerned about the news reports as they were building at home, which pointed out that he wasn’t involved in any of the important meetings, and was being kept out of things. He was obviously uptight about being left out of the meeting with Mao [Tse-Tung] on Monday, and made the point that if there’s any other meeting with Mao, he wants to be sure that he is included. He also was carping about the fact that [National Security Adviser] Henry [Kissinger] had two NSC people in the Chou meeting with the P [President Nixon], while there were no State Department people there. Later today, Henry charged in, furious, because he’d learned that Rogers had raised, with the foreign minister, the question of their participating in writing the communique, and the Foreign Minister had said no, that Prime Minister Chou [En-lai] had assigned it to Dr. Kissinger, and Mr. Chiao. So it put Rogers in a rather embarrassing position. This is a problem that’s going to continue, I think, on a similar basis.”—H.R. Haldeman, diary entry for February 23, 1972, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1993)

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain James T. Kirk is given the unenviable task of escorting an ambassador from his implacable enemies, the Klingons, on a peace mission to the Federation. When he asks why he’s been chosen for this unlikely assignment, Mr. Spock tells his friend, the space-age cold warrior, of “an old Vulcan proverb”: “It took Nixon to go to China.”

Forty years after the 37^th President’s extraordinary week in Red China, “Nixon going to China” is shorthand for a rapprochement with a foe that only the hardest of hard-liners can conclude. After that event, it seemed, anything was possible.

The images of Richard Nixon with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the very symbol of world Communism on the march, gave a tremendous boost to the President in the year of his re-election effort. (Four months later, the Watergate burglary occurred, giving a double meaning to the Chinese astrological cycle designation for 1972: “The Year of the Rat.”) Over the long term, the move was part of a four-corner diplomatic maneuver in which Nixon sought to move China to nudge North Vietnam toward a more favorable negotiating position at the Paris peace talks, and to use China in turn to prod the Soviet Union toward better relations (including the first SALT treaty).

But, as the passage above from the diaries of Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman indicates, the week also brought to the fore a trend occurring within the U.S. delegation: the growing chasm between the State Department and the upstart agency, the National Security Council. Assuredly, prior Secretaries of State had not always seen eye to eye with the men (and they were all men back then) heading this new agency created by National Security Act of 1947. But no other NSC head before Henry Kissinger had sought so relentlessly to cut the President’s senior Cabinet member out of the all-important information loop.

Kissinger found a willing ear in Nixon, who had views of foreign policy strong enough that he wouldn’t have minded acting as his own Secretary of State. Since he couldn’t do that, Nixon appointed to the office a longtime friend who happened to be inexperienced in foreign policy: William Rogers. The latter has often been characterized by historians as weak, but the Haldeman diary entry here demonstrates that even Rogers had his limits: he was not going to be humiliated in front of the media during the most important foreign-policy initiative by the President.

Nixon didn’t think much of several units within the State Department. The Latin American division, he felt, was a “disaster area,” and, his investigation as a congressman of Alger Hiss could not have inspired confidence. Above all, he noted, in a top-secret discussion with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai (pictured here with the President), the State Department had been given only the most sanitized version of the 500-page summary of Kissinger’s secret July 1971 talks with Chinese officials because the department “leaked like a sieve.“

Not long after the election, Haldeman was deputized with urging Rogers to hand in his resignation. The news rankled the Secretary of State, who 20 years before had helped Nixon survive his “slush fund” scandal by urging him to address the nation on TV in the “Checkers” speech. But Nixon and Haldeman ended by doing Rogers a favor: he wasn’t around to be consumed by the growing Watergate scandal that burst on the administration the following spring.

State Department-NSC tensions hardly ended with Rogers’ resignation (and Kissinger’s assumption of both posts). Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski had worked together before they joined the Carter Administration, but they quickly fell out over policy differences. The pattern repeated itself in the Reagan Administration, with first Alexander Haig bickering with Richard Allen, then George Schultz watching angrily as Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter did the President’s bidding in fomenting the Iran-contra mess. It is very likely that some President in the not-so-distant future will create another mess involving two governmental units out to defend their foreign-policy prerogatives.

Flashback, October 1935: Mao’s “Long March” Ends

Just one year after 86,000 Chinese Communist troops began to retreat from government forces, only 4,000 survivors completed the “Long March” that entered the nation’s realm of legend and cemented the position of the ragtag group’s leader and incipient dictator, Mao Tse-tung.

Let’s do a little calculation from the above figures: Less than 5% of the original force Mao had at the start of his desperate retreat from Chiang Kai-shek made it to the end in Shensi Province in northwest China on October 20, 1935.

But here are other figures that make this statistic understandable, and the eventual ascension of the Communists to power inevitable:

* 700,000 – the amount of troops that Chiang had at hand in 1934 when he decided, after four unsuccessful attempts, to destroy Communists in China once and for all.

* 368—the number of days it took Mao and his troops to make the journey.

* 6,000—the number of miles on this trip—nearly twice the distance across the continental U.S.

In other words, you had to be pretty tough for this journey. It helped if you were ruthless, as Mao turned out to be over the last 40 years of his life.

How ruthless? I don’t think that the number of deaths blamed on Mao by biographers Jung Chan g and Jon Halliday in Mao: The Unknown Story—70 million, more than any other 20th-century leader—really conveys this, even if you’re inclined to accept this awful statistic.

These facts might help make a little more sense of all this:

* A bitter power struggle broke out in China after Mao’s death because while he was alive, he preferred to have any potential replacements imprisoned, murdered or exiled.

* Mao refused to alter the death sentence of a doctor falsely accused of disloyalty, even though the physician had saved his life. He could get plenty of others without any bother, he reasoned.

* One of his favorite maxims in his infamous “Little Red Book” was “Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself”—a catch-all term for his all-encompassing influence, used to cover virtually any major bloodbath in his reign, including during the "Cultural Revolution" (a misnomer if there ever was one, along with "People's Republic of China").

For the rest of his life, Mao undoubtedly must have felt that if the Long March didn’t kill him, nothing could. Weapons and supplies weren’t conveyed by motorized vehicles, but on men’s backs and horse-drawn carts, frequently done at night so the Nationalists couldn’t see them, across 24 rivers, 18 mountain ranges and who knows how many swamps. (The crossing at the Tatu River was particularly perilous, as the troops came under nearly continuous fire from Chiang's forces.)

Every day Mao looked around, he saw his line of marchers shorten, falling victim to starvation, aerial bombardment, and constant skirmishing. With his own ideological cadre narrowing, he and his forces were forced to ally themselves with minority groups—and in one infamous instance, drank chicken blood to impress them.

Under normal circumstances, losing 95% of your men is enough to make you an ex-military leader. Before the Long March began, that thought had crossed the mind of Chinese’s Communist Party committee, which actually voted to replace Mao. But the new leaders had proven just as bad as Mao on the battlefield, so he’d been reinstated.

Chiang had been able to virtually annihilate Mao’s forces, but Mao himself had escaped. In time, Chiang would have reason to rue this failure on his part.