History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought 0520029070, 9780520029071

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at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Institute of International Studies (University of California, Berkeley), and the State of California, is the unifying organization for social science and interdisciplinary research on contemporary China. PUBLICATIONS

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (1966) Potter, J. M. Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant: Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village (1968) Schiffrin, Harold Z. Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese (1968) Schurmann, Franz. Ideology and Organization in Communist Edition, 1968)

Revolution

China (Second

Van Ness, Peter. Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy: Peking's Support for Wars of National Liberation (1970) Larkin, Bruce D. China and Africa, 1949-1970: The Foreign Policy of the People's Republic of China (1971) Schneider, Laurence A. KM Chieh-kang and China's New History: and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (1971)

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Moseley, George. The Consolidation of the South China Frontier (1972) Rice, Edward E. Mao's Way (1972)

History and Will

This volume is sponsored by the CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

University of California, Berkeley

HISTORY and WILL Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought

FREDERIC WAKEMAN, JR.

University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1973, by The Regents of the University of California Paperback Edition 1975 ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 2 9 0 7 - 0 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-170722 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Jean Peters

This book is dedicated to the three men whose influence shaped it most: my father, Frederic Wakeman my teacher, Joseph R. Levenson my friend, Irwin Scheiner

Acknowledgments This book was written while I received sabbatical and research funds from the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California, Berkeley and from the American Council of Learned Societies. My research assistants, Jonathan Grant and Edward Hammond, provided me with both materials and an opportunity to discuss some of the issues dealt with here. Carolyn Grant, who edited the original versions of the manuscript with such a keen eye, comes close to deserving a collaborator's place on the title page, because so many of her thematic suggestions are reflected in the contents. My colleague, John Starr, generously offered invaluable documentary help with many of the Mao papers. I am also very grateful to those members of the Chinese history colloquia at Stanford University, of the Institute of International Affairs at the University of Washington, and of the Research Scholars Group at Berkeley who read and discussed portions of the manuscript. Finally, I owe particular thanks to those fellow scholars who so helpfully scrutinized the first draft: Ch'en Shih-hsiang, Jack Dull, David Keightley, Angus McDonald, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Moss Roberts, Irwin Scheiner, Tu Wei-ming, Jonathan Unger, Frederic Wakeman, Sr., and Judith Whitbeck.

Preface Like most foreign students of China, I was astounded when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966. As reports filtered through to outsiders, as Asahi Shimbun correspondents began reprinting big-character posters, as trussed corpses floated down the Pearl River to Hong Kong, it seemed as though the People's Republic had completely lost its political bearings. Partly a failure of communication, partly a failure of vision, our perceptions were as confused as the events we dimly witnessed. Then, as consistency slowly emerged, it became clear that Mao Tse-tung had both discovered and declared class war within his own Communist Party. Go to Peking University and face the Cultural Revolution in person, he ordered his party secretaries in July of 1966. "Students will surround you. Let them. You will be surrounded as soon as you begin to talk to them. More than a hundred people have been beaten up at the school of broadcasting. This is the beauty of our age. . . . " * Some of the very same cadres who had marched alongside Mao from Kiangsi to Yenan in 1935 were now told that adolescents, born long after the Civil War, made more effective revolutionaries. "Trouble making," Mao declared, "is revolution." t To me at least, such statements were a staggering revelation. How * Mao Tse-tung, 'Talk at the Reception of Secretaries of Big Regions and Members of the Central Cultural Revolution Team—Notes for Circulation" (July 22, 1966), in Jerome Ch'en, ed., Mao Papers: Anthology and Bibliography (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 26-30. t Mao Tse-tung, 'Talk at the Reception of Secretaries, Second Version" (July 21, 1966), in Ch'en, Mao Papers, p. 33.

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could any Marxist-Leninist so laconically abandon his own party, vanguard of the proletariat and bearer of the socialist consciousness? Where did Mao himself derive the certainty that his conception of ongoing revolution was correct? Perhaps because I knew so little then of the sources of Mao's thought, I found it very difficult to reconcile this visionary with the pragmatic revolutionary of the 1930s. To be sure, other scholars like Stuart R. Schram, Jerome Ch'en, Maurice Meisner, and Benjamin I. Schwartz had already carefully analyzed the "Prometheanism," "voluntarism," "populism," and "Jacobinism" of Mao Tse-tung's thought. But all those "isms," however admirable the research and thought that detailed them, left me dissatisfied. Stuart Schram, for instance, had shown precisely how Mao's view of Communist society ("something which does not necessarily represent the ultimate destiny of humanity") was the product of a certain "dialectical bent" in his thought. Yet how was the bent determined in the first place? Like Schram, I felt that, "The quest for the antecedents of the dialectical bent of Mao's thought is a fascinating —though perhaps insoluble—problem in intellectual history." * True, it was possible to create a consistent political portrayal of Mao Tse-tung in strategic revolutionary terms alone. But such a depiction remained hazy when it came to explaining the buttresses of Mao's theory of permanent revolution. Was he an existentialist, stepping boldly off into the void? Was he a Marxist romantic, resolving theory with a mystique of praxis? Or was he even—as some have gingerly suggested —a Taoist dialectician, replacing yin and yang with antagonistic contradictions? I found it impossible to answer these questions directly. One could, of course, refuse to take Maoism seriously. Why—just because Mao Tse-tung led the Communist Party to victory in 1949—ascribe theoretical wisdom to a revolutionary pragmatist? Why confuse successful strategy with intellectual subtlety by believing that his famous essays, "On Practice" and "On Contradiction," were anything more than an emulation of Stalin's theoretical pretensions? Why complicate the simple by transforming Mao Tse-tung into a Marxist philosopher? After all, Mao was first and foremost a revolutionary who had discovered a mission even before he possessed the socialist vocabulary for it. But, gladly conceding that "the battlefield was [Mao's] school," I also assumed that conscious revolutionary action is informed by theory. That * Stuart R. Schram, "Mao Tse-tung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution," China Quarterly, 46:225-226.

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ideology, in turn, is supported by a scaffold of assumptions of which the actor himself is often barely aware. The genesis of those assumptions can sometimes be directly traced, especially when the person in question is intellectually introspective. Mao was usually not. Consequently, I found myself facing a problem in modern Chinese intellectual history which transcended Mao Tse-tung. Because his most significant problematic was the contradiction between objective history and subjective will, I would have to fathom the fundamental assumptions about man and nature which he shared with many of his contemporaries. These assumptions—which constituted the uniqueness of the Marxist revolution in China—remained inarticulable unless they were placed in historical perspective. Nevertheless, simple contrast was fatuous. Sweeping generalizations ("Eastern man accommodates himself to nature; western man strives against it") attributed timeless, and therefore historically meaningless, characteristics to particular cultures. They also relied on universal qualities when there existed no concretely universal language to bridge the gap between those cultures. To be sure, any specific national language was, in Antonio Gramsci's words, a "continuous process of metaphors." As he once wrote, "Language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of the fossils of life and civilization." * Therefore, the one language which Mao knew carried both the immanent ideas of his Chinese past and the neologisms of his Marxist present. If we read that language from both perspectives, we can begin to understand some of Maoism's basic assumptions. We can also better comprehend the way in which foreign and native ideas melded in the thought of twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries, because Marxism was not only historically important for them; it is heuristically instructive for us. By its own pretension a universal truth, Marxism takes national forms, so that it combines universality and particularity in such a way as to permit the kind of analysis which many other "languages" deny. In fact, as "Maoism," Marxism became a hybrid language of its own in modern China. In order to expose that hybrid quality, the first section of this book consists of montages. A few concern Mao alone: his fear of revolutionary retrogression, his personal cult, his attitudes toward intellectuals, and so forth. But most of the synchronic montages pose Mao and his policies alongside other political examples, often by way of disanalogy. Some of these are historically concrete, like the Ch'ing village covenant * Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957), pp. 110-111.

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system which may even have inspired similar institutions in modern China. Others are conceptually abstract, like Rousseau's Great Legislator, or even metaphorical, like Gramsci's myth-prince. The montages are therefore imagistic: first, by looking through the guises of Mao as though he were a transparent overlay to the theory of government as such; and second, by evaluating Mao's own political symbols which frequently correspond to the popular Chinese imagery of revolution. For, Mao is as much myth-maker as politician, expressing through allegory and symbol the yearnings of his people. The montages are designed to suggest the two languages of Western and Chinese Marxism. To elucidate their differences I have employed a philosophical vocabulary—not because I regard it as a transcendental language of its own, but because it affords a more articulate mode of contrast. The next several sections of the book therefore present a logically coherent exposition of the philosophical foundations of SinoWestern thought. A reader solely interested in political Maoism may find these distracting. Why, after all, delineate the evolution of K'ang Yu-wei's theories when Mao and his contemporaries so misjudged them? Here, I contend that the history of ideas is illuminating as such. Although the intricacies of K'ang Yu-wei's thought were not known to Mao, K'ang's monistic concept of jen (humaneness) and his theory of the three stages of human history permeated the thinking of Mao Tsetung's entire generation, breaking the tyranny of Confucian relationships to prepare the way for even more radical forms of social criticism. It is partly in this spirit of K'ang's pervasive importance, then, that I devote so much space to him. But why also fully explicate the philosophy of Immanuel Kant just because Mao Tse-tung considered himself a "Kantian Idealist" as a youth? Mao, in fact, did not even know the works of Kant firsthand. Instead, he learned about that philosophy from a book by Friedrich Paulsen—a secondary Neo-Kantian who chose to emphasize only some strains of the original philosophy. Were we solely interested in the quality of Mao's early idealism, surely a study of Paulsen's transmission ¿ o n e would suffice. Why return to the original source? The most obvious answer is the simplest: ideas have to be defined in context. Here, Mao Tse-tung's intellectual environment is the object of study, but its components are more significant for us when we see them move from their primary setting (which must be understood for itself) to the new context. Not only does this tell us a great deal about the force of the blosse Idee; it also—to use a physical image—establishes the fields in

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which the particles move. One of the primary assertions of History and Will, for example, is that Mao Tse-tung's dialectic was not truly Marxian because Chinese metaphysical constructions did not possess the universal ontological categories of European rationalism. The bare statement of such a proposition hardly demonstrates its truth. To render the meaning intelligible, therefore, I have imposed upon the reader my understanding of the nature of those categories by retracing the development of transcendental logic. Consequently, the exposition of Kant's thought in this book is designed to show just how adamantine are the categories behind Western Marxism, whereas Maoism employs the identical integers with more resilience and flexibility because of a different intellectual context. Much of History and Will, therefore, tries to demonstrate the primary qualities of Western and Chinese thought about man and nature by taking the reader through segments of each world of ideas rather than simply by declaring that the differences exist. In the end, I depend heavily upon the reader to draw these intellectual segments together for himself. Every author hopes that his audience will help construct the final synthesis of his work by retaining the accumulated levels of an argument until the structure is completed. But History and Will presumes more because it is not built up in this manner. Rather, it is a series of essays which are thematically cohesive but not discursively sequential. Having finished one segment, the reader is asked to hold on to the image of that argument until it can be placed alongside another. That is, the book tries to present a group of reflections as in a hall of mirrors. Each of these is different, but they finally converge in the single focus of the Cultural Revolution. At that moment, when history (bureaucratic routinization) and will (Mao's permanent revolution) conflicted so dramatically, the reflections were united at last. F.W. Berkeley, 1972

Contents PART ONE

MONTAGES 1 2 3 4 5 6 PART

The The The The The The

Revolutionary Founder Red Sun Dictator Great Legislator Myth-Prince Image Seeker

3 18 26 43 60 74

TWO

TRANSITION T O IDEOLOGY 7 8 9 10 PART

Affinities and Influences The Kung-yang Revival in the Nineteenth Century Syncretic Utopianism Construction and Destruction

97 101 115 137

THREE

FREEDOM 11 12 13

New Youth Rationalism Idealism

155 167 183

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PART FOUR

NECESSITY 14 15 16 17

Socialism Marxism Wang Yang-ming: The Parallel Tradition of Practice Wang Yang-ming: Existential Commitment

200 220 238 257

PART FIVE

HISTORY AND WILL 18 19 20

Neo-Hegelianism Contradictions To Embrace the Moon

APPENDIX: Ku Yen-wu on "Pure Discussion" (Ch'ing-i) NOTES INDEX

277 295 302 329 336 371

1 The Revolutionary Founder Mao Tse-tung's singular prominence within the Chinese Communist Party was not quickly won. His share of leadership was secured during the famous Tsun-yi conference of January 1935; but it was not until 1942, after seven years of ideological compromise and political maneuvering, that he and his thought dominated the party alone. 1 However, the image which his hagiographers project has been far more dramatic: a prescient revolutionary whose unwavering vision of the sole path to victory carried him to a stunning triumph over far lesser rivals. Lenin may be extolled for his ability to compromise and to adjust personal beliefs as the situation demanded. Mao is praised for his unswerving commitment to an individual and constant perception of the dynamics of modern Chinese history. One reason for this particular image of stubborn integrity was Mao's initial pragmatism. The strategies he claimed—reliance upon peasant radicalism in 1927, guerrilla warfare during 1933, and the decision to head north to fight the Japanese (pei-shang k'ang-jih) in 1935— usually conflicted with orthodox Marxism-Leninism as well as with Comintern instructions. Mao never adhered to these doctrines exclusively nor did he develop them singlehandedly, but he did realize sooner than any other Chinese Communist leader that revolution would be launched from the countryside by a Red Army devoted as much to mobilizing the peasantry as to waging warfare. The history of the Chinese revolution then becomes the struggle of

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Mao to emerge from the wilderness—from doctrinal isolation within his own party, and from geographical exile in the loess hills of Yenan. Cast as a prophet whose message was heeded too late for earlier victory, Mao thus appeared to carve out revolution alone, so that Communist victory became his personal triumph and twentieth-century Chinese history his story. More so even than Nikolai Lenin, Mao Tse-tung embodied—possessed—the revolution. Its destiny was his fate; its fulfillment, his self-realization. All of us become our own figments as we slip into the roles we project. What distinguished Mao from most was the identification of that image, that story, with history itself. It was not just because of his own mortality that Mao feared civil routinization and was obsessed by retrogression after victory. Rather, he believed that he could not make his revolutionary story permanent unless history were so, unless revolution itself became permanent. Mao became concerned about the defeat of his revolution when the civil war was on the way to being won. On the eve of victory in 1949, he detected the likelihood of power corrupting the revolutionary purity of his comrades. With victory certain moods may grow within the party—arrogance, the airs of a self-styled hero, inertia and unwillingness to make progress, love of pleasure and distaste for continued hard living. The flattery of the bourgeoisie may conquer the weak willed in our ranks. There may be some communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets.2

Victory would bring a generation of revolutionaries out of rural China and into the bourgeois metropolis; it would distance the cadres from the masses as fighters became bureaucrats. "A dangerous tendency has shown itself of late among many of our personnel—an unwillingness to share the joys and hardships of the masses, a concern for personal fame and gain." 3 Victory would also lull the Communists into believing that their struggle had finally ended with the nationwide seizure of power and the defeat of their military enemies, even though—Mao insisted —there was still a principal internal contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. "After the enemies with guns have been wiped out there will still be enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly. If we do not now raise and understand the problem in this way we shall commit the gravest mistake."