Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One of Mao's most insightful biographers comments on the ironies
of Mao's transition from liberator to tyrant:
Mao Zedong thus stands in a long line of revolutionary tyrants—
revolutionary in that they contributed to great socio-economic progress,
tyrannical in their political methods. Mao began his political career as a
servant of China's impoverished peasants and made himself their
master in the process. He liberated the Chinese nation from the shackles
of a century-long foreign impingement, only to bind the people of the
nation to the alien shackles of his own deified image
The ill-fated
Great Leap Forward campaign marked the transition from Mao as the
dominant leader of an authoritarian Leninist party to a personal tyrant
ruling above the Party.
(Meisner 2007, 194)
...
Ever since he had become a Marxist during his student days at Beida,
Mao Zedong was an idealogue in a hurry who valued socialism for its
own elegant, purely theoretical sake. He wanted to see the completion
of the Marxian stages of socioeconomic development and the final
emergence of a truly classless, communistic society in China. He
longed for the culmination of this grand historical process during his
own lifetime and was annoyed by the possibility that he might not live
to see it. Thus, during the 1950s as he began contemplating his own
mortality, he grew impatient with the slow, grinding gait of historical
process and sought to impel or accelerate it, to make History bend to
human (i.e., his) will. For China, the results of Mao's impatience with
the unfolding of Marxian fantasy were utterly disastrous:
Mao's subjective desire for socialism proved far more powerful than
the influence of Marxist teachings on the objective material prerequisites
of the new society. Thus, by the late 1950s, Mao's Marxian insistence on
proceeding through the necessary stages of socio-economic develop-
ment gave way to the notion of a “permanent” or “continuous” revolu-
tion, one that bypassed the “bourgeois-democratic” phrase altogether;
he claimed to have completed “the transition to socialism” in a few short
years, and then proclaimed the imminence of communism.
...
By late
1957 Mao Zedong had thrown off all conventional Marxian restraints
on the revolutionary will, permitting him to embark on the tragic adven-
ture of the Great Leap Forward. Standing above all institutions, he now
became a tyrant as well as a utopian prophet, nearly oblivious to the
human and social costs of his “great leap” to communism—and to the
costs of the Cultural Revolution, an upheaval which in large measure
grew out of the political tensions generated by the failure of the Great
Leap.
(Meisner 2007, 197)
...
