The final push by Mao to stop the development of a new party-based ruling
middle class was thecultural revolution. This he launched in 1965, fearing,
quite correctly, that he was losing all control of the party. The movement urged
the forming of radical ‘Red Guards’ who would go into the countryside and
raise what was very nearly a populist revolution against the communist state.
His commitment to the peasant life was so strong, and his dislike of the whole
principle of division of labour was so great, that he tried to force all techno-
crats, students and party bureaucrats to be made to work in the countryside
along with the peasants and to give up not only their privileges, but also their
technical authority. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands forced
to give up their specialities, confess their revisionism, and do penance.
Though the cultural revolution only lasted, at its height, for a year, it did
massive damage to China’s economic and technical development. After Mao’s
death most of those associated with this movement were purged as thousands
of much needed technicians streamed back to the cities, discipline was restored
in the universities, and the post-Mao leadership struggled to return China to a
more orthodox approach to socio-economic modernization. His political
thought, neatly expressed in a small book called, officially,The Thoughts of
Chairman Mao, and, more popularly,The Little Red Book, became the unofficial
bible not only in China, but world-wide. His insistence on Chinese autonomy
was in part responsible for the widening gulf between the Soviet Union and
China which led, especially after the rapprochement between the USA and the
People’s Republic in the 1970s, to a serious ideological split in the communist
world. Mao so totally rejected the co-operation of the Soviet Union that he
even tried to stop Soviet military supplies getting to the North Vietnamese,
whom he was supporting in theVietnam War. Though a brilliant, if
idiosyncratic leader, it is unclear whether his leadership, so opposed in style
and ideology to European communism, helped or hindered China. Even with
the reforms and slow changes in Chinese political life in the last quarter of the
20th century, Mao remained a potent symbol legitimating contemporary
Chinese governments for some time. Whether this influence will long survive
the gradual spread of capitalism into China is improbable.
Maoism
Maoism, largely a matter of following the ideas set forth inThe Little Red Book,
technicallyThe Thoughts of Chairman Mao, is a radical version ofcommunism,
owing rather less than might be expected to theMarxist-Leninismwhich
held sway, on and off, in China during his years in office. It also caught the
attention of radicals world-wide, and much of the French, German and even
American far left are still influenced by it. The crucial point of Maoism is the
total rejection of the immunity of the official communist party to criticism, and
Maoism