may be another indication of his holistic approach to national affairs.
If something is to be done, it must be done holistically with nation-
wide perfection.
Mao was a visionary on nationalism. He struggled for decades
finally to be able to proudly proclaim on October 1, 1949, ‘‘Chinese
people have stood up!’’ Mao was able to redress an imbalance in
decision-making in the international arena that had previously been
dominated by the West, and introduced China as a solid weight on
the scale of international affairs (Wilson, 1977 ). Schwartz asserted
that in Mao’s writings, there is an ‘‘overwhelming preoccupation
with the preservation and enhancement of China as a political-social
entity in a world of other societal entities known as nation-states’’
(Schwartz, 1977 : 16) and that Mao refused to identify and conform
‘‘Chineseness’’ with universal cultural, ethical, and social values. Mao
visited only one foreign country in his lifetime, the Soviet Union.
Describing that sole experience of a foreign visit, he referred to his
call to Josef Stalin for assistance as ‘‘grabbing meat from the tiger’s
mouth.’’ Even in his dealings with the Soviet Union, Mao made valiant
efforts to assert and achieve China’s independence from the ‘‘big
brother,’’ first from the pressure of the Soviet model of orthodox
Marxism in the early revolutionary years, and then under extremely
dire national conditions when the Soviet Union withdrew all its
economic support from China after the severance of the Sino-Soviet
tie (Li, 1994 ).
Compared with Mao, Deng was more realistic and details-oriented,
and more of a visionary on economic construction. Deng’s reforms
were initiated with the realistic understanding that China was still at
the initial stage of socialism, and that people must be motivated not by
remote communist visions, but by more immediate individual inter-
ests. With this understanding, he designed the ‘‘distributed responsi-
bility system’’ where the individual is more immediately rewarded
or penalized with respect to his/her own achievements. This model
was in clear contrast to Mao’s system of the people’s commune where
collectivity and egalitarianism was favored. Deng’s realistic and
details-oriented inclinations were also discerned in his early speeches
before his era of reform. As indicated by the analyses of his early
speeches presented previously in this chapter, Deng chose realistic and
practical results over grand impressions. To help accomplish such
results, he depended on cautious and careful analysis of the conditions
Leadership theories and practices of Mao and Deng 231