Mao Zedong's World View (review)

KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 2022

This article examines the leading Chinese Straussian Liu Xiaofeng’s talk on Mao in 2013 and his other related writings. It holds that, in his eclectic selections of various sources, Liu creates in Mao a hybrid philosophical and political figure as a “Confucian sagely ruler,” a “Platonic philosopher-king,” and a “revolutionary” and thus presents Mao as a timeless figure in a nationalist temporality, connecting the present and the remote past and also directing it toward a promised future. Nationalism is defined in this article as a set of discourses of searching or affirming a common descent through allegiance to the power of nation-state and advocating or implementing cultural and political homogeneity. It is discussed in this article as a neutral term based on culture, not on race.

2011

2017

A Critical Introduction to Mao, 2009

On the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth in December 2013, the whole of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, led by new installed leader Xi Jinping, attended commemorations held in Beijing. Commentators inside and outside China were calling Xi a new kind of Mao, noting his eagerness to use some of Mao’s political techniques to mobilise people, and often referring to the supreme leader of the People’s Republic from 1949 to 1976 in highly complementary ways. As I try to show in this paper, Mao Zedong’s legacy today remains profound, but complex. That so many were critical of Xi’s willingness to refer to the former leader is one indication of this. Mao was perhaps the modern leader of China who forged the deepest emotional link with people in the country. But he was also someone associated with campaigns from the 1950s onwards that carried huge social costs. The most epic of these, the Cultural Revolution, was one that Xi himself suffered in, becoming a send down youth in 1969 and moving from Beijing down to the Shaanxi countryside. Many, many others have similar experiences. Those that appeal to the Chairman these days tend to do so not because, like Xi, they want to make a clear link between pre and post-1978 history, when the reform and opening up process is meant to have started, but because the feel that modern China has lost its path. It has forsaken the Utopian, idealistic goals that Mao set it, allowing elites to re-emerge, and the Party to end up as the sort of self-serving, bureaucratic entity that he strove so much to avoid it turning into. The language contained in documents like the statement put out after the Third Plenum in Beijing in October 2013 of `perfecting the market’ in China and saying that a free market is necessary for implementation of socialism with Chinese characteristics alienates and antagonises them. They want public ownership of assets restored, and a welfare system that covers everyone and drives for equality imposed again. They feel that while some have gained form the post 1978 deal, there are many more Chinese who have suffered, been pushed into poverty and injustice, and betrayed. Some of these voices find their way onto the internet, and have social influence. I look at these in this paper, and try to answer just how influential and representative they are. For the question of Mao and his continuing impact, the answer is partly that he continues to escape the boundaries that people claiming his name try to put on him. For this reason, understanding him and those that try to speak in his name even to this day, is important. I hope this study helps a little in understand just why the red sun of Mao Zedong is still very much alive in some Chinese people’s hearts, and why people as senior as Xi chose to appeal to Mao when they conduct politics in the era when China has become the sort of economic and political powerhouse that Mao could only ever dream about.

Harvard Asia Quarterly, 2008

1968

5,000 or 6,000 characters. Modern Chinese is essentially a polysyllabic language and combinations of these several thousand graphs, or characters provide an extraordinarily rich and expressive vocabulary. Consequently,, reading and translation requires extensive and demanding preparation. Through complete immersion in the translated portion of the thesis I have hoped to achieve some measure of control of the Chinese language which .is so necessary for advanced study and scholarship The introductory portion of the thesis has also been equally challenging and rewarding. It is often stated that man is the sum-total of his environment and is shaped by factors and forces within his environment. In other words, man is. a product of society. His awareness of that total-shaping environment, however, may begin with only a glimpse of some part of it. That glimpse may be political, economic,social or cultural in outlook, and it may develop in stages as man's knowledge of himself and his environment broadens and the relationship between his knowledge and his experiences becomes clear. Young Mao Tse-tung's first understanding of China's problems was political. At the age of sixteen, he came across a pamphlet telling of the dismemberment of China in 1898. The opening sentence stuck in his mind: '"Alas, China will be subjugated!'"Â t the age of seventy-four. Chairman Mao is a complete Marxist™ Leninist-styled political animal. He understands the politics of 1. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 131. Paperback edition.

Journal of Contemporary Educational Research, 2018

This paper presents an analysis of the former Chinese Communist Party leader Chairman Mao Zedong’s political career (reigned 1949-1976), with regards to his success and failures. Mao was one of the most prominent Communist theoreticians who governed a quarter of humankind for a quarter of a century. His political philosophy, particularly his Method of Leadership, focusing on the “masses” is discussed here. The analytical arguments are centered on three phases of his leadership: the rise, the apex, and the fall. In the first phase, the paper attributes his victory before 1949 to his profound understanding of Chinese peasants. In the second phase, it elaborates on his successful method of leadership in the early 1950s. And in the third and last phase, it criticizes his disastrous political movements, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. The study hopes to offer an objective and a balanced view of Chairman Mao, who had a complex personality and was a highly controversial figure in human history. The article also wishes to help readers gain a better understanding of China’s top leader in recent history, and how China came to be what it is today.

2016

While “Marxian,” Mao’s thought came from a wide variety of sources, notably from his cultural roots and from his life-long study of classical Chinese philosophy, which in many aspects registers a striking affinity with the postmodernist movement of the West in the late 20th century. Mao’s Chinese Marxism can be interpreted as a break-away from traditional Marxism, a political-economic-philosophical metanarrative, which is culturally Eurocentric and epistemologically logocentric—formulated along the line of rationalistic thinking that can be traced back through the Enlightenment all the way to Plato’s idealism. Postmodernism “abandons absolute standards, universal categories, and grand theories in favor of local, contextualized, and pragmatic conceptual strategies” (Seidman, 1994: 207). This article has no intention to declare Mao as a complete postmodernist, but the obvious would have to be pointed out: i.e., Mao’s notion of integrating Marxism into the specific situation of China i...