For more than 35 years, Andrew Walder has been teaching and researching how communist politics have transformed Chinese society. His studies of workers' dependence on their patrons in Chinese factories, market reforms in rural and urban China, and the impact of Communist Party membership on social mobility exemplify how the study of China can contribute to comparative social science understandings. Walder also devoted more than a decade to fine grained studies of Cultural Revolution materials to straighten out the complex and confusing history of Red Guard factions.
China Under Mao, the magisterial synthesis of Walder's research and insights, should be required reading in any Chinese politics course, not just those that focus on the Mao period. In an era of wonderfully rigorous empirical research on narrow topics but few books dealing with the big picture in China, Walder's book stands out for its bold and credible judgments about Mao's rule as a whole.
In Walder's account, Mao Zedong was a leader who “managed to seize one defeat after another from the jaws of an astonishing victory, consigning China to two decades of destruction and pointless conflict” (p. 5). Especially during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, “the destructive aspects of Mao's initiatives far outweighed any outcomes that could be construed as positive” (p. 319). The self-induced failures left China “severely damaged and backward” (p. 13) and caused it to fall behind other nations in its economic development.
Rather than blame Mao's personality or his overly romantic ideas about sustaining revolutionary élan as others have done, Walder focuses on the political and economic structures that Mao imposed on Chinese society. Instead of seeing Mao as a creative or visionary thinker, he depicts him as a dogmatic Stalinist.
The story of China's Stalinization begins with the revolutionary organization that Mao built in Yan'an in the 1940s. It was an organization designed to “enforce discipline among subordinates and ensure directives would be carried out” (p. 39). The key to the communist victory was not peasant-based guerilla war – that was just a survival strategy for the communists hunkered down in Northwest China while the KMT did most of the fighting against the Japanese. Victory came from conventional warfare against the KMT and the “militarized party and conventional army that extracted sacrifice from subject populations in an all-out mobilization for war” (p. 16). Drawing a picture very different from that taught to most students of Chinese history in the PRC or abroad, Walder compares the final years of the civil war to the Soviet army's conquest of Eastern Europe.
Mao was tutored in Yan'an by Chen Boda and other secretaries who had studied in the USSR, using as the textbook the Chinese translation of the Short Course (The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course). This history of Stalin's rise to power by defeating his enemies within the communist party became Mao's how-to-stay-in-power manual. From that time onward, Mao was ever alert for intra-party conspiracies that could bring him down and modelled his dictatorial leadership style on Stalin.
Party discipline and personal loyalty to him as Party leader became Mao's overriding concerns beginning with the 1942–44 Rectification Campaign. Walder's account of that campaign to cleanse the Party of suspected traitors and spies and the atmosphere of fear created by coerced confessions and the pressure to conform sounds eerily resonant of Xi Jinping's China. Xi and Mao differ in many ways and today's China is world's apart from pre-1949 China; yet it's impossible to read Walder's clear-eyed account of the Stalinist strain in Mao's rule without thinking that it persists in Xi Jinping's leadership style today.
The central section of Walder's book presents a clear introduction to the communist party-state and central economic planning that Mao adopted from the Soviet blueprint. It reminds us that there was good reason for the Chinese to have confidence in the Soviet model because the Soviet economy was growing much faster than that of the United States. But when the flaws of central planning revealed themselves, while the rest of the Soviet bloc made significant modifications to it by introducing modern mathematical modelling by scientific experts (in the USSR) or managerial discretion and profit incentives (Yugoslavia and Hungary), Mao rejected these approaches as forms of “capitalism” and doubled down on Stalin-style planning combined with the kind of political mobilization for all out effort that had helped win the civil war. As Walder notes, during the Great Leap Forward when Mao demanded even greater sacrifice for the common economic good, he “cast economic policy in terms of political loyalty” (p. 155).
Walder draws on his previous research to analyse how Communist Party membership became a credential for career advancement. Under Mao, although meritocracy based on test scores and school grades mattered for college admission and job promotion particularly in science, engineering and the professions, it was combined with what I have called “virtuocracy,” promotion based on measures of political loyalty. Again the comparison with the Soviet Union is instructive: China adopted from the USSR the practice of sorting people into class categories of “proletarians” (including people who joined the party or army before Liberation) and “exploiters,” labels inherited from your father or grandfather that were ambiguously combined with evaluations of your own political behaviour. But while the Soviets abandoned the practice of discrimination according to class background by 1937, under Mao, it persisted until the Cultural Revolution.
The last third of the book is devoted to Walder's masterful analysis of the Cultural Revolution. After the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, Mao never felt confident of the loyalty of comrades like Liu Shaoqi, Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi. The Cultural Revolution was both a massive purge of “people in authority taking the capitalist road,” and the destruction of the party-state bureaucracy by mobilizing student Red Guards against it. Walder's detailed account highlights significant facts: that the Red Guards were directed by the small group of Mao's loyalists (originally headed by Chen Boda, Mao's Yan'an tutor); that Red Guard factionalism was produced by this top-down manipulation rather than more deeply rooted conflicts among social groups; and that half of the Cultural Revolution's violent deaths (total of 1.2–1.6 million) occurred during 1968 when military-led organs of local power anxious to prove their own loyalty carried out a massive witch hunt including confessions forced by torture.
The tragic consequences of Mao's rule for Chinese society come through vividly on every page of Walder's dispassionate and authoritative account. I hope that current and future generations of Chinese youth, who have been deprived of knowledge about Mao's China by parental reticence and politicized schooling, will have the chance to read it.
