Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
did not want to admit that what he did was more than passively
support Mao. Deng was the General Secretary of the CCP at that time
and was not only responsible for implementing the Great Leap
Forward policies but also for acting as the interface between the centre,
headed by Mao, and various regional and provincial leaders who put
the ideas and policies in practice. It is therefore not surprising that
during the Seven Thousand Delegates meeting in Beijing in early 1962,
when Mao made a public criticism of himself for the Great Leap
Forward disaster, Deng defended Mao by saying that mistakes were
made because his office of the General Secretariat did not follow Mao’s
ideas to the spirit (Zhang Suhua 2006). Deng’s defence of Mao was so
effusive that even Mao was embarrassed (Wu Lengxi 2000: 317). It is
also not surprising that Deng defended his ally and friend, Li
Jingquan, who was the CCP boss of the Southwest region and principal
leader of Sichuan province where the famine death toll was the worst
(Zhang Suhua 2006).
The second sentence by Nathan quoted above is very ambiguous.
During the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mao, like other
CCP leaders, did have the illusion that peasants could produce more
than they could eat. However, by 1959 he began to be cautious. In fact,
it was Mao who put a stop to some of the stupid practices of the Great
Leap Forward in late 1958, as pointed out by Lin Ke et al (1995). As
early as March 1958 Mao instructed the chief editor of the People’s
Daily, Wu Lengxi, not to publish a report from Henan on its wish list
of what could be achieved in three years. Mao said the tone must be
adjusted and cold water had to be poured on those who were full of
themselves (Wu Lengxi 1995: 63–4). Again and again in April, August
and November 1958 Mao told Wu that the media had to be coolheaded
and had to tone down publicity about unrealistic production
targets, that they should not inspire unrealistic production targets, and
that their news and reports had to be realistic, cautious and down to
earth. In June 1958 Mao instructed Peng Zhen and Deng Xiaoping to
make sure that the media changed their direction from inflated
reporting to cool realism. According to Wu (1995) it was not Mao but
other leaders who were in charge of the propaganda work who were
slow to change.
It is true that Mao might have acted as an emperor and his words
were treated as God-given by many. However, anyone who has a rudimentary
knowledge of China should know that not everything that
happened in China under Mao’s rule was his own doing. It is therefore
incredible for a scholar of international standing to make simplistic
and naïve statements such as ‘He [Mao] froze the people’s standard of
living at subsistence level in order to build a massive wasteful industrial
structure’ (Nathan in Li Zhisui 1994: x). Mao is taken as a God who
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