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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Ma Yinchu, population control and elite attitudes
Mao was a very complex personality, and as a political leader his ideas
and work had impacts on the lives of millions of Chinese. Evaluation of
a man of such historical importance inevitably requires us to engage
with almost every issue of human life in China. One of these involves
China’s population. There has been a consensus among the public policy
makers that there are too many people in China and the population has
to be controlled. If, for the sake of argument, we put aside the moral or
theological issues of whether human life is intrinsically and inherently
sacred, we should note that there can be endless debates on how many
people within a national boundary are considered to be too many and
whether people are valuable resources or a waste of resources. For a
brief period of time, at least during the 1950s, Mao happened to be one
who thought that humans might be resources rather than constraints on
China’s economic development. However, this does not mean Mao did
not agree to some control of the population. In fact during the 1950s and
1960s measures were taken to slow population growth, though not as
coercively as during the post-Mao reform years. 2
Nevertheless, one of the crimes that Mao is being accused of is that
he made the Chinese population explode because he wrongly criticized
a demography professor who advocated population control. Yi
(2007) confronts the issue head on by arguing that it was groundless to
blame Mao for the great population surge in China and that the accusation
was politically motivated. According to Yi, in 1979 Hu Yaobang,
then the Minister of Organization and Secretary of the CCP, is reported
to have shed a few tears when he read the file of Professor Ma Yinchu
of Beijing University and said something like: if the Chairman listened
to Ma Yinchu, China would not have had more than 1 billion people
now. This wrongful criticism of one person led to a population increase
of many millions. On 5 of August 1979 an article with a rhythmical and
poetic headline ‘Cuo pi yi ren, wu zeng san yi’ (Wrongful criticism of one
person led to a damaging population increase of 300 million) appeared
in the so-called intellectual paper the Guangming Daily. 3 The headline
summarizes what has been the accepted wisdom on the issue of population
in contemporary Chinese historiography. When Ma was
rehabilitated he was hailed as a Marxist. Yi, however, argues not only
that Professor Ma was not a Marxist but also that he said nothing original
but just repeated a platitude of Marx’s adversary Malthus, whose
view on population has been proved to be wrong. Yi argues that
China’s population increased so much not simply because there were
too many births but also because there were fewer deaths. This was the
result of the social and economic revolution and improvement of living
conditions for the majority of the people in China.
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