Mao Seeking Glory Before His Death

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30641, 6 January 1965, Page 9

Mao Seeking Glory Before His Death

(By

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

A squat, bulky shadow menaces the coming year. It be« longs to Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

This Stalin of the Far East has a blandly open face. His skin has the warm glow of old ivory. His eyes are set wide apart and betray nothing. His blueblack hair has receded and, although he is almost 71, shows little greying. He has a prominent mole on a strong chin. These physical features mask the mind of an intellectual tiger; for nobody is more aware than Mao that nobody and nothing is revered more in China than a scholar or scholarship. With this in mind Mao, through what he calls poetry and his critics call doggerel, has created the image of a militant romantic. Asian Liberation The image is only a segment of a man with a sense of global mission. He showed this as far back as May Day, 1949, when, with the conquest of the mainland a certainty, he declared that the revolution was not limited to China, but must proceed ultimately “ttf the liberation of the 1000 million suffering people of Asia.” A cardinal point in his long term planning has been the slashing of the ties that bound most of Asia to the European powers and substituting China as the leader of the Afro-Asian bloc. Stingy Parent Mao was born in Shao Shan village, Hunan Province, the son of Mao-Shun-sheng, a comfortably-off peasant with a reputation for meanness to family and labourers alike. He grew up with hatred and contempt for his father, and a feeling of kinship with all rebels. China was then being bled by the Manchu dynasty. When the revolution broke out in 1911, Mao cut off his pigtailsymbol of servitude —and joined the local rebel forces. The revolution over, he took up his studies again, hoping to be a teacher. Instead, he got a job as an assistant in the National Library, where he found not only further knowledge, but the two men who were to influence all his future thought. They were Li Ta-chao and Professor Chen Tu-hsiu, the future founders of the Chinese Communist Party. Early Communist Now oriented towards the Communist Party he was one of the first 12 members at its first congress in Shanghai in 1921. By 1923 he was elected to the Party’s Central Committee, and was given the task of co-ordinating the activities of the Party and the Kuomintang, Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s revolutionary movement, to form a unified front against the war lords. Although unknown then, he collaborated with Chiang Kaishek. already a military name. Peasant Backing Mao saw from the beginning that revolutionary success could come only with the support of the peasants. After 1925 he became President of the “All China Peasant Movement.” He formulated then a new and distinctively Chinese form Of Communism. In 1927 Chiang turned against the Communists. Executions followed torture. Those of the Communist leaders who escaped went underground. Mao, after seeking refuge in Szechwan, organised a peasant resistance army in Hunan. 1 In the five bitter campaigns

that followed Mao showed his insight into ancient Chinese history and his latent genius. Sun Tzu. the father of strategy, laid down the laws that are being followed to this day in the musty jungles of Viet Nam. Mao took his principles in as a boy. and applied them as a revolutionary soldier. Only superior forces and equipment flushed him into the open. Then began the historic Long March. His army had grown from a 1000 ragged rebels to 100,000 hardened veterans. In 1934 they began the march of 6000 miles through enemy-held territory. One year later 20,000 survivors reached Yenan in the north. Part-time Poet He established his headquarters in the caves in the Yenan hills. There, thin, stooping, chain smoking Mao married his third wife and directed the operations that were to firstly help to defeat the Japanese and eventually drive Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland. In odd moments he penned his pungent poems, looked into land reform, followed the advice he still gives his followers “conceive the cam-

was exhausted—was beginning to form. By 1950 his programme was under way. Cleverly he played one section of the population against the other. This way he destroyed opposition group by group, part of it by synchronised violence. “Revolution is not a dinner party,” he said, “Communism is not love, but a hammer for destroying the enemy.” To Mao war is inevitable. He sees the methods he applied to “liberating” China as the answer to the “liberation” and “unification” of the world 'of the future. Tactical alliances he regards only as a move to throw a dangerous opponent off guard before tearing him down. But exI perience and centuries of hisI tory have taught Mao , caution. So he bends just a little to the wind of the moment while making an unobtrusive move in the other direction. But in more recent times he has shown a terrifying hunger for a glory that can lead only to Armageddon. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Stalinist personality cult in 1956 was a direct slap to Mao. In his simple grey uniform he was the "Stalin of China.” The Great Stumble In 1958 he showed he was no “paper tiger” by making his first open bid for the leadership of International Communism. He called for the Great Leap Forward, the conversion of China from an agrarian to an industrial country—a further move to make China independent of outside aid. The race to bring China to the final stage of Communism brought economic chaos and revealed another Mao—a leader prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions to impracticalities, to ignore economic realities, and by doing so destroy the Chinese way of life. Chauvinistic Mao has declared he has no fear of nuclear war. Men, he says, are more important than materials. And there are 700 million Chinese. In reality great impatience gnaws at him. Now more than 70, he could grow tired of holding off from his awful ambitions. Only on October 16, 1964, he showed that Time is pressing him towards what he considers his and China's destiny when the explosion, of “an atomic device” in Western China was announced. Only one sort of glory awaits Mao and the world if he gives the fatal signal. The eternal variety.

paign as a whole” and planned for the political future. The uneasy alliance with Chiang followed in 1937. Three years later one of Chiang’s generals manoeuvred Mao’s new Fourth Army over the Yangtse, then butchered it.

In spite of this, Mao again called for alliance in 1945 because he then needed the capital that the Kuomintang possessed.

He reckoned he could take them over afterwards —an excellent example of Mao’s application of military thought to political revolution. His vision of his New Democracy —in which all classes would play their part until their “revolutionary usefulness”