MAO
AND LINCOLN
By
Henry C.K. Liu
Part I:
Demon and deity
This article appeared in AToL on
March 31, 2004
Chairman Mao Zedong, the
greatest revolutionary in modern Chinese history, has been unfairly
vilified by the neo-liberal West, but he set a decaying China on the
path to renewed greatness and provided a vision for a new China that
will survive for centuries to come. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th
president of the United States, is deified, while Mao is demonized.
Lincoln's assault on due
process was decidedly more violent than Mao's alleged autocratic
leadership style. The difference between Lincoln and Mao is that
Lincoln's high-minded quest for equality in practice allowed a few to
monopolize the resultant national wealth, while Mao tried to distribute
it to all equally.
A look at the two great
leaders - one of them a great revolutionary - is instructive:
The Central Committee of
the Communist Party of China (CPCCC) held a seminar at the Great Hall
of the People on December 30, 2003, to mark the 110th anniversary of
Mao Zedong's birth. Hu Jintao, Chinese president and CPCCC general
secretary, called for carrying on the great cause of the older
generation of Chinese revolutionaries as the best way to commemorate
Chairman Mao. The great cause is to build a socialist China that is
prosperous, peaceful and strong, with equality for all its citizens, to
carry on the grand tradition of Chinese civilization with friendship
and goodwill toward all around the world.
The neo-liberal West goes
so far as to accuse Mao of being a ruthless dictator, allegedly
murdering 30 million of his fellow citizens with his radical programs,
such as the controversial Great Leap Forward. Such propaganda bears
little relation to the reality of Mao (as the greatest revolutionary in
modern Chinese history who set a decaying China on the path to renewed
greatness). Mao was neither perfect nor a superman. Like all humans, he
made mistakes as a leader, but he provided a vision for a new China
that will survive for centuries to come. Mao was demonized by the
neo-liberal West simply because he was a communist. It is also a
mistake for the Western left to interpret post-Mao China's strategic
response to changing global geopolitical conditions as an ideological
deviation from Mao's revolutionary vision for China.
Some libertarians
vilify Lincoln
Lincoln, a great leader,
is also vilified by his libertarian detractors as the US president who
suspended civil liberty and destroyed free markets. While there is
historical evidence of Lincoln being accountable for these partisan
charges, there is also evidence that he did such with a higher purpose.
Elected by narrow pluralities, Lincoln is known as the US president who
preserved the Union. Under his leadership, and largely because of it,
the United States moved closer to the full implementation of the
promise that was contained in the Declaration of Independence: that all
men are created equal; and toward fulfillment of the potential of the
US constitution, which is the commitment to equality under the law.
Stopping in Philadelphia
in 1861 on the way to his inauguration, Lincoln visited Independence
Hall, where he said in a speech, "I have often inquired of myself what
great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long
together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of colonies from
the motherland, but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not
alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all
future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the
weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all
should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that
Declaration of Independence." Lincoln aimed to give hope to the world
for liberty by example, not by foreign wars.
Lincoln scholar Harry
Jaffa argues in The Crisis of the House Divided that Lincoln
was a model statesman who stuck by high-minded principles as he fought
to promote liberty, even though he had to suspend liberty temporarily
to achieve his higher purpose. Gore Vidal's Lincoln: A Novel
views Lincoln as a heroic figure who moved to change the very nature of
American government and society, aiming toward greatness against the
tide of popular opinion in sympathy with the South. Preserving the
Union was decidedly an undemocratic undertaking.
And there are more
dissenting critical views. Lincoln critic Tom DiLorenzo argues in The
Real Lincoln that Lincoln was a calculating politician who waged
the bloodiest war in American history, not to free the slaves, but to
build an empire of corporate welfare. DiLorenzo points out that there
were incidents of war-waging on innocent civilians at the very
beginning, in 1862-63. The town of Randolph, Tennessee, was burned to
the ground because Confederate sharpshooters sniped at Union ships. Not
being able to find the sharpshooters for punishment individually, Union
troops retaliated by burning down the whole town.
This kind of wholesale
atrocity also was perpetrated by the Nazis eight decades later, but
only in occupied lands and not on fellow ethnic Germans, unless they
were communists. And this sort of wholesale atrocity went on all
through the American Civil War, because in a war between brothers,
there is usually no honor code. It is a sad testimony to the ascendance
of inhumanity that wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians continues
to this day in the name of a holy war on terrorism. And although
preemptive self-defense may be justifiable, it is hardly a high-minded
principle.
Lincoln sacrificed
individual freedoms
In another book, The
Great Centralizer, DiLorenzo documented much centralization of
power in the first 18 months of the Lincoln administration, at the
expense of individual freedom and states' rights, the founding
principles of the American republic.
Regarding internal
development, Leonard Curry wrote in Blueprint for Modern America
that constitutional scruples against government subsidy for private
monopolies disappeared after Lincoln, ending seven decades of
constitutional resistance against corporate welfare prior to Lincoln's
presidency. And money was nationalized under Lincoln. Senator John
Sherman said of the National Currency Acts and the Legal Tender Acts:
"These will nationalize as much as possible, even the currency, so as
to make men love their country before their states. All private
interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interest of
individuals, everything should be subordinate now to the interest of
the [central] government." The New York Times editorialized on March 9,
1863, that "the Legal Tender Act and the National Currency Bill
crystallize a centralization of power such as [Alexander] Hamilton [the
first US treasury secretary] might have eulogized as magnificent."
The tariff was tripled by
Lincoln and remained at that high level for decades after the war
ended. Harvard professor David Donald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln
biographer, wrote: "Lincoln and the Republicans intended to enact the
high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law
that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a
transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for
jobbery [political-patronage jobs]."
One not-so-high-minded
reason Lincoln and the Republicans gave for their opposition to the
extension of slavery was that they wanted to preserve the new
territories for white labor, not opposition to an immoral institution.
They said clearly that they wanted the political support of white
laborers who did not want competition from black slave labor. In
practice, democracy often thrives on the lowest instincts of
impassioned voters while ignoring the rights of the disfranchised.
Representative democracy, as practiced in the United States, is an
electoral power game in which the rich and the powerful have an
overwhelming advantage over the weak and the poor, which is
objectionable enough by itself, and it becomes absolutely repugnant
when vaunted as a universal standard for a global holy war.
Lincoln a dictator?
In many scholarly works,
such as Constitutional Problems under Lincoln by James Randall,
Freedom under Lincoln by Dean Sprague, The
Fate of Liberty by Mark Neely and Constitutional Dictatorship
by Clinton Rossiter, Lincoln is labeled a dictator because he launched
a military invasion of the Southern states without consent of Congress
and suspended habeas corpus, with the result that at least
13,000 Northern citizens were imprisoned without arrest warrants being
issued. For that matter, the last war declared by Congress,
constitutionally the sole authority for war declaration, was World War
II, after which all wars had been executive wars. Lincoln censored all
telegraph communication to control developing news on the Civil War;
nationalized railroads for war transport and ordered federal troops to
interfere in Northern elections. David Donald writes also that the
Republican Party won New York state by 7,000 votes in 1864 "under the
protection of Federal bayonets".
Clement Vallandigham,
Ohio congressman and leader of the Copperheads, Northern sympathizers
with the South, accused Lincoln of continuing the Civil War after the
Union had already been saved militarily in the Battle of Bull Run,
simply to enslave white labor by freeing black slaves to compete
unfairly in tight labor markets in the North. Lincoln deported
Vallandigham after General Ambrose E Burnside, then commanding the
Department of the Ohio, accused Vallandigham of violating General Order
No 38, which threatened punishment for those declaring sympathy for the
"enemy". Vallandigham was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to
imprisonment for the rest of the war.
Lincoln also confiscated
firearms from the public, depriving the American people of their
constitutional right to bear arms. Ministers in the South were
imprisoned for not praying for Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's secretary of
state, William Seward, set up a secret police force, and famously
boasted to Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, that he could ring a
bell and have any man in America arrested without due process. The
Journal of Commerce, early in the Lincoln administration, published a
list of 100 newspapers in opposition to Lincoln's administration, and
Lincoln ordered the postmaster general to stop delivering the mail for
those papers, putting the government squarely in the business of
violating freedom of the press. And these newspaper owners and editors
were imprisoned for opposing Lincoln. All were justified as necessary
to stop the secession.
Lincoln's famous
Gettysburg Address resolution of not letting "government of the people,
by the people and for the people" perish from the Earth was not kept by
actual events after the Civil War, nor the resultant United States that
emerged. A 2004 poll conducted by a non-profit organization shows that
only 20 percent of Americans believe that their government works for
them, ie, for the people in general; 56 percent believe that it works
for special-interest lobbyists; and 80 percent believe that it works
for large corporations.
Unlike Lincoln, Mao
was dedicated to equality
Yet unlike Lincoln, Mao
is not given credit in the West as a revolutionary of high-minded
principles who fought for equality with all necessary means. In the
context of the strong US tradition of civil liberty, Lincoln's assault
on due process was decidedly more violent than Mao's alleged autocratic
leadership style, since such is natural in Chinese political tradition.
The difference between Lincoln and Mao is that Lincoln's high-minded
quest for equality in practice allowed a few to monopolize the
resultant national wealth, while Mao tried to distribute it to all
equally.
Like Lincoln, Mao's
tenure as leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's
Republic of China (PRC) was entirely under wartime conditions, first a
civil war with the Nationalists and, after the founding of the PRC,
with more than two decades of total embargo imposed by a hostile US
with extreme prejudice. Garrison state was not merely a mentality
during Mao's time, it was a reality. Most of his policies, like those
of Lincoln, must be viewed in the context of wartime exigencies. Still,
it was Mao who engineered the US-China rapprochement in 1972, and it
was Mao who rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping to carry on socialist
construction with Chinese characteristics.
In March 2004, Chinese
Premier Wen Jiabao vowed to live up to the people's expectations and
commented on many issues related to China's political, economic and
social development at a press conference shortly after the conclusion
of the National People's Congress. The premier also highlighted the
goal of maintaining a balanced and sustainable yet still relatively
fast economic growth and he identified agriculture, rural areas and the
welfare of farming peasants as the most pressing problems. He
identified issues related to people as being those he cares about most.
Wen pledged to continue reform, innovation and forging ahead with
political courage, quoting verses from poems of Chairman Mao and the
ancient Chinese patriotic poet Qu Yuan, the father of Chinese poetry
and a national cultural hero, to express his determination to work
harder for the people in spite recognized difficulties.
The premier identified as
the first goal the establishment of a "scientific and democratic
decision-making mechanism", including a group decision-making system
based on the people's will and consultations with experts and
professional people. The second goal is to administer the country
according to law: "We must prompt the government to administer the
country in line with law, build a clean and honest government, and
pursue the combination of the government's power and responsibility."
The third goal is to accept supervision from every corner of the
society, including the supervision from the National People's Congress
and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and
governments, both central and local, must solicit mass opinion and
listen to diverse views from the people.
Party to lead the
people in respecting law
Wen also urged leading
officials of the CCP and all party members to abide by the constitution
and the country's laws. The constitution and laws will not be changed
according to changes of state leaders or changes in the leaders'
attention. The premier also stressed two principles: that the party, as
the people's vanguard, leads the people in making the constitution and
laws, and leading party officials and all party members should play an
exemplary role in implementing the constitution and laws.
The amendment to the
constitution is of great significance for China's development, he said,
adding that it had just been passed at the national legislature's
annual session with overwhelming support, reflecting the will of the
entire people. He highlighted the incorporation into the constitution
the important thought of the "Three Represents" along with
Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as the
guiding ideology for the party and the nation.
(The Three Represents,
the CCP's modern mission statement, say that the party must always
represent the development trend of China's advanced productive forces,
the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental
interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. It is now
considered the distillation of the party's collective wisdom and is to
be the party's guiding ideology for many years to come.)
These goals are not new
in Chinese communist political culture. Mao, while always placing his
faith in the power of the people, was also a vocal admirer of statesman
Shang Yang (died 338 BC) of the Kingdom of Qin in the Warring States
Period (408-221 BC). Shang Yang built the state's legal system upon the
Book of Law, introduced a legalist government and propelled the Qin
state to prosperity that enabled it to unite all of China, ushering in
the Qin Dynasty. He introduced a new, standardized system of land
allocation and reforms to taxation, he encouraged the cultivation of
new frontiers and favored agriculture over commerce. Shang Yang burned
books by Confucians in an effort to curb the philosophy's pervasive
influence. Shang Yang was credited by Han Fei-zi with putting forth two
precepts: Ding Fa (fixing the standards) and Yi Min
(all people as one). Han Fei was a prince of the state of Han who
joined the state of Qin, but eventually he ran afoul of Qin's chief
minister, Li Si (died 208 BC), and was forced to commit suicide in 233
BC.
Legalism,
Confucianism, Taoism
Legalism is one of the
three main schools in Chinese philosophy, the other two being
Confucianism and Taoism (also transliterated as Daoism). Legalists
believed that a nation should be governed by law, which must be clearly
written and made public. All are equal before the law. Under the
previous Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC), laws had been loosely written and
controlled by tradition based on social classes. Legalism advocates
that laws should reward those who obey them and punish those who break
them. In addition, the legal system rules the state, not the officials.
It is only through the impartial administration of law that a ruler can
rule the state effectively.
In contrast to
Confucianism, Legalism restricts moral issues to the making of law, not
the administering of the law. Strict enforcement of the law is the
foundation of a stable society. Still, the term "rule of law" has
distinctly different meanings in Chinese political culture than in the
West. Critical theory views the Western concept of the rule of law as
merely a method by which the ruling class can justify its rule, as it
alone determines what laws get passed based on its own narrow
interests.
Legalism places
importance on three aspects. The first is shi (influence) or
legitimacy, the legal basis of power based on the legitimacy of the
sovereign and the doctrinal orthodoxy of his policies. In a socialist
society, legal legitimacy is inseparably tied to the interests of the
people as represented by the socialist party. The second is shu
(skill) in manipulative exercise of power in order to respond to the
highest aspirations of the masses. The third is fa (law) which,
once publicly proclaimed, should govern universally without exceptions.
These three aspects Legalists consider the three pillars of a
well-governed society.
This concept of the rule
of law is different from that used in the US legal system, in which
laws are made by lobbyists, manipulated to serve special interests and
applied by courts dominated by high-priced lawyers. The US legal system
is blatantly undemocratic, with its courts packed with politically
appointed judges and a legal-fee structure unaffordable by the average
citizen.
The so-called Gang of
Four distorted Legalist politics in China toward the end of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. For their power-usurping
game, they used as shi (influence) for legitimacy; rote
resuscitation of Marxist orthodox doctrine, reinforced by a co-opted
Maoist personality cult that negates the very nature of Mao; party
factionalism as shu (skill) for exercising power; and
dictatorial rule as fa (laws) to be obeyed with no exceptions
allowed for tradition, ancient customs or special relationships and
with little regard for human conditions. These self-styled Legalists
yearned for a perfectly administered state, even if the price was the
unhappiness of its citizens. They sought an inviolable system of
impartial justice, without extenuating circumstances, even at the
expense of the innocent or the wrongly accused. Worst of all, they put
themselves above the law.
Feudalism with
fascist, socialistic, democratic characteristics
Feudalism in China has
concurrent aspects of what modern political science would label as
fascist, socialist and democratic. As a socio-political system,
feudalism is inherently authoritarian and totalitarian. However, since
feudal cultural ideals have always been meticulously nurtured by
Confucianism to be congruent with the political regime, social control,
while pervasive, is seldom consciously felt as oppressive by the
contented public. Or more accurately, social oppression, both vertical,
such as sovereign to subject, and horizontal, such as gender prejudice,
is considered civilized self-restraint and natural for lack of a
socially acceptable alternative vision. Concepts such as equality,
individuality, privacy, personal freedom and democracy, are deemed
antisocial, and only longed for by the mentally deranged, such as
radical Taoists.
This would be true in
large measure up to modern times when radical Taoists would be replaced
by other radical political and cultural dissidents. A distinction needs
to be made between genuine indigenous dissent and dissent from those
merely playing opportunistically for foreign imperialist favor.
Dissidents who hide under foreign imperialist patronage and protection,
conveniently enjoying bogus martyr status without the inconvenience of
martyrs' fates, will pay for such free rides with loss of credibility.
Economic self-interest, the foundation of market fundamentalism, is
viewed in Chinese culture as a character flaw. Until modern times,
merchants were ranked in social status below prostitutes in feudal
society.
The imperial system in
China took the form of a centralized federalism of autonomous local
lords in which the authority of the sovereign was symbiotically bound
to, but clearly separated from, the authority of the local lords.
Unless the local lords abused their local authority, the emperor's
authority over them, while all inclusive in theory, would not extend
beyond national matters in practice, particularly if the sovereign's
rule was to remain moral within its ritual bounds. This tradition
continues to the modern time. This condition is easily understood by
Americans, whose federal government is relatively progressive on
certain issues of national standards with regard to community standards
in backward sections of the union.
Confucianism (Ru Jia),
through the code of rites (li), seeks to govern the behavior and
obligation of each person, each social class and each socio-political
unit in society through self-constraint. Its purpose is to facilitate
the smooth functioning and the perpetuation of the feudal system.
Therefore, the power of the sovereign, though politically absolute, is
not free from the constraints of behavior deemed proper by Confucian
values for a moral sovereign, just as the authority of the local lords
is similarly constrained.
Issues of
constitutionality in the US political milieu become issues of proper
rites and befitting morality in Chinese dynastic politics. To a large
extent, this approach continues to apply to the modern Chinese polity.
The legitimacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat (defined in
Chinese political nomenclature as the property-less class) lies in its
intrinsic moral validity, upon which the CCP assumes its leadership
role in government. Criticizing the CCP for not subjecting itself to
election challenge is a debate that lies outside the range of its
discourse. Morality is not an elective issue.
The party must lead
the people
The Three Represents is a
newly adopted theory put forward by former Chinese president Jiang
Zemin. The official formal statement of the theory is as follows:
"Reviewing the course of struggle and the basic experience over the
past 80 years and looking ahead to the arduous tasks and bright future
in the new century, our party should continue to stand in the forefront
of the times and lead the people in marching toward victory. In a word,
the party must always represent the requirements of the development of
China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of the development
of China's advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the
overwhelming majority of the people in China."
The correct
interpretation of the theory is still under study. Logic dictates that
the "Three Represents" must be of equal priority. The ultimate test is
"the fundamental interest of the overwhelming majority of the people"
without which the first two "Represents" would be irrelevant. And the
overwhelming majority in China is the Chinese peasant. The inclusion of
capitalists and entrepreneurs in the party and the legitimization of
private property in the constitution remain ideologically problematic
in a political party of the proletariat.
The ideal Confucian state
rests on a stable society over which a virtuous and benevolent emperor
rules by moral persuasion based on a Code of Rites, rather than on law.
Justice would emerge from a timeless morality that governs social
behavior. Man would be orderly out of self-respect for his own moral
character, rather than from fear of punishment prescribed by law. A
competent and loyal literati-bureaucracy faithful to a just political
order would run the government according to moral principles rather
than following rigid legalistic rules devoid of moral content. The
interest of the masses is the highest morality in politics.
Confucian values, because
they were designed to preserve the then-existing feudal system,
unavoidably ran into conflict with contemporary ideas reflective of new
emerging social conditions. It is in the context of its inherent
hostility toward progress and its penchant for obsolete nostalgia that
Confucian values, rather than feudalism itself, become culturally
oppressive and socially damaging. When Chinese revolutionaries
throughout history, and particularly in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries, rebelled against the cultural oppression of reactionary
Confucianism, they simplistically and conveniently linked it
synonymously with political feudalism.
Mao aimed to smash
Confucian dominance
These revolutionaries
succeeded in dismantling the formal governmental structure of political
feudalism because it was the more visible target. Their success was due
also to the terminal decadence of the decrepit governmental machinery
of dying dynasties, such as the ruling house of the three-century-old,
dying Qing Dynasty (1583-1911). Unfortunately, these triumphant
revolutionaries remained largely ineffective in remolding Confucian
dominance in feudal culture, even among the progressive intelligentsia.
Mao understood this reactionary aspect of Confucian culture. He aimed
to reform not only the polity of the Chinese state but also the culture
of Chinese society.
Almost a century after
the fall of the feudal Qing dynastic house in 1911, after countless
movements of socio-political reform and revolution, ranging from
moderate democratic liberalism to extremist Bolshevik radicalism, China
has yet to find a workable alternative to the feudal political culture
that would be intrinsically sympathetic to its aspirational social
tradition of populist government. Chinese revolutions, including the
modern revolution that began in 1911, through its various metamorphoses
over the span of almost four millennia in overthrowing successive
political regimes of transplanted feudalism, repeatedly killed
successive infected patients - in the form of virulent governments.
But these revolutions
failed repeatedly to sterilize the infectious virus of Confucianism in
its feudal political culture. The modern destruction of political
feudalism produced administrative chaos and social instability in China
until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. That is the
undeniable contribution of Mao Zedong to Chinese political history.
But Confucianism still
appeared alive and well as cultural feudalism, even under communist
rule, and within the CCP. It continued to instill in its victims an
instinctive hostility toward new ideas, especially if they were of
foreign origin. Confucianism adhered to an ideological rigidity that
amounted to blindness to objective problem-solving. Almost a century of
recurring cycles of modernization movements, nationalist or communist,
liberal or Marxist, did not manage to make even a slight dent in the
all-controlling precepts of Confucianism in the Chinese mind. In fact,
in 1928, when the CCP attempted to introduce a soviet system of
government by elected councils in areas of northern China under its
control, many peasants earnestly thought a new "Soviet" dynasty was
being founded by a new emperor by the name of "So Viet". Mao Zedong
recognized this feudal mentality as the central obstacle to China's
revitalization.
Confucianism
considered Legalism an aberration
During the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the debate between
Confucianism (Ru Jia) and Legalism (Fa Jia) was
resurrected as allegorical dialogue for contemporary power struggle.
Legalist concepts such as equal justice under law for all and none
being above the law are considered by Confucians aberrations of social
morals and corruption of moral governance. At the dawn the 21st
century, Confucianism remained alive and well in Chinese politics
regardless of ideology in political economy. Modern China was still a
society in search of an emperor figure and a country governed by feudal
relationships, but devoid of a compatible political vehicle that would
turn these tenacious, traditional social instincts toward constructive
purposes, instead of allowing them to manifest themselves as
rationalization for corruption.
Of the three great
revolutions in modern history - the French (1789), the Chinese (1911)
and the Russian (1917) - each overthrew feudal monarchial systems to
introduce idealized democratic alternatives that had difficulty holding
the country together without periods of terror. The French and Russian
revolutions both made the fundamental and tragic error of revolutionary
regicide and suffered decades of social and political dislocation as a
result, with little if any socio-political benefit in return.
In France, regicide did
not even prevent eventual restoration of monarchy imposed externally by
foreign victors. The Chinese revolution in 1911 was not plagued by
regicide, but it prematurely dismantled political feudalism before it
had a chance to develop a workable alternative, plunging the country
into decades of warlordism. Worse still, it left largely undisturbed a
Confucian culture while it demolished its political vehicle. The result
was that almost a century after the fall of the last dynastic house,
the culture-bound nation was still groping for an appropriate and
workable political system, regardless of economic ideology.
Next: Mao's
glory will outshine neo-liberals
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