The Subjective Dimension

Development of the subjective dimension of charismatic leadership in China is paradoxical if viewed from a Weberian perspective. At a time when Mao's charisma—in its classic Weberian sense of an heroic, irrational force—might have been expected to be at its zenith, in the wake of the conquest of national power, it was quite well sublimated within the Party organization. Its antinomian aspect emerged only gradually, in response to tendencies toward organizational rationalization and autonomy, asserting itself in Mao's vigorous, sometimes impetuous and headstrong leadership. But charisma in its classic antibureaucratic sense fully manifested itself only in the wake of cataclysmic failure —contrary to what one might have expected from Weber's conception of charisma as the fruit of heroic achievement. The chaotic form it took thereafter was not simply a manifestation of the ineluctable antithesis between heroic and mundane, sacred and profane, but also a case of tactical scapegoating to salvage legitimacy amid terminal disagreement over mission. That Mao should win this showdown is no doubt largely due to his political

acumen, but partly also to the role of the heroic leader in traditional Chinese political culture.

The assumption that leadership resides in an extraordinary individual has deep roots in Chinese culture, perhaps even being theological in origin—as in Dong Zhongshu's conceptualization of the cosmic mediating role of the "son of heaven." Belief in an omnipotent and omniscient sage-king—"sage within and king without" (nei sheng wai wang )—goes back at least to the Qin unification of China in 221 B.C. The introduction of Marxism in its initial Leninist from represented a modification of this tradition. At the top of the Party vanguard roosted the Politburo, where collegiality obtained; one member might be primus inter pares , but each member had certain equal rights (e.g., one vote, the right to be heard in council). The decision to select a personal figurehead to represent this corporate leadership to the public seems to have come in response to the wartime heroization of Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek.^[21] The Party seems to have then molded its cult of the (individual) personality to fit existing cultural stereotypes, hoping to facilitate popular compliance. As long as the person playing the role of revolutionary sage-king adhered to the inner-Party rules of consensual decision-making, all (i.e., the entire Party) would benefit from this division of functions.

In the early post-Liberation period, the personification of charismatic leadership and the Party's corporate interests coincided perfectly. Although Mao was the primary beneficiary of the series of successes the Party enjoyed, charismatic infallibility was to a considerable degree "collectivized," and the Party as a whole basked in the glow of revolutionary heroism, all the way down to the local cadres. The problem arose when the bureaucracy began to become institutionalized in pursuit of its own maintenance and enhancement needs on the one hand, and Mao Zedong fell under the spell of his own propaganda and became convinced of his infallibility on the other, leading him to violate the norms of collective leadership in favor of an increasingly unilateral decision-making style.

The Party-state bureaucracy was set up in rather ad hoc fashion in the immediate post-Liberation period but with the passage of time became a vast organizational edifice. The New Democratic State proclaimed in 1949 was a hybrid body consisting of the Communist Party together with a bloc of smaller parties that were supposed to represent the three nonproletarian classes making up the United Front. The Chinese People's Government (CPG) was elected by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a heterogeneous legislative assembly

[21] See Ray Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung , Ch'en Po-ta , and the Search for Chinese Theory , 1935 –1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), pp. 281–301.

comprising representatives from the various parties, groups, sectors, and interests that had been coopted by the CPC. In 1952, half of the CPG vice-chairmen, half of the vice-premiers in the State Council, the president of the Supreme People's Court, and other officials were still non-Party "democratic personages."^[22] A Democratic Construction Association was formed to represent the national bourgeoisie, many of whom received appointments as deputy provincial governors or provincial mayors or served on the Standing Committees of the Political Consultative Conferences at various levels.^[23]

The 1949–53 period was one of New Democracy, or People's Democratic Dictatorship, whose mission was to prepare the way for Proletarian Dictatorship during the socialist transition period. As the Party's first experiment with pluralism, brief and superficial though it was, it made an enduring impression. Mao was later to complain that it had allowed bourgeois opposition to socialism to become entrenched, whereas some of the supporters of liberal reform in the early 1980s were to object that New Democracy was "not thoroughgoing" and had been prematurely suspended, with the result that New China failed to come to terms with deeply rooted "feudal" (i.e., autocratic) traditions.^[24]

The new government inaugurated in September 1954 to preside over

[22] Xu Chongde, "A Tentative Discussion of the Change in the Nature of Our Country's Political Power," Minzhu yu Fazhi [Democracy and law] (Shanghai), no. 11 (November 25, 1981): 9–12.

[23] "On the Characteristics," Xin Shiqi , pp. 2–5. (see above, n. 5.)

[24] In a discussion of various revisionist influences, Mao remarked to two Albanian visitors in 1967: "One portion is those engaged in democratic revolution. They cooperate during the period of democratic revolution and agree to the overthrow of the national bourgeoisie. They agree to the distribution of land to the peasants but do not agree to the cooperativization movement. Of this group some are our so-called 'old cadres.'" "Conversations with Comrades Hysni Kap and Beqir Balluku" (February 3, 1967), in Mao Zedong Sixiang Wan Sui [Long live Mao Zedong Thought] (Hong Kong: n.p., 1969), pp. 663–67. (Hereinafter Wansui [1969].) In November 1980 the Chongqing Philosophical Society convened a symposium to discuss the feudal legacy, the proceedings of which appeared in Guonei Zhexue Dongtai [Philosophical trends in China], no. 3, 1981. Some of the discussants contended that feudal influence is not merely a "vestige" but actually a kind of "force." The reason has to do with the "two not-thoroughgoings," one being the bourgeois democratic revolution led by Sun Yat-sen and the other the New Democratic Revolution led by the CPC. See Zhengming [Contend], no. 49 (September 1, 1981): 86. (Hereinafter ZM .) The issue was raised in sharpest form by a young scholar named Jiang Guangxue, who, writing under the pseudonym Ying Xueli and Sun Hui (joint author), wrote an article, "Some Theoretical Problems during the Latter Stage of the Socialist Transformation of Our Nation," which appeared in the Nanjing University Xuebao , vol.4, 1980. Jiang referred to socialist transformation as a "blind mopping-up operation" that had been pursued too rashly, due to the Party's historical "adoration of the spontaneity of the peasant class." The article subsequently came under officially sponsored academic criticism, which elicited a self-criticism from the author.

the socialist transition was an ambiguous one, in essential respects conforming to the classic Leninist mold (a unicameral, single-party state), but retaining certain democratic trappings. The CPPCC for instance continued to function in a "consultative" capacity, providing a fairly anemic claim to multiparty pluralism. The Communist Party monopolized the nominating process for candidates to the National People's Congress (NPC), but delegates were popularly (if indirectly, except at local levels) elected from regional constituencies. The large size, infrequent convention, and brevity of its sessions precluded a very active role in the policy-making process. During the chairmanship of Liu Shaoqi (1954–64), the NPC did at times examine proposals on economic development programs before giving its approval, and at least on one occasion (the Fourth Session of the First NPC, in June 1957), NPC delegates even criticized Mao in relation to the Anti-Rightist movement and the Party's handling of university affairs in Shanghai.^[25] Due to such minor but apparently troubling departures from unanimity, the Party increasingly abandoned legislative channels to rule through its own emission of documents. During the Great Leap Forward the NPC fell into desuetude, enacting no new legislation until after the Cultural Revolution.

Aside from its representative and legislative functions, the main task of the bureaucracy was planning and managing economic development. In August 1952, a State Statistical Bureau (Guojia tongji ju ) was set up under the auspices of the State Council (executive organ of the NPC), followed by the State Planning Commission (Guojia jihua weiyuanhui ). In 1953 the First Five-Year Plan (FYP), drawn up on the basis of Soviet advice and predicated on extensive fraternal technical and financial assistance, was introduced.^[26] Its centerpiece was the importation of 156 complete plants from the USSR, mostly in heavy industry. It called for completion of basic industrialization and collectivization by 1967 (the end of the Third FYP).

The relationship of these burgeoning representative and economic organizations to charismatic leadership was ambiguous. They were creatures of the Party, and the Party retained control over staffing and routine decision-making through such devices as nomenklatura , internal Party fractions, and joint appointments. Yet they still displayed a tendency to drift from Party control. The reason for this has to do with the contradiction between their functions as defined in their founding constitutional documents and formal structure and their informal political base.

[25] Union Research Institute, Communist China , 1949 –1959 (Hong Kong: Union Research Press, 1960), p. 60. Granted, this episode was exceptional, occurring as it did in the context of the Hundred Flowers movement.

[26] Brugger, China , pp. 86–94.

According to the former, they should be more or less autonomous and concerned with the implementation of rational-legal bureaucratic rules; according to the latter, they should promote revolutionary charismatic leadership. From the bureaucrat's perspective, this involved a balance between routine performance of one's official role and occasional display of ideological zeal. From the point of view of the Party, it generated an incessant tension between the officials' "forgetting" their charismatic origins (the class struggle, the revolution) and the consequent need for the Party to "remind" them. Forgetting was a direct function of undisturbed office tenure, plus absorption in organizational chores, whether legislative, managerial, or technical-economic. Reminding was done chiefly through rectification movements, whose exemplary purges jeopardized tenure while at the same time affording chances to regenerate charismatic commitment.

By the mid-1950s, this tension between forgetting and reminding, bureaucratic secularization and charismatic revivalism had begun to penetrate the Party leadership itself. This occurred on the one hand due to a process of reverse cooptation : those Party leaders sent to manage a bureaucratic organ tended to adopt the organizational interests of that organ as their own, and to represent those interests in Party policymaking councils. On the other hand, Mao Zedong, the Party's personification of charismatic infallibility, began to take advantage of his role for political self-aggrandizement. He took credit for the success of the continuing revolution, and allowed his works to be compiled as the primary embodiment of the Party's collective wisdom. The first heavily edited volume of his Selected Works was published in October 1951, the second in March 1952, and volume 3 in February 1953.^[27] Beginning with its enshrinement in the Party Constitution of the Seventh Congress, references to Mao's Thought began to appear in the context of tributes to Marxism-Leninism as the Party's official ideology.

Mao seems to have manipulated both public opinion and political levers to eclipse his colleagues, gradually enhancing his power at their expense. Thus in 1953, he asserted his right to final approval over all CC directives: "From now on, all documents and telegrams sent out in the name of the CC can be dispatched only after I have gone over them, otherwise they are invalid. Please take note."^[28] The Gao Gang-Rao Shushi incident that marred elite unity in 1954–55 does not seem to have

[27] Helmut Martin, Cult and Canon: The Origins and Development of State Maoism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), p. 26.

[28] Mao Zedong, "Liu Shao-ch'i and Yang Shang-k'un Criticized for Breach of Discipline in Issuing Documents in the Name of the Central Committee without Authorization" (May 19, 1953), in SW , vol. 5:92.

revolved around the position of Mao but that of his immediate subordinates, and according to the most recent revelations, ideological issues do not seem to have been at stake.^[29] Yet the political implication of the purge was a further centralization of leadership, warning habitually autonomous provincial leaders by negative example and eliminating the six regional Party bureaus.^[30]

A divergence within the leadership first appeared concerning apparently minor issues of timing and pace. Prompted by a poor harvest in 1954 and by serious difficulties in consolidating cooperatives that had been formed without meeting the necessary organizational and material preconditions, Mao in March 1955 proposed a "three-point policy" to "stop" the development of cooperatives in most areas, "contract" the process in areas where APCs had been overdeveloped, and "develop" cooperativization where few cooperatives had been established. Accordingly, the CC Rural Work Department charted a plan to increase the number of elementary APCs to one million (a 50 percent increase) in 1955–56, but to retreat where conditions were not mature. A meeting of Party secretaries from fifteen provinces and municipalities convened in May 1955 to ratify this policy, and Mao made a personal representation to them in which he stressed "developing" over "stopping and contracting," enthusiastically calling for a 100 percent increase. Apparently Deng Zihui and the Rural Work Department insisted on the original plan, and proceeded (with the endorsement of a Politburo meeting convened under Liu Shaoqi) to "contract" about twenty thousand cooperatives back to the stage of Mutual Aid teams.^[31] Infuriated by this show of resistance (and by the rumor that two hundred thousand cooperatives had been dismantled), Mao convened a meeting of provincial and munic-

[29] Deng Xiaoping, "Suggestions on the Drafting of the 'Resolutions on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the PRC'" (March 1980–June 1981), reprinted in Hongqi [Red flag], no. 13 (July 1, 1983): 2–15. (Hereinafter HQ .)

[30] Kong Zhongwen, "Line Struggles—Eliminating Opposing Factions within the Party: Mao Zedong's 27–year Rule," part 5, ZM , no. 73 (November 1983): 71–74.

[31] Because of his efforts to resist hasty collectivization and his pioneering advocacy of the responsibility system, Deng Zihui has emerged as something of a hero before his time in recent historical reconstructions. See Editorial Board, "Shenqie huainian Deng Zihui tongzhi" [Deeply cherish comrade Deng Zihui's memory], Nongcong Gongzuo Tongxun , no. 5 (May 5, 1981): 7–9; Qiang Yuangan and Lin Bangguang, "Wo guo nongye jitihua de zhuoyue zuzhizhe Deng Zihui" [Our country's outstanding organizer of agricultural collectivization Deng Zihui], Xinhua Wenzhai , no. 7 (1981): 187–90; and Dai Qingui and Yu Zhan, "Study Comrade Deng Zihui's Viewpoint on Agricultural Production Responsibility Systems," RR , February 23, 1982, as translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (Hong Kong: U.S. Consulate) (hereinafter FBIS ), no. 44 (March 5, 1982): K16–K19. As cited in Thomas Bernstein, "Reforming China's Agriculture," unpublished paper presented to the conference "To Reform the Chinese Political Order," Harwichport, Mass., June 18–23, 1984.

ipal Party secretaries at the end of July, where he initiated criticism of "old women with bound feet."^[32]

Opposition quickly wilted, and the organization reoriented itself to a more headlong pace. By the end of the year Mao's original target had been effectively advanced from the cooperativization of 50 percent of all agricultural households by the spring of 1956 to 70–80 percent by the end of 1956. Already by the end of 1955, the number of peasant households organized into APCs had jumped from 14 to 60 percent, and, by the end of 1956, to well over 96 percent (of which 87.8 percent were "advanced"). The policy of advancing by stages was therewith abandoned: many households joined advanced APCs in response to an announcement by leading cadres at a meeting of production teams, without having first been organized into Mutual Aid Teams or even elementary APCs.^[33]

Mao's successful defiance of elite consensus was accomplished through a shrewd appeal to outside constituencies, in this case Party secretaries of the provinces and municipalities, who in turn represented grass-roots interests.^[34] The impact of this bold initiative on production could not be precisely determined until later, but the initial impression was at least not adverse, and, inasmuch as socialization was considered desirable in its own right, Mao's intervention was a provisional triumph. It vindicated his reputation for infallibility and discredited those who disagreed with him, whom he was able to demote or force to make self-criticisms.^[35]

[32] Yan Ling, "The Necessity, Possibility and Realization of Socialist Transformation of China's Agriculture," Social Sciences in China (Beijing) 3, no. 1 (March 1982): 94–123.

[33] RR , October 11, 1956.

[34] According to Vivienne Shue, "It is evident that at the bottom level there had been pressure for a top-level go-ahead to permit the quick, final expropriation of upper-middle and rich peasants they felt they needed to consolidate broad peasant support behind their own political leadership in the villages." Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development toward Socialism , 1949 –1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 281–92. Although Mao generated political support for his initiative and was hence able to push it through with unexpected swiftness, that it had disruptive consequences is made clear in Selden and Lippit, The Transition to Socialism , particularly in the Selden article.

[35] Mao arranged to have two long-time supporters, Chen Zhengren and Chen Boda, placed in the Agricultural Department; he also mobilized support from provincial and local officials, who were enthusiastically in favor of his proposal as a solution to their problems of dwindling rural investment and capital seepage. In August he convened an "expanded" Politburo meeting in which a majority supported his decision to accelerate rather than suspend the collectivization campaign, and at the Sixth Plenum of the Seventh CC (October 1955) his opponents were forced to capitulate: self-criticisms were submitted by Premier Zhou Enlai, by Minister of Finance Li Xiannian, Chairman of the State Planning Commission Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Commission for Large Industries Bo Yibo, and Chen Yi, then mayor of Shanghai. Walker, "Collectivization in Retrospect"; see also Rainer Hoffman, Kampf zweier Linien: Zur politischen Geschichte der chinesischen Volksrepublik , 1949 –1977 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1978).

Subsequently there was however an inner-Party backlash against his aggressive leadership, partly in response to developments in the Soviet bloc, partly due to domestic economic difficulties. In February 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Khrushchev suddenly made a public attack against Stalin's personality cult, thereby implicitly jeopardizing all within the bloc (including Mao) who had been guilty of analogous tendencies. At home, whereas agricultural output continued to increase in 1956, the rate of increase declined.^[36] The overextended expenditure of capital construction resulted in a budget deficit of about 3 billion yuan ,^[37] always a matter of concern to fiscally conservative Chinese financial planners. Beginning around March 13, articles began to appear in People's Daily referring to disequilibrium between different production sectors and other difficulties. A public campaign was in fact finally launched against economic adventurism (jizao maojin ), and although Mao's own words were quoted in support of this retreat and blame placed on overzealous local cadres who had misinterpreted central policy directives, Mao took these criticisms personally and harbored a grudge.^[38]

The resurgence of the "engineers" was visible not merely in the nuances of public rhetoric, but in the constitutional restructuring undertaken at the Eighth Party Congress. Not only were references to Mao Zedong Thought deleted from the Party Constitution (at the motion of Peng Dehuai, promptly approved by Liu Shaoqi), but a new position of "honorary chairman," for which there could be only one conceivable candidate, was created. And, in an organizational maneuver that was to be repeated for the gradual removal of Hua Guofeng in 1980, the Secretariat was greatly strengthened, apparently in order to create an alternative leadership nexus. The provision contained in the 1945 Constitution permitting the party chairman to hold the concurrent post of chairman of

[36] Yan Ling, "The Necessity," pp. 113 ff.

[37] Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 1, p. 79.

[38] On June 19, an article by Deng Tuo (then editor of RR ) that was particularly harsh in its criticisms of economic adventurism was submitted for approval. The article quoted Mao's words from his preface to Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside that "no one should disregard reality and indulge in flights of fancy, or make plans of action unwarranted by the objective situation, or reach out for the impossible." Mao refused to read the article, scrawling "bu kanle " (I'm not going to read any more) in the margin. Liu Shaoqi, however, approved it on behalf of the Politburo, and it was published the following day. See the editorial in RR , June 20, 1956. Eighteen months later (at Nanning, in January 1958), in the context of his own blistering criticism of officials in the Finance Ministry, Mao revealed his reasons: "There was an editorial in June 1956 warning against venturesome advance. It looked like it was taking an evenhanded stance, anti-Rightist conservatism on the one hand and anti-venturesome advance on the other. Yet its key point was on the latter. . . . Why should I read an article that attacks me? Wansui (1969), pp. 151–52. See also Roderick MacFarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution: I. Contradictions among the People , 1956 –1957 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 346, n. 15.

the Secretariat was dropped, and a separate Secretariat was created under a general secretary named Deng Xiaoping. It was the general secretary who was authorized not only to handle the daily work of the CC, but to convene the Central Work Conferences that were regularly held in place of CC Plenums (convened by the Chairman) in the 1962–65 period.^[39]

A third way in which Mao's colleagues sought to impose the discipline of collective leadership was to reassert control over elite-mass communications. The organizational rules of the game in inner-Party decision-making hold that in order for intra-elite discussion to be relatively untrammeled it must be confidential, precluding any attempt to mobilize outside constituencies. Thus elite-mass communication must proceed through the established document system, with important statements being emitted from the top only after attaining elite consensus.^[40] But, beginning in the mid-1950s, as Mao grew impatient with the bureaucracy and came to resort increasingly to unilateral initiatives, he sought ways to evade the requirements screening his contact with mobilizable constituencies. One of these was to avail himself of the opportunity for ad hoc communications afforded by field trips—as in his 1958 comment to a reporter in Hebei that the commune was "good," which was widely publicized and had a mobilizational impact exceeding even Mao's expectations. An expedient more frequently resorted to, however, was the convention of a central meeting, the proceedings of which could be predetermined through control over the roster of participants and the setting of the agenda, with the expectation that these would then be publicized. Thus Mao's convention of provincial and municipal officials under the auspices of an "expanded" Politburo conference at the end of July 1955, duly publicized in the document stream and eventually (i.e., three months later) in the media, was pivotal in Mao's acceleration of collectivization. But by early 1957 he was also beginning to encounter resistance to such expedients. When nothing appeared in the press following his talk on the handling of contradictions among the people (February 1957) or his March speech to the Party's National Propaganda Conference, Mao complained (in April):

It is the task of the Party press to represent the political line of the Party. It is wrong to remain silent about the conference on propaganda work. Why has the press not printed a word about it? Why was there no lead article about a high state conference? Why is the political line of the Party kept secret?^[41]

[39] Hoffman, Kampf , pp. 30–45.

[40] Michel Oksenberg, "Methods of Communicating within the Chinese Bureaucracy, "CQ , no. 57 (January–March 1974): 1–39.

[41] "Push the Revolution in the Press to the End," joint lead article in RR , HQ , and Jiefangjun Bao (Liberation Army Daily, hereinafter JFJB ), as translated in Survey of the Chinese Mainl and Press (hereinafter SCMP ) (Hong Kong: U.S. Consulate General), no. 4253, p. 23.

Unlike Hua Guofeng, whom Deng and his cohorts would thus maneuver into a politically passive position two decades later, Mao successfully resisted the more limited organizational role his colleagues conceived for him. An inveterate maverick throughout his career,^[42] Mao defied the emerging consensus. Anything but chastened by the 1956 campaign against adventurism, he introduced and resourcefully promoted two even more ambitious campaigns: the Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap Forward.

The Hundred Flowers, to be analyzed in greater detail in chapter 3, was not Mao's original initiative—a rapprochement with the Chinese intelligentsia had been pursued for more than a year by Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, and others—but Mao gave it its name and its distinctive emancipatory thrust, urging the cautious intellectuals to speak out under his personal assurance of complete freedom. This assurance, according to the best recent evidence available, was at least controversial, possibly unilateral, leaving Mao vulnerable to elite criticism when it resulted in intellectual criticisms of the regime well beyond what he had anticipated. The incident also soured Mao's relationship with the intellectuals, who felt understandably betrayed by the anti-rightist mousetrapping that followed the "blooming," while Mao in turn became suspicious of the sincerity of the intellectuals' conversions. Yet it ironically facilitated new radical initiatives in the short run, by eliminating (through purge and intimidation) one likely source of resistance to them.

The decisive watershed in the shift from corporate to personal charisma was the Great Leap Forward. Hitherto the storming approach had been applied to mass criticism movements and to redistributive programs, but never before on such ambitious scale to economic development.^[43] Economic development had previously been monopolized by the planning apparatus, a centralized, vertical hierarchy branching out from the various ministries and commissions of the State Council in Beijing to the factories and farms of China. The Great Leap was of course not purely economic in focus—like most campaigns, it was a multifunctional affair. It was in part redistributive, in that it resulted in the formation of communes and the confiscation of private plots. It also had aspects of a rectification campaign, oriented as it was against selfish individualism and in favor of the self-reliant, creative capabilities of the masses. There were utopian elements, such as the widespread belief that the commune was the first step in the imminent realization of communist relations of

[42] See John E. Rue, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition , 1927 –1935 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).

[43] True, there was a "mini-leap" to enhance agricultural production in early 1956, but this came more as a concomitant of the successful collectivization drive than as a primary objective. See MacFarquhar, Origins, 1 , pp. 26–33.

production,^[44] or Zhang Chunqiao's article (endorsed in an editorial note by Mao) condemning the "bourgeois wage system" and calling for restoration of the Yan'an free supply system. But its basic, animating rationale was a dramatic acceleration of economic development. It was envisioned that China would suddenly do everything "bigger, better, faster, and more economically," reaching the levels of the advanced industrial countries within fifteen years. And it was the Leap's resounding failure to meet such targets that doomed all of its ancillary objectives.

By dissipating the leadership's accumulated prestige among the masses, the Leap disaster would raise the question of blame. As far as can be determined from the most recent evidence available, there seems to have been a broad leadership consensus in support of the program in its early phases, when its achievements appeared so unprecedented. Chen Yun apparently expressed reservations in 1957 (and was accordingly relieved of his major operational positions), but many normally sober members of the leadership (e.g., Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi) were also carried away on this wave of enthusiasm. All that having been conceded, Mao was conspicuously in the forefront of the campaign, consistently seizing the initiative and sometimes preempting regular decision-making procedures to present his colleagues with faits accomplis . According to Deng Liqun, in a speech to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences:

Our mistakes were made by Chairman Mao. . . . One was the People's Commune movement. In many areas, this one supplied and that one supplied, and Chairman Mao was very happy at the beginning. In 1958, not long after the Beidaihe meeting, Xushui in Hebei was the first to advance to communism. It introduced the total supply system. The chairman was indeed very enthusiastic and wanted to find out how Xushui accomplished it. Taking Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao with him, he asked the county Party committee secretary to make a report. . . . Chairman Mao added the following passage to the decision on the People's Commune at the Beidaihe meeting: "By introducing the People's Commune, three or four, or five or six years later, the collective ownership system will change to the whole-people's ownership system." . . . He also agreed to setting high quotas and doubling the output.^[45]

Another recent commentator had this to say about Mao's increasingly assertive decision-making style:

After the Nanning Conference in January 1958, Comrade Mao Zedong no longer participated in the meetings of the Politburo. He only listened to

[44] In the words of one popular jingle, attributed to Kang Sheng: "Communism is paradise/The People's Commune is the bridge" (Gongchanzhuyi shi tiantang/Renmin gongshe shi qiaoliang), quoted in MacFarquhar, Origins , 2 , p. 129.

[45] Quoted in Lu Zhongjian, "On Assessing Mao," ZM , no. 35 (September 1, 1980): 24–31.

reports and delivered speeches on necessary occasions. What he said could not be changed. The situation became such that Comrade Mao Zedong alone could criticize the Standing Committee members as he pleased. It seemed that everyone else was wrong, that only he himself adhered to Marxism, and that all the others did not follow the socialist road. His criticisms of others were so severe that he practically put himself over and above the Politburo.^[46]

Many of the specific components of the Leap had in fact been bureaucratically generated,^[47] but their enthusiastic mass adoption can be traced to Mao's personal endorsement. It was Mao who first proposed the ideal of People's Communes, because they were larger in scale and had a higher degree of public ownership. At the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, Mao foresaw that China would be able to overtake Russia and realize communism "earlier,"^[48] and again in the Beidaihe Resolution (August 1958) he proclaimed that the transition to communism would not be in the distant future. Its achievement would be facilitated by miraculous increases in production (whose feasibility Mao had championed as early as 1955—in his preface to Socialist Upsurge , he had also discussed the prospect of doubling or trebling productivity within a short period). In July and August of 1958 the target of doubling the output of steel and grain was formally adopted. And in his speech endorsing this target, Mao indulged in the following reverie:

Yesterday, I could not get to sleep. I have something to tell you all. In the past, who ever dreamed that a mu of farmland could produce ten thousand catties of grain? I never dreamed it. . . . If the situation is allowed to continue, I am afraid that our 1.5 billion mu of farmland will be too much. Planting one-third of them is enough; another one-third may be turned into grassland; and let the remaining one-third lie fallow. The whole country will thus become a garden.^[49]

Although a certain tension between the bureaucratic predilection for planning and orderly sequence and the charismatic drive for momentum was already apparent in the "high tide" of collectivization, and again in the 1956 "mini-leap," during the Leap the planning and statistical accounting apparatus was utterly decimated. As Mao later admitted, plans were "suddenly abandoned after the Beidaihe meeting."^[50] In the Sixty Articles, a system of "dual planning" was introduced (one stipulating a

[46] Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 2, p. 90.

[47] David Bachman, "To Leap Forward: Chinese Policy-Making, 1956–1958" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983).

[48] Wansui (1969), p. 204.

[49] Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 2, p. 88.

[50] Wansui (1969), p. 204. See also Kenneth R. Walker, Food Grain Procurement and Consumption in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 129–146.

respectably ambitious public quota, the other setting a higher private quota that was actually expected to be met), which resulted in a continuous raising of targets, and a "wind of exaggeration." Mao's scorn for the advice of experts, expressed at the Chengdu meetings (March 1958) and elsewhere, laid the foundation for exclusive reliance on the mass mobilization of unskilled labor.^[51] Mao even sought to discredit his more cautious colleagues and consecrate his taste for pell-mell advance in ideological terms. At both the Supreme State Conference in January and at the Chengdu meetings he broached his concept of continuous revolution:

I advocate continuous revolution. Do not mistake mine for Trotsky's permanent revolution. A revolution has to be struck while the iron is hot, one revolution has to be followed by another, a revolution has to move forward incessantly. The Hunanese have a saying: "The straw sandal has no pattern, its shape evolves as it is being woven. "[Our revolution proceeded through] the land reform, and after the land reform there was the mutual-aid team, and then elementary cooperatives, followed by advanced cooperatives. Within seven years things were organized within a cooperative pattern, and the relations of production were transformed. And then we started the rectification campaign, with the technological revolution immediately following.^[52]

He also attempted to salvage a starring role for the charismatic leader in leading such a revolution from the damage inflicted by the critique of Stalin's personality cult by distinguishing between "correct" and "incorrect" cults. As he put it at Chengdu on March 10:

There are two kinds of the cult of the individual. One is correct, such as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the correct side of Stalin. These we ought to revere and continue to revere forever. It would not do not to revere them. . . . Then there is the incorrect kind of cult of the individual in which there is no analysis, simply blind obedience. This is not right. Opposition to the cult of the individual may also have one of two aims: one is opposition to an incorrect cult, and the other is oppostition to reverence for others and a desire for reverence for oneself. The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth.^[53]

The leadership first became aware of problems with the Leap by the fall of 1958, though the gravity of the situation did not fully surface until

[51] MacFarquhar, Origins , 2 , pp. 31, 40.

[52] Quoted in Ding Wang, ed. Mao Zedong Xuanji Buyi [Supplement to the selected works of Mao Zedong], vol. 3 (Hong Kong: Ming Bao Monthly Pub., 1971), p. 162; also translated in various compendia.

[53] Mao, "Talks at the Chengdu Conference" (March 10, 1958), trans. in Stuart Schram, ed., Mao Tse-tung Talks to the People (New York: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 99–100.

several months later. As long as he could hold other people accountable for shortcomings, Mao was prepared to make necessary adjustments. At the second Zhengzhou meeting in February-March 1959, Mao harshly criticized the tendency toward egalitarianism and overconcentration commonly found among local cadres. At this time Mao made the startling admission that "while it [viz., the Leap] had a tight grip on production, it ignored livelihood and continued to ignore it until hundreds of thousands of people suffered from malnutrition and people in Beijing had no more than one tael of vegetables each."^[54] Yet he still insisted that the basic line was correct—mistakes were in a ratio of one finger to the other nine. While he tried to correct the trend toward egalitarianism and overconcentration, he still felt that most private plots should be incorporated into the commune and that the free supply system and communal mess halls should be continued.^[55] When he saw the report of a provincial Party secretary having ordered mess halls dissolved in a particular county, Mao denounced him as a "rightist opportunist." Despite concessions to the need for reform, Mao repeatedly emphasized the need to continue the Leap and strengthen the commune. Mistakes were inevitable but should not give rise to doubts; if there had to be criticisms, these should "follow the order of first affirming the achievements of the Great Leap Forward, affirming the superiority of the People's Commune, and then pointing out the weaknesses and mistakes in their actual workings."^[56]

By exposing the full magnitude of the disaster and attributing responsibility to Mao in tactful but unmistakable terms, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, at a famous series of meetings at Lushan in July and August 1959, reinforced Mao's tendency to identify with the program. In the months following Mao's stinging refutation, radical policies were revived and new ones (such as the urban commune movement) introduced in an otherwise pointless effort to vindicate Mao's position. As Bo Yibo put it, with retrospective insight:

Unfortunately, during the latter period of the Lushan meeting, Comrade Mao Zedong erroneously criticized Comrade Peng Dehuai and some other comrades and launched a nation-wide struggle against "right opportunism." This

[54] Wansui (1969), p. 278; also translated in "Mao Tse-tung: Speeches at the Zhengzhou Conference" (February and March 1959), Chinese Law and Government 9 (Winter 1976–77): 18.

[55] Wansui (1969), pp. 288, 284–285.

[56] Mao Zedong, "Dui Anhui shengwei shujichu shuji Zhang Kaifan xialing jiesan Wuwei Xian shitang de baogao de piyu" [A critique of the report by Zhang Kaifan, secretary of the provincial Party committee of Anhui province, explaining his order to dismantle mess halls in Wuwei County], in Ding Wang, Mao Zedong Xuanji Buyi (1971), vol. 3: 238; also Wansui (1969), p. 281

destroyed in a moment all our achievements scored in fighting against leftist mistakes over the past nine months.^[57]

Although Peng Dehuai was thus politically destroyed for his effrontery, the underlying validity of his criticisms was to become apparent (although never officially acknowledged) over the next three years, as the Chinese economy plunged into a deep depression. Chinese economists have recently acknowledged the magnitude of the disaster: according to their statistics, industrial and agricultural production increased by an annual average of only 0.6 percent during the period of the Second FYP (1957–62).^[58] The impact on Chinese living standards was severe, resulting in millions of deaths by starvation (particularly in Shandong, Henan, and Gansu) and in pervasive malnutrition serious enough to affect population growth rates, as a result of excessive procurement of grain based on exaggerated local reports of increases in yield.^[59]

The collapse of the Leap affected the Party's reputation in two ways. First, as already noted, it impaired the prestige of the Party as a whole

[57] Bo Yibo, in HQ , July 1981, as translated in FBIS , July 29, 1981, p. K33.

[58] Industrial growth was 3.8 percent while agricultural output declined by 3.9 percent per annum during the second FYP. Industrial output improved by 36.1 percent in 1959 over the previous year, and by 11.2 percent in 1960 over 1959; but in 1961, it declined by 38.2 percent from the 1960 level. Agricultural output increased in 1958 but declined every year thereafter, falling 26.3 percent over the 1959–61 period. Xu Dixin, "Lun wo guo guominjingji de biange yu fazhan" [An essay on the transformation and development of our national economy], in Editors of Jingji Yanjiu , eds., Shehuizhuyi Zhengzhi Jingjixue Ruogan Jiben Lilun Wenti [Some basic theoretical issues of socialist political economy] (Shandong: People's Press, 1980); see also Sun Shangqing et al., "Zai lun shehuizhuyi jingji de jihua yu shichangxing xiangjiehe de jige lilun wenti" [Further discussion of some theoretical issues concerning the combination of planning and market mechanisms in socialist economy], in Shehuizhuyi Jingji zhong Jihua yu Shichang de Guanxi [Relations between planning and market mechanisms in socialist economy], vol. 1 (Beijing: Chinese Social Science Press, 1980), pp. 98–99.

[59] Gross procurement in 1959–60 reached the remarkable level of 67.49 million tons, which was 32 percent higher than the 1958–59 amount, from an output of 170 million tons, which was 15 percent below that of 1958. Net procurement rose from 15.9 percent of output in 1958–59 to 28 percent in 1959–60. Walker, Food Grain Procurement , p. 149. The famine is examined in Thomas P. Bernstein, "Stalinism, Famine, and Chinese Peasants: Grain Procurements during the Great Leap Forward," Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (May 1984): 339–77. Jürgen Domes, citing Jingji Guanli (no. 3, March 1981, p. 3), estimates a loss of over 20 million people between 1959 and 1962. Domes, The Government and Politics of the PRC : A Time of Transition (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 38, 274. This loss is reflected in Chinese demographic statistics, according to which the average death rate rose from 11 per thousand in 1957 to 17 per thousand in 1958–61, while the birth rate declined from 34 per thousand in 1957 to 23 per thousand in 1958–61. See Judith Bannister, "Population Policy and Trends in China, 1978–83," CQ , no. 100 (December 1984): 717–42.

among the masses, contributing to a demoralization that was to become visible in the corruption described, for example, in the Lianjiang documents of the early 1960s.^[60] Second, it damaged Mao's personal reputation for infallibility among the Party elite. Henceforth, Mao's leadership was tolerated or accommodated amid fairly widespread elite skepticism about the wisdom of his policies, a skepticism that extended as high as the CC itself.

Mao was sensitive to this change in elite reception to his initiatives, to which he responded in two ways. First, he acknowledged his own lack of economic competence in a series of inner-Party self-criticisms. Already in his "statement of opinion" of July 14, 1959, written in response to Peng's criticisms, he admitted that "in 1958 and 1959 I should take main responsibility, it is I who am to blame. In the past, the blame was on others. . . . but now I am to blame for I really have taken charge of a great many things." In the same statement, Mao pointed to some of the drawbacks of attempting to apply storm tactics to economic construction:

Neither coal, iron, nor transportation capacity were correctly calculated. But coal and iron do not stroll through the area by themselves, they must be transported in freight cars. It was precisely this point that I had overlooked. I and Premier Zhou know little of these planning arrangements. I don't want to make excuses, although this is certainly an apology. Until August of last year I applied myself essentially to revolution. For problems of economic, especially industrial, contruction I am really not competent.^[61]

And in his speech to the Supreme Conference on National Affairs in September 1958 he conceded that "for eight or nine years we have not actually grasped industry; our emphasis has been placed on revolution." In a talk on February 2, 1959, he said: "Just like children who play with fire, we just feel hurt after touching it because of lack of experience." Mao made another self-criticism on June 12, 1961, that has never been published, although Mao called for its wider distribution in another speech made the following year.^[62]

The political upshot of such mea culpas was that Mao in effect withdrew from active participation in economic decision-making, giving rise

[60] C. S. Chen, ed., Rural People's Communes in Lien-chiang , trans. Charles Price Ridley (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1969). See also Byung-joon Ahn, "Adjustments in the Great Leap Forward and Their Ideological Legacy, 1959–1962," in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), pp. 257–301.

[61] Mao Zedong, "Talk at the Lushan Conference" (July 23, 1959), Wansui (1969), p. 302.

[62] In order of citation, Mao Zedong, "Summary of a Talk at the Supreme State Conference" (September 1958), Wansui (1969), pp. 243–44; "Talk at a Conference of Provincial and Municipal Party Secretaries" (February 2, 1959), Wansui (1969), p. 278; and "Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference" (January 20, 1962), Wansui (1969), pp. 399–423.

to a division of labor within the elite. The division of the Politburo into two "fronts" apparently antedates this occasion, for there are already references to it in the mid-1950s. But now the distinction was more consistently maintained, as Mao retreated to the "second front," leaving operational problems to the "first front" under Liu Shaoqi (who, as ranking Party vice-chairman, was empowered to convene central meetings in Mao's absence) and Deng Xiaoping (who, as general secretary, took charge of day-to-day Party administration). The long-run implication was that any attempt by Mao to recover his own reputation would take ideological rather than operational form. He first took the opportunity to try out his new ideas in the polemic against Yugoslav and Soviet "revisionism"; then in 1964–65 he began to turn that critique against analogous developments in the PRC.

The second aspect of Mao's ambivalent response to his colleagues' less receptive demeanor was one of denial of guilt, and a concomitant tendency to scapegoat those colleagues who seemed to have lost faith in him. From his colleagues' perspective, this was of course unfair; as Deng Xiaoping later put it:

He always complained with everybody because, he protested, they didn't listen to him or they didn't consult him, they did not keep him informed. Well, it was not true for the others, it was true for me. And I did that because I did not like his patriarchal behavior. . . . He never wanted to know the ideas of others, no matter how right they might be, he never wanted to hear opinions different from his. He really behaved in an unhealthy, feudal way.^[63]

He became acutely sensitive to criticism, retaliating promptly with the application of pejorative ideological "labels" but also keeping score of Aesopian intimations of his fallibility for later, more thorough retribution (the most famous examples being Wu Han's famous play and the "three-family village" newspaper column published in Beijing Evening News ).

One eventual concomitant of this denial was a reassertion of Mao's infallibility, in a publicity blitz launched with the help of the recently promoted Lin Biao. The vehicle for this revival was the Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong , a small text (designed to fit into a uniform jacket pocket) of quotations extracted from their historical context and arranged thematically. First distributed within the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 1961, the Quotations was printed in a mass edition in May 1964, reprinted in 1965. By the Cultural Revolution, over 700 million copies of the text had been distributed, a number then equal to that of the

[63] Oriana Fallaci, "Deng: Cleaning Up Mao's 'Feudal Mistakes,'" Washington Post , part 1 (August 31, 1980), pp. D 1 ff; part 2 (September 1, 1980), pp. A1 ff.

population of China.^[64] The campaign to "study" and memorize these excerpts resulted in an extension by analogy of the infallibility principle, as the masses were encouraged to apply Maoist precepts to all walks of life. To judge from the in camera statements later leaked and attributed to Mao's colleagues, there was inner-Party resistance, never explicitly bruited, to what was regarded as "vulgarization."

To summarize in terms of charismatic development, a "corporate charismatic" leadership agreed upon a salvationary mission in the immediate post-Liberation period, and successfully performed it during the ensuing decade, relying primarily on engineering tactics. By the end of 1956, the part of the mission on which consensus could be obtained had been "exhausted," with generally favorable results: the economic and family structures had been radically transformed, enemies had been largely destroyed or reeducated (as we shall see in the next chapter), all amid rapid economic growth. That all this had been accomplished was so encouraging that it was perhaps not immediately clear that the exhaustion of a salvationary mission would require a fundamental reorientation if the revolution were to continue. The initial leadership impulse was to retire from the revolution amid plaudits—one reason the bitter harvest of the Hundred Flowers came as such a shock, exposing enclaves of opposition that suggested the revolution was unfinished. Those among the leadership most committed to permanent revolution (and least equipped to "retune" to routine economic management), including Mao and many other symbol specialists, resisted its abandonment. Thus, in the Great Leap Forward, mission was redefined to include economic hypergrowth. Whereas heretofore charisma had remained uneasily corporate in its subjective dimension, the disaster of the Leap marked a shift to personalized charisma, as Mao became semidetached from a bureaucratic staff that he felt had let him down. The shift presaged the polarization between charismatic leadership and bureaucracy that was to culminate in the Cultural Revolution.

A second important consequence is that in the post-Leap redivision of functions, those who assumed responsibility for organizational maintenance tacitly abandoned the mission for the time being, becoming completely absorbed in salvaging the economy. They thereby forfeited responsibility for reformulating the mission to Mao alone, who had meanwhile essentially relinquished operational control of the domestic policy process. This foreboded a tendency toward idealization in the definition of mission. As the Leap lost credibility in the wake of the "three bad years" and no new mission made its debut, there was also a

[64] Helmut Martin, Cult and Canon , p. 26. In toto, about 2 billion copies would ultimately be published.

tendency to shift from a mission-based charisma to one based on a deified personality.