MCLC: Mao's Little Red Book review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Alexander C. Cook <accook at berkeley.edu>
Subject: Mao's Little Red Book review
***********************************************************

Dear MCLC Friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History
is now available from Cambridge University Press. Please find below a link
to a promotional interview I did with Voice of America (with audio) and
then a review (not entirely favorable!) from the New Statesman:

Voice of America interview with Alexander C. Cook:
http://www.voanews.com/content/qa-with-alexander-cook-the-powers-of-maos-li
ttle-red-book/1909226.html

Alex Cook

===================================================

Source: New Statesman, Cultural Capital Blog (5/24/14):
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/05/how-west-embraced-chairman-mao-
s-little-red-book

How the west embraced Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book
By JOHN GRAY

At the peak of its popularity, Mao's bible was the most printed book in
the world. It attained the status of a sacred, holy text during the
Cultural Revolution, and retains its place among western devotees.

In 1968 a Red Guard publication instructed that scientists must follow Mao
Zedong’s injunction: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every
difficulty to win victory.” Expert knowledge was not valid, and might be
dangerously misleading, without the great leader’s guidance. Examples of
revolutionary science abounded at the time. In one account, a soldier
training to be a veterinarian found it difficult to castrate pigs.
Studying Mao’s words enabled him to overcome this selfish reaction and
gave him courage to perform the task. In another inspirational tale, Mao’s
thoughts inspired a new method of protecting their crops from bad weather:
making rockets and shooting them into the sky, peasants were able to
disperse the clouds and prevent hailstorms.

By the time the Red Guard publication appeared, Mao’s Little Red Book had
been published in numbers sufficient to supply a copy to every Chinese
citizen in a population of more than 740 million. At the peak of its
popularity from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, it was the most printed
book in the world. In the years between 1966 and 1971, well over a billion
copies of the official version were published and translations were issued
in three dozen languages. There were many local reprints, illicit editions
and unauthorised translations. Though exact figures are not possible, the
text must count among the most widely distributed in all history. In the
view of Daniel Leese, one of the contributors to Mao’s Little Red Book,
the volume “ranks second only to the Bible” in terms of print circulation.

Originally the book was conceived for internal use by the army. In 1961,
the minister of defence Lin Biao – appointed by Mao after the previous
holder of the post had been sacked for voicing criticism of the disastrous
Great Leap Forward – instructed the army journal the PLA Daily to publish
a daily quotation from Mao. Bringing together hundreds of excerpts from
his published writings and speeches and presenting them under thematic
rubrics, the first official edition was printed in 1964 by the general
political department of the People’s Liberation Army in the
water-resistant red vinyl design that would become iconic.

With its words intended to be recited in groups, the correct
interpretation of Mao’s thoughts being determined by political commissars,
the book became what Leese describes as “the only criterion of truth”
during the Cultural Revolution. After a period of “anarchic quotation
wars”, when it was deployed as a weapon in a variety of political
conflicts, Mao put the lid on the book’s uncontrolled use. Beginning in
late 1967, military rule was imposed and the PLA was designated “the great
school” for Chinese society. Ritual citation from the book became common
as a way of displaying ideological conformity; customers in shops
interspersed their orders with citations as they made their purchases.
Long terms of imprisonment were handed out to anyone convicted of damaging
or destroying a copy of what had become a sacred text.

The editor of Mao’s Little Red Book writes in the preface that this is
“the first scholarly effort to understand Quotations from Chairman Mao as
a global historical phenomenon”. It is an accurate description, but the
collection has the shortcomings that are to be expected in a book of
essays by academic authors. The prose style is mostly stodgy and
convoluted, and the contributors seem anxious to avoid anything that might
smack of a negative attitude towards the ideas and events they describe.
“As a group,” the editor continues, “we are diverse with respect to age,
gender, ethnicity and political sympathies.” He is right that, judged by
prevailing standards, it is a well-balanced group. All of the relevant
disciplines are represented – history, area studies, literature, political
science and sociology – and although ten of the 13 contributors teach in
the US, the collection is representative of the range of views of China
that you will find in universities in much of the world. However, the fact
that it reflects the present state of academic opinion is also the book’s
most important limitation.

Reading the essays brought together here, you would hardly realise that
Mao was responsible for one of the biggest human catastrophes in recorded
history. Launched by him in 1958, the Great Leap Forward cost upwards of
45 million human lives. “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to
death,” Mao observed laconically. “It is better to let half of the people
die so that the other half can eat their fill.” He did not specify how
those condemned to perish would be made to accept their fate. Ensuing
events provided the answer: mass executions and torture, beatings and
sexual violence against women were an integral part of a politically
induced famine that reduced sections of the population to eating roots,
mud and insects, and others to cannibalism. When Mao ordered an end to the
horrific experiment in 1961, it was in order to launch another. The
Cultural Revolution was nothing like as costly in fatalities, but it left
a trail of broken lives and cultural devastation, the memory of which is
one of the chief sources of the post-Mao regime’s legitimacy.

There will be some who object that everyone knows about Mao’s failings –
why bang on about them now? However, if today we know the scale of Mao’s
crimes, it is not as a result of decades of academic work on the subject.
The first detailed examination of the famine, Hungry Ghosts (1996), was
written by the Hong Kong-based journalist Jasper Becker. It was only in
2010 that the historian Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine appeared, a
pioneering study based on years of research in recently opened Chinese
archives. Apart from accounts given in the memoirs of those who survived,
the human costs of the Cultural Revolution were best captured by Simon
Leys (the pen-name of the Belgian sinologist and literary critic Pierre
Ryckmans) in his books Chinese Shadows (1974) and The Burning Forest
(1987). The authoritative and revelatory Mao: the Unknown Story (2005) is
the work of Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday. Aside from
Dikötter’s, none of the books that captured the human experience of life
under Mao was written by a professional academic.

In fastidiously avoiding any reference to the oppressive realities of the
Mao years, academics were faithful followers of conventional opinion. The
predominant western perception of Mao’s regime was of a progressive
political project – if at times it got a little out of hand, that was no
more than the exuberance that goes naturally with such a liberating
enterprise. When in the 1970s I raised with a British communist the
millions who were killed in rural purges in the years immediately after
Mao came to power, he told me, “Those sorts of numbers are just for
western consumption.” Further conversation showed that his estimates of
the actual numbers were significantly lower than those conceded by the
regime. No doubt unwittingly, he had stumbled on a curious truth: the
prestige of the Mao regime in the west was at its height when the
leadership was believed to be at its most despotic and murderous. For some
of its western admirers, the regime’s violence had a compelling charm in
its own right.

Julian Bourg recounts how in France Mao’s thoughts became à la mode with
the August 1967 release of La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard’s film about a
youthful Parisian Maoist sect. Among French thinkers, Bourg notes, “Mao’s
language of violence had a certain rhetorical appeal.” In fact, it was his
combination of rhetorical violence with sub-Hegelian dialectical logic
that proved so irresistible to sections of the French intelligentsia.
Eulogising Mao’s distinction between principal and secondary
contradictions, Louis Althusser deployed Maoist categories as part of an
extremely abstract and, indeed, largely meaningless defence of “the
relative autonomy of theory”.

Althusser’s student Alain Badiou (for many years professor of philosophy
at the École Normale Supérieure) continued to defend Maoism long after the
scale of its casualties had become undeniable. As recently as 2008, while
commending himself for being “now one of Maoism’s few noteworthy
representatives”, Badiou praised Mao’s thought as “a new politics of the
negation of the negation”. From one point of view, this stance is merely
contemptible – a professorial pirouette around a vast pile of corpses. But
one must bear in mind the fathomless frivolity of some on the French left.
Already in 1980, two former Maoist militants had announced their rejection
of the creed in the language of fashion: “China was in . . . Now it is out
. . . we are no longer Maoists.” Against this background, Badiou’s
persistence is almost heroically absurd.

In the west, Maoism had two defining characteristics: it bore no relation
to conditions in China, in regard to which its proponents remained
invincibly ignorant; and it was embraced by sections of an intellectual
class that was, for political purposes, almost entirely irrelevant. In
Italy, Mao’s thought had for a time a slightly wider influence.

As Dominique Kirchner Reill writes, discussing Maoism in Italy and
Yugoslavia, “In Italy Mao-mania was not purely a left-wing phenomenon.
Some ultra-right groups quoted their Little Red Books to justify their
arguments.” In 1968-73 the neo-fascist party Lotto di Popolo (“the
people’s fight”) lauded Mao as an exemplary nationalist and resolute
opponent of US global hegemony. In a footnote Reill observes that the
“Nazi-Maoist movement in Italy included many other figures and groups”
besides the Lotto di Popolo. It is a pity this aspect of Mao’s influence
is not explored in greater detail.

Despite its inevitable limitations as an academic text, Mao’s Little Red
Book contains much that is of interest. In a programmatic introductory
essay Alexander C Cook compares the Chinese leader’s book to a “spiritual
atom bomb” and considers its global fallout. Showing how it reflects the
influence of the choral singing introduced into China by 19th-century
Christian missionaries, Andrew F Jones provides an illuminating account of
the rise of the Maoist pop song. Taking as her starting point the global
distribution of the Little Red Book to over a hundred countries in the
eight months between October 1966 and May 1967, Xu Lanjun examines the
process of translation in the context of Maoist ideas of global
revolution. Quinn Slobodian discusses the impact the book had in eastern
and western Germany. In the concluding essay, Ban Wang considers the
Little Red Book and “religion as politics” in China. Elsewhere, its
influence in Tanzania, India, Peru, Albania and the former Soviet Union is
discussed.

To my mind, the most illuminating contributions are those of Slobodian and
Wang. Distinguishing between “badge books” and “brand books”, Slobodian
defines the former as “books that express meaning through their outer
form”, while brand books are “commodities that are consumed within the
space of the market”. In West Germany in the late 1960s, the Little Red
Book “resembled simultaneously an accessory of the classical workers’
movement and a modish commodity of the educated elite”. In theatres,
across from the refreshments, there were glass cases “full of pretty red
Mao bibles (two Deutsche Marks each)”. As an anti-consumerist commodity,
the book became “a marker of social distinction within a commercial
market”.

For Wang, the book “represented a scriptural authority and emanated a
sacred aura”. During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an
unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving
“ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly
diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be
seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious
hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical
texts”.

It was not long before the Little Red Book and anyone connected with it
fell out of favour with the Chinese authorities. In September 1971, Lin
Biao – who had first promoted the use of Mao’s quotations in the army –
died in a plane crash in circumstances that have never been properly
explained. Condemned as distorting Mao’s ideas and exerting a “widespread
and pernicious influence”, the book was withdrawn from circulation in
February 1979 and a hundred million copies pulped.

If it was used as scripture during the Cultural Revolution, the Little Red
Book had something of the same function for its western devotees. In
China, studying the book was believed to have enabled peasants to control
the weather. In the west, its practical efficacy was more limited. Among
the radical intelligentsia, it provided a fantasy of revolution that
enabled them to forget that their political influence was practically
non-existent. As China has embraced a type of capitalism and turned itself
into the world’s second-largest economy, original editions have become a
scarce commodity. Today the great leader’s thoughts have joined a host of
trashy collectibles – Mao fridge magnets, CD cases, cigarette lighters and
playing cards, among other bric-a-brac – and become items whose only value
lies in the commercial marketplace. The Little Red Book has now achieved
what looks like being its most enduring significance: as a piece of
capitalist kitsch.

John Gray is the New Statesman’s lead book reviewer.