The film is mercifully free of many of the clichés that dog the official history of China handed down from the Cold War:
The third paragraph is most shocking--Mao offered to meet three US presidents and was roundly ignored. Although this differs in the sense that its secret diplomacy, it reminds me of Fidel Castro's tour to the United States when he had not yet declared himself a "Marxist-Leninist" or his movement as communist walking around harlem and bringing flowers to the Lincoln memorial. The US knew that Castro was not actually communist or particularly anti-American but opposed to a brutal pro-American regime that ran the country as a fiefdom for the sugar industry and organized crime. However, the anti-communist religion in the US distorts the lens and confuses cause and effect Castro turning to the Soviet Union and declaring himself a communist was not caused by the cold shoulder he received in Washington or continued American belligerence towards the new regime but in fact the US turned a cold shoulder to him and continued to carry out its righteous actions because he was a communist on the sly and an anti-American at heart. China is a similar story, if Mao offered to meet three presidents, including Eisenhower who Nixon served as Vice-President, then the truth is the PRC was not some sort of enigmatic radically isolationist regime about which Nixon learned of its openness to dialogue through Ceaușescu and merely seized the opportunity. Mao didn't turn to the United States because he was dying and the Cultural Revolution had failed; he had been open to having relations all along, even freshly following the Korean War that had killed his own son. Nearly all historians agree that China was the biggest shock that kicked off the McCarthyist campaign that ruined thousands of lives and careers and broke the back of the powerful progressive Left that had grew up during the Great Depression and WWII. "Who Lost China?" was after all the rallying cry for the McCarthyist current in America and continued antagonism towards Red China's very existence was something of a mea culpa for that embarrassing episode once McCarthy's games had become both a nuisance to the ruling class and discredited in front of the American public and the world. The Vietnamese and Korean wars were driven just as much, if not more so, by a desire to contain the boogeyman of communist China as it was by the desire to repress the national liberation movements there--in that respect the containment policies that aided in producing the result of Vietnam and Korea are not so different from the policies being pursued today. Millions of lives in Asia were lost, along with that of about 100,000 US servicemen, for what was, to put it gently, a hoax. In fact, while bombs were still raining all over Indochina and the youth of Chile were being tortured and raped by old Nazi expats and thrown from helicopters--Nixon and Mao were cementing a seismic geopolitical alliance. While all these crimes were being committed in the name of stopping "communism" the American president had struck a deal with the chairman of the country whose ruling party was allegedly the most communist party among the communist nations, how could that happen?China presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today, it stands in the heart of a very capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada.Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. “China must industrialise.” he wrote, “This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict.”Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington “when the catatonic Cold War trance,” wrote the critic James Naremore, “held our country in its rigid grip”.The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.
If you take anti-communist wisdom at its word you would conclude that it couldn't--excepting for the Christian concept of hypocrisy, but then you really have to condemn all of humanity as well don't you? But at least Washington thought it knew what it was doing at the time right? Well, here's the thing about that, to think you know everything about a subject its kinda implied that you at least you know something about the subject and in the 1950s Washington did not have one Chinese speaker on their payroll as Pilger reveals. All the China experts had been cleaned out in the "anti-communist" purges of the 50s. We had no relations with a country that we had longstanding, though not always friendly, relations with going all the way back to the 18th century and furthermore when open trade relations were resumed China was no longer a war-torn famine-ridden wreck with little to no industry, considerable industrialization and improvement in popular welfare had occurred under Mao making China's position vis-a-vis trade with the United States much stronger then it would've been had the US agreed to trade relations in China in 1949. The United States in 1950 had a trade-surplus and a large industrial base that was bursting at the seems to dump its surplus goods, and China would've been an ideal place to sell everything from cars, to shoes, to industrial equipment; America in 1976 was in chronic trade deficit and in fact its factories were beginning to shut-down and move offshore and into the picture stepped China to become the producer of first resort for American retail. The ultimate irony is that for patriots and boosters of American capitalism (and democracy) the American policy towards China was a disaster; it produced exactly the opposite result of what they believed they were fighting for in their minds.
A Critique of Maoism
Enver Hoxha wrote of the peculiar outlook of the Chinese communists and how it was viewed favorably by the old China hands like John Service:
The American envoys attached to Mao Zedong's staff in the years 1944-1949 have described in detail the views, attitudes, activity and demands of Mao Zedong towards the United States of America. One of these envoys was John Service, political adviser to the commander of the American forces on the Burma-China front and later secretary of the American Embassy to the Chiang Kai-shek government in Chongqing. He was one of the first of the American intelligence agents who made official contact with the leaders of thia Communist Party of China, although there were continual unofficial contacts. Speaking about the Chinese leaders, Service admits: "Their outlook impresses one as modern. Their understanding of economics, for instance, is very similar to ours." (J. Service, Lost Chance in China, New York 1974, p.195) "It is not surprising," he continues, "that they had favourably impressed most or all of the Americans who have met them during the last seven years: their manners, habits of thought, and direct handling of problems seem more American than Oriental." (Ibidem, p.198)The comparison with American democracy actually makes Maoism intellectually and historically intelligible; consider the fact that Sun Yat-sen (who Mao never failed to praise) had sought to create an odd-mash of American Democracy and Soviet socialism. This "post-colonial" outlook that sought to both take the best of both worlds from the Western and the Soviet models picking and choosing what was allegedly best in both was not unique to the Chinese national bourgeoisie. But it was perhaps China that manifested this contradiction in the strangest and most absurd ways. Sun Yat-sen presided over a republic that was in many ways premised on an American bourgeois-democratic model but was in alliance with the USSR and proclaimed Lenin and Stalin to be friends to their republic. Lenin for his part, reciprocated and proclaimed Sun Yat-sen's bold strike against oriental despotism and a great progressive step for China. Perhaps no man in Lenin's lifetime illustrated his thesis that the nationalist bourgeoisie in colonial countries could be a progressive force in the fight against imperialism more then Sun Yat-sen who had declared war on both indigenous feudal custom and foreign imperialist domination. In reality, Sun Yat-sen's China while officially an enlightened democratic-socialist state was a place where feudal backwardness/superstition, disunification, growing foreign domination/dismemberment, and brutal ever-growing capitalist exploitation. One perverse aspect of it was the fact that the entire KMT banking and collection system was reliant on domestic opium cultivation, in addition to the continued foreign importation of drugs, this colonial legacy was internalized on a grand scale exacerbating the massive destruction of the health and wealth of China's people caused by this trade. While Chiang Kai-Shek was a fierce anti-communist he had himself been trained in the USSR, he had led the movement to smash the power of the feudal warlords of the Chinese North, a campaign that also allegedly received support from the Soviets if Richard Bernstein's book is to be believed. At this time Chiang could be considered a revolutionary but when he took the counter-revolutionary step of purging the communists and was seen to be making peace with the landlords and encroaching Japanese imperialism this relationship did not come to its natural end. As Japan savaged China, Chiang's forces had been trained by both Soviet and Nazi military officers and both German and Soviet equipment was to be found, the latter pouring in large quantities after Japan's blatant seizures of Chinese territory. Despite the seeming omni-presence of American business, missionaries, journalists, and spies in Nationalist China, American aid was nowhere to be found, in fact the Roosevelt administration continued to trade and sell essential strategic materials to Japan up until 1940.
The weirdness of these conflicts within interwar and WWII China is represented first by the KMT, in theory it represented a proper bourgeois democracy but in practice it was governed through ruthless terror and, was at the same time, subordinate to the landlord class in practice; like any democratic capitalist regime you could say it sought a "popular capitalism" but in reality Chinese capitalism under the KMT was dominated by just four big families. A further contradiction while it was allegedly Nationalist, and indeed was the first to waive the flag of modern Chinese nationalism, it was beholden to foreign powers, especially "friendly" powers such as the US and Britain. The further irony is that in many ways the CPC was what the KMT aspired or claimed to be: it was closer to American democracy in its outlook then the kleptocratic KMT regime and its heavily traditionalist outlook. It claimed to be "communist" but in fact when it came to power it was much closer to the popular and modern capitalism that the KMT claimed to be building. And in fact, considering the significant land reform and welfarist elements of Maoist China and successes of modern China at pulling so many out of extreme poverty it could be justly called the most successful and most popularly-oriented form of capitalism in history, and indisputably it holds this title when compared against any capitalism emerging from a traditionalist and formerly colonized society.
Service's observation that the understanding of economics was very similar to the American understanding of the time was not off-base. This famous fragment from Mao on state-capitalism from 1953 is in-line with that observation:
The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People's Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state.
But the problem with Maoism isn't that this pro-capitalist stance wasn't limited to just the People's Democracy phase which Maoists often defend as being similar to the Soviet NEP period in intent and function. In fact, New Democracy and the Soviet NEP were only superficially similar, as the property of the Russian industrial bourgeoisie (as well as other factions of the big bourgeoise) were confiscated and capitalism was left functioning among the peasantry whose property could not be collectivized in one sweep; whereas during the New Democracy period in China the national bourgeoisie was quite free to reap and privately appropriate its the fruits of the labor of the working class for seven years. The Albanian press in Hoxha's time described how the nationalization of the property of the national bourgeoisie occurred:
To achieve the so-called “integration of the capitalist economy into socialism” the Chinese revisionists utilize some forms which, with their content, ensure the road of capitalist development of the economy. Some enterprises of heavy industry, of rail and sea transport were bought over by the state with immediate compensation, and their owners were kept as directors and given fat salaries. The income accruing from the sale of these enterprises were deposited by the capitalists in the National Bank of China, which began immediately to pay them an interest rate equal to the average profit when the enterprises were their property. In this manner, the promise about the nationalization of the means of production was partially, though only formally and for demagogic reason, honoured, but the relations of exploitation were maintained, except that now the exploitation of the working masses by the bourgeoisie was achieved through finance capital.So we begin to see that the real problem of Maoist economics wasn't the problems inherited from New Democratic period, or from "dogmatic" adherence to Soviet models, or as the Western bourgeoisie would have us believe--of a grave restriction of private property and individual enterprise but rather in the implementation of its so-called socialist model. We can dismiss any notion of the poor oppressed Chinese businessman suffering under the tyranny of the majority out of hand:
The Chinese revisionists went into partnership with another section of capitalists by making investments from state funds in the capitalist enterprises, or by setting up new enterprises with joint funds of the state and the capitalists, In both categories of enterprises, the capitalists were recognized the right of sharing in the profits with the state to the extent of capital invested, of remaining in the more important leading posts and receiving wages from two to five times higher than those of high state functionaries for equal work. From this practice, until 1970 the Chinese big bourgeoisie made a profit of 6 billion 150 million yuan (2 billion 350 million yuan more than its estimated capital in the first years after liberation), of which 2 billion 800 million yuan from the sharing of profits and the rest from bonuses, from the 5 per cent interest rate and high salaries. This process continues up to this day. As the revisionist chiefs themselves have admitted, this practice includes also the Chinese capitalists who have assumed American citizenship, most of whom have emigrated for the crimes they have committed against the Chinese people and their close collaboration with the Chiang Kai-shek regime (From the newspaper “Wenhuibau”, May 1968).
Even Maurice Meisner a noted China historian who is quite sympathetic to the Maoist socialist experiment admits that the nationalization of property happened this way. So to be quite fundamentalist about it we see the root problem in the Maoist model of socialism--the expropriators hadn't really been expropriated, as Lenin and Stalin taught, but in fact were bought out; even so, it was not a clean divorce, but the kind where the marriage formally ends but the philandering continues. In many ways, Maoist economics is quite similar to Titoism except that it was less blatant in its sell-out to capitalist forces. The question some skeptical reader might ask is why did Chinese capitalists allow nearly the whole of the economy to be put under nominal state control when Western capitalists screech demagogically screech that any government spending on social need is nothing but encroaching socialism and a mob-rule of economic illiteracy? Why would Chinese capitalists concoct such a wild "conspiracy" to advance their class rule when Western capitalists seem to be in a hurry to "privatize everything"? Culture plays a role here: while a supposed Asian aversion to private property was a mere mystification invented by colonially oriented anthropologists in Asia, due to the particularities of the feudal mode of production there, there has always been a large state-presence and direct state ownership in East Asian economies. It was often the case that their feudal classes appropriated the product and labor of the peasantry through their bureaucratic domination of the state. Saying this does not mean we have to pay any mind to Western bourgeois platitudes that bureaucracy is a special and unique evil or that these societies were inherently less dynamic for this reason. For example, Japan is often considered the closest thing to the Western feudal model in Asia, but there was a key difference: the samurai stratum of the aristocracy were generally paid servants and bureaucrats either for the Shogun(s) or for the monarchy--not landlords themselves. While the Samurai constituted the mass-base of the Japanese aristocracy (estimated by some to make up 14% of the population), and in a certain sense its die-hard element, in the end the Meiji revolutionaries found it easier to shed the dead-weight of the samurai then to pursue a real program of land reform. Since the monarchy ended up controlling a great deal of the rent-bearing land anyway it logically saw no need to let its own property go and thus the royal family was both Japan's largest landowner and capitalist prior to the Allied Occupation.By the end of 1956 virtually all private industry (with the exception of handicrafts) was converted into “joint-state-private” enterprises. This massive transformation was accompanied by parades of businessmen beating gongs and carrying red flags as they marched to government ministries to petition to have their companies converted into joint-state-private companies. The capitalists were placed at the head of the new joint-state- private companies and new state-appointed officials joined them in management.
Although the state had never been absent in Japan's economic success it became more interventionist with the advent of the Occupation government where American New Deal planners got a chance to take a whirl at redesigning the Japanese economy on a scale they'd never be allowed to do it home. Certain things like the planning of the new Japanese economy (which was influenced by the Soviet five year plan) other forms of state ownership/intervention, land reform and welfare redistributionism are reminiscent not only of Maoist and modern China but in the model pursued by developing East Asian states generally. When we leave aside the cultural particularities of this region we see that this move towards state intervention/control and welfarism is emblematic of a world trend and that the reason for the existence of this trend is rooted in an intensification of the class struggle. The failure of the lassiez-faire model premised on late 19th century neoclassicism was vividly and undeniably exposed during the World Wars and the Great Depression. The existence of the Soviet Union as an alternative to capitalist rule and the tottering of formal European imperialism caused a great re-think in capitalist economics that would later come to be known as the Keynesian shift. Service was not wrong to assert that the understanding of economics common to among the Maoists in the 30s and 40s was very similar to the shift in economic understanding occurring in the New Deal United States. One thing about America that perplexed economic observers from Engels to Count Okuma was the hesitancy of the United States in embracing free trade even when it was clear its economic output was so massive that it could overpower its rivals on the free market. First, United States shared the impressions of 19th century nationalist leaders and dissident economists all-over the Western hemisphere that free trade was mainly to the benefit of the powerful former European colonial powers that they had seceded from. Secondly, as the conquerer of a continent with immense national resources the United States found there were relatively few things that it could not supply for itself indigenously from its home economy, unlike European countries that were heavily dependent on foreign trade. It is not a coincidence that a tradition of ecological thinking with an emphasis on conservation was first began among American economists as they were convinced that free trade would diminish the natural splendor of "their" continent to benefit of European powers. Into this political economic milieu stepped Franklin Roosevelt and his team of New Deal economists some of whom were influenced by utopian socialist ideologies and varying shades of dissident bourgeois political economy. The mobilization of the unemployed by the state in programs such as the WPA was to become one of the great prescriptions of Dr. Keynes and his new orthodoxy; these were Doctors orders that, unfortunately, were seldom followed. As most historians concede it was really WWII that put an end to the Great Depression (though in 1940 there were some promising signs of in much of the capitalist world particularly France) but the needs of WWII drove the output of the American economy to unprecedented heights but to manage this enormous effort the United States government took direct control of the US economy and in directing the Federal Reserve bank in a way that was unprecedented both before and since. The issuing of greenbacks and the founding and direct investment in industries relating to war during the Civil War was the only event that came close in scale, intent, and effect.
As it became clear that the United States would emerge victorious in the war, and that the European empires could not continue in the old way, the United States began to reach into Britain's old bag of free-market tricks. While Britain was the undisputed hegemon of the world market it willingly embraced free-trade to the point where it became a national religion; the reason for that is simple, just like in any war, in the market its the biggest, baddest capitalist nation and group of capitalists who benefit the most from such no-holds-barred freedom of action. The United States stepped into these shoes once it had indisputably become the biggest baddest capitalist nation but the similarities in policy were superficial. The economic planners of the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations were reaching for something that wasn't free trade in the dominant classical and neoclassical sense but something that was only a pantomime of free trade. In this new version of free trade, trade would be constrained within the limitations of the new international economic institutions that America was building; America would retain all the privileges that come with being the free trade hegemony but its state would continue to interfere in its internal economy in order to stimulate and manage it--in addition to the unilateral ability to interfere in the world market that it claimed a right to. Although the form is very different is there not a similarity between the "right" of the United States to print money in order to prime its economy at will within a free trade context and the massive state-ownership and direction that occurs within the Chinese economy. To say nothing of the veiled protectionism practiced by both parties even if they both preach the financial sobriety of neoliberalism. It was not for nothing that David Harvey observed that America and China were really the twin Keynesian drivers, or cores, of the neoliberal world order. If not for China's enormous stimulatory effect, which accounts for half of global growth, its hard to imagine exactly how the capitalist world system would plod along in this era of long downturns and slower annual growth rates. The United States plays a similar role not only as the alleged war horse of the Western world which was considerably weakened by WWII but also as the consumer of last resort.
If we were to imagine the political economy of Maoist China in a post-war era where US leaders had actually taken up Mao on his offer after 1956 it likely would've been similar but with a far more proportionally extensively state-owned economy in than exists in China today; on the upshot far-more Chinese goods would've been sourced from handicrafts, small peasant proprietors, and small enterprises then whats common in China today which is increasingly dominated by large corporations and monopolies. We can understand the affinity of the Chinese national bourgeoisie for joint-state-ownership in the fact that Chinese business could not compete with Western monopolies--some of which were probably larger in scale then the Chinese state itself immediately after liberation. We can also surmise that this is probably a reason why the Chinese bourgeoisie continues to be hesitant about kicking away the ladder of state-subsidy, protection, and nominal state ownership; we shouldn't begrudge the Chinese capitalists too much for this, after all the Western capitalists, whatever their rhetoric, are unwilling to do this themselves. The oddity of Mao Zedong's China in this scenario would've been the fact that prior to the Sino-Soviet split China would've been the only member of Soviet bloc whose major trade partner is the United States. As it actually happened, China's absence from the American market and even the world market to some extent (thanks to non-recognition and sanctions) didn't hurt China too much since it could only compete on the world market with great difficulty and China had large internal market with great potential to draw from. One last thing that should be noted in the similarity between American and Chinese political economy of the time is the fact that land-reform was implemented in Japan under the Occupation and in US allies Taiwan and South Korea and in China. This was partially done in order to subvert a communist movement in those countries by preempting the land-reform that a communist party would follow but the undeniable benefits of land-reform in making capitalism, especially a developing capitalist state, work better then it would otherwise. But after the 40s and 50s the United States lost its stomach for such bourgeois-revolutionary measures, after all implementing such programs violated the religious feeling for the sanctity of private property that America was trying to instill in the world and, after all, does not rent in its capitalist form continue to exist in the most advanced capitalist society in the world? Unsurprisingly, counter-revolutionary America began taking a technocratic approach to social issues like land-ownership and farming, and hunger after WWII. It might even be said that America's approach to the issue was worse then doing nothing as it discouraged and refused to grant loans to developing countries to help develop their agriculture in order to keep them dependent on the subsidized agriculture of the US and other imperialist countries. In this sense, Mao did for China what American capitalists of his time acknowledged as necessary but were simply unwilling or unable to do in China or in many other places around the world; we see the fruits of the American approach in places like Guatemala and India. Some have said that the way in which China has modernized (under capitalism) has vindicated Chiang Kai-Shek's worldview and his vision of China--maybe Chiang imagined a modernized industrial China but the facts were he simply wasn't able to do it. It was a much simpler task on a small island colony defended by American warships and generally funded by US imperialism to say nothing of the lucrative profits of the drug trade! But of course the false dichotomy between Mao and Chiang assumes that 1. there was no alternative between them 2. Mao's true intention really was to build communism in China
Mao the Stalinist?
Anyone who believes that Mao was a fervent defender and student of Stalin is a person that hasn't read much of Mao's works. For instance, during a rather famous talk with a group of Japanese socialists Mao when the Kuril island issue was brought up Mao replied:
The places occupied by the Soviet Union are very many. In accordance with the Yalta Agreement, the Soviet Union, under the pretext of assuring the independence of Mongolia, actually placed that country under its domination. Mongolia covers an area much greater than that of the Kurile Islands. When Khrushchev and Bulganin were in China in 1954 we raised this question, but they refused to speak to us about it. They annexed a part of Rumania. They cut off a part of East Germany and chased the local inhabitants into the western part. They cut off a part of Poland and included it in Russia, and as compensation gave Poland a part of East Germany. The same happened in Finland. They cut off everything that was possible to cut off. Some people have declared that Sinkiang Province and the territory north of the Amur River should be included in the U.S.S.R. The U.S.S.R is concentrating troops on its borders.
The Soviet Union covers an area of 22 million square kilometers and its population totals 200 million people. The time has come for it to stop annexations. Japan covers an area of 370,000 square kilometers and has a population of 100 million. It has been only 100 years that the land east of the Baikal has been Russian territory, and it is from those times that Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other points can be considered territory of the Soviet Union. We have not yet presented accounts on this score. As far as the Kurile Islands are concerned, the question is clear for us — they should be returned to Japan.
While an orthodox Maoist might assert that Mao is merely trying to drive home the evils of Soviet revisionism, its clear to anyone who knows the chronology that much of what he's referring to happened in Stalin's time. My objection is not that Mao doesn't rubber-stamp Stalin's every decision unambiguously but the fact that Mao's opinion sounds here very much like a run of the mill anti-communist conservative and so soon after WWII when the blood spilled by fascist aggression was still fresh. First, we should note the lying slander of Mao who makes no note of the fact that the Polish republic occupied Soviet land and that the people there were kept under the lock and key of racist Polish oppression in the interwar period. Second, Germany had annexed and incorporated a large part of Poland and had oppressed Polish peasants and workers who resided within her borders--this German hunger for Polish territory and prejudice towards Poland was something that Marx himself vigorously opposed. The Soviets had wanted to prevent a German bridgehead through Finland and offered to double their land claim in exchange for a buffer zone around Leningrad. Finland invaded on the side of the Nazis, just as the Soviets expected, and even after being defeated were not annexed or forced into neo-colonization but only made to swear their neutrality. The decision to allow Finland to secede from the Soviet Union was supported by Lenin and unfortunately the planned independent socialist republic of Finland was drowned by counter-revolutionaries by a river of blood that drew outcry even from American liberals ill-disposed to bolshevism; and nonetheless, the Soviets allowed the bourgeois government and capitalist system in Finland to be maintained. The Kuril islands were something of an obsession of Mao's and they seem to come up almost every time he gave an in-depth discussion of Soviet revisionism. The reason for his softness towards Japan and Germany is obvious when one considers the fact that according to Maurice Meisner most of the industrial equipment that the PRC imported during the Cultural Revolution was West German and Japanese.
The infamous theory of Three Worlds where the "second world" of Western /revisionist East Europe and Japan are included as potential allies of the Third World against the "First World" of America and the USSR (i.e. the superpowers) was already latent in Mao's sixties writings, speeches and interviews. He writes: "even Europe, Canada, and other countries are rising against imperialism. Imperialists are even rising against imperialists. Isn’t that what De Gaulle is doing?" and: "The Japanese people are a great people. They waged war with the United States, with England and France. They carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor; they occupied Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia. Their advance reached the eastern part of India...Wouldn’t it be best for Japan to be completely independent, to establish relations and enter into cooperation with those forces in Asia striving for national independence?" while it isn't necessarily wrong to take advantage of contradictions among the imperialists and differing sections of the ruling class it is pretty apparent that what Mao is doing here is trying to convince progressive people to count the Japanese imperialists (still dripping with blood from the open fascist era) and European nationalists like DeGaulle as their friends. This led to the queer episode where the CPC openly supported the EU and wrote articles alleging a Soviet conspiracy to sabotage this incipient super-imperialist combine. It was a common joke among European politicians that the Chinese wanted a United Europe far more then the Europeans do themselves! This tradition continues to this very day when the Chinese leadership scrambled to warn the British about the perils of Brexit and the benefits of the EU; not surprisingly, China were also hot under the collar due to the fact that Britain is their bridgehead into the European common market. Mao Zedong raised this latent anti-Stalinism to please the pained bourgeoisie of those powers that were either defeated and or diminished by WWII. The mention of DeGaulle also was not an accident as his France was the first imperialist power to recognize China in 1962 just two years older and Mao several times praised the "business ethics" of the French in comparison of that of the Soviet Union.
As Mao admitted before a group of Yugoslavian delegates:
Before I met with Stalin, I did not have much good feeling about him. I disliked reading his works, and I have read only “On the Basis of Leninism,” a long article criticizing Trotsky, and “Be Carried Away by Success,” etc. I disliked even more his articles on the Chinese revolution.
It's very odd that a supposed defender of Stalin and Stalinist would admit that he disliked reading his works. He goes on:
And this isn't all Mao says: "Now that Moscow has criticized Stalin, we are free to talk about these issues." a sentiment that he repeats several times which indicates that if anything he supportive of the de-Stalinization campaign and this is understandable the CPC did not break with the CPSU until the early 60s and they were really following Hoxha's lead when they did so. According to one pro-Mao source the Chinese used to say that Beijing was the only place you could read the complete works of Khrushchev. Bill Bland tied a connection between the ultra-left Great Leap Forward where central planning was abolished in favored of locally based planning following unrealistic national goals and the campaign of de-stalinization in the USSR in the late 50s. Mao's judgement that Stalin was 30% wrong and 70% correct was more or less the Khrushchevite evaluation of Stalin in another form and its not a coincidence that Mao's "criticism" of Stalin largely follows those of Khrushchev. And all that's needed to see that is a thorough reading of Mao's works. Whereas sharp bourgeois observers often compare Maoism to Trotskyism many Maoists fail to see the parallel themselves. As for Stalin's own opinion of Mao and the Chinese communists Averrell Harriman the US ambassador famously said about Stalin's views on Mao: "The Chinese Communists [according to Stalin] are not real Communists, they are ‘margarine’ Communists. Nevertheless they are real patriots and want to fight the Japs." Stalin's right-hand man Molotov wrote in his recollections:
There was, however, another factor which prevented us from responding to you: the Soviet friends did not want us to form diplomatic relations with you. If so, was China an independent state? Of course, yes. If an independent state, why, then, did we follow their instructions? [My] comrades, when the Soviet Union requested us to follow their suit at that time, it was difficult for us to oppose it. It was because at that time some people claimed that there were two Titos in the world: one in Yugoslavia, the other in China, even if no one passed a resolution that Mao Zedong was Tito.
And this isn't all Mao says: "Now that Moscow has criticized Stalin, we are free to talk about these issues." a sentiment that he repeats several times which indicates that if anything he supportive of the de-Stalinization campaign and this is understandable the CPC did not break with the CPSU until the early 60s and they were really following Hoxha's lead when they did so. According to one pro-Mao source the Chinese used to say that Beijing was the only place you could read the complete works of Khrushchev. Bill Bland tied a connection between the ultra-left Great Leap Forward where central planning was abolished in favored of locally based planning following unrealistic national goals and the campaign of de-stalinization in the USSR in the late 50s. Mao's judgement that Stalin was 30% wrong and 70% correct was more or less the Khrushchevite evaluation of Stalin in another form and its not a coincidence that Mao's "criticism" of Stalin largely follows those of Khrushchev. And all that's needed to see that is a thorough reading of Mao's works. Whereas sharp bourgeois observers often compare Maoism to Trotskyism many Maoists fail to see the parallel themselves. As for Stalin's own opinion of Mao and the Chinese communists Averrell Harriman the US ambassador famously said about Stalin's views on Mao: "The Chinese Communists [according to Stalin] are not real Communists, they are ‘margarine’ Communists. Nevertheless they are real patriots and want to fight the Japs." Stalin's right-hand man Molotov wrote in his recollections:
And as for Stalin own writings about the PRC it can be said that it was hardly a ringing endorsement:
He was a clever man, a peasant leader, a kind of Chinese Pugachev. He was far from a Marxist, of course—he confessed to me that he had never read Marx’s Das Kapital.Only heroes could read Das Kapital. When I was in Mongolia talking with the Chinese ambassador—he was nice to me—I said, “You want to create a metals industry quickly, but the measures you have planned—backyard blast furnaces—are improbable and won’t work.” I criticized the Chinese, and our people reproved me later. But it was such obvious stupidity!... Backyard blast furnaces to produce worthless metals—nonsense.
People illiterate in terms of economics do not distinguish between the People's Republic of China and the People's Democracies of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, let us say the People's Democratic Republic of Poland. These are different things.Like other myths, Mao the Stalinist, along with Mao the anti-capitalist, and Mao the vehement enemy of US imperialism are narratives that belong to a by-gone age of Cold War paranoia.
What is People's Democracy? It contains at least such features as: 1) Political power being in the hands of the proletariat; 2) nationalisation of the industry; 3) the guiding role of the Communist and Working Peoples' Parties; 4) the construction of Socialism not only in the towns but also in the countryside. In China we cannot even talk about the building of Socialism either in the towns or in the countryside. Some enterprises have been nationalised but this is a drop in the ocean. The main mass of industrial commodities for the population is produced by artisans. There are about 30 million artisans in China. There are important dissimilarities between the countries of Peoples' Democracy and the Peoples' Republic of China: 1) In China there exists a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, something akin to what the Bolsheviks talked about in 1904-05. 2) There was oppression by a foreign bourgeoisie in China, therefore the national bourgeoisie of China is partially revolutionary; in view of this a coalition with the national bourgeoisie is permissible, in China the communists and the bourgeoisie comprise a bloc. This is not unnatural. Marx in 1848 also had a coalition with the bourgeoisie, when he was editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung , but it was not for long. 3) In China they still face the task of the liquidation of feudal relationships, and in this sense the Chinese revolution reminds one of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. 4) The special feature of the Chinese revolution is that the Communist Party stands at the head of the state. Therefore, one can say that in China there is a Peoples' Democratic Republic but only at its first stage of development. The confusion on this question occurs because our cadres do not have any deep economic education.
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