Mao: the Real Story, Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine, 2007

I started Mao in 2020 and finished on New Year's Day 2021. There is some symbolism in this because as I begin a new year I also will begin a new book on a new era after Mao, since I plan to read a book on Deng Xiaoping next. It is not a deep or unique observation that China is rapidly increasing in heft and influence in the world, and I personally am trying to react to this by studying China. I expect that for the rest of my life, China and its economy, policy, culture, and history will grow in its direct relevance in my daily life. An interest in geopolitics can sometimes appear like sports fandom - a great game played by its famous participants whose only direct impact on the viewer is that viewer's perceptual emotional response to a sense of "their team winning or losing." On the contrary, just as America and its economy, policy, culture, and history is directly relevant for many people in the world (think the daily life of Iraqis in the extreme), I see China doing the same to me and the rest of the world. As such, I want to study China and understand what it will do and why it will do that. 

Mao by Pantsov and Levine has some demerits as a history - it is overly rote on CCP internal squabbles and weak on discussing larger trends. The book spends less time on Mao's time in power than it does on the long halting growth of the CCP in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. The rounds of internal power struggles that led to Mao's preeminence in the party are clearly by definition crucial to his biography, but I left those sections feeling I hadn't gained any wider insights into Mao, the CCP, or China. The sections on his youth addressed his personal ideological journey and Chinese history to the 1911 Revolution were very strong. The sections on his reign post-1949 were a mix between the positives and demerits of the two segments just described. 

On the positive side, Pantsov and Levine attack the subject from the Soviet/Russian perspective, which is illuminating. The relationship between Stalin/Mao, and Khrushchev/Mao are enriched by this focus, as well as the discussion of Sino-Soviet relations and the final split. It is nice as an American to see history without the United States as the central focus.

My impression of Mao leaving this work is confused. It seems that his relevance to contemporary China is low, except that he created the CCP regime and endowed it with the authoritarian rule that persists today. But his rule by personality rather than institution is not even used by his nearest successor, Xi Jinping, whose personal authority is steeped in technocracy and traditional great power politics. His ideologies and policies were immense failures and have been abandoned. His incompetence as a leader killed millions more than any other 20th century leader, quite a feat, but one might argue that he was less evil than his contemporaries but more radical, revolutionary, and crazed. His rule from 1956 to 1976 is marked by a clear degeneration into frenzied irrational radicalism, moving from New Democracy to the Great Leap to the Cultural Revolution. He was cleverly tactical in dealing with party politics, but apparently had no overarching strategy for China. His program was entirely replaced by that of Deng who followed him, and in many ways it is Deng's China and not Mao's that we see today. There are those that credit Mao with raising up China from abject poverty and a semi-colony status to a growing world power, who reinvigorated the Chinese central authority with a new imperial dynasty to replace the Qing. It's hard to credit him with any lasting accomplishments when his overriding drive towards radicalism was so self-defeating - if I had to guess, he likely set China back rather than pushed it forward. 

What is interesting in the end is to see the mind of Mao. It is a portrait in radicalism and strong-willed individualism taken to the extreme. I did not realize in the young Mao's ideological development to what extent Ayn Randian individualism combined with veneration for traditional Chinese imperial power figures explained how he acted. It was perhaps this individual imperial ethic that drove him more than the dream of socialism or communism. I think the term Maoism has many meanings, but to study the combination of irrationality, politics-first, cult-of-personality, radicalism, individualism, etc is important to avoid this road in other movements.