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卡拉 09-08-2016 20:02

《纽约时报》40年前撰写的毛泽东讣告

来源:《纽约时报》中文网
作者:包德甫
2016年9月9日

40年前的今天,毛泽东的逝世为中国历史上一个跌宕起伏的时代画上了句号。40年来,毛泽东的影响一直留在中国的政治话语、乃至流行文化中,并将继续影响这个国家可以预知的未来。

纽约时报中文网从今天起将分期刊登时报1976年9月9日为毛泽东撰写的讣闻,欢迎关注。以下是本文第一部分。


毛泽东讣告(一):从农民儿子到马列主义君主

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香港,9月9日――毛泽东出生在默默无闻的农民之家,去世时却成了历史上最重大的革命人物之一。

毛泽东出生时,中国饱受内乱蹂躏,陷入赤贫,还被更先进的外国势力所蚕食,他一生都是为了实现儿时的梦想,让中国恢复其传统地位,重新成为一个伟大国家。用中国人的话来说,他堪与中国的第一个皇帝、于公元前221年统一中国的秦始皇相提并论,毛主席本人也非常乐于将自己同秦始皇对比。

他以极大的毅力和精心策划的战略,驾驭了农村中的不满力量与民族主义力量,把一支微不足道的农民力量变成了百万雄师,率领他们征战20年,于1949年在全中国取得了胜利。在这个过程中,这支军队既有过与斯大林格勒保卫战程度相当的大战,也经历过堪与亚历山大大帝的征途相媲美的英勇长征。

中华人民共和国成立时是一个农业占统治地位的半封建国家,大部分人口是文盲,占地近400万平方英里,人口为世界的五分之一,毛发起了一系列规模庞大,有时引发剧烈动荡的运动,旨在将它改造为一个现代化、工业化的社会主义国家。到他去世时,中国已经能够制造自己的核弹与制导导弹,成了石油生产大国。

在中国的复兴过程中,毛还改写了中国的外交进程,为西方国家通过“不平等条约”强加给中国的百年耻辱画上了句号,为中国赢得了全新的承认与尊敬。最后,在1972年,就连美国也放弃了20年来难以平息的敌意,当理查德·M ·尼克松(Richard M. Nixon)总统访问北京时,毛面带微笑地表示欢迎。

与此同时,他不允许任何人反对自己的控制,为了巩固新政权,50年代初,他发起了一场运动,数以十万计的人们遭到处决。50年代末,不顾党的其他领导人的批评,他发起了“大跃进”,最终导致了大规模经济混乱和食品短缺。在他统治的年代,他打倒了党内一个又一个竞争对手。他还冒着令整个国家陷入混乱的风险展开了“文化大革命”。

虽然在毛泽东领导下,中国取得了巨大的经济进步,但有些评论人士认为,他发动的接连不断的政治运动、以及他要求别人俯首帖耳的做法,最终把许多中国人变成了心灰意懒、忧心忡忡的芸芸众生,他们愿意顺着政治风向的变化而行动。

复杂的人物

作为20世纪最卓越的人物之一,毛泽东是个异常复杂的男人——有时他精于盘算且很现实,有时又没有耐心,他既是浪漫的梦想家,又是个人主义者,也是严厉的执行纪律者。他本人曾说过自己“身上有些虎气……也有些猴气”,也许,毕竟他也被各种矛盾所分裂,正如他喜欢用这些矛盾来解释自己身边的世界。

毛泽东是一名中国的爱国者、好斗的革命家、热诚的传播者、马克思主义理论家、战士、政治家和诗人,但他首先是一个道德说教者,他深深相信,人的美德必须置于只不过是经济的进步之前,这也是孔子以来的中国人相信的东西。和过去100年来的许多中国人一样,他对帝国主义的欺侮感到愤慨,他想把中国整个拆毁,好让它变得更加强大。他向往着在中国建立平等的革命乌托邦,在这个国度里,人民大众的热情将为其提供发展的动力。

“我看到了广大人民群众的力量,”毛泽东在“大跃进”期间的1958年写道,大跃进是他发动的最大、但最终造成巨大破坏的运动之一。“有了这种力量,什么事情都能办成。”这两句话是他思想的惊人总结。

和许多伟大领袖不同,毛泽东从未对日常事务行使过绝对的控制,也从未追求过这种控制。但是出身卑微、在湖南农村长大的他,后来成了八亿中国人事实上的君主,如果不是活着的神的话。他的每句话都是国家的教义。被打印在用红色塑料皮包装的小册子里,这本《毛主席语录》发行了数百万册,它们被认为具有不可战胜的神奇力量。

权力、特权与焦虑

尽管毛泽东是忠诚的列宁主义者,与他的俄罗斯前辈一样,强调需要有高度组织性和纪律性的党,但他却把自己置于全党之上,当党对他构成阻力时,他还寻求用个人崇拜来取代党。

尽管他拥有极高的权力和特权,在他的人生晚期(大约是从1960年起),毛泽东似乎开始被焦虑困扰,他担心中国革命面临危险,可能会退到中国帝制时期的旧精英主义和官僚主义的道路上去。在他眼中, 这种危险看似非常大,因为在那个时期苏联发生了他称之为“修正主义”的情况。在毛泽东看来,尼基塔·S·赫鲁晓夫(Nikita S. Krushchev)强调用物质的鼓励来刺激以消费者为导向的生产,以及赫鲁晓夫领导下党内特权精英阶层的明显出现,都是可憎的事物。纵观中国的问题,毛泽东在1964年抱怨说,“几包烟就能买个支书当当,更别提把女儿嫁给他了。”这个说法也许带着他特有的夸张。

为了振兴中国,净化党的队伍,确保自己死后革命仍然能够进行下去,毛泽东在1966年发动了“文化大革命”。正如他后来承认的,文革带来的后果甚至连他本人都无法预见。

党的团结受到损害

数十万年轻人被动员起来,当了“红卫兵”。他们往往难以控制,习惯于内部斗争,在全国串联,毛泽东号召“炮打司令部”后,他们羞辱和责备毛在党内的对手。在那两年的动荡中,经济受到破坏,甚至发生了流血事件,后来终于恢复了秩序,那是在时任国防部长林彪领导下的越来越强大的军队,以及周恩来总理等幸免于难、不太激进的党内领导人的帮助之下。

但是,党内至关重要的持久团结被毛泽东严重地破坏了,这种团结是在20世纪30年代史诗般的“长征”中形成的——“长征”是一次长达6000英里的远征,一支初出茅庐的军队跨越高山、河流与荒原,从中国南方的江西来到西北部的陕西。“文革”中被清洗的最重要的人包括国家主席刘少奇和党的总书记邓小平,他们被扣上“走资派”的帽子。刘少奇曾是毛泽东多年的最亲密战友之一,1959年起出任国家主席,当时毛为了让自己潜在的接班人得到更多经验,辞去了这个职位。那以后,毛泽东唯一的官方职务是中国共产党中央委员会主席。

林彪元帅因为在军队支持毛泽东上起了作用,加上他对毛泽东不断地献媚吹捧,被冠以“毛泽东的亲密战友与接班人”的称号,他的接班地位于1969年被写入党章。但是林彪的这个地位只持续了两年;据官方的说法,1971年,林彪暗杀毛的企图被发现后,试图叛逃苏联,因飞机失事,在蒙古死亡。更奇怪的是,在那以后传到外界的书信和讲话中,毛泽东坚持说,他早在1966年就开始怀疑林彪了,利用林彪只不过是为了铲除刘少奇而已。

林彪死去数年后,大总管和调节人周恩来倍加努力,帮助显然已经苍老的毛泽东领导这个国家,让其进入了一个看来持续了一段时间的经济发展阶段。但是,周恩来在1976年1月因癌症去世,日常领导工作落到了前任党总书记邓小平身上,显然是在毛的许可下,周恩来于1973年重新启用了邓小平,把邓小平安排在国务院第一副总理的位置上,让他成为可能的接班人。

火速失势

邓小平旋即受到毛泽东的猜忌,比刘少奇和林彪失势的速度还要快。周恩来逝世仅三个月后,邓小平即遭撤职,再次被打为“党内走资派”,并遭毛泽东指责为曲解他本人的指令,过分强调经济发展。

在毛泽东的晚年,有一些人认为他看起来像是一个垂垂老矣的独夫,越来越喜欢心血来潮。在刚刚过去的冬天,他邀请尼克松再次访问北京,回到他担任总统期间取得最大成就的地方。毛泽东的这一举动被外界视为可能标志着他开始脱离现实,不过按照中国的观念,这也可以解读为对好友的亲善姿态。

毛泽东最后一次公开露面是在1971年;在后来发布的照片中,他看起来往往像是身患疾病。他似乎难以控制双手和面部的运动,谈吐不清,激起了有关他曾中风或罹患帕金森病的猜测。

然而,他仍然不断地在书房里接待各种外宾,无甚生气地坐在一张花格图案的沙发里,左图右史。此外,他似乎依旧在令北京四分五裂的政治冲突中表现活跃。据说,他最后的动作就包括挑选最终接班人华国锋。华国锋知名度相对较小,早年在党内的任职地包括毛泽东的家乡湖南湘潭。至于两人是否有亲密的私人关系,则不得而知。

与莫斯科的矛盾

近年里,毛泽东的精力还被中国与苏联之间的巨大分歧占据。这是战后世界局势的一大关键动向。在中国看来,中苏冲突一部分来源于党的思想之争,毛泽东担心苏联的修正主义是可能会颠覆中国革命的危险的异端邪说。另一部分来源于政治与军事之争,涉及毛泽东早前抵制莫斯科对中国共产党的控制、后来又在中国边境抵御苏联军队。还有一部分来源于领土之争,涉及北京认为沙皇时代的俄罗斯曾吞并中国领土。

双方的争执在60年代初浮出水面。尽管在那之前外界没什么人觉察到了这一点,但如今看来,显然根源可以追溯到中国共产党与苏联在20年代最早开始接触的时候。当初,来自新成立的中国共产党的毛泽东等人在摸索掌权的道路,而斯大林从遥远的莫斯科给他们下达的指令一再将他们引向灾难。

听命于斯大林的共产国际代表在中国充当顾问——毛泽东戏称他们为“钦差大臣”。斯大林和这些代表先是指示中国共产党与蒋介石领导的国民党合作。然而,蒋介石于1927年突然反目,屠戮了数千共产党人。斯大林随后下令中国共产党为大城市(基本不存在的)无产阶级发动“革命暴动”做准备。

在苏联的直接干预下,毛泽东曾于30年代初被剥夺了职务与权力。直到共产党被迫在1934年开始长征之后,在又犯下了多次策略失误之后,毛泽东才凭借他在农村革命中组织与领导农民游击队的非凡才干掌握了党的指挥权。

首次出访

在1949年底,毛泽东设立自身领导的中央政府后不久,他带着胜利的愉悦来到莫斯科访问。然而,他立即就遭遇了中华人民共和国在外交领域的首场危机:他与斯大林就一份援助协议和苏联特许权的条款进行了长达两个月的争论。尽管有那么几年毛泽东尝试了强调重工业的苏联经济发展模式,但到了50年代中期,他开始心生疑虑,不仅因为在中国这样一个以农业为主的国家里这么做用处不大,还因为它带来了官僚主义、权贵主义和资本主义倾向——也就是其中的物质激励。

在50年代中后期,一系列事件把这种长期令人不安的关系发展成激烈的争斗,最终演变为公开的武装冲突。首先是尼基塔·S·赫鲁晓夫在1956年做的报告,抨击斯大林惨无人道,还搞个人崇拜。毛泽东此时已将自己设想为世界上重要的马列主义思想家与革命家,这件事让他猝不及防。他很恼怒事先没有与他商量,而苏共中央领导人赫鲁晓夫出面揭露的事情也令他处境尴尬。

紧接着,在因为大跃进造成的混乱局面而批评毛泽东之后,国防部长彭德怀于1959年被打倒,而苏联显然在这件事情上有所牵涉。其他情况也接二连三地冒出来:在中国与印度的一场边境冲突中,莫斯科未能支持北京;北京与台湾和华盛顿之间爆发了牵涉一些小岛的台海危机;到了最后,苏联突然于1960年7月将技术专家悉数撤出,撕毁了数百份计划修建工厂等设施的协议。

与此同时,赫鲁晓夫在向罗马尼亚工人党全国大会所做的报告中将中国领导层称为狂人,毛泽东也很快向同僚表示,“修正主义集团篡夺了苏联党和国家的领导。”

这场危机在1969年的冬天到达顶点:苏联与中国的边防部队沿着乌苏里江结冰的河岸爆发了冲突。在此之后,苏联持续在两国边境地带增派陆海空三军,直到将四分之一的兵力囤积在这一地区。

在每位到访的外国领导人面前,毛泽东都要花上不少时间强调苏联扩张政策的危险性——用他的话来说,是“霸权主义”。他认定,苏联的“社会帝国主义”是对和平的最大威胁。这让他得以用更积极的眼光看待美国,并助推两国在1972年之后取得关系的逐步改进。

翻译:纽约时报中文网

卡拉 09-10-2016 19:36
40年前的9月9日,毛泽东的逝世为中国历史上一个跌宕起伏的时代画上了句号。40年来,毛泽东的影响一直留在中国的政治话语、乃至流行文化中,并将继续影响这个国家可以预知的未来。

纽约时报中文网在此分期刊登时报1976年9月9日为毛泽东撰写的讣闻,欢迎关注。以下是本文第二部分。


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简朴作风

虽然毛拥有巨大的权力——1955年,在与地方官员的闲谈中,他推翻了五年计划的一些内容,而这些内容刚在一天前由全国人民代表大会确定下来——他却不喜欢披上显示强大力量的外衣。他很少在公众场合亮相,也许是为了保持敬畏感和神秘感,他从不穿着华丽的服装或佩戴奖章,始终秉持自己在游击战时期确立的简朴标准。不管在什么场合,他都穿着扣子扣到脖子的朴素灰色上衣和配套的裤子——西方后来称之为毛套装(Mao suit,即中山装——译注),这种服装在70年代的一段时间里风靡一时。

美国记者埃德加·斯诺(Edgar Snow)在1936年成为第一个见到毛的西方人。他觉得毛的风格与他在农民家庭长大有很大关系,那种背景中有简朴,也有种粗砺和粗野。在拜访过陕西延安附近的共产党游击队总部后,斯诺报道说,毛有着“农民般的个人习惯,讲话朴实,生活朴素”。毛对个人形象毫不在乎,他和其他农民一样,住在两间房的窑洞里,“墙壁裸露、简陋,挂满地图”。斯诺发现,毛主要的奢侈品是一顶蚊帐,他只有几条毯子和两套棉制服。

“毛泽东的伙食也同每个人一样,但因为是湖南人,他有着南方人“爱辣”的癖好,”斯诺写道,“他甚至用辣椒夹着馒头吃。除了这种癖好之外,他对于吃的东西就很随便。”

经典的《西行漫记》(Red Star Over China)是第一部有关于毛的公开记录,斯诺在书中写道,他发现毛是个“体形削瘦,看上去很像林肯的人物,个子高出一般的中国人,背有些驼,一头浓密的黑发留得很长,双眼炯炯有神,鼻梁很高,颧骨突出”。书中还说:“我的第一印象是非常精明的知识分子的脸庞。”

“他似乎没有任何狂妄自大的表现,”斯诺说。对毛的狂热崇拜要到1942年第一次整风运动才开始。不过,斯诺补充说:“个人自尊心极强,他身上的某种东西透露出在必要时候当机立断的无情魄力。”

似乎内敛清高

当时另一位在延安见过毛的记者艾格尼丝·史沫特莱(Agnes Smedley)感觉,虽然毛能够与几位密友热烈交流,但他依然是一个总体来讲内敛清高的人。“我最初在他身上强烈感觉到的阴险品质,被证明是精神上的疏离,”她写道,“红军的[军事指挥官]朱德受人爱戴,而毛泽东则是受人尊敬。少数几个逐渐了解了他的人喜爱他,但他的心灵封闭在他的身体里,让他与外界隔绝。”

20世纪40年代,美国政府希望促使毛和蒋联合抗日。其他在那段短暂的乐观时期蜂拥前往延安的美国访客——外交官、军官和记者——不可避免地都被毛明显的热诚以及牺牲个人舒适以追求理想的意愿所折服。在这些方面,他与大部分国民党领导人的腐败和无动于衷形成鲜明对比。

毛的献身精神、坚韧和内敛可能也源自于他通往权力的道路上那苦涩的个人经历。他的妹妹和第二任妻子杨开慧在1930年被蒋介石处决;一个弟弟(毛泽覃——译注)在长征中的一次殿后作战中牺牲;另一个弟弟(毛泽民——译注)1943年在新疆被处决;毛的大儿子(毛岸英——译注)在朝鲜战争中牺牲。据文革期间红卫兵的消息,另一个儿子(毛岸青——译注)因为母亲被处决后自己在一个“资产阶级”家庭长大而变疯。

毛本人也有几次与死神擦肩而过。1927年,他在湖南组织农民和工人起义,被支持国民党的当地民兵抓获,押回总部枪决。毛在刚看到民团总部的位置时,挣脱开来,逃进附近的田地,藏在高高的草里直到日落。

“民兵们追我,强迫一些农民帮忙搜索,”他对斯诺说,“有很多次他们离我非常近,有一两次我差一点就碰到他们的身体了,不过不知怎么他们没有发现我。最后天近黄昏,他们不搜了。”

不忘家人付出的代价

他肯定没有忘记自己的家人和朋友为革命所付出的代价。1964年,毛泽东在与其被处决的弟弟(毛泽民——译注)的儿子毛远新谈话时回忆:“我们家很多人都是让国民党和美帝国主义杀死的。你是吃蜜糖长大的,从来不知道什么是吃苦。你将来不当右派,当个中间派,我就满足了。你没吃过苦,怎么当左派?”

或许痛失家人和朋友也影响了他对待敌人的态度。和斯大林不一样,毛从不大批处死自己在党内的反对派。他以一种非常中国式,甚至是儒家的方式,把那些人送进劳改营或边远地区进行再教育和改造,相信教育改变人的力量。

然而,在杀死那些被他视为真正的反革命者时,他从不手软。最早的例子之一,发生在他自1927年开始建立的共产党根据地中。1930年年底,在根据地富田镇,为了镇压一群士兵对自己的领导进行的挑战,毛下令处决了2000到3000名军官和士兵。50年代初期,为了巩固共产党的权力,毛发起了一场打击反革命的暴力运动。据毛泽东最仔细和敏感的传记作者斯图尔特·施拉姆(Stuart Schram)认可的估计,共有100万到300万人被处决,其中包括地主、国民党特务和其他被怀疑为“阶级敌人”的人。

“不管怎样,”施拉姆写道,“没有证据表明毛从杀戮或酷刑中得到快感。但是如果他相信有必要时,会毫不犹豫地采取暴力手段。毫无疑问,毛觉得这是革命斗争中的自然组成部分。他毫不留情,也不会请求别人手下留情。”

正如毛自己在他最著名的文章之一,1927年的《湖南农民运动考察报告》中写道的:

“革命不是请客吃饭,不是做文章,不是绘画绣花,不能那样雅致,那样从容不迫,文质彬彬,那样温良恭俭让(被儒家子弟视为典范的美德)。革命是暴动,是一个阶级推翻一个阶级的暴烈的行动……质言之,每个农村都必须造成一个短时期的恐怖现象。”

对于毛的个人生活和习惯,人们知之甚少,他刻意不对公众曝光。他烟瘾很大,据说在长征中没有烟抽时,他尝试过抽各种叶子烟。或许正是因为这个习惯,他声音沙哑,晚年经常咳嗽。

他似乎喜欢每天工作十三四个小时,斯诺发现他经常熬夜到凌晨两三点,阅读和处理报告。尽管晚年身体衰弱,毛还是拥有在湖南省会长沙市求学时锻炼出来的坚强体魄。

“没有时间谈情说爱”

毛回忆自己在求学时的朋友们是“人数不多,但思想上很认真的人”,他们“没有时间谈情说爱”,他们试图推翻将体力劳动和锻炼视为下层阶级活动的中国传统偏见。毛本人也曾经受这种传统思想的影响,1911年,辛亥革命爆发后,他因为一时热情,曾经在军队里呆了几个月,当时他的饷银是每月7块钱,其中很大一部分都要支付给为他取水的挑夫,因为知识分子是不能做这种工作的。

强健的体魄、勇气和军事才智是贯穿毛毕生的基本主题。他于1917年首次发表的文章(《体育之研究》——译注)也呼吁中国人多多锻炼。文章一开头写道:“国力恭弱,武风不振”。

到了另一个阶段,也就是1966年7月,毛在长江中游泳65分钟的事迹被广泛宣传,它或许更像是传奇而非事实,不管它是不是真的,毛对待游泳的方式典型地反映出其顽强追求目标的作风。

“我说下了决心,一定可以学,不管年纪大小,” 毛曾经对手下的重要将领们谈起自我提高的必要性。“我举个例子。游泳我是1954年才学好的,以前就没有学好。1954年[北京的]清华大学有一个室内游泳池,每天晚上去,带个口罩化装,三个月不间断,我就把水的脾气研究透了:水它是不会淹死人的呀!水怕人,不是人怕水。”

如饥似渴的阅读者

毛读过大量书籍,他从小就喜欢中国古典文学和小说,后来也读翻译过来的西方历史、文学和哲学。他常常恰如其分地引用文学作品,或口吐一句辛辣的谚语,令来访者印象深刻,但是作为一国领袖,他有时说话显得颇为漫不经心和心血来潮。50年代,当他仍然是国家主席时,他曾经会见过一个个子特别高的西方外交官,他惊叹道:“我的天!这么高!”

毛泽东随意的风格,经常出现的精辟的中式比喻,以及其自身超群魅力,使他成为农民群众的天生领袖。一个中国作家指出:“毛泽东本质上是一个中国小说或戏曲中的人物。”

晚年时期,毛的大部分时间都在北京紫禁城内自己那处简朴的淡黄色居所中度过,只和一小群人保持接触。其中一部分是帮助他走路的女护士;还有三个女性口译员,往往在有外宾来访时为他做翻译。因为他的湖南口音和口齿问题,一个女人必须把他的话翻译成能够理解的普通话。

负责这个任务的就是王海容,有些人相信她是他的姨表侄孙女,但也有人认为她是他最喜爱的老师的女儿。不管怎样,在1976年的春天,邓小平失势后,未经事先宣布,王海容和另外两位翻译便被突然撤换,令人们猜测毛的随从中是否有人嫉妒她们的位置。

明天请继续关注《纽约时报》1976年毛泽东讣告第三部分。

http://cn.nytimes.com/obits/20160911/c11mao-obit2/

卡拉 09-12-2016 15:15
40年前的9月9日,毛泽东的逝世为中国历史上一个跌宕起伏的时代画上了句号。40年来,毛泽东的影响一直留在中国的政治话语、乃至流行文化中,并将继续影响这个国家可以预知的未来。

纽约时报中文网在此分期刊登时报1976年9月9日为毛泽东撰写的讣闻,欢迎关注。以下是本文第三部分。

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尽管毛泽东为中国带来了翻天覆地的变化,他和其他共产党统治集团上层的领导人如何作出决定的戏剧性场景,却仿佛是一个来自明朝宫廷的故事。

比如说,毛的助手都是些什么人,谁为他安排何时与何人见面,谁为他准备他在红色丝绒帷幕后边的办公室里阅读和批示的文件,又是谁把他的命令传达给中共中央委员会——这一切都不为中国外界所知。这个谜团中的一个关键人物,自然是他的第四任妻子江青,她是个直言不讳、有时尖酸刻薄的女人,宣称自己承担着毛泽东最忠诚追随者的责任。

毛泽东认为自己只结过三次婚——他的第一任妻子是父母在他14岁那年安排的一个农村女子,当时她已经20岁了。两人从未一起生活过,所以他告诉斯诺,“我不认为她是我的妻子,也几乎没有想到过她。”

他的第二任妻子杨开慧于1930年被处决,她的父亲杨昌济是一位伦理学教授,是毛在长沙求学时期对其影响最深的老师之一。杨昌济把年轻的毛泽东介绍给北京一位杰出的民族主义知识分子和作家李大钊,他也是中国共产主义运动的奠基人之一。

尽管毛有时被视为一个禁欲者,只热衷追求革命和权力,但他显然也有多愁善感和浪漫的一面。1937年,在回复一位作战时牺牲的共产党领导人的妻子所写的一首纪念诗时,毛写了下面的词句:

我失骄杨君失柳,杨柳轻飏直上重霄九。问讯吴刚何所有,吴刚捧出桂花酒。寂寞嫦娥舒广袖,万里长空且为忠魂舞。忽报人间曾伏虎,泪飞顿作倾盆雨。

杨与柳

后来出版的毛泽东诗词集所附的官方阐释说,毛的第二任妻子姓“杨树”的杨,那位作战死亡的男子姓“柳树”的柳。

诗的第三行提到的“吴刚”,在一个古老的传说中,为寻找长生不老术犯了些罪,被罚砍伐月亮上的桂树。他每砍下一斧,那棵树又马上变得完好无缺,因此,他必须永无休止地砍下去。第七行诗中的“虎”是指毛泽东与之斗争的国民党政权,所以,最后的对句描述的,是毛失去的伴侣听到革命取得最后胜利时的心情。官方阐释认为这首诗包含了“很大的革命浪漫主义成分”。

1928年,毛泽东35岁,他的第二任妻子还活着,他就开始与18岁的贺子珍同居。根据某些描述,贺子珍性格坚强,是一个女子军团的指挥官;也有人说她是地主的女儿。不管怎样,1930年,杨开慧被处决后,她和毛结了婚,后来还在危险艰苦的长征路上一直伴随着他,是为数不多的参加长征的女性之一。她为毛生过五个孩子,其中一个就是在长征途中生下来的。

这种艰苦生活显然摧毁了她的健康,到达共产党在西北的新根据地延安后不久,她被送到苏联接受治疗。她不在的时候,一位不太有名的电影演员蓝苹来到了延安,在生活朴素、与外界隔绝的共产党人中,她必然看上去富有魅力且漂亮迷人。根据一种说法,她在听毛的讲座时,招摇地坐在前排,还大声鼓掌,因此吸引了他的注意。毛显然对她一见钟情,蓝苹——当时她已经改名为江青——很快住进了毛的窑洞。

据说,两人的风流韵事激怒了毛的一些战友,他们觉得他被江青迷惑,背叛了真正的共产党员、长征时的忠实伴侣贺子珍。据说,为了让他们同意自己与江青的婚事,毛保证江青今后不过问政治。这可能是党的领导中对她猜疑和厌恶的起源,这些猜疑和厌恶自那以后一直纠缠着她。

“文化大革命”

在接下来的30年里,江青一直保持着低调,但在1964年,毛开始对党感到不满,并准备发动“文化大革命”,他转而把江青视为少数可以信任的人之一。

江青对受欢迎的传统戏曲和电影进行了有力改造,要求它们在所有表演中注入大量的“阶级斗争”成分,把英雄塑造得绝对高大,把坏人都变成十恶不赦的人。她还同上海一位左派文学批评家姚文元结盟,后者愿意对讽喻毛泽东的历史剧《海瑞罢官》写一篇尖锐批评的评论。1965年11月,这篇文章在上海发表——毛无法让它在北京发表,因为他的对手当时在北京当权——这成了“文化大革命”开始的信号。

江青很快成为毛泽东成立的“文化大革命”领导小组的主要人物,她对很多主要领导人进行了尖锐的人身攻击,这让她越来越不得人心。

随着“文化大革命”势头的减弱,江青的权威也在减少,但是在接下来的几年里,她仍继续努力行使自己的影响力。她可能对1976年初邓小平的下台起了重要作用。邓小平罪名众多,其中包括他从来不去观看江青的样板戏,并试图取消天津附近一个生产队的国家补贴,而该生产队特别受江青喜欢。

甚至没打个电话

很难判断毛泽东对自己的这位备受争议的妻子的看法。江青曾对美国学者罗克珊·维特克(Roxane Witke)提到,她和毛私下里并不总是很亲密。她说,1957年,毛第二次去莫斯科时,她正好在那里治病,但毛既没去看她,也没给她打电话。后来,在文革初期,毛给她写了一封信——这封信经常被她在党内的批评者引用。

“我劝你也要注意这个问题,”他写道,“不要被胜利冲昏了头脑,经常想一想自己的弱点、缺点和错误。这个问题我同你讲过不知多少次,你还记得吧,4月在上海还讲过。”

虽然中国人都觉得江青很恶毒且居心不良,但是在尼克松总统和福特总统访华期间见过她的美国人,都觉得她快乐活泼。她对毛事业的明显热诚,给维特克留下了深刻的印象,维特克觉得江青作为一个在男人主导的世界中的女人,遭受了痛苦。

毛明显地喜欢女人,他自己的婚姻生活也不完美,这与他自1949年起实行的单调的禁欲和清教主义形成了鲜明对比。爱情被视为堕落的资产阶级思想而遭到摒弃,男人和女人的法定结婚年龄被分别推迟至28岁和25岁。

婚姻不是毛为了自己而破坏规则的某种意愿的唯一例子。虽然他坚决主张所有的戏剧、小说、诗歌和绘画必须遵守常常使人迟钝的社会现实主义原则——“我们的文艺应该是为人民服务的”,这是他1942年在延安说的话,后来成为一种严格艺术标准的基础——但他继续写自己想写的诗,其中很多是按照晦涩的古典格式,并引喻那时已被摒弃的中国古典文学中费解的典故。他的传记作者施拉姆指出,这种矛盾“似乎让他既感到尴尬,又感到自豪”。

中国的爱国者

施拉姆在研究了毛泽东不计其数的复杂性格后总结说,从根本上讲,他是一个中国的爱国者。毛把自己获得了“一定程度上的政治觉悟”归功于1909年他16岁时读的一本宣传册,那本宣传册对中国“失去了”朝鲜、台湾、印度支那和缅甸等附属国表示强烈谴责。1936年与斯诺交谈时,毛还记得那本宣传册开篇的第一句话:“呜呼,中国其将亡矣!”

毛泽东本性中的仇外情绪,在他发现列宁主义后得到了强化,列宁主义将中国等国家的落后归咎于帝国主义。不过,施拉姆写道,虽然毛成为“一名坚定的列宁主义革命者,虽然他的理论属于马克思主义范畴,但是在很大程度上,他个性最深刻的根源存在于中国传统之中,对他来说,中国的荣耀至少和世界革命同样重要”。

施拉姆指出,毛晚年时甚至走得更远,他微妙地淡化了马克思列宁主义在中国革命中的重要性,仅把其视为一种政治手段的宝库。这从某个方面来看,是19世纪的中国保守封建官员观点的回归,他们想让中国强大起来,抵御西方侵略,但却坚决主张只借用西方的“技术”,比如炮舰和议会,不引进“西学”体系,认为后者可能会破坏中国的本质。正如毛在1965年有意谈起19世纪的主张时所说的:“西学的‘体’不能用。只能用西方的技术。”

“无产者的”觉悟

毛泽东对马列主义的贡献不在于他的理论著作——那些著作大多单调乏味,他本人对它们也没什么兴趣——而在于他将马克思主义中国化了。当中国共产党按照教条以城市和无产阶级为重心的做法遇到重重困难、面临灭亡之时,毛发现了农民的力量。他的成功,在于组建了一个严格按照列宁主义的路线、用马克思主义的某些基本原则为动力、但主要以农民为基础的政党。

在毛泽东看来,通过适当地灌输,中国的农民、以及在党领导层中占多数的中国知识分子,能够形成“无产者的”觉悟。就像哈佛大学(Harvard)教授史华慈(Benjamin I. Schwartz)在他的开拓性著作《中国的共产主义与毛泽东的崛起》(Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao)中所写的那样,毛的贡献是“一种在行动中得以执行而在理论上从未阐明的异端邪说”。

毛泽东的革命方法中还有另一个基本因素,就是他坚信人的力量将克服所有的物质阻力,他的想法是,推动革命的必要力量蕴藏在人民群众之中。1927年,他在家乡湖南省调查农民运动,并以此为基础写下了那份著名的报告,那次调查让他突如其来地感受到农民中蕴含的潜力。毛泽东在一个又一个村子里看到的农民推翻地主的解放运动,对他是一种巨大的影响。

从农民阶层对中国革命的重要性以及人类意志的力量这两种基本洞察出发,毛泽东开始为总体革命精心制定了战略和战术。首先,他认识到赢得人民支持的重要性,正如他的一句被广泛引用的话所说的,游击队在人民群众之中才能如鱼得水。1964年,毛和安德烈·马尔罗(Andre Malraux)交谈时说:“你必须了解,在我们以前,在群众之间,从来没有人对妇人小子讲话,当然也不对农民讲话,在他们有生以来第一遭,每一个人都觉得参与在里面。”

严密的行为准则

同样,为了让那些没有报酬、经常没有足够食物和武器的游击队员们保持忠诚,毛泽东制定了严密的行为准则。

“红军的物质生活如此菲薄,仍能维持不敝,“他写道, “就是靠实行军队内的民主主义。官长不打士兵,官兵待遇平等,士兵有开会说话的自由,废除烦琐的礼节,经济公开。士兵管理伙食,这些办法,士兵很满意。”

在战术方面,毛泽东参考了自己少年时代读的那些中国古典传奇小说,比如《三国演义》和《水浒传》,它们栩栩如生地描述了古代勇士和土匪的英勇与谋略。毛的战术与公元前五世纪的军事大师孙子的兵法非常相像,这一点也不令人惊讶,这种战术后来在越南战争中也有重要作用。

最根本的问题,是找到一个让游击队能战胜蒋介石的更大、装备更好的军队的方法。毛为此制定了两条原则:只在兵力占优势时才发动攻击,而且要出其不意。

“我们是以少胜多的,这件事情已经不是什么秘密,敌人一般地都摸熟我们的脾气了。然而敌人不能取消我们的胜利,也不能避免他们的损失,因为何时何地我们怎样做,他们不晓得。这一点我们是要保密的。红军的作战一般是奇袭。”

军队的口号

毛泽东的军事理念被总结为四句口号,他的军队将其铭记在心。

“敌进我退”、“敌驻我扰”、“敌疲我打”、“敌退我追”。

除了这些,毛还发展了根据地的概念,让游击队员可以在根据地内休养生息、补充供给,并且从根据地逐渐发展壮大。最终,这个战略取得了胜利。

胜利的时刻

最崇高的时刻是1949年10月1日,那天,54岁的毛泽东站在北京高耸的天安门城楼上,宣告了中华人民共和国的成立,天安门是过去前来皇帝面前跪拜、敬献礼物的人的必经之路。

游行的队列在装有黄铜门钉的红色大门前的广场上聚集起来。戈壁滩吹来的冷风令空气中带着几分寒意。毛泽东戴着灰色布帽,穿着破旧的外套和裤子,身边是周恩来和朱德。他们的下面,聚集在那里的人群高喊着:“毛泽东万岁!”

突然,一片寂静笼罩广场。广场的巨大白色旗杆上,一小团东西缓缓升起,快到杆顶时展开为一面10米宽的血红色旗帜,左上角四分之一处有五颗黄色的星星。礼炮齐鸣。人群在提示下唱起了新国歌,毛在更大的欢呼声中走向麦克风。

“中华人民共和国、中央人民政府成立了,”他宣布。一周前,他在中国人民政治协商会议上说:“我们的民族将再也不是一个被人侮辱的民族了,我们已经站起来了……让那些内外反动派在我们面前发抖罢。”

他说这番话的28年前,他与另外11个人在上海创建了中国共产党。当时的党员共有52人。“星星之火可以燎原,”毛曾经说。确实如此。

农民出身

1893年12月26日,毛泽东出生在中国中部湖南省韶山村的一座瓦房里,周围环绕着稻田和丘陵。他的父亲毛贻昌是一位高大健壮的农民,勤劳节俭,也暴虐专横。通过勤劳工作、节俭和一些小买卖,他把自己的身份从没有土地的退伍军人,变成了后来被儿子称为“富农”的地位,虽然在那时的中国,这种地位几乎不意味着“富有”。

毛泽东的母亲文素勤是个能吃苦耐劳的女子,既操持家务,也下田务农。她是个佛教徒,对孩子们温柔善良,与丈夫的专制严厉形成鲜明对比。闹饥荒时,她会趁丈夫不注意时——他不赞成慈善事业——把食物施舍给前来乞讨的穷人。

毛泽东出生时,中国处于躁动不安的状态,大清帝国处于最后破裂的边缘,并于1911年崩溃。自从19世纪中期以来,统治着中国的大清王朝就饱受农民起义的困扰,其中最著名的是19世纪60年代的太平天国造反,同时,外国势力的蚕食也对中国自视优越的传统信念发起了挑战。

以北京深宫中皇帝的名义治理中国的政界要员们似乎在内忧外患面前无能为力。他们腐败、自满,是建立在儒家经典基础上的中国特有的科举制度的产物,这些官员们只会拖延时间。中国没有工业,占人口85%的农民贫困无知,每时每刻都受着饥饿与地主过度征敛的威胁。

6岁下田

6岁那年,父亲让毛泽东下稻田劳作,但是父亲也希望这个孩子多识一些字,好帮助家里记账,于是也送他到村学读书。学校里的课程是《论语》,必须依旧学的方式背诵。毛还是更喜欢中国古时的小说,“特别是造反的故事,”他后来回忆。他在学校里常看这些书,“当教师走过面前时,就用一本经书来掩盖着”。

13岁那年毛泽东离开了学校,白天长时间地干农活,晚上记账。父亲经常打毛泽东和他的两个弟弟,只给他们最菲薄的饭食,从不给他们吃肉或鸡蛋。

当时还发生了一件事,被西方作家们视为理解毛未来人生的重大线索。在一次待客时,毛泽东的父亲骂他懒而无用。他被激怒了,就跑到附近的一座池塘,威胁要跳下去。冲突最终通过妥协得到平息。毛泽东同意对父亲下跪行礼——但只是单腿下跪——父亲也答应不再打他。“战争这样结束了,”毛回忆,“我从这件事认识到,我如果公开反抗,保卫自己的权利,我父亲就软了下来;可是如果我仍温顺驯服,他反而打骂我更厉害。”

有些学者还注意到在湖南的成长经历对毛泽东可能也有影响。湖南是个亚热带省份,山脉河流众多,让这里惯出土匪和秘密社团。湖南人爱吃红辣椒是出了名的,同样他们也以刚健的性格和政治才能著称。在19世纪和20世纪,湖南领袖人物层出不穷。

转校

尽管离开了学校,毛泽东仍然在空闲时间读书不倦。16岁那年,不顾父亲的反对,他上了附近一座现代化的学堂。这座学校位于一个繁忙的贸易城镇,就是在这个学校里,毛泽东的心智培养和政治教育真正开始了。在一个表亲送给他的报纸上,他了解到19世纪末民族主义改革者们的事迹,在一本名叫《世界英杰传》的书里,他读到了华盛顿和拿破仑的故事(毛从早年便开始神往于军事功绩)。

大多数同学都是地主的子弟,穿着考究,举止高雅。毛泽东只有一套像样的衣服,平时都是穿着破旧的衫裤。此外,之前他被迫中断读书好几年,所以比班里其他人年纪都大,个子也高很多。所以这个高大、褴褛,粗笨的“新生”就遇到了嘲笑和敌意。这段经历或许也影响了他对待地主阶级的态度。

一年后,远游的冲动让毛泽东来到了省会长沙,进入了一座中学。当时是1911年,满清王朝就是在那一年被推翻的。席卷全国的政治风云也裹挟着他。他剪掉了辫子,这是一桩反叛之举。之后他还加入了当地的一支军队。又过了几个月,他仍然无所事事,在报纸的分类广告上寻找机会,之后在省图书馆呆了半年,读到了亚当·斯密(Adam Smith)的《国富论》(Wealth of Nations)、达尔文(Darwin)的《物种起源》(On the Origin of the Species)和卢梭(Roussearu)的《社会契约论》(Social Contract)。他还第一次看到了世界地图。

1913年,毛泽东上了长沙的湖南省师范学校,在那里接受了他最后五年的正式教育。尽管它实际上只是一个高中,但水平相当高,毛尤其深受伦理学教师杨昌济教授的影响,后来还娶了他的女儿。杨教授曾在日本和欧洲留学,他主张把西方和中国的观念结合起来,振兴中国。通过他,毛很快接触到了主流的知识界。当时的知识界正投身于“五四运动”,这是一场激烈的民族主义运动,旨在实现中国文化的现代化。

首次发表作品

正是在这个时候,毛泽东首次发表了自己的作品,是一篇刊登在受欢迎的北京杂志《新青年》上的文章,讨论的是通过让国民保持身体健康来增强军事实力的必要性。同时,他开始展现出自己的领导才能,成立了一个激进的学生团体。

1918年从师范学校毕业后,毛泽东于同年秋天前往北京。这个时机至关重要。为了寻找最新、最有效的灵丹妙药来振兴国家,这个时期的中国知识分子不断从西方的一个“主义”转向另一个主义。正如毛泽东后来所写的那样,他自己刚好赶上俄罗斯“十月革命一声炮响”,给中国送来了马克思主义。

毛泽东找了一份不起眼的工作,在北京大学担任图书馆助理员,上司是李大钊。后者当时已经发表了影响深远的文章《布尔什维克主义的胜利》,并刚成立了中国首个马克思主义学习社团。毛泽东仍在有些“困惑地寻找道路”,但他正变得“越来越激进”。

第二年初春,他离开北京,前往上海。在那里,他送别了一些去法国留学的朋友。因为缺乏外语能力,他不愿同去。在接下来的两年里,他在上海、北京和长沙之间往返,一边把一部分时间用来教书,一边投身于组织激进的学生团体,并负责两家颇受欢迎、却受到当地军阀政府镇压的期刊的编辑工作。

民粹主义倾向

施拉姆认为,毛泽东当时发表的文章《民众的大联合》反映了他的民粹主义倾向。那篇文章认为,中国绝大部分人追求进步,构成了一股强大的变革力量。在这位传记作者看来,“这种想法可以看做是一座桥梁,引领他从1917年相对保守和传统的民族主义,走向了真正的马克思主义。”

1920年秋,毛泽东效仿刚在北京成立了一个共产主义小组的老上司李大钊,在长沙也成立了一个共产主义小组。第二年7月,毛泽东和另外11名代表在上海召开会议,成立了中国共产党。

因为警方的突击搜查,第一届全国代表大会的举办地点被迫从一所女子学校转移至附近一个湖里的一艘游船上。燃起了新的热情的毛泽东回到湖南,并在那里按照标准的马克思主义手法组织工会和罢工。他找到了自己作为革命者的真正的理想职业。

处在萌芽状态的中国共产党深受俄国人影响,后者参与促成了中国共产党与孙中山领导的国民党之间的结盟,当时的国民党要比共产党强大很多。斯大林的这一举动,以及他之后在中国采取的所有举动,不见得和中共是出于相同的目的,因此为日后的很多分歧埋下了种子。

斯大林首先是想在自己的东边获得一道友好的屏障,因此必须避免任何可能会促使西方介入的混乱。其次,他试图控制中国共产党。起初几年,他的结盟政策效果良好,给共产党提供了扩张的机会,但1927年,它突然变成了一场灾难:于1925年接任国民党领导人的蒋介石突然袭击共产党,展开了大屠杀。

隐约的爱国主义

兴许是因为自身的民粹主义和高度民族主义的感情,毛泽东是国共结盟最热心的支持者之一。他始终有种隐约的爱国主义态度。

对他双重角色的批评产生了一个偶然的后果。批评最终致使他深感不快,并于1925年回到老家休养。在这个过程中,他意外地接触到一股农民暴动浪潮。“原来我没有完全意识到农民当中的阶级斗争的程度,”他对埃德加·斯诺(Edgar Snow)说。从那时起,毛泽东开始对农民产生了巨大的兴趣——先是1926年到国民党在广州开办的农民运动讲习所任教,之后于1927年初对湖南农村进行了一次著名的考察,最后在1927年秋,他带领一小队幸存下来的支持者进入井冈山地区,重新开始按照自己的方式争取权力。那时,共产党已和蒋介石决裂。

明天请继续关注《纽约时报》1976年毛泽东讣告第四部分。

http://cn.nytimes.com/obits/20160912/c12mao-obit3/

卡拉 09-14-2016 10:16
40年前的9月9日,毛泽东的逝世为中国历史上一个跌宕起伏的时代画上了句号。40年来,毛泽东的影响一直留在中国的政治话语、乃至流行文化中,并将继续影响这个国家可以预知的未来。

纽约时报中文网在此分期刊登时报1976年9月9日为毛泽东撰写的讣闻,欢迎关注。以下是本文第四部分。

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党内斗争

1927年到1935年期间,围绕着领导权和政策,党内充满复杂的斗争,毛泽东最终赢得了党的指挥权。当时党内的重要人物都安全地呆在上海的租界内,他们和斯大林不断寻找“革命暴动”,并且按照传统的马克思主义教条,准备进攻城市。毛泽东被隔绝在农村,因为农民的“异端”而受到批评,尽管他并不能随时得知党内最新的变化,而且是在很晚之后才知道自己被降级。1927年和1930年,他曾经两次接受命令领导对城市的攻击,两次都以灾难性的失败告终。毛泽东后来回忆,“对于斯大林的一些错误,中国共产党人是早有切身体会的。”

井冈山是毛泽东逐渐形成他自己战略思想的地方。这里仿佛是故事书里的场景,江西与湖南交界地带的崇山峻岭,是一片几乎难以攻破的广袤地带,只有星星点点的几座小村落,还驻扎着几伙土匪。毛泽东同土匪联合,靠减轻地租拉拢农民,到了1934年,已经把手下的1000名士兵发展到10万人。江西南部的瑞金被定为共产党人的首都。

毛泽东的成功恰恰导致他的失势。1931年,党的中央委员会从上海迁到江西,接下来剥夺了毛在党内和军内的一切职务。1933年,周恩来接替他担任总政委。当时,毛为数不多的坚定支持者中就有邓小平。1976年,身居要职的邓小平被毛打倒。

丧失领导权是双重意义上的灾难,因为恰在此时,蒋介石发动了旨在消灭共产党的第五次围剿。毛泽东避敌主力、集中优势兵力突袭敌人小股孤军的战术,瓦解了前几次围剿。这一次,党的领导人尝试正面迎击国民党军队。但是蒋介石有70万人,是共产党军队的七倍,他还听取了纳粹将军汉斯·冯·塞特克(Hans von Steeckt)的建议,用铁丝网和机关枪火力形成包围,一点一点扼杀共军。

逃跑是唯一的出路

唯一的出路就是逃走。1934年10月15日,共产党军队的主力突破国民党封锁线,向西南进军,开始了长征。向哪里走,目标是什么,都不清楚。有些人想寻找新的根据地;包括毛泽东在内的其他人则希望北上抗日,自从1931年以来,日军的势力已经日益深入中国。

突围出来的9万名共产党人,经过一年时间和6000英里的跋涉,最后只有2万人到达了西北部的新根据地陕西。尽管经历了各种艰难困苦,但长征拯救了共产党,让它更强大,有了一支不可战胜的军队。这支军队以游击战为指导思想,有铁的纪律,团结一致,还有了一个新的领导人——毛泽东。在长征中,经过不少挫折,1935年1月,当军队驻扎在贵州省偏远的遵义县时,毛泽东终于获得了指挥权。当时,靠着完全来自《三国演义》的计谋,使用缴获的国民党制服和旗帜,共产党军队不费一枪一弹占领了遵义。

新的党,新的政权

长城脚下的延安地区,是3000年前中华文明的起源地,毛泽东建立起完全打上了他个人色彩的一个新的党,和一个新的政权。这是一段关键时期,50年代末期和60年代,他发动大跃进和文化大革命的时候,他还将无限怀旧地重拾自己在延安形成的那些思想。这些思想包括把党的干部送到乡下,接受意识形态改造、强调自力更生和农村的互助生产队,以及普及教育。

或许他在1936年2月,到达西北不久后创作的词《雪》最能体现他当时的心情。这首词用铿锵的语调把他和中国辉煌历史连在了一起,也表达了他对这片土地的热爱。词是这样写的:

北国风光,千里冰封,万里雪飘。望长城内外,惟余莽莽;大河上下,顿失滔滔。山舞银蛇,原驰蜡象,欲与天公试比高。须晴日,看红装素裹,分外妖娆。江山如此多娇,引无数英雄竞折腰。惜秦皇汉武,略输文采;唐宗宋祖,稍逊风骚。一代天骄,成吉思汗,只识弯弓射大雕。俱往矣,数风流人物,还看今朝。

抗日的象征

毛泽东决定性的一步,就是天才地把共产党塑造成了中国抗日的象征。日本的侵略始于1931年入侵东三省,终于在1937年对中国发动了全面战争,激起了全民族巨大的愤怒。

面对这种局面,蒋介石继续坚持先消灭共产党,再对付日本。1936年12月,这个战略产生了事与愿违的效果。被日军赶出东北的青年军阀张学良率领亲国民党的部队,在距离中共根据地不远的西安劫持了蒋介石。蒋介石被迫同意与中共结成第二次统一战线,一致抗日,才被释放。

尽管从一开始就明显存在摩擦,但两党之间的协议给了毛泽东迫切需要的喘息间隙,让他有机会借抗日的名义,在整个中国北部扩大共产党的领地。善于游击战的共产党在这方面可谓训练有素。到1945年战争结束时,重新命名为八路军的共产党军队已经发展为一支强大的力量,有100万人,其统治的地区内有1亿人口。

由于历史的偶然,日本的侵略“或许是毛掌握权力过程中最重要的因素”,施拉姆在他的传记中这样写道。

毛泽东利用这段相对稳定的时期大量阅读和写作,把自己的思想进行了系统化。他的一些最重要的书和讲话都是在延安时期写成的,其中包括《论持久战》、《中国革命和中国共产党》、《新民主主义论》,以及《实践论》和《矛盾论》。

“枪杆子里面出政权”

他最常被引用的一段话出自1938年:

“每个共产党员都应懂得这个真理:‘枪杆子里面出政权’。我们的原则是党指挥枪,而决不容许枪指挥党。但是有了枪确实又可以造党。”

1942年,为了控制成千上万新招募的官员,确保他们忠于他的思想,毛泽东发起了第一次整风运动。那是思想改造的开始,也是对毛泽东个人崇拜的开始。他下令全党学习他的著作,助长了这种崇拜(在文革中,他曾宣传一篇他参与撰写的赞扬他的思想的文章)。

整风运动有另一个目的——结束在毛泽东看来对苏联指导的过分依赖:“没有抽象的马克思主义,只有具体的马克思主义。所谓具体的马克思主义,就是通过民族形式的马克思主义。因此,马克思主义的中国化,使之在其每一表现中带着中国的特性——成为全党亟待了解并亟须解决的问题。”这是要求中共脱离莫斯科而独立的号召。

1944年至1945年,有很短一段时间,毛泽东和美国人曾经互相示好。美国政府希望促成共产党和国民党共同抗日。那些被允许进入延安的美国外交官和记者,都对毛及其军队的成就印象深刻。毛则是看到获得美国部分援助的可能性——当时美国的援助都给了蒋介石,用于抗击日军。

“我们共产党人现在所进行的工作,乃是华盛顿、杰佛逊、林肯等早已在美国进行过了的工作,”1944年7月4日中共官方报纸的一篇鼓舞人心的社论这样写道。不过,蒋介石的不妥协阻挡了这方面的所有努力。

1945年战争结束时,美国政府努力扮演双重角色。一方面帮助蒋介石,继续支援他,把他的数万大军空运到东北,在向那里进军的共产党到达之前占领日军的地盘。另一方面,发起组建联合政府的谈判。在美国的敦促下,毛泽东飞往重庆——那是他第一次坐飞机——在那里,他与蒋介石进行了43天最终无果的谈判。1945年11月,哈里·S·杜鲁门总统(Harry S. Truman)派乔治·C·马歇尔将军(George C. Marshall)作为他的特派员前往中国。马歇尔继续尝试促成停火和联合政府,一直到1947年1月,但全面内战已于1946年初爆发。

蒋介石非常自信。美国支持他,斯大林看上去保持中立,并不渴望看到毛获胜,他的兵力是毛的四倍。不过,他的军队被腐败、严重通货膨胀以及完全根据忠诚度升迁的无能的军官拖垮。民众普遍的厌战情绪以及对国民党的敌意也产生了影响。

到1947年中期,国民党的兵力已降至共产党的两倍,到1948年中期,双方基本持平。国民党的将军们开始大批投降,此后不到一年,战争就结束了。

走苏联道路

在接下来的五年里,中国的很多发展是按照正统的苏联模式进行的。毛泽东在1949年宣布,中国之后将实行“一边倒”政策,与苏联合作。看上去也的确如此。按照苏联的模式,中国的第一个五年计划(1953-1957)强调重工业、中央规划、技术专长和大规模的国防建设。几所技术学校要求学生修交际舞课程。从彼得大帝开始,俄罗斯人便是这么做的。

这在一定程度上大概是毛泽东后来坚持说的自己1949年决定退居“二线”,把“日常工作”交给其他人造成的。他自称这么做是“想要使国家安全,想吸取斯大林在苏联的教训”。“有许多事情让别人去做,想让他们在群众中树立威信,以便我见马克思的时候,国家不那么震动,”他写道。“但是处在一线的同志处理得不那么好。”

无论是哪种情况,1950年朝鲜战争中断了中国的建设。尽管战争具体缘由仍鲜为人知且颇具争议,但重要的证据表明,它从根本上来说是苏联发动的,且未征询毛泽东的意见。这场战争对新成立的国家产生了糟糕的影响。它促使美国总统杜鲁门下令保卫蒋介石1949年退守的台湾,导致毛泽东与华盛顿的关系冰封二十年。此外,中国还付出了数以万计的生命代价和国家建设迫切需要的大量资金。

战争结束后,毛泽东开始无法忍受中国的发展速度和引入社会主义的方式。1955年,他下令加快农村地区的集体化速度。在那年7月的一次讲话中,他似乎又重新相信人的力量会战胜物质上的困难。这也预示了接下来很多事情的发生。

“一九五五年,在中国,正是社会主义和资本主义决胜负的一年。……一九五五年上半年是那样的乌烟瘴气,阴霸满天。一九五五年下半年却完全变了样,成了另外一种气候,几千万户的农民群众行动起来……这是大海的怒涛,一切妖魔鬼怪都被冲走了。”

改弦更张

如果随后多年里中国所走的道路常常看上去呈之字形,这在很大程度上一定是面对显而易见的经济困难,毛泽东在其好战的乌托邦式展望和更慎重的现实主义之间摇摆不定,不断换挡的结果。

1956年,赫鲁晓夫揭发了斯大林的劣迹,波兰出现骚乱,匈牙利发生暴动,这些都促使毛做出新的政策尝试,提出了“百花齐放”。在严厉的控制稍有放松后,他希望能激发人们对共产党提出一些有益但有度的批评,来避免类似问题在中国上演,与此同时鼓舞中国知识分子成为优秀的共产主义者。但他没有打算进行全面自由化。

在1957年2月的一次题为《关于正确处理人民内部矛盾的问题》的讲话中,毛泽东通过他惯用的两面性或矛盾论角度,概括了这一转变的理论依据。中国应该同时有更多的自由和更多的管制,这在西方人看来是不可能的,但毛不以为然,在他看来类似的矛盾或二元对立比比皆是。他说,“没有矛盾斗争,就没有世界,就没有发展,就没有生命,就没有幸福,就没有一切。”

困难在于正确分析矛盾。正如他在1957年所说:“人民内部,民主是对集中而言,自由是对纪律而言。这些都是一个统一体的两个矛盾着的侧面,它们是矛盾的,又是统一的,我们不应当片面地强调某一个侧面而否定另一个侧面。”

毛的这一论证倾向在很大程度上是得自马克思主义的辩证法,但中国的阴阳说也可能是一个来源,毛在小时候接触到了这种关于两股交替力量的理论。

大量批评涌现

让毛意想不到的是,百花齐放引起了大量的批评声,矛头直指共产党,为此他迅速转向了另一面——管制,发起了严厉的整治运动。

就是在那段时间,他在1957年第二次访问莫斯科时表示无需害怕核战争,掀起了轩然大波。“我说,极而言之,死掉一半人,还有一半人,帝国主义打平了,全世界社会主义化了,再过多少年,又会有二十七亿,一定还要多。”

这符合他对人的信念,他认为决定性因素不是机器或武器,而是人。1947年的一次访谈中,他宣称:“原子弹是美国反动派用来吓人的一只纸老虎,看样子可怕,实际上并不可怕。当然,原子弹是一种大规模屠杀的武器,但是决定战争胜败的是人民,而不是一两件新式武器。”这是一种游击战的观点。

据毛的回忆,这段时期,也就是1957–58年冬天,是中国的一个重大转折点。他对苏联的忧虑已经突破极限,决心结束对俄国人的亦步亦趋。他回到在江西和延安的源头寻找启发,重新强调农村以及农民在克服物质困难方面的潜能。中国需要进行一场“大跃进”。毛希望用公社对农民进行重组,释放他们的能量,大幅增加农业产量,一夜之间赶超西方。这是一个构想,不是计划。

正如毛自己所说:“中国六亿人口的显著特点是一穷二白,这看起来是坏事,其实是好事。穷则思变,要干,要革命。一张白纸,没有负担,好写最新最美的文字,好画最新最美的图画。”

全中国立刻热火朝天地行动起来。农民在院子里建起炽热的熔炉,自己提炼作为工业化象征的钢铁。成功让干部们欣喜若狂,农业产量一年里报出了100%的增长。湖南农民的一首歌谣体现了当时的气氛:

“入了公社如上天,一夜赛过几千年。”

但事实没那么简单。这之后出现了严重的混乱,食物短缺,一些地方甚至出现饥荒。整整过了三年经济才得到恢复。

领袖遭到攻击

这些举措让毛泽东的领导权自30年代初以来首次受到严重挑战。1959年夏天,中共中央委员会的一次会议在度假胜地庐山召开。会上,时任国防部长的彭德怀对他进行了大胆的批评。由于受到彭德怀的抨击,毛泽东变得紧张烦躁。“你们讲了那么多,允许我讲个把钟头,可以不可以?”他最后对与会者说。“吃了三次安眠药,睡不着。”

他坦率地承认自己对这场灾难负有一定责任:“这个乱子就闹大了,自己负责……对建设根本外行,对工业计划一点不懂。”

但毛泽东也以极具杀伤力的手腕发起反击,撤销了彭德怀的职务。做完这件事,毛泽东心满意足地把国内日常事务交由别人管理,在随后几年里集中精力处理外交事务,尤其是与莫斯科之间日益升级的争执。

当时的外交政策似乎常常像国内的政治运动一样剧烈摇摆;从出兵朝鲜半岛,到(印尼)万隆会议及和平共处五项原则,从呼吁解放全世界,到尼克松总统的中国行及上海公报。学界认为,在外交政策的这些转向背后,所有基本决定都是由毛泽东本人做出的,尽管周恩来常常以大使的身份代表中国与外界沟通。

此外,在摇摆不定的表象之下,毛泽东坚守着他深信不疑的几个观念。

首先,中国奉行仅限于防御的政策,比如说不会出兵越南。“不主动惹事,不挑起争端,不越出国境,”毛泽东告诉中共中央委员会。

帮助第三世界闹革命

其次,他致力于支持第三世界的革命运动。不过,他推崇辩证法,摸索出了一条路线,既和一国政府保持正常的外交关系,又向旨在推翻该国政府的共产党游击队施以援手。

再次,毛泽东致力于把中国重新打造成一个大国,而且他很早就意识到,中国只有在经济和军事上强大起来,才能得到以美国为首的帝国主义国家的认可。时间证明他是对的。中美关系破冰后,在70年代中期,以前和中国处于敌对状态的中南亚邻国纷纷效仿美国的做法。

与此同时,毛泽东越来越为苏联感到困扰,认为它既是外部威胁,又可能在内部形成会颠覆中国革命的异端。在1959年遭到彭德怀批评之后,毛泽东或许已经觉得党背叛了他,已经掌握在想追随苏联模式的官僚手中。这种模式是基于党内精英、物质刺激和重工业来实现渐进式发展。此外,毛泽东也开始怀疑中国的年轻人;就像他在1965年对马尔罗所说的,“这批年轻人表现出危险的苗头。”

“放任人性,不一定会让资本主义重新抬头,但是会让不平等重新抬头,”他说。“催生新阶级的力量是很强大的。”

“革命和下一代要健康发展,必须接受锤炼,”他接着表示。“年轻人要接受考验。”(以上三段引语仅见于中共发表的英文会议记录——译注)

考验:文化大革命

这个考验就是毛泽东在那年秋天发动的文化大革命。从很多方面讲,这是他人生中最长的一次巅峰,将他青睐的所有主题凝聚其中。“什么人间奇迹,我们都可以创造出来。要革命,就必须掌握阶级斗争的规律,”他在文化大革命开始前不久说道,可能属于他的语录的一部分。这场运动也是他对苏联影响的终极反抗,针对的是它的精英主义和官僚主义。

对于自己离世后会发生什么,毛泽东并没有把握。就像他在1965年告诉埃德加·斯诺的,一千年后,就连马克思和列宁大概都会“显得相当可笑吧”。

去年,在献给临终的周恩来的一首诗中,毛泽东以更心酸的笔触写道:

“父母忠贞为国酬,何曾怕断头?如今天下红遍,江山靠谁守?业未竟,身躯倦,鬓已秋。”

结尾称,“你我之辈,忍将夙愿,付与东流?”

翻译:纽约时报中文网

http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160914/c00mao-obit4/

卡拉 09-14-2016 18:08
September 10, 1976

【OBITUARY】 Mao Tse-Tung: Father of Chinese Revolution

By Fox Butterfield

Special to The New York Times
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HONG KONG, Sept. 9--Mao Tse-tung, who began as an obscure peasant, died one of history's great revolutionary figures.

Born at a time when China was wracked by civil strife, beset with terrible poverty and encroached on by more advanced foreign powers, he lived to fulfill his boyhood dream of restoring it to its traditional place as a great nation. In Chinese terms, he ranked with Chin Shih-huang, the first Emperor, who unified China in 221 B.C., and was the man Chairman Mao most liked to compare himself to.

With incredible perseverance and consummately conceived strategy, he harnessed the forces of agrarian discontent and nationalism to turn a tiny band of peasants into an army of millions, which he led to victory throughout China in 1949 after 20 years of fighting. Along the way the army fought battles as big as Stalingrad and suffered through a heroic march as long as Alexander's.

Then, after establishing the Chinese People's Republic, Mao launched a series of sweeping, sometimes convulsive campaigns to transform a semifeudal, largely illiterate and predominantly agricultural country encompassing almost four million square miles and a fifth of the world's population into a modern, industrialized socialist state. By the time of his death China had manufactured its own nuclear bombs and guided missiles and had become a major oil producer.

With China's resurgence, Mao also charted a new course in foreign affairs, putting an end to a century of humiliation under the "unequal treaties" imposed by the West and winning new recognition and respect. Finally, in 1972, even the United States abandoned its 20 years of implacable hostility when President Richard M. Nixon journeyed to Peking, where he was received by a smiling Mao.

At the same time he brooked no opposition to his control. To consolidate his new regime in the early 50's he launched a campaign in which hundreds of thousands were executed. In the late 50's, despite criticism from other party leaders, he ordered the Great Leap Forward, ultimately causing widespread disruption and food shortages. Throughout his years in power he toppled one of his rivals after another in the party. In the Cultural Revolution he risked throwing the country into chaos.

While China achieved enormous economic progress under Mao, some critics felt his constant political campaigns and his emphasis on conformity finally reduced many Chinese to a dispirited, anxious mass ready to go along with the latest shift in the political wind.

Complex Figure

One of the most remarkable personalities of the 20th century, Mao was an infinitely complex man-- by turns shrewd and realistic, then impatient and a romantic dreamer, an individualist but also a strict disciplinarian. His motives seemed a mixture of the humanitarian and the totalitarian. He himself once commented that he was "part monkey, part tiger," and perhaps after all he was riven with the same contradictions he was fond of analyzing in the world around him.

A Chinese patriot, a combative revolutionary, a fervent evangelist, a Marxist theorist, a soldier, a statesman and poet, above all Mao was a moralist who deeply believed, as have Chinese since Confucius, that man's goodness must come ahead of his mere economic progress. Like many Chinese of the past 100 years, angered by the insults of imperialism, he wanted to tear China down to make it stronger. He envisioned creating in China an egalitarian, revolutionary utopia in which mass enthusiasm provided the motive force.

"I have witnessed the tremendous energy of the masses," Mao wrote in 1958 in the midst of the Great Leap Forward, one of his biggest but ultimately most disruptive campaigns. "On this foundation it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." The two sentences are a striking summary of his thought.

Unlike many great leaders, Mao never exercised, or sought, absolute control over day-to-day affairs. But the man who rose from humble beginnings in a Hunan village became virtually sovereign, if not a living god, to the 800 million Chinese. His very words were the doctrine of the state. Printed in millions of little red plastic-bound books as "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse- tung,"they were taken to possess invincible magic properties.

Power, Prestige and Anxieties

Although Mao was a devoted Leninist who, like his Russian predecessor, stressed the need for a tightly organized and disciplined party, he came to cast himself above his party and sought to replace it with a personal cult when it thwarted him.

Despite awesome power and prestige, in the later years of his life--from about 1960 onward--he seemed obsessed by anxieties that the Chinese revolution was in danger of slipping back into the old elitism and bureaucratic ways of imperial China. This danger appeared all the greater, in his eyes, because of the concurrent development in the Soviet Union of what he termed "revisionism." In Mao's view, Nikita S. Krushchev's emphasis on material incentives to increase consumer- oriented production and the clear emergence of a privileged party elite were anathema. Looking at the problems in China, Mao complained in 1964, with perhaps characteristic exaggeration, "You can buy a branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying a daughter to him."

To revitalize China, to cleanse the party and to insure that the revolution survived him, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. As he conceded later, it had consequences even he did not foresee.

Party Unity Undermined

Hundreds of thousands of youngsters were mobilized as Red Guards. Often unruly, given to fighting among themselves, they roamed the country and humiliated and chastised Mao's opponents in the party after his call to "bombard the headquarters." After two years of turmoil, economic disruption and even bloodshed, order was finally restored, with help from the increasingly powerful army under Lin Piao, then Minister of Defense, and some surviving party leaders of a less radical bent such as Prime Minister Chou En-lai.

But Mao had severely undermined the critical and long-standing unity of the party, forged in the 1930's during the epochal Long March--an anabasis of 6,000 miles that took the fledgling army over mountains, rivers and wastelands from Kiangsi, in South China, to Shensi, in the northwest. Foremost among those purged in the Cultural Revolution were Liu Shao-chi, head of state, and Teng Hsiao-ping, the Secretary General of the party, who were labeled "capitalist roaders." Mr. Liu, for years one of Mao's closest associates, had served as head of state since 1959, when Mao relinquished the post in order to give his potential successors more experience. Mao's only official post after that was Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee.

Marshal Lin, for his role in keeping the army behind Mao and his constant and fulsome praise, was termed "Comrade Mao Tse-tung's close comrade in arms and successor" and his inheritance was engraved in the 1969 party constitution. But Marshal Lin lasted only two years; according to the official version, he died in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971 after trying to escape to the Soviet Union when his plot to kill Mao was discovered. Even more bizarre, Mao insisted in letters and speeches that have since reached the outside world that he had been suspicious of Marshal Lin as early as 1966 and had used him only to help get rid of Mr. Liu.

For several years after Marshal Lin's death, the redoubtable Mr. Chou, a master administrator and conciliator, helped the visibly aging Mao lead the country and embark on what seemed a sustained period of economic growth. But Mr. Chou's death from cancer in January 1976 left the daily leadership in the hands of Mr. Teng, the former party Secretary General whom Mr. Chou resurrected in 1973, evidently with Mao's approval, and installed as senior Deputy Prime Minister and likely successor.

An Even Quicker Fall

Mr. Teng then fell victim to Mao's suspicions even more quickly than had Mr. Liu and Marshal Lin. Only three months after Mr. Chou's demise, Mr. Teng was stripped of his posts, castigated once again as a "capitalist-roader within the party" and accused by Mao of misinterpreting his personal directives by overstressing economic development.

In these later years there were some who thought that Mao appeared as an aging autocrat, given more and more to whim. His invitation last winter to Mr. Nixon to revisit Peking, the scene of his greatest triumph as President, was viewed as a possible sign of a man becoming divorced from reality, though it was understandable in Chinese terms as a kind gesture to a good friend.

Mao made his last public appearance in 1971; in published photographs since then he often looked like a sick man. His apparent difficulty in controlling the movement of his hands and face and his slurred speech stirred speculation that he had suffered a stroke or had Parkinson's disease.

Yet he continued to receive a succession of foreign visitors in his book-lined study, sitting slouched down in a tartan-covered chair, and he apparently remained active in the political conflict that divided Peking. One of his last acts, it was said, was to select a final successor, Hua Kuo-feng, a relative unknown who had spent his early party career in Mao's home district, Hsiang-tan, in Hunan. Whether the two men had a close personal relationship was not clear.

Rift With Moscow

In recent years Mao had also been preoccupied with China's monumental quarrel with the Soviet Union, one of the pivotal developments of the postwar world. From the Chinese side the conflict was partly doctrinal, over Mao's concern that Soviet revisionism was a dangerous heresy that threatened to subvert the Chinese revolution. It was partly political and military, concerned with Mao's effort first to resist Moscow's domination of the Chinese party and later to defend against Soviet troops on China's border. It was partly territorial, over Peking's contention that Czarist Russia had annexed Chinese territory.

Although few outsiders perceived it until the quarrel surfaced in the early 1960's, it is clear now that the trouble had its origin in the earliest contact between the Chinese Communists and the Russians in the 1920's. It was a period when Mao and others in the newly organized Chinese party were groping for a way to power, and Stalin, from the distance of Moscow gave them orders that repeatedly led them into disaster.

Stalin and his representatives from the Communist International who served as advisers in China-- Mao dubbed them "imperial envoys"--first directed the Communists to ally with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. Then, after Generalissimo Chiang turned on the Communists in 1927, massacring thousands, Stalin ordered the party to anticipate a "revolutionary upsurge" in the cities by the (largely nonexistent) proletariat.

Mao was shorn of his posts and power in the early 1930's as a result of direct Soviet interference. It was only after the Communists were forced to begin the Long March in 1934, after more errors in strategy, that Mao won command because of his genius for organizing and leading peasant guerrillas in a revolution in the countryside.

His First Journey Abroad

When Mao traveled triumphantly to Moscow--it was his first journey abroad--at the end of 1949, soon after setting up his government, he immediately ran into the first foreign policy crisis of the People's Republic of China in the form of a two-month argument with Stalin over terms of an aid agreement and Soviet concessions. Although Mao was to try the Soviet model of economic development, with its emphasis on heavy industry, for a few years, by the mid-1950's he came to have doubts about it, both for its utility in a basically agricultural country such as China and because of the bureaucratic, elitist and capitalistic tendencies--material incentives--it brought with it.

A series of events in the mid- and late-1950's turned this history of uneasy relations into bitter wrangling and eventually open armed clashes. First among these was Nikita S. Khrushchev's speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin for his brutality and personality cult. Mao, who by then envisioned himself as the world's major Marxist-Leninist thinker and revolutionary, was caught by surprise. He resented not being consulted, and he was put in an awkward position by revelations by Mr. Khrushchev, then the party leader.

There followed in rapid succession the evident Soviet complicity in the affair of Peng Teh-huai, the Chinese Defense Minister who was purged in 1959 after criticizing Mao for the chaos of the Great Leap Forward: Moscow's failure to support Peking in a border clash with India, the offshore islands crisis with Taiwan and Washington, and finally the abrupt withdrawal of all Soviet technicians in July 1960, canceling hundreds of agreements to build factories and other installations.

At the same time Mr. Krushchev labeled the Chinese leaders as madmen in a speech to the Rumanian Party congress, and Mao was soon to tell his colleagues that "the party and state leadership of the Soviet Union have been usurped by revisionists."

The conflict reached its climax in the winter of 1969, when Soviet and Chinese patrols clashed along the frozen banks of the Ussuri River. Thereafter the Russians continued to build up their army, navy and air force along the Chinese frontier until a fourth of their troops were stationed in the area.

Mao spent hours lecturing every visiting head of state on the danger of Soviet expansionism-- hegemonism, as he termed it. His belief that Soviet "social-imperialism" was the greatest threat to peace enabled him to take a more sanguine view of the United States and helped bring about the gradual improvement in relations after 1972.

An Austere Style

Although Mao commanded enormous authority--in 1955, in a casual talk with local officials, he overturned the provisions of the five-year plan fixed only a day before by the National People's Congress--he shunned the trappings of might. He seldom appeared in public, perhaps to preserve a sense of awe and mystery, and he eschewed fancy dress or medals, in conformity with the simple standard he himself had set during his guerrilla days. Whatever the occasion, he wore only a plain gray tunic buttoned to the neck and trousers to match that came to be called a Mao suit in the West and for a period in the 1970's became a fashion craze.

Edgar Snow, the American journalist who in 1936 became the first Westerner to meet Mao, felt that his style owed much to the simplicity, if not roughness and crudeness, of his peasant upbringing. He had the "personal habits of a peasant, plain speaking and plain living," Mr. Snow reported after a visit to the Communists' guerrilla headquarters in Shensi, near Yenan. Mao was completely indifferent to personal appearance; he lived in a two-room cave like other peasants "with bare, poor, map-covered walls." His chief luxury was a mosquito net, Mr. Snow found, and he owned only his blankets and two cotton uniforms.

"Mao's food was the same as everybody's, but being a Hunanese he had the southerner's ai-la, or love of pepper," Mr. Snow wrote. "He even had pepper cooked into his bread. Except for this passion, he scarcely seemed to notice what he ate."

In the classic "Red Star Over China," the first public account of Mao, Mr. Snow wrote that he found Mao "a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick black hair grown very long, and with large searching eyes, a high- bridged nose and prominent cheekbones." The account continued: "My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness."

"He appears to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania," Mr. Snow said--the cult of Mao would not begin until the first "rectification" campaign in 1942. But, Mr. Snow added, "he has a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggests a power of ruthless decision."

Seeming Reserve and Aloofness

Agnes Smedley, another journalist who encountered Mao in Yenan at that time, felt that though he could communicate intensely with a few intimate friends, he remained on the whole reserved and aloof. "The sinister quality I had at first felt so strongly in him proved to be a spiritual isolation," she related. "As Chu Teh [the military commander] of the Red Army was loved, Mao Tse-tung was respected. The few who came to know him best had affection for him, but his spirit dwelt within himself, isolating him."

Other American visitors--diplomats, army officers and journalists--who trooped to Yenan in the 1940's during an optimistic interlude when Washington hoped to bring Mao and Chiang together to fight the Japanese, inevitably were impressed by Mao's obvious earnestness and by his willingness to sacrifice personal comfort for the pursuit of an idea. In these he contrasted all too clearly with the corruption and indifference of most Nationalist leaders.

Some of Mao's dedication, toughness and reserve may also have been the product of his bitter personal experiences along the road to power. His sister and his second wife, Yang Kai-hui, were executed in 1930 by General Chiang; a younger brother was killed fighting a rear-guard action during the Long March; another younger brother was executed in 1943 in Sinkiang, and Mao's eldest son was killed in the Korean War. Another son, according to Red Guard sources during the Cultural Revolution, was said to have gone mad because of the way he was brought up by a "bourgeois" family after his mother was executed.

Mao also had several close brushes with death. In 1927, when he was organizing peasants and workers in Hunan, he was captured by local pro-Kuomintang--that is, pro-Nationalist--militiamen, who marched him back to their headquarters to be shot. Just in sight of their office, Mao broke loose and fled into a nearby field, where he hid in tall grass until sunset.

"The soldiers pursued me, and forced some peasants to help them search for me," he related to Mr. Snow. "Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery. At last when it was dusk they abandoned the search."

Mindful of Cost to Family

He was certainly mindful of the cost of the revolution to his family and friends. In a talk in 1964 with Mao Yuan-hsin, the son of his executed brother, Mao recalled: "Very many members of our family have given their lives, killed by the Kuomintang and the American imperialists. You grew up eating honey, and thus far you have never known suffering. In the future, if you do not become a rightist, but rather a centrist, I shall be satisfied. You have never suffered--how can you be a leftist?"

Perhaps his losses contributed to Mao's attitude toward his enemies. Unlike Stalin, Mao never sought to put vast numbers of his opponents in the party to death. Instead, in a very Chinese, even Confucian, way, he believed in the power of education to reform them and sent them off to labor camps or the countryside for reindoctrination and redemption.

However, he did not cavil at killing those whom he considered true counterrevolutionaries. One of the first instances of this occurred in late 1930 in the small town of Futien, in the Communists' base area, which Mao had built up since 1927. In putting down a revolt by soldiers who challenged his rule, Mao had 2,000 to 3,000 officers and men executed. In the early 1950's, to consolidate the Communists' power, Mao launched a violent campaign against counterrevolutionaries. According to an estimate accepted by Stuart Schram, Mao's most careful and sensitive biographer, from a million to three million people, including landlords, nationalist agents and others suspected of being "class enemies," were executed.

"There is no evidence whatever," Mr. Schram wrote, that Mao "took pleasure in killing or torturing. But he has never hesitated to employ violence whenever he believed it necessary. No doubt, Mao regarded it all as a natural part of revolutionary struggle. He gave no quarter, and he asked for none."

As Mao himself put it, in one of the most celebrated passages in his writing, his 1927 "report of an investigation into the peasant movement":

"A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or embroidering a flower; it cannot be anything so refined, so calm and gentle, or so 'mild, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous' [the virtues of Confucius as described by a disciple]. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the authority of another. To put it bluntly, it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area."

Little is known about Mao's personal life or habits, which he kept sheltered from the glare of publicity. He was an inordinate cigarette smoker, and during the Long March, when cut off from regular sources of supply, is said to have experimented by smoking various leaves. Perhaps because of his habit, his voice was husky and he coughed a good deal in later life.

He apparently liked to work 13 or 14 hours a day, and Mr. Snow found that he frequently stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning reading and going over reports. Despite infirmity in his last years, Mao had an iron constitution that he consciously developed as a student in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan.

'No Time for Love or Romance'

In this Mao and his student friends--"a serious-minded little group" that "had no time for love or romance," Mao recalled--were trying to overcome the traditional Chinese prejudice that any physical labor or exercise was lower class. Mao himself was so much a product of this tradition that when the Chinese revolution of 1911 broke out and he joined the army for a few months in a burst of enthusiasm, he spent much of his salary of $7 a month to pay carriers to fetch his water since intellectuals did not do that kind of work.

Physical strength, courage and military prowess remained a basic theme of Mao's life. Even his first published writing, an essay written in 1917, was a plea that Chinese exercise more. "Our nation is wanting in strength," it began. "The military spirit has not been encouraged."

Whether, in another period--July 1966--Mao actually took his widely publicized swim in the Yangtze for 65 minutes is perhaps more a matter of legend than of fact. But his approach to swimming typified his dogged pursuit of an objective.

"I say that if you are resolved to do it, you can certainly learn, whether you are young or old." Mao once advised his principal military officers in discussing the need to improve themselves. "I will give you an example. I really learned to swim well only in 1954; previously I had not mastered it. In 1954, there was an indoor pool at Tsinghua University [in Peking]. I went there every day with my bag, changed my clothes, and for three months without interruption I studied the nature of water. Water doesn't drown people. Water is afraid of people."

Wide and Voracious Reader

A voracious reader, Mao enjoyed both the Chinese classics and novels he had devoured as a boy, and Western history, literature and philosophy, which he read in translation. He often impressed his visitors with an apt allusion to literature or a salty proverb, but he could be remarkably offhand and whimsical for the leader of a country. In the 1950's, when he was still head of state, he once greeted a particularly tall Western diplomat with the exclamation: "My God! As tall as that!"

Mao's informal style, his pithy and frequent use of Chinese metaphors and his transcendent charisma made him a natural leader for the masses of peasants. A Chinese writer observed that "Mao Tse-tung is fundamentally a character from a Chinese novel or opera."

In his later years Mao spent most of his time in his simple, yellowish residence inside Peking's Forbidden City, cut off from all but a small group of people. Some of these were female nurses who helped him walk; others were the three women interpreters who usually translated for him when there were foreign visitors. Given his difficult Hunan accent and speech problem, one of the women had to translate his words into comprehensible Mandarin Chinese.

Assigned to do that was Wang Hai-jung, whom some believed was his niece but others thought was the daughter of one of his favorite teachers. In any event, in the spring of 1976, after the downfall of Teng Hsiao-ping, Miss Wang and the two others were suddenly replaced without an announcement, stirring speculation that someone else in the entourage was jealous of their position.

In Classical Vein

For all the overwhelming changes Mao brought to China, the drama of how he and others at the top of the Communist hierarchy reached decisions seemed a tale from the Ming Dynasty court.

Who Mao's aides were, for example, who arranged his appointments, prepared documents for him to read and sign in his study behind the red velvet drapes, or carry his orders to the Central Committee--all this is not known outside China. One key figure in the mystery was certainly Chiang Ching, his fourth wife, an outspoken, sometimes vitriolic woman who claimed the mantle of his most faithful disciple.

Mao considered that he had been married only three times--his first wife was a peasant girl whom his parents married him to when he was only 14 and she was 20. He never lived with her, and as he told Mr. Snow, "I did not consider her my wife and at this time gave little thought to her."

His second wife, Yang Kai-hui, the woman executed in 1930, was the daughter of one of Mao's most influential teachers in Changsha. Yang Chang-chi, a professor of ethics. Professor Yang was to introduce the young Mao to Li Ta-chao, a brilliant nationalistic intellectual and writer in Peking who was one of the founders of the Communist movement in China.

Although Mao has sometimes been adjudged an ascetic man, bent only on the pursuit of revolution and power, he evidently could also be sentimental and romantic. In 1937, in reply to a commemorative poem written by a woman whose husband was a Communist leader killed in battle, Mao composed the following verse:

I lost my proud poplar, and you your willow, Poplar and willow soar lightly to the heaven of heavens. Wu Kang, asked what he has to offer, Presents them respectfully with cassia wine. The lonely goddess in the moon spreads her ample sleeves To dance for these faithful souls in the endless sky. Of a sudden comes word of the tiger's defeat on earth, And they break into tears of torrential rain. The Poplar and the Willow

The official interpretation accompanying a later collection of Mao's poems points out that his second wife's surname means "poplar" while the name of the man killed in battle means "willow."

According to an ancient legend, Wu Kang, mentioned in the third line, had committed certain crimes in his search for immortality and was condemned to cut down a cassia tree on the moon. Each time he raises his ax the tree becomes whole again, and thus he must go on felling it for eternity. The tiger in the seventh line refers to the Kuomintang regime Mao was fighting, and, hence, the last couplet describes the emotion of Mao's lost companion at the final triumph of the revolution. The official interpretation found that the poem contained a "large element of revolutionary romanticism."

In 1928, while Mao's second wife was still alive and he was 35, he began living with an 18-year- old, Ho Tzu-chen. By some accounts she was a forceful character and a commander of a woman's regiment; she was also said to have been the daughter of a landlord. In any case she married Mao in 1930, after Miss Yang was executed, and later accompanied him on the perilous and exhausting Long March, one of the few women to take part. One of the five children she bore Mao was born on the march.

The rigors evidently broke her health, and not long after reaching the Communists' new base area in Yenan, in the northwest, she was sent to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. While she was away, there arrived in Yenan a minor movie actress from Shanghai, Lan Ping, who, in contrast to the plain-living and isolated Communists, must have seemed glamorous and attractive. According to one version, she came to Mao's notice after ostentatiously sitting in the front row at one of his lectures and clapping loudly. It was apparently love at first sight for Mao, and Miss Lan--with her name changed to Chiang Ching--was soon living in Mao's cave house.

Their affair reportedly angered some of Mao's colleagues, who felt that he had betrayed his faithful companion of the Long March, Miss Ho, a genuine Communist, for the seductive Miss Chiang. To win approval for their marriage Mao is said to have pledged that Miss Chiang would stay out of politics. This may have been the origin of the widespread suspicion of and distaste for her among party leaders that have dogged her since.

Cultural Revolution

Miss Chiang did keep a low profile for much of the next three decades, but in 1964, when Mao grew dissatisfied with the party and prepared to launch the Cultural Revolution, he turned to her as one of the few people he could trust.

She undertook a vigorous reform of the popular traditional opera and the movies, demanding that they inject heavy doses of "class struggle" into every performance and paint all heroes in the whitest whites and villains in the blackest blacks. She also lined up a leftist literary critic in Shanghai, Yao Wen-yuan, who was willing to write a scathing attack on a play, "Hai Jui Dismissed from Office," that was an allegorical criticism of Mao. The publication of the article in November 1965 in Shanghai--Mao could not get it printed in Peking, where his opponents were in control-- signaled the start of the Cultural Revolution.

Miss Chiang was soon promoted to a commanding position in the group Mao established to direct the Cultural Revolution, and she vastly increased her unpopularity by making stinging personal attacks on many leading officials.

When the Cultural Revolution subsided Miss Chiang's authority was reduced, but in the following years she continued to try to exert her influence. She may have been instrumental in the downfall of Mr. Teng early in 1976. He was accused among other crimes of failing to attend any of her model operas and of trying to cut off a state subsidy to her pet production brigade near Tientsin.

Not Even a Telephone Call

How Mao regarded his controversial wife is difficult to say. She once indicated to an American scholar, Roxane Witke, that she and Mao were not always close personally. In 1957, when Mao made his second trip to Moscow she happened to be there in the hospital but he neither stopped in to see her nor phoned, she related. Later, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao wrote her a letter that is often cited by her detractors in the party.

"I think you also ought to pay attention to this problem," he wrote. "Don't be obsessed by victory. It is necessary to constantly remind ourselves of our own weaknesses, deficiencies and mistakes. I have on countless occasions reminded you of this. The last time was in April in Shanghai."

Although Miss Chiang had a reputation among Chinese for being rancorous and spiteful, Americans who met her during the visits to Peking by Presidents Nixon and Ford found her gay and vivacious. Miss Witke was impressed with her evident devotion to Mao's cause and felt she had suffered from being a woman in a world where men predominated.

Mao's apparent fondness for women and the checkered pattern of his married life contrasted sharply with the monotonous austerity and Puritanism he enforced since 1949. Romance is now frowned on as a decadent bourgeois idea and the age when women may marry has been pushed back to 25 and for men to 28.

Marriage was not the only instance of a certain willingness on Mao's part to bend the rules for himself. Though he insisted that all plays, novels, poems and paintings follow the often-stultifying code of socialist realism--"So far as we are concerned, art and literature are intended for the people," he said in talks at Yenan in 1942 that became the basis of a rigid artistic canon--he continued to write poetry as he chose, much of it in difficult classical forms with obscure allusions to the now-discredited Chinese classics. This contradiction, Mr. Schram, his biographer, noted, "seems to fill him with a mixture of embarrassment and pride."

Chinese Patriot

Looking into Mao's endlessly complex character, Mr. Schram concluded that he was fundamentally a Chinese patriot. Mao dated his attainment of "a certain amount of political consciousness" from the reading of a pamphlet in 1909, when he was 16, that deplored China's "loss" of Korea, Taiwan, Indochina, Burma and other tributary states. In 1936, speaking with Mr. Snow, Mao still recalled the opening sentence of the pamphlet: "Alas, China will be subjugated."

In Mao's case his native xenophobia was to be reinforced by his discovery of Leninism, in which imperialism was blamed for the backwardness of countries like China. But, Mr. Schram wrote, while Mao became "a deeply convinced Leninist revolutionary, and while the categories in which he reasons are Marxist categories, the deepest springs of his personality are, to a large extent, to be found in the Chinese tradition, and China's glory is at least as important to him as is world revolution."

Mr. Schram noted that in the closing years of Mao's life, he went so far as to subtly play down the importance of Marxism-Leninism in the Chinese revolution, envisioning it only as a storehouse of political techniques. This was in some ways a throwback to the views of 19th-century conservative Chinese imperial officials who wanted to strengthen China against the West but insisted that it borrow only Western "techniques" like gunboats and parliaments without bringing in "Western learning," which might subvert the Chinese essence. As Mao put it in 1965, consciously referring to the 19th-century formulation: "We cannot adopt Western learning as the substance. We can only use Western technology."

'Proletarian' Consciousness

Mao's contribution to Marxism-Leninism lay not in his theoretical writings, which were often plodding and in which he showed little interest himself, but in his Sinification of Marxism. When the Chinese Communists were floundering and faced extinction because of their orthodox concentration on the cities and the proletariat, Mao discovered the peasantry. He succeeded in imposing a party organized along tight Leninist lines and, animated by certain basic Marxist tenets, on a largely peasant base.

With suitable indoctrination, as Mao saw it, both the Chinese peasantry and Chinese intellectuals, who made up much of the party's leadership, could develop a "proletarian" consciousness. As Prof. Benjamin I. Schwartz of Harvard wrote in his pioneering study, "Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao," it was "a heresy in act never made explicit in theory."

The other basic element in Mao's approach to revolution was his inordinate belief in the power of the human will to overcome material obstacles and his conception that the necessary energy to propel the revolution lay stored among the masses. The potential energy of the peasantry was borne home to him with sudden force in 1927, when he embarked on the investigation of the peasant movement in his home province that formed the basis of his famous report. The liberation Mao found at work in village after village, with peasants overthrowing their landlords, had an enormous impact on him.

Beginning with these two basic insights--the importance of the peasantry to revolution in China and the power of the human will--Mao went on to elaborate the strategy and tactics for the entire revolution. First, he recognized the importance of winning the support of the people, who were, as he put it in his widely quoted formulation, like the ocean in which the guerrillas must swim like fish. Talking with Andre Malraux in 1964, Mao related: "You must realize that before us, among the masses, no one had addressed themselves to women or to the young. Nor, of course, to the peasants. For the first time in their lives, every one of them felt involved."

Careful Rules of Behavior

Similarly, to keep the allegiance of his guerrilla fighters, who received no pay and often inadequate food and weapons, Mao developed careful rules of behavior.

"The reason why the Red Army has been able to carry on in spite of such poor material conditions and such frequent engagements," he wrote, "is its practice of democracy. The officers do not beat the men; officers and men receive equal treatment; soldiers are free to hold meetings and to speak out; trivial formalities have been done away with; and the accounts are open for all to inspect. The soldiers handle the mess arrangements. All this gives great satisfaction to the soldiers."

For military tactics Mao drew on his boyhood reading of China's classic swashbuckling novels such as "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "The Water Margin," which described in vivid detail the exploits and strategems of ancient warriors and bandits. Not surprisingly Mao's military tactics--which were to be an important role in Vietnam--bore a close resemblance to those of Sun Tzu, the military writer of the fifth century B.C.

The basic problem was to find a way for a guerrilla force to overcome General Chiang's much larger and better equipped army. To this end Mao revised two principles--concentration of force so that he attacked only when he had a numerical advantage, and surprise.

"We use the few to defeat the many. That is no longer a secret, and in general the enemy is now well acquainted with our method. But he can neither prevent our victories nor avoid his own losses, because he does not know when and where we shall act. This we keep secret. The Red Army generally operates by surprise attacks."

Slogan for the Troops

Mao's military precepts were summed up in a four-line slogan his troops memorized:

"The enemy advances; we retreat." "The enemy camps; we harass." "The enemy tires; we attack." "The enemy retreats; we pursue."

To these Mao was to add the concept of a base area where his guerrillas could rest and replenish their supplies, and from which, over time, they could expand. In the end, this strategy led to victory.

The Moment of Victory

The supreme moment came on Oct. 1, 1949, when Mao, at age 54, stood on the high balcony of Tien An Men, the Gage of Heavenly Peace in Peking through which tribute-bearers had once come to prostrate themselves before the emperors, and proclaimed the People's Republic of China.

Processions had filled the square in front of the scarlet brass-studded gate. The air was chilly with the wind from the Gobi. Mao, wearing a drab cloth cap and a worn tunic and trousers, had Mr. Chou and Marshal Chu with him. Below them the immense throng shouted: "May Mao Tse-tung live 10,000 years!"

Suddenly there came a hush. Sliding up the immense white staff in the square was a small bundle that cracked open as it neared the top to reveal a flag 30 feet broad, blood red, with five yellow stars in the upper left quadrant. Guns reared in salute. On cue the crowd broke out in the new national anthem, and Mao stepped to the microphone amid more cheers.

"The Central Governing Council of the People's Republic of China today assumes power in Peking," he announced. A week before, speaking to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, he said: "Our nation will never again be an insulted nation. We have stood up. Let the domestic and foreign reactionaries tremble before us."

His words came 28 years after he and 11 others founded the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Its membership then was 52. "A small spark can start a prairie fire," Mao once said. It had.

Peasant Origins

Mao Tse-tung was born in a tile-roofed house surrounded by rice fields and low hills in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan Province, in central China, on December 26, 1893. His father, Mao Jen-sheng, was a tall, sturdily built peasant, industrious and thrifty, despotic and high-handed. Through hard work, saving and some small trading he raised himself from being a landless former soldier to what his son later described as the status of a "rich peasant," though in the China of those days that hardly meant being wealthy.

Mao's mother, Wen Chi-mei, was a hardy woman who worked in the house and fields. A Buddhist, she exhibited a warm-hearted kindness toward her children much in contrast to her husband's patriarchal sterness. During famines, when her husband--he disapproved of charity--was not watching, she would give food to the poor who came begging.

The China into which Mao was born was a restive empire on the point of its final breakup, which came in 1911. Since the middle of the 19th century the ruling Ching Dynasty had been beset by rural uprisings, most notably the Taiping revolt in the 1860's, and by the encroachments of foreign powers that challenged China's traditional belief in its superiority.

The mandarins who governed on behalf of the emperor in Peking seemed helpless to stop either the internal decay or the foreign incursions. Corrupt, smug, the product of a rarified examination system based on the Confucian classics, they procrastinated. China had no industry, and its peasants, 85 percent of the population, were mired in poverty and ignorance, subject to the constant threat of starvation and extortionate demands by landlords.

In the Fields at Age 6

At age 6 Mao was set to work in the rice fields by his father, but because he wanted the youngster to learn enough characters to keep the family's accounts, he also sent him to the village primary school. The curriculum was the Confucian Analects, learned by rote in the old style. Mao preferred Chinese novels, "especially stories of rebellions," he later recalled, which he used to read in school, "covering them up with a classic when the teacher walked past."

At 13 Mao left the school, working long hours on the farm during the day and keeping the accounts at night. His father frequently beat Mao and his two younger brothers and gave them only the most meager food, never meat or eggs.

At this point there occurred an incident that Western writers have seized on as a seminal clue to Mao's later life. During a reception Mao's father began to berate him for being lazy and useless. Infuriated, he fled to a nearby pond, threatening to jump in. Eventually the quarrel was resolved by compromise when Mao agreed to kowtow--on one knee only--in exchange for his father's promise to stop the beatings. "Thus the war ended," Mao recalled, "and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me the more."

Some scholars have also noted the possible influence on Mao of growing up in Hunan. A subtropical region, its many rivers and mountains made it a favorite haunt for bandits and secret societies. Hunanese are also famed for their vigorous personalities and their political talents as well as their love of red pepper, and they have produced a disproportionate number of leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Going to Another School

Although out of school, Mao retained his passion for reading in his spare time, and at 16, over his father's opposition, enrolled in a modern higher primary school nearby. It was at this school, in a busy market town, that Mao's real intellectual and political development began. In newspapers a cousin sent him he learned of the nationalistic late 19th-century reformers, and in a book, "Great Heroes of the World," he read about Washington and Napoleon (from his earliest days Mao was fascinated by martial exploits).

Most of his fellow students were sons of landlords, expensively dressed and genteel in manner. Mao had only one decent suit and generally went about in an old, frayed coat and trousers. Moreover, because he had been forced to interrupt his education for several years, he was much older than the others and towered above them. As a result this tall, ragged, uncouth "new boy" met with a mixture of ridicule and hostility. The experience may also have left its mark in his attitude toward the landlord class.

After a year wanderlust took Mao off to the provincial capital, Changsha, where he entered a junior high school. The year was 1911, the time of the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, and he was caught up in the political turmoil that swept the country. He cut off his pigtail, a rebellious act, and it was then that he joined a local army unit. After several more months of drifting and scanning classified ads in the press for opportunities, he spent half a year in the provincial library, where he read translations of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" and Rousseau's "Social Contract." He also saw a map of the world for the first time.

In 1913 Mao enrolled in the provincial normal school in Changsha, where he received his last five years of formal education. Although it was really only a high school, its standards were high, and Mao was particularly influenced by his ethics teacher, Prof. Yang Chang-chi, whose daughter he was later to marry. Professor Yang, who had studied in Japan and Europe, advocated combining Western and Chinese ideas to prod China back to life. Through him Mao soon found himself in touch with the mainstream of intellectual life, which was then caught up in what was called the May 4th Movement, an explosive nationalistic effort to modernize Chinese culture.

His First Published Writing

It was at this time that Mao published his first writing, an article for the popular Peking Magazine Hsin Ching Nien, or New Youth, on the need for physical fitness to build military strength. He also began to display his genius for leadership, setting up a radical student group.

Having graduated from the normal school in 1918, Mao set off that fall for Peking. The timing was critical. It was a period when intellectuals were turning from one Western "ism" to another in search of the latest and most potent elixir to revive their nation. In Mao's case, as he later wrote, he arrived just when "the salvos of the October Revolution" in Russia were bringing Marxism to China.

Mao secured a menial job as a library assistant at Peking University under Li Ta-chao, who had published an influential article, "The Victory of Bolshevism," and who had just founded the first Marxist study society in China. Mao was still somewhat "confused, looking for a road," but he was becoming "more and more radical."

Early the next spring he left Peking for Shanghai, where he saw off some friends on their way to study in France; he was reluctant to go because of his lack of ability in foreign languages. Over the next two years he moved between Shanghai, Peking and Changsha, teaching part of the time and throwing himself into organizing radical student groups and editing two popular journals that were suppressed by the local warlord government.

A Tendency Toward Populism

One article he published at the time, "The Great Union of the Popular Masses," which held that the vast majority of Chinese were progressive and constituted a mighty force for change, reflected what Mr. Schram has called Mao's populist tendency. In the biographer's opinion, "this idea can be regarded as the bridge which led him from the relatively conservative and traditionalist nationalism of 1917 to a genuinely Marxist viewpoint."

In the fall of 1920 Mao copied the example of his former boss in Peking, Mr. Li, who had just established a small Communist group there, and formed one in Changsha. The following July Mao and the 11 other delegates met in Shanghai to form the Chinese party.

The first congress was forced by a police raid to flee from its original meeting place in a girls' school to a holiday boat on a nearby lake. Filled with a new sense of zeal, Mao returned to Hunan, where, in orthodox Marxist fashion, he set about organizing labor unions and strikes. He had found his true vocation as a revolutionary.

The embryonic party fell heavily under the influence of the Russians, who helped engineer an alliance between the Chinese Communists, and the much stronger Nationalists of Sun Yat-sen. Stalin's goals in this, as in all his later moves in China, did not necessarily coincide with those of the Chinese Communists, and herein lay the source of much of the later friction.

Stalin wanted first to secure a friendly buffer on his eastern flank, so had to avoid any upheaval that would invite Western intervention. Second, he sought control over the Chinese party. His policy of alliance worked well enough for the first few years, giving the Communists a chance to expand, but in 1927 it suddenly became a disaster when General Chiang, who had succeeded to leadership of the Nationalists in 1925, turned on the Communists and carried out his massacre.

Patriotism Near the Surface

Perhaps because of Mao's populism and his highly nationalistic feelings, he was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the alliance. His patriotism was always near the surface.

Criticism of his dual role had a fortuitous result, eventually making him uncomfortable enough so that in 1925 he returned to his native village for a rest and, in the process, encountered a wave of peasant unrest. "Formerly, I had not fully realized the degree of class among the peasantry," he told Edgar Snow. From this time on Mao was to take a major interest in the peasantry--first lecturing at the Kuomintang's Peasant Movement training institute in Canton in 1926, then in early 1927 making his renowned inspection of the Hunanese countryside, and finally in the fall of 1927, after the Communists split with General Chiang, he led his small surviving band of supporters up into the Chingkang-shan Mountains to start the search for power all over again--on his terms.

Party Wrangling

The period from 1927 to 1935, when Mao finally won command of the party, was filled with complex wrangling over leadership and policy. The principal figures in the party, who remained in the security of the international settlement in Shanghai, and Stalin kept looking for a "revolutionary upsurge," and in accordance with conventional Marxist dogma planned attacks on cities. Mao, cut off in the countryside, was condemned for his peasant "deviation," though he was not often informed of the latest shifts in line or of his demotions until much later. Twice in 1927 and 1930, he was directed to lead attacks on cities, both ending in catastrophic defeats. Mao was to recall, "Long ago the Chinese Communists had first-hand experience of some of Stalin's mistakes."

The Chingkangshan area where Mao gradually worked out his own strategy was a storybook setting; a range of precipitous mountains on the border between Kiangsi and Hunan, it was an almost impregnable vastness populated only by a few simple villages and groups of bandits. By allying with these bandits and drawing on the peasants, whom he rewarded by reducing rents, Mao built his band of 1,000 soldiers into 100,000 by 1934. A capital was declared at Juichin, in southern Kiangsi.

Mao's very success proved his undoing. In 1931 the party Central Committee moved up to Kiangsi from Shanghai and proceeded to strip him of his posts in the party and army, with Mr. Chou replacing him as chief commissar in 1933. One of Mao's few steadfast supporters at this time was Mr. Teng, whom he was to oust from high position in 1976.

The loss of control was doubly grave because it coincided with the fifth of General Chiang's encirclement campaigns to wipe out the Communists. The previous efforts had failed in the face of Mao's tactics, withdrawing when outnumbered and then launching surprise attacks in overwhelming force on isolated units. Now the other Communist leaders tried the Nationalists head on, but General Chiang had 700,000 men--a seven-to-one advantage--and on the advice of a Nazi general, Hans von Steeckt, slowly strangled the Communists with a ring of barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements.

Flight Was the Only Answer

The only answer was flight. On Oct. 15, 1934, the main body of the Communist army broke through the Nationalist lines and headed southwest, beginning the Long March. Neither their destination nor their purpose was clear. Some thought of finding a new base area; others, including Mao, spoke of going north to fight the Japanese, who had been expanding farther and farther into China since 1931.

Of the 90,000 Communists who broke out, only 20,000 would eventually reach the new base area in Shensi, in the northwest, over a year and 6,000 miles later. For all its hardships, the Long March both saved and strengthened the Communists, giving them a legion of invincibility, a guerrilla ethic, a firm discipline and unity, and a new leader--Mao. He was finally given command after several more blunders along the march, when the army stopped at the remote town of Tsunyi, in Kweichow Province, in January 1935. Tsunyi had been captured without firing a shot by using a ruse straight out of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms," involving captured Kuomintang uniforms and banners.

A New Party and a New State


In Yenan, just below the Great Wall, the area where Chinese civilization originally developed over 3,000 years before, Mao proceeded to build a new party and state fully in his own image. This was a critical period, for the ideas he worked out in Yenan he would turn back to nostalgically in the late 1950's and 60's, when he launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Among them were the sending of party cadres down to the countryside for ideological remolding and the stress on self-reliance, mutual aid teams on farms and popularized education.

His mood at this time was perhaps best suggested by his poem "Snow," written in February 1936 shortly after his arrival in the northwest. A ringing affirmation of his links with China's glorious past and his love for the land, it reads:

This is the scene in that northern land; A hundred leagues are sealed with ice, A thousand leagues of whirling snow On either side of the Great Wall One vastness is all you see. From end to end of the great river The rushing torrent is frozen and lost. The mountains dance like silver snakes. The highlands roll like waxen elephants, As if they sought to vie in height with the Lord of heaven, And on a sunny day See how the white-robed beauty is adorned with rouge, enchantment beyond compare. Lured by such great beauty in our landscape Innumerable heroes have rivaled one another to bow in homage. But alas, Chin Shin-huang and Han Wu-ti were rather lacking in culture, Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu had little taste for poetry, And Genghis Khan, the favorite son of heaven for a day, knew only how to bend his bow to shoot great vultures. Now they are all past and gone. To find heroes in the grand manner, We must look rather in the present. Incarnation of Resistance

The most decisive stroke by Mao at this time was his genius in making the Communists the incarnation of Chinese resistance to the Japanese. The Japanese invasion, which began in 1931 in Manchuria and culminated in full-scale war in 1937, had provoked an enormous wave of popular resentment.

In the face of this, General Chiang continued to insist that his army would fight the Communists first and deal with the Japanese later. This strategy backfired in December 1936, when pro- Nationalist troops under Chang Hsueh-liang, the young warlord whom the Japanese had driven from Manchuria, kidnapped General Chiang at Sian, near the Communists' base area. He was released only after agreeing to a second united front with the Communists to fight the Japanese.

Although frictions were obvious from the start, the agreement gave Mao a badly needed breathing spell and the chance to expand Communist areas across the whole of North China under the guise of fighting the Japanese. For this the Communists were well prepared by their guerrilla training. By the end of the war in 1945, Communist troops, renamed the Eighth Route Army, had increased to a formidable force of a million men covering an area inhabited by 100 million people.

By an accident of history the Japanese invasion was to prove "perhaps the most important single factor in Mao's rise to power," Mr. Schram concluded in his biography.

Using this time of relative stability to read and write broadly, Mao systematized his thought. Several of his most important books and speeches were produced in the Yenan period, including "On Protracted War," "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party," "On New Democracy," and "On Practice" and "On Contradiction."

'Out of Barrel of a Gun'

One of his most-quoted speeches came in 1938:

"Every Communist must grasp the truth: 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' Our principle is that the party commands the gun, and the gun will never be allowed to command the party. But it is also true that with guns at our disposal we can really build up the party organization."

In 1942, to discipline the thousands of new officials the party was enrolling and to insure their fidelity to his thought, Mao launched the first rectification campaign. It was the beginning of thought reform, and it was also the start of the cult of Mao. He lent the cult a hand by ordering the study of his works. (In the Cultural Revolution he would promote an article praising his thought that he had helped compose.)

The rectification campaign had another purpose--to end what Mao saw as overreliance on Soviet guidance: "There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism. What we call concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on a national form. Consequently the Sinification of Marxism--that is to say, making certain that in all of its manifestations it is imbued with Chinese peculiarities--becomes a problem that must be understood and solved by the whole party." It was a call for independence from Moscow.

For a brief time in 1944-45 Mao and Americans had a short-lived courtship. American diplomats and journalists who were allowed into Yenan at this time, when Washington hoped to bring the Communists and Nationalists together against the Japanese, were invariably impressed by Mao and his army's accomplishments. Mao, for his part, looked to the possibility of winning some of the United States aid that was flowing to General Chang for use against Tokyo.

"The work which we Communists are carrying on today is the very same work which was carried on earlier in America by Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln," said an encouraging editorial in the official party newspaper on July 4, 1944. But General Chiang's intransigence blocked all efforts in this direction.

When the war ended in 1945, Washington endeavored to play a dual role. On the one hand it helped General Chiang by continuing aid to him and airlifting thousands of his troops to occupy Japanese positions in Manchuria ahead of the advancing Communists. On the other hand it sponsored negotiations for a coalition government. At the urging of the Americans Mao flew to Chungking-- his first airplane flight--where he held 43 days of ultimately futile talks with General Chiang. In November 1945 President Harry S. Truman dispatched Gen. George C. Marshall to China as his special envoy; he would continue trying to arrange a cease-fire and coalition government until January 1947, but full-scale civil war had broken out early in 1946.

General Chiang was vastly overconfident. He had American backing, apparent neutrality on the part of Stalin, who was not eager to see Mao win, and a four-to-one numerical advantage. But his army was racked by corruption, punishing inflation and an incompetent officer corps in which promotion was based entirely on loyalty. The general war-weariness and hostility of the populace to the Nationalists also played a role.

By the middle of 1947 the Nationalists' advantage had been reduced to two to one, and by mid- 1948 the two sides were almost even. Nationalist generals began surrendering in packs, and within a year it was all over.

In Soviet Path

Over the next five years much of China's development followed the orthodox Soviet model. Mao had proclaimed in 1949 that henceforth China would "lean to one side" in cooperation with the Soviet Union, and so it seemed. The first five-year plan (1953-57) placed emphasis on heavy industry, centralized planning, technical expertise and a large defense buildup in the Soviet pattern. Several technical schools required courses in ballroom dancing, as the Russians had done since Peter the Great.

Part of this may have been the result of what Mao later maintained was his decision in 1949 to retreat to a "second line" and leave "day to-day work" to others. He did this, he said, "out of concern for state security and in view of the lessons of Stalin in the Soviet Union." "Many things are left to other people, so that other people's prestige is built up, and when I go to see God there won't be such a big upheaval in the state," he wrote. "It seems there are some things which the comrades in the first line have not managed too well."

Whatever the case, China was disrupted in 1950 by the Korean War. Although its exact origins are still obscure and controversial, the weight of evidence seems to indicate that it was basically a Soviet initiative and that Mao was not consulted. The war had terrible consequences for the new state. It prompted President Truman to order the defense of Taiwan, which General Chiang had retreated to in 1949; it froze Mao's relations with Washington for two decades; it cost tens of thousands of Chinese lives and funds urgently needed for reconstruction.

The war over, Mao began to grow impatient with the speed of China's development and the way socialism was being introduced. In 1955 he ordered an acceleration in the tempo of collectivization in the countryside. In a speech that July he seemed to be returning to his belief in the power of the human will to overcome material obstacles; it was a precursor of things to come:

"In China 1955 was the year of decision in the struggle between socialism and capitalism. The first half of 1955 was murky and obscured by dark clouds. But in the second half the atmosphere changed completely. Tens of millions of peasant households swung into action. It is as if a ranging tidal wave has swept away all the demons and ghosts."

Mao Shifting His Gears

If over the succeeding years China often appeared to follow a zigzag course, it must have been more than in part a result of shifting of gears as Mao alternated between his warlike, utopian outlook and his more prudent realism in the face of obvious economic difficulties.

In 1956, following Mr. Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's excesses, the riots in Poland and the uprising in Hungary, Mao took a new tack and proclaimed the policy of "let a hundred flowers bloom." He hoped that some relaxation of tight controls would bring forth useful but limited criticism of the party to avert similar problems in China and at the same time encourage Chinese intellectuals to become good Communists. But he did not intend full-scale liberalization.

In a speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," in February 1957, Mao outlined his own typically two-sided or contradictory rationale for this. China should have both more freedom and more discipline, an impossibility in Western eyes but not to Mao who saw similar contradictions or dichotomies everywhere. He said, "If there were no contradictions and no struggle, there would be no world, no progress, no life, and there would be nothing at all."

The trick lay in analyzing contradictions correctly. As he put it in 1957: "Within the ranks of our people democracy stands in relation to centralism and freedom to discipline. They are two conflicting aspects of a single entity, contradictory as well as united, and we should not one-sidely emphasize one to the detriment of the other."

Mao's tendency to reason in this fashion owed much to the dialectics of Marxism, but it may also have had its origin in the Chinese theory of yin and yang, the two great alternating forces, which Mao absorbed as a boy.

Vast Outpouring of Criticism

When, contrary to Mao's expectation, the hundred flowers policy led to a vast outpouring of criticism that called the Communist Party itself into question, he quickly switched to the other side of his formula--discipline--and instituted a tough rectification campaign.

It was at this time that he made his second trip to Moscow in November 1957, and created a sensation by declaring that there was no need to fear nuclear war. "I said that if the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist: in a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more."

This accorded with his deeply held belief that men, not machines or weapons, were the decisive factor. In 1947, in an interview, he had declared: "The atom bomb is a paper tiger used by the U.S. reactionaries to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by people, not by one or two new types of weapon." It was a guerrilla's view.

In Mao's recollection, this period, the winter of 1957-58, marked a great watershed in China. His misgivings about the Soviet Union had reached the breaking point, and he resolved to put an end to copying the Russians. He reached back to the wellsprings of his experience in Kiangsi and Yenan, re-emphasizing the countryside and the potential energy of the peasantry to overcome material obstacles. China was to make "a great leap forward." By reorganizing the peasants into communes, Mao would release their energy, vastly increase agricultural production and catch up with the West overnight. It was a vision, not a plan.

As Mao described it: "China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it."

All China went to work at a fever pitch. Peasants set up backyard blast furnaces to make their own steel, the symbol of industrialization. Cadres became dizzy with success and reported a 100 percent jump in agricultural production in a single year. A jingle by peasants in Hunan caught the mood:

"Setting up a people's commune is like going to heaven. The achievements of a single night surpass those of several millennia."

It was not so easy. Terrible dislocations ensued, food grew scarce and there was even some starvation. It took three years to restore the economy.

Leader Attacked

These steps led to the first serious challenge to Mao's leadership since the early 1930's. At a Central Committee meeting in the summer of 1959 at the mountain resort of Lushan, he was boldly criticized by Peng Teh-huai, then Minister of Defense. Under the impact of Mr. Peng's attacks, Mao became tense and irritable. "Now that you have said so much, let me say something, will you," he finally told the group. "I have taken sleeping pills three times, but I cannot to seep."

Candidly accepting some of the onus for the disaster, he declared: "The chaos was in a grand scale, and I take responsibility. I am a complete outsider when it comes to economic construction, and I understand nothing about industrial planning."

But with devasting tactical skill Mao also counterattacked and ousted Mr. Peng from his post. This done, Mao was satisfied to leave the running of China to others, and over the next few years concentrated on foreign affairs, particularly the growing quarrel with Moscow.

Foreign policy often seemed to swing almost as wildly as domestic political campaigns; from intervention in Korea to the Bandung (Indonesia) Conference and the five principles of peaceful coexistence, from calls for world revolution to President Nixon's trip and the Shanghai communique. Behind these shifts, scholars agree, it was Mao himself who made all the fundamental decisions, even if Mr. Chou was often China's ambassador to the world.

Moreover, underneath these swings Mao adhered to several deeply held ideas.

First, China would pursue a strictly defensive policy, it would not, for example, intervene in Vietnam. "Others may come and attack us, but we shall not fight outside our borders," Mao told the Central Committee, "I say we will not be provoked."

Helping Third World Revolts


Second, he was committed to supporting revolutionary movements in the third world. But with his penchant for reasoning in contradictions, he worked out a way of conducting correct diplomatic relations with a government at the same time as he aided Communist guerrillas dedicated to overthrowing it.

Third, Mao was dedicated to making China a great power again, and he recognized early that only by building it up economically and militarily would the imperialists, led by the United States, come to accept it. Time proved him right. In the mid-1970's, after the thaw in relations with the United States, China's formerly hostile neighbors in Southeast Asia followed suit.

At the same time Mao became increasingly obsessed with the Soviet Union, both as an external threat and as a heretical internal system that might subvert the Chinese revolution. After the 1959 encounter with Mr. Peng, Mao may have already felt that the party had betrayed him and was in the hands of the bureaucrats who wanted to follow the Soviet example of gradual growth based on a party elite, material incentives and heavy industry. In addition, Mao came to have doubts about China's youth; as he told Mr. Malraux in August 1965, "This youth is showing dangerous tendencies."

"Humanity, left to its own, does not necessarily re-establish capitalism, but it does re-establish inequality," he said. "The forces tending toward the creation of new classes are powerful."

"Revolution and children have to be trained if they are to be properly brought up," he added. "Youth must be put to the test."

The Test: Cultural Revolution

The test, which Mao launched that fall, was the Cultural Revolution. In many ways it was the longest culmination of his life, bringing together his favorite themes. "Once class struggle is grasped, miracles are possible," he remarked not long before the start of the Cultural Revolution in what might be his motto. The movement was also his ultimate revolt against the influence of the Soviet Union--its elitism and bureaucracy.

Mao remained uncertain of what would follow him. As he told Edgar Snow in 1965, in 1,000 years even Marx and Lenin might "appear rather ridiculous."

Last year, in a poem addressed to the dying Chou En-lai, he put it more poignantly:

Loyal parents who sacrificed so much for the nation Never feared the ultimate fate. Now that the country has become red, who will be its guardian? Our mission, unfinished, may take a thousand years. The struggle tires us, and our hair is gray. The poem concludes: "You and I, old friends, can we just watch our efforts be washed away?"

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.html


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