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Andrew G. Walder is a sociologist at Stanford University who has written extensively on the Cultural Revolution and life in Maoist China. His latest book, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed,” published this year by Harvard University Press, incorporates the latest scholarship on this tumultuous era, when bedrocks of Chinese society — especially private property and communal religious life — were destroyed in favor of Communist-style collectives. He argues that Mao lurched from crisis to crisis, inspired less by a new vision of Communism than a simplistic understanding of Stalinist ideology.

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In painting this bleak picture, Mr. Walder helps explain why in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death, China embarked on far-reaching market-oriented economic liberalization — the basis for its prosperity and power today. In an interview, he discussed how the Communist victory in the civil war informed Mao’s approach to politics, who was responsible for most of the violence during the Cultural Revolution and what elements of Mao’s rule can be seen in President Xi Jinping’s administration today. Excerpts follow:

Q.

Why do we need a new book on Mao Zedong and the first decades of Communist rule in China?

A.

Some really good material on the Maoist era only really came out well into the reform era, but most social scientists were focusing on China’s reforms. The reforms were dramatic and unexpected, and so most of the attention focused on them. And these materials, as they gradually became available, languished. It took scholars like Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Schoenhals, Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun to begin to put this picture together. These works brought into focus the politics at the top. They dispelled many misperceptions. I see my role as connecting what happened at the top of the political system with the outcomes.

Q.

What sort of misperceptions did they dispel?

A.

Teiwes and Sun, for example, showed that what we thought of as the “two-line struggle” [between Mao and other leaders over economic policy in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, when famine killed at least 30 million] wasn’t really like that. The original idea was that Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi staked out positions different from Mao. This view was derived from the polemics of the period. Mao and his side criticized Deng and Liu, so scholars thought that this reflected a deeper reality. That twisted our perception of the real issues.

Mao did accurately perceive that many people were not as enthusiastic as he was, but they went along with him, especially Liu Shaoqi. So the idea of two opposing camps was discredited.

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It’s surprising how much we know about the Cultural Revolution compared to other movements, like the Great Leap Forward. The Red Guard movement, especially in universities, all had factional newspapers. They chronicled events. We now have tens of thousands of pages of material. I can’t think of a movement that is better documented. We think of it as mindless violence, but a lot of people were writing a lot about things they were doing.

Q.

I was struck by your description that the Communists’ guerrilla period was not as important to their governing style as we think. In fact, you argue that the civil war was far more important — and completely different from guerrilla war.

A.

Only when I read historical scholarship in the last 15 years that focuses on civil war and casualty figures of the Nationalists did I realize that they didn’t come to power through guerrilla war. You look at the casualty figures, and you realize that. In graduate school, most works we read glossed over that fact. For me, that was a revelation. The Communist Party did very little of the fighting against the Japanese, and it was a myth that a people’s war led the Communists to power.

Instead, the conquest of China was a military conquest, much like the [Soviet] Red Army fought the Nazis. It was a mass mobilization that supported vast armies that defeated the Nationalists. I don’t think that’s sunk into the consciousness of the field.

Q.

How did that affect the Communists’ governing style?

A.

Mao had these startling victories. Everyone said he couldn’t win quickly against the Nationalists. Even Stalin urged caution. But he pushed and won. That was the approach he turned to again in the late 1950s with the Great Leap Forward. He thought that you could accomplish anything. Also, he learned that he shouldn’t listen to others.

Q.

I was also struck by how little Mao evolved. After the civil war, he seemed to learn nothing.

A.

Stalin also pushed hard for Communism, but after the war, he moderated his view and become relatively conservative. Mao never moderated his views. He became more radical with time.

Q.

In fact, he seemed like an intellectual lightweight. You say most of what he learned about Communist thought was from “The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks),” the textbook commissioned by Stalin and first published in 1938.

A.

He was a great strategist. But a lot of what he wrote was, if not ghost-written, heavily edited by people like [his secretary] Chen Boda. His understanding of Marxism-Leninism was based on a CliffsNotes edition of Stalinism.

Q.

Another interesting thing I learned was how he failed at everything he tried after the early 1950s.

A.

He was pretty good at that [covering up his errors]. I never thought of it this way until I wrote it down, but pretty much everything he tried after 1957, nothing worked out the way he thought. He didn’t intend to deliberately starve peasants. I think historians of the Soviet Union showed that Stalin was willing to starve peasants if they resisted collectivization. I don’t think Mao set out to starve peasants, but when it happened he wasn’t shocked. He viewed it as collateral damage.

He was constantly making a risky move, and if it didn’t work, then he’d shift, and that didn’t work out. The whole Cultural Revolution decade was a mess because of that.

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Q.

You write that about 1.1 million to 1.6 million people died during the Cultural Revolution.

A.

In the literature, the number ranges from 40,000 to eight million. So it’s a relatively conservative estimate. But as a percent of the population, 750 million, that’s about one-fifth the death rate of Stalin’s Great Terror. Some people are annoyed that I’m minimizing the violence, but I’m trying to put it in perspective.

Another point was that in the Cultural Revolution, most killing wasn’t by the students or Red Guards, but by the government.

We focus on students killing their teachers. That touches a nerve. Or we focus on armed conflict between rebel groups. But most of the killing occurred when order — in quotation marks — was restored. It was not the rampaging Red Guards, even though those deaths were the most dramatic. It was the military restoration of order. The cure was far worse than the disease.

Q.

People often say that China’s president, Xi Jinping, is adopting elements of the Mao era, or even the Cultural Revolution. What do you think?



A.

He’s adopting some of the symbolism of Mao in the Cultural Revolution. People look back on that era as less corrupt. Similarly in Russia, people looked back at Stalin as someone who got things done. You can certainly say that about Mao. He bullied people, pushed them around and got things done. They’ve forgotten the outcomes.

It reminds me a bit of the U.S. South after the Civil War. You had a Reconstruction period and then, after the 1870s, they began to rewrite the history and that what the Confederate flag stood for was heritage and tradition, not slavery and lynching. There’s a sanitizing of the historical record. What Xi is about is unity and stability and economic development, and that’s not what Mao was about. Mao was willing to throw things to the wind. He was willing to gamble. He never thought things could happen if it was orderly. He thought disorder was the midwife of progress. Xi is completely different.

One example: Xi is clamping down on corruption, but he’s also clamping down on free expression and press freedom. But when Mao set out to reform the system twice, in the [1956] Hundred Flowers movement and the Cultural Revolution, he started out by opening the system to criticism. He invited people inside and outside the system to criticize. Xi does not want to do that.

People have forgotten that Mao was an incredibly radical guy. But like a lot of these guys whose pictures end up on currencies, they end up as an icon.

Q.

On the positive side, he held China together and gave it territorial integrity.

A.

Yes, absolutely, but he also held China back economically, socially, intellectually, for 20 years. It’s interesting to think what would have been China’s trajectory if he’d stepped aside in 1961 or 1962. Certainly China wouldn’t have started the reform period in 1978, having dug itself in such a deep hole. This 10 percent a year economic growth that they like to boast about was in part making up for 20 years of a more or less very stagnant economy.

Q.

But did his destruction pave the way for reform?

A.

Mao destroyed the bureaucracy that might have blocked reform. The party and bureaucracy were still in turmoil in the late 1970s, so a leader like Deng Xiaoping had more options to reform the party than Gorbachev did. The array of forces against him were much weaker than in the Soviet Union.