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23-02-2016 | Global Society

From Totalitarian to Utilitarian: The Coupling of Mao’s New Man and the Liberal Old Self

Author: Aihe Wang

Published in: Society | Issue 2/2016

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Abstract

This article investigates the conceptualization of the socialist subject – Mao’s New Man – in American Sinology. Rather than an empirical study of the Maoist subject itself, it situates this conceptual trajectory in the larger histories of global politics and the Anglophone public imagination of Mao’s New Man. Tracing this conceptual history from the field’s origin in a Cold War totalitarianism paradigm to the present, it argues that the conceptual basis for diverse definitions of Mao’s New Man is not the pre-modern Chinese self, but its modern other – the liberal subject as an autonomous, rational actor. All subsequent generations of Sinologists have defined their works against this totalitarian image, insisting that China was an exception from totalitarianism. They have never unpacked its conceptual other – liberalism and its ontology of human nature as a coherent individual driven by self-interest – which has persisted in shaping the field’s analytical vocabulary and the public imagination.

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Esherich, Pickowicz, Walder, The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 7.

See Lynn White III, “Chinese Political Studies: Overview of the State of the Field”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Vol. 14 (2009), pp. 229–51. Among 145 works White surveyed, a handful remain solidly focused on Mao’s era, as exemplified by the masterpiece of MacFarquhar and Schoenhals.

Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies”, Kritika: Explorations in Russianand Eurasian History, Vol. 1, No.1 (2000), pp. 119–46, 120.

Harry Harding, “The Study of Chinese Politics: Toward a Third Generation of Scholarship”, World Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 (January, 1984), pp. 284–307, 286–8, 290, 298.

Elisabeth Perry, “Trends in the Study of Chinese Politics: State-Society Relations”, The China Quarterly, No. 139 (September, 1994), pp. 704–13, pp. 704, 713.

Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?” The China Journal, No.57 (January 2007), pp. 1–23, 6, my emphasis.

Cited in Harry Harding, “The Study of Chinese Politics: Toward a Third Generation of Scholarship”, World Politics, No. 36 (January 1984), pp. 284–307, 298.

Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 12–3, 17; my italics.

Sujian Guo, citing Karl Popper, argues that using “ugly facts” or “deviant cases” to falsify totalitarian (and any) theoretical model is ineffective and invalid. Sujian Guo, Post-Mao China: From Totalitarianism to Authoritarianism? (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2000), pp. 10–1.

Shue, The Reach of the State, p. 12.

Carl Friedrich, Totalitarianism (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 4.

Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: An Inner History of the Cold War (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 10.

Richard Shorten, Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 4.

Peter Baehr, “China the Anomaly: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Maoist Regime”, European Journal of Political Theory (2010.9-3), pp. 267–86, 274.

Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 2.

For Walder’s synthesis of these original texts, see Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, pp. 2–3.

Margaret Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment”, in Dana Villa ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [2000] 2006), pp. 25–43, 25.

In this section, I rely on Gleason’s work for the historical context of totalitarian theories, while the conceptual analyses of the original theoretical texts, such as those of Hayek, Friedrich, and Arendt, are my own. For the origin of the concept of totalitarianism, see Gleason, Totalitarianism, chapter 1.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 9–10, 29.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 33–9, 43.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 49–50.

Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. iii.

Hayek, Serfdom, p. 57.

Hayek, Serfdom, pp. 16, 14, and 15 respectively.

Hayek, Serfdom, p. 56.

David Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 1.

For the influence of these fictions on Soviet studies, see Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject.” For their influence on the American public, see Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: The Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Carl J. Friedrich, Totalitarianism, p. 4.

Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, [1956] 1965), p.16.

Ibid., pp. 21–2.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 11, 73–88.

Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism”, p. 25. I draw on Canovan’s work particularly for its contextualization of Arendt’s texts. The reading of Arendt’s original writings and their contrast with those of Hayek are my own.

Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964, p. 3.

Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, [1951] 1976), p. 200.

Arendt, Origin, p. 155.

Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism”, p. 26.

Arendt, Origin, Preface to Part 2, p. xviii.

Arendt, Origin, p. 463.

Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianim”, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, [1954] 1994), p. 341.

Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998), p. 64.

Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 233, 239.

“Its neglect of material interest, its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian attitudes . . . contributed to making contemporary politics well-nigh unpredictable.” Arendt, Origin, pp. 418–9.

Arendt, Origin, p. 456.

Shue, The Reach of the State, p. 17.

Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China (New York: Vangard Press, 1951).

Eric Ericson, “Wholeness and Totality—A Psychiatric Contribution”, in Friedrich, Totalitarianism, pp. 156–71.

Robert J. Lifton, “Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric Evaluation”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1957), p. 17.

For the wide use of the term in the China field at the time, see Mosher, China Misconceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 88–90; Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 103–7.

Simon Leys, “Human Rights in China”, in his The Burning Forest (New York: Holt Press, 1986), pp. 1–2.

Benjamin I. Schwartz, “New Trends in Maoism”, Problem of Communism, Vol. 4, No. 6 (July-August 1957), p. 7.

Ibid.

Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The First Decade”, China Quarterly, Vol. 1 (January-March, 1960), pp. 18–21, 19–20.

Joseph R. Levenson, “Communist China in Time and Space: Roots and Rootlessness”, China Quarterly, Vol. 39 (July-September 1969), pp. 1–11, 10.

Victor H. Li, “The Role of Law in Communist China”, China Quarterly, Vol. 44 (October 1970), pp. 66–111.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, p. 107.

P. 314.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, p. 104, fn. 113.

Fairbank, “China, Time for a Policy”, Atlantic Monthly (April 1957), pp. 35–9.

Fairbank, Chinabound (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 317–18.

Richard Madsen calls this modernizing paradigm the “liberal China myth” which has dominated mainstream American public discourse and foreign policy since the 1970s. See Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1995).

The term “revolutionary socialism” is defined by Tai-Chun Kuo and Ramon H. Myers: “[1] The Chinese revolutionary socialist regime, strongly influenced by Maoist thought and policies, initiated revolutionary strategies that greatly improved the welfare of the Chinese people and created a more egalitarian society. [2] These developments were not associated with any severe difficulties for this new leadership and society.” Kuo Tai - Chun and Ramon H. Myers, Understanding Communist China: Communist China Studies in the United States and the Republic of China, 1949–1978 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), p. 29. Mosher added the third element; “the revolutionary masses as a motive force in China’s development.” Mosher, China Misconceived, p. 233. “Revolutionary Redeemer” is another term describing the same paradigm, originating from one advocate and recapped by Richard Madsen in China and the American Dream, pp. 52–8.

Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, China! Inside the People's Republic (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 2.

John G. Gurley, “Maoist Economic Development: The New ‘Man’ in the New China”, originally published in E. Friedman and M. Selden (eds.), America’s Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1969); reprinted in Gurley, China’s Economy and the Maoist Strategy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press), 1976, pp. 1–19, 4–7.

Ibid., pp. 13, 18–9.

Ibid., p. 19.

Mark Selden, Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. viii.

Mosher, China Misconceived, pp. 124–38.

For the critique of many books and articles as well as media coverage published in the 1970s and 1980s that denied the harsh realities of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, see Miriam London, “The Romance of Realpolitik”, in George Hicks (ed.), The Broken Mirror: China after Tiananmen (Chicago: St. James Press, 1990), pp. 246–256; Mosher, China Misconceived; Leys, The Burning Forest; Jonathan Mirky, “The Myth of Mao’s China”, New York Review of Books (May 30, 1991), pp. 19–27; and Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream.

Gurley, “Maoist Economic Development”, p. 16.

Harding, “The Study of Chinese Politics”, p. 298.

James Pect, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America’s China Watchers”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 2, No. 1 (October 1969), pp. 59–69, 65.

For Nixon’s China initiative and the press coverage that changed U.S. public opinion, I draw on Mosher, China Misconceived, “Prologue” and chapter 7.

Theodore H. White, “Journey Back to Another China”, Life, Vol. 72, No. 10 (17 March 1972), pp. 49–50.

Seymour Topping, “New Dogma, New Maoist Man”, Report from Red China (New York: Aron Books, 1971), pp. 258–65, 258.

James Reston, “New China: ‘A Sink of Morality’”, and “Eric Sevareid’s Interview with James Reston”, in Report from Red China, pp. 237–239, 239; and pp. 354–5. Italics are mine.

Harrison Salisbury, To Peking—and Beyond (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), pp. 13, 301–2.

Joseph Kraft, “America’s China Myths”, Washington Post, February 29, 1972, B7; cited from Madsen, China and the American Dream, p. 80.

Shue, The Reach of the State, p. 13.

Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 133, 136.

Shue, The Reach of the State, p. 16.

Since the space of this paper would be insufficient to list the bibliography of this vast and diverse scholarship, I will only highlight the most representative examples.

Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, pp. 1, 24.

Ibid., pp. 6, 24.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. xiii (italics mine).

Ibid., pp. 7, 24–7.

Ibid., p. 162.

Ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., pp. 144, 146.

Ibid., pp. 27, 172.

Ibid., pp. 8–14.

Ibid., pp. 8, 25, 251–3.

Ibid., p. 166.

The social scientific scholarship on this subject is extensive. I cite only a few early landmarks: Hong Yung Lee, “The Radical Students in Kwangtung during the Cultural Revolution”, The China Quarterly, No. 64 (December 1975), pp. 645–85; and The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978); Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Stanley Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Canton) (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982); Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985).

Shaoguang Wang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 2–3.

Ibid., p. 4.

Ibid., pp. 268–281.

Andrew Walder, Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 13.

Ibid., p. 262.

100

Fairbank, Chinabound, pp. xiv, 316.

101

http://www.jungchang.net/jungchang_books_wildswans.asp. Accessed November 1, 2013.

102

See also Ruth Y. Y. Hung, “‘To be Worthy of the Suffering and Survival’: Chinese Memoirs and the Politics of Writing”, MPhil Thesis, the University of Hong Kong, 2003.

103

Krylova points out the same conceptual contradiction in Soviet studies. She calls for “the study of the individual as a process constituted over time” and questions the “possibility of static identity at any given moment in the Soviet Russia of the 1930s.” Krylova, “Tenacious Liberal Subject”, p. 145.

104

Hayek, Serfdom, pp. 15–6.

105

Xiaoying Wang, “The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre of China’s Capitalist Market Reforms”, The China Journal, No. 47 (2002), pp. 8, 15.

106

Yunxiang Yan, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 217.

107

Ibid., p. 219.

108

Arendt, “Understanding and Politics”, in Essays in Understanding, pp. 307–23, 323.

Title: From Totalitarian to Utilitarian: The Coupling of Mao’s New Man and the Liberal Old Self
Author: Aihe Wang
Publication date: 23-02-2016
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 2/2016
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-9995-6

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