immediately saw them as a threat, and a long period of clashes and battles began. From 1927 to the final victory of the revolution in 1949, Mao became ever more successful at winning these struggles.
Under pressure from the Nationalist armies, a number of the emerging Communists gathered in the south. Pursued, they walked and fought their way north, halfway across the country, absorbing followers from the heartlands as they went. This was the legendary Long March.
Throughout the thirties, the Japanese had been aggressively encroaching on Chinese territory. They occupied Manchuria in 1933, and with the advent of the Second World War they began to express their violent designs for the whole of China. Working their way down the coast, they pushed the Nationalist armies south. As they moved further inland, the Japanese then encountered the Communists, who formed a wall of guerrilla resistance for eight years. So long as the Communists wore away at the Japanese, the Nationalists let them be. And from the Communist point of view, so long as they had to fight the occupiers, they left the home-grown oppressors alone.
With the end of World War ii, the Nationalists and the Communists resumed their fierce struggle. The big showdowns took place in Manchuria. By the time the opposing armies faced off in the north, the Communists had grown substantially in number. On the battlefield, hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops deserted and joined the Red Army. The Communists dealt the Nationalists a crushing blow. With this momentum, the Communists swept across the country, absorbing the whole of the Chinese people.
With such a long and convoluted path to victory, it cannot really be said that the Communists were easterners or northerners or southerners. They had picked up members from all over the country. The Communists, vast legions of them, were Chinese. And by the time they acceded to power in 1949, their uncontested leader was Mao Zedong.
To institute the radical reforms and nationwide restructuring measures that he believed would propel China towards inexorable self-sufficiency and social harmony, Mao came to believe that a strong central governing body was necessary. Almost sixty years later, communism, the original ideology of the revolution, exists in name only. But the central governing body—that tremendous unifying power, the Communist Party—remains. This is the real legacy of Mao’s reign. The government Mao created is the new Forbidden City of a one-party dynasty. Its true location and form are as mysterious now as they were when the Forbidden City still struck awe across the land. Today as ever, no one can say from where China is governed. No one knows where the real decisions are made. It is even hard to gauge the actual power of the president and the premier. They stand at the top of a hierarchy of appearances. What lies beneath is forbidden and unknown.
TRUDEAU AND HÉBERT visited China in the fall of 1960, smack dab in the middle of the Great Leap Forward. Mao had concluded that peasant force alone would not safeguard China from its enemies. He had also decided that China must be able to satisfy the entirety of its various appetites on its own. He thus enacted a series of radical reforms aimed primarily at the countryside. Mao dreamt that the countryside would become the new centre of industry, a diffuse and inexhaustible source of essential products.
And so farmers were told to build iron smelters. Villages across the country were integrated into a national campaign for rapid self-sufficiency and slapped with impossible production quotas. Not only did the rural population fail to produce anything close to the quantity or quality of goods necessary to turn China into a modern industrial power but, distracted from their farms, the peasants began to experience massive food shortages. The Great Leap Forward caused a great famine.
At the time, the Communist Party so tightly cloaked the countryside from sight that visitors like Hébert and Trudeau could not imagine what was happening in certain parts of China while they toured other sites. To this day, the Party has made it impossible to fathom how many people really died in the famines caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Thus the Party survived the first great catastrophe of its reign.
It is said that the emperors of China governed the land by virtue of a heavenly mandate. As such their authority was sacrosanct. But the mandate also meant that, through the Emperor, the people were the benefactors of heaven’s blessings. The Emperor was beyond reproach, but only so long as his rule was, by and large, beneficial for all. If it was not, the Emperor clearly did not have a heavenly mandate, which meant that he could not be the true Emperor of China. So ended many dynasties.
Things are no different today. In the decades immediately after the revolution, most Chinese people embraced the Communist Party, because it had united China and formed a wholly Chinese government for the first time in centuries and also because it offered a new hope to the poorest class: the landless peasants, hundreds of millions strong. But by Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party was ideologically bankrupt and close to collapse. Too many great experiments had gone desperately wrong. The people had begun to sense that the heavenly mandate was on the wane.
Two major changes shored up the Party’s mandate to govern. The first was a thawing of relations with the West. Stunned by American defeat in Vietnam, social strife at home, humiliating expulsions from former colonies and the continued radiance of Soviet power, the Western powers became more realistic about their global hegemony. Seeing that their dominance was no longer total or inexorable, they became more open to negotiating with hitherto snubbed rivals.
Shortly after the revolution, Mao came to see Soviet involvement in China’s affairs as a particularly insidious form of foreign domination. And so he led the way in establishing a third pole of world power: the non-aligned movement. By the seventies, China was thoroughly at odds with the Soviet Bloc.
But the Western powers could not afford to be at loggerheads with both the Warsaw Pact countries and the non-aligned nations, and they saw the former as a far greater threat. China was both an enemy of the Russians and the natural great power of the non-aligned movement, so the Western powers gambled that a rapprochement with China would be in their interests. More subtly, they guessed that by elevating China, they would also stall the growing non-aligned movement, which would lose its natural leader.
So at the very time that the Communist Party of China, controlled by increasingly irrational ideologues, was beginning to lose the mantle of the heavenly mandate, the West offered China the recognition it had craved for so long. China was invited to join the table of superpowers and was granted permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council. The People’s Republic suddenly had new grounds to claim legitimacy.
The second change that shored up communist authority took place within the Party. Faced with the catastrophic famines brought on by the Great Leap Forward and the insane purges of the Cultural Revolution, a group of respected elders fought against the more orthodox Maoist core of the party to introduce another benchmark for legitimacy: prosperity. They also used their influence to elevate a critical mass of younger cadres that might become agents of reform. The party had to find ways to create wealth. With Mao’s gradual withdrawal into senility, his right-hand man, the wise and venerable Zhou Enlai, allowed this reformist movement to survive in the face of fierce opposition within the party. But it was the old revolutionary peasant Deng Xiaoping who eventually ensured the movement’s success. In so doing, Deng became the Communist Party’s dominant figure after Mao Zedong.
The pursuit of prosperity—the logic that Deng finally made inevitable in the late seventies—has held to this day. Prosperity may even have eclipsed the other virtues of communist power in China. And for more and more Chinese, prosperity has become the only benchmark for legitimacy. These days, Communist Party rule will be tolerated only so long as it creates wealth.
The new wealth is overwhelming in the big cities and undeniable in most towns. But if it doesn’t trickle down to the hundreds of thousands of villages of China, the claim to the celestial mandate will find three quarters of a billion detractors. And prosperity does seem to be reaching the countryside. Villages are more connected than ever before. A village may be extremely remote, but it is now linked
