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From the “Great Union of the Popular Masses” to the “Great Alliance”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Stuart R. Schram
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Extract

The main purpose of this article is to serve as an introduction to the foregoing translation of Mao Tse-tung's essay, “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” written during the summer of 1919. As suggested by the title, however, while focusing primarily on Mao Tse-tung's thought at the time of the May Fourth Movement, I have chosen to develop also certain parallels with the ideas he has put forward more recently, especially during the Cultural Revolution. That there are elements of continuity between these two epochs has been recognized by everyone from the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, Mao himself not only stressed these links, but, for a time at least, sought to exaggerate them. The Cultural Revolution was (among many other things) an attempt to re-create, for the benefit of today's youth, an experience analogous to that of Mao's generation of young Chinese half a century ago. None the less, the juxtaposition, for purposes of analysis, of two such episodes widely separated in time may at first glance appear somewhat arbitrary. Such an approach can, in my view, be justified by the fact that the Mao Tse-tung of 1919 had not yet seriously begun to assimilate Marxism, whereas the Mao Tse-tung of the Cultural Revolution had already moved beyond Marxism to conceptions not altogether compatible with the logic of Marxism or of Leninism. The intervening years, during which he mastered, applied and then to some extent discarded the principles of revolution developed by Lenin and Stalin are, of course, vitally important to an understanding of the genesis and present significance of his thought. But by looking directly from 1919 to 1969, and leaping over the intervening period, one can perhaps see the problem in a perspective which reveals points that would otherwise be obscured. In particular, one can note the persistence of traits and ideas not derived from Marxism, and which therefore belong to an earlier and deeper stratum of Mao's thinking and feeling about the problems of Chinese society.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 49 , January 1972 , pp. 88 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1972

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References

1. Revised edition (New York: Praeger, and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), 1969, pp. 162–4, 239–41.Google Scholar

2. Rekishi Hyōron (Critical Studies of History) (Tokyo), No. 3/4, 1971. For details regarding the Chinese source, see above p. 76 the note at the beginning of the translation.Google Scholar

3. Mao Tse-tung chi (Collected Writings of Mao Tse-tung). Supervized by Takeuchi Minoru (Tokyo: Hokubōsha, in progress).Google Scholar

4. Text in Tung-fang tsa-chih (Eastern Miscellany), Vol. XX, No. 6, 25 03 1923. (For some reason it is described there as a recent document, but the correct date is 1921.)Google Scholar

5. Li, Jui, Mao Tse-tung t'ung-chih ti ch'u-ch'i ko-ming huo-tung (Peking: Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien ch'u-pan-she), 1957, p. 106.Google Scholar

6. Rekishi Hyōron, 3/4, 1971, p. 19.Google Scholar

7. Ibid. pp. 124–5.

8. See Schram, S., Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1967, pp. 47–9.Google Scholar

9. Li, Ta-chao, “Chieh-chi ching-cheng yü hu-tsu” (“Class struggle and mutual aid”), in Li Ta-chao hsüan-chi (Selected Works of Li Ta-chao), pp. 222–5Google Scholar. (Originally published in Mei-chou p'ing-lun on 6 07 1919.)Google Scholar For a further analysis of this and other contemporary writings of Li Ta-chao see Meisner, M., Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1967, especially pp. 142–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. References in Schram, Political Thought, p. 34.Google Scholar

11. Li, Ta-chao, “Shao-nien Chung-kuo ti shao-nien yün-tung” (“The youth movement of the Young China Association”), Shao-nien Chung-kuo (Young China), Vol. I, No. 3, pp. 1–3Google Scholar. Mao was probably a reader of Shao-nien Chung-kuo at this time; he formally joined the Young China Association in January 1920 during his second visit to Peking. (See the note regarding new members in Shao-nien Chung-kuo, Vol. I, No. 8Google Scholar, p. 66.) For a translation of extracts from another of Li Ta-chao's writings of this period stressing universal brotherhood, see Carrère d'Encausse, H. and Schram, S., Marxism and Asia (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press), 1969, pp. 208–10.Google Scholar

13. “On the ten great relations,” point 3, text in an untitled collection of Mao's writings produced during the Cultural Revolution, p. 22, translation in Current Background (CB) (Hongkong: U.S. Consulate General), No. 892, pp. 24–5.Google Scholar

14. For a discussion of Li Jui's handling of sources, see Schram, Political Thought, p. 459.Google Scholar

15 Editorial in Hsin Hunan, No. 7, 1919, as quoted in Hsin Ch'ing-nien, Vol. VII, No. 1, p. 105. The word “authority” appears in English after the Chinese, shih-li; I have felt obliged to use Mao's own equivalent, but his meaning was probably closer to the usual sense of the Chinese term, which signifies “power” or “influence” rather than authority.Google Scholar

16. “Jen hsueh” (“A study of benevolence”) in T'an Ssu-t'ung ch'üan-chi (Complete Works of T'an Ssu-t'ung) (Peking: San-lien Shu-tien, 1954), p. 15.Google Scholar

17. “Chih-shih p'ien,” ibid. pp. 91–102. I am grateful to Judith Whitbeck for calling my attention to this text. See also the summary of T'an's argument, with a translation of essays 3 and 4, by Robel, Ronald R., “T'an Ssu-t'ung on Hsueh Hui or Study associations,” in Frederick, Wakeman (ed.), “Nothing Concealed” – Essays in Honour of Liu Yü-yun (Taipei: Chinese Materials and Research Aids Service Center, 1970), pp. 163–76.Google Scholar

18. Schram, , Political Thought, pp. 334–7Google Scholar; R., Witke, “Mao Tse-tung, women, and suicide in the May Fourth era,” The China Quarterly, No. 31, 1967, pp. 128–47.Google Scholar

19. Ibid. p. 154.

20. Mao Tse-tung szu-hsiang wan sui (n.p., n.d.), p. 26; translated in CB No. 891, p. 42, and in Jerome Ch'en, Mao Papers (London: Oxford University Press), 1970, p. 93.Google Scholar

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22. Li, Jui, op cit., p. 106.Google Scholar

23. Schram, Political Thought, p. 354.Google Scholar

24. Li, Ta-chao, “Youth and the villages” (Schram, Political Thought, p. 32 and Meisner, there cited); also article cited in note 11. Intellectuals, Li declared, must not become “a kind of cultural liu-min outside the working society,” but go to the peasants. Real humanism would be forged in common toil with the peasants by young intellectuals. Mao himself, at this stage, did not attach so much importance to going to the peasants.Google Scholar

25. Mao chu-hsi wen-hsuan, p. 63, translated in JPRS, No. 49826, p. 45.Google Scholar

26. Ibid. p. 62 (JPRS, p. 44).

27. Ibid. p. 81 (JPRS, pp. 49–59).

28. Mao chu-hsi tui P'eng, Huang, Chang, Chou fan-dang chi-t'uan ti p'i-p'an (n.p., n.d.), p. 27, translated in Chinese Law and Government, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 94–5.Google Scholar