Historian: Maurice Meisner
Lived: 1931-2012
Nationality: American
Books: Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (1967), Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic (1977), Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (1999), The Deng Xiaoping Era: an Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism 1978-1994 (1996), Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait (2007).
Profession: Historian, academic, writer
Perspective: Marxist
Born in Detroit, Meisner was an outstanding student who studied both in his hometown and at the University of Chicago. Meisner’s doctoral thesis, completed at Chicago, focused on the contribution of Li Dazhao to Chinese adaptations of Marxism. During the 1950s, Meisner and his wife came under government scrutiny for their left-wing political views.
After graduating, Meisner took up positions in Virginia and Wisconsin. In 1968 he became a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of academics who opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War. Meisner wrote prolifically about the 20th century, not only as a historian but also as a press commentator and editorialist.
At his retirement in 1999, Meisner was one of America’s best-known Sinologists. He died in January 2012.
A scholarly but accessible writer, Meisner was always alert to the relationship between ideology and policies. Meisner courted a good deal of criticism in the 1970s, however, he was always prepared to re-evaluate his conclusions when new information came to hand.
His seminal work, Mao’s China, was first published in 1976 but has been revised and republished three times since. When the cruelties and excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution became known in the early 1980s, Meisner decided to “correct errors of fact and interpretation” in the first edition. By 1999, the focus of the book had changed to reflect the “most massive and the most intensive era of capitalist development in world history” within China.
Quotations
“[The May Fourth Movement] marks the true beginning of the Chinese Revolution… A massive wave of popular anti-imperialism engulfed the cities, and the country… was seething with political as well as intellectual ferment.”
“In an orgy of counterrevolutionary violence, Chiang turned his Soviet-built army to the task of destroying all radical mass organisation, as well as the Chinese Communist Party… Those killed in the White Terror of 1927-1930 took a toll of human lives that must be counted in the hundreds of thousands.”
“The alliance [First United Front, 1923-27] with the Guomindang [Nationalists] provided the Communists revolutionaries wider access to Chinese society and the powerful forces of revolution latent within it.”
“In was in the Jinggangshan border [1927-28] area that the Maoist strategy of a rural-based revolution had it origins.”
“Mao [did not present] himself as a Chinese sage in a Chinese tradition of sages. Instead, he appeared on the Chinese historical scene as an iconoclast, bearer of new social visions, prophet of new social orders based on universal truths derived from Western intellectual and political traditions.”
“But the heroism and great human drama of the epic [Long March] should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it was born out of political and military failure and ended in near disaster.”
“It was the Long March – and the legendary tales to which it gave rise – that provided this essential feeling of hope, the confidence that determined people could prevail under even the most desperate conditions… it was Mao Zedong who radiated and inspired this faith in the future… These ascetic values [of struggle, heroic sacrifice, self-denial, diligence, courage and unselfishness] lay at the core of what later came to be celebrated as ‘the Yan’an spirit’… Indeed, the cult of Mao Zedong … was born out of the Long March, for Mao was the prophet who had led the survivors through the wilderness.”
“The Yan’an era was also the time when Mao and the Maoists laid down rigid dogmas and orthodoxies in political and cultural life, conducted witch hunts … and relentlessly suppressed political and intellectual dissent in general.”
“The Communists rightly attribute their victory [in the Civil War] to the principles and practices of the Yan’an era.”
“For more than two decades the Chinese Revolution had grown in an insular national mold. It had developed independently of international revolutionary currents and was both physically and spiritually isolated from them… Unlike Lenin and Trotsky, Mao Zedong was an eminently national revolutionary leader, not an international revolutionary spokesman.”
“The power of the new Chinese government [The People’s Republic of China] rested ultimately on the forces of violence which all states wield over society: the army and the police.”
“In most revolutionary situations, the choice is not between terror and its absence but rather between revolutionary terror or counterrevolutionary terror; and since China had suffered so greatly from the latter over the decades, one should not be too quick to levy moral condemnations of the former.”
“The early 1960s were undoubtedly the most frustrating years in Mao’s political life… His attempts to inaugurate new revolutionary campaigns were repeatedly thwarted, distorted or ignored… Mao began to suffer from an uncharacteristic loss of confidence in the future of the revolution.”
“While the leaders of the Cultural Revolution [1966-76] left ambiguous their vision of the new political order – and the place of the Party in it – there was nothing ambiguous… about Mao Zedong’s call for the masses to rebel against the existing Party and its organisations, albeit a call made in the name of the Party and its Chairman.”
“[The Cultural Revolution] yielded inhumanities in sufficient quantity for all groups and institutions involved to share some part of the blame. And one of the products of the years 1966-69 was a bitter legacy of grief, distrust, hatred, and a thirst for revenge.”
“The most obvious result of the Cultural Revolution… is that it took a fearsome toll of human lives… It not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problem of political succession.”
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