Gao Hua's book was first published 20 years ago. In its Chinese editions it has been admired, praised and widely reviewed by many outside China, but in China itself it has been criticized and banned. I first started reading it six years ago in search of material on the early Rectification and Thought Reform Movements and their impact on science. Even as a result of this rather selective approach, I was gripped immediately. We now have the work in English and to re-read the book in its entirety has been a further revelation. The field of modern Chinese studies owes a debt of gratitude to Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian who have translated this vast work which, together with notes, bibliography and indexes, runs to 812 pages. Equal thanks are due to the Chinese University Press for seeing this translation through its long march to publication.
I am not myself a specialist in the field of Chinese history or of the Chinese Communist Party, I therefore focus here on what I have learned from Gao Hua as a historian of China's economic and scientific development. I leave to others the many detailed issues of Party history and related topics in military and diplomatic affairs that careful study of the book gives rise to.
I should say immediately that in more than 60 years of reading, three books have had a transformative impact on my understanding of China. The first two were Fei Xiaotong's Peasant Life in China (Routledge, 1939) and Franz Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (University of California Press, 1967). The value of the former was that it can take the reader from data and abstract social science to a grasp of what the lives of most Chinese were actually like in Jiangnan in the 1930s, when Fei was doing his fieldwork there. Schurmann, on the other hand, provided a general framework within which one could think about organizing the mountains of empirical information that always threaten to overwhelm when beginning research on a specific topic. The third book in my group has been Gao Hua's work reviewed here.
While the first two books of this trio were read in the very early stages of my research experience, Gao came after a great deal of other work, and the basic reason why its impact has been so powerful is that almost all that I thought I knew about the years after 1948 (i.e. from victory in Manchuria to the 1980s), has been enriched by grasping much more deeply its origins in the 1930s and 1940s.
To start with there are the people. At various times I have looked in some depth at most of the Politburo level leaders up to the early 1980s, and have been especially interested in the economic leadership, including figures such as Chen Yun, Bo Yibo, Li Xiannian, Li Fuchun, Tan Zhenlin and others. Also, so important in their many roles, have been several of the Ten Marshals of the PLA, especially Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Ye Jianying and Peng Dehuai. At a lower level, more local figures such as Tao Zhu and Ke Qingshi have played a role, and of course there are the “intellectuals” and scientists, for example Chen Boda, Yu Guangyuan and Ye Qisun. All these figures are covered in recent histories, biographies and chronologies of various kinds. These sources do often go back to the early years of their subjects but, without the comprehensive picture of the kind offered here by Gao, their value for me at least was often limited.
The central point of Gao's research is in the title: it is about how the Red Sun (Mao) rose, and again, so many aspects of the answers to this question recur and echo throughout and to the very end of Mao's career.
A central narrative that Gao explains is the way in which what at first seemed to be a mild, corrective process of cadre criticism and reform, moved on to a stage of harsh individual cadre examination and inquisition which, in turn, culminated in a final scenario marked by violence, indiscriminate torture, and deaths by execution and suicide. There is nothing in the delirium of these final stages that was later exceeded by events in the Cultural Revolution. Gao does list a substantial number of leaders who disapproved of these excesses, but only Zhou Enlai, Gao Gang and two others appear to have formally objected. Only the intervention of the Comintern leader, Georgi Dimitrov, eventually slowed the movement down.
Two other features of Mao's rise will ring bells to those familiar with later PRC Party history. One, is the wild and indiscriminate labelling of entire swathes of the Party membership with accusations of them being “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “KMT agents,” “Japanese spies,” “left or right deviation tending capitulationists” and so on. These labels were as absurd as the later labelling of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others as Capitalist Roaders, Slaves to Imperialism and similar. What the labelling did, however, was enable Mao to bring struggle methods appropriate to the extermination of external enemies, into the Party itself.
Another technique of interest was the way that, on the eve of and during the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, Mao insisted on all of the top leadership making self-confessions of their errors. Only Kang Sheng was exempt from the process. This technique was to be employed again in the summer of 1958, and yet again in the first week of February 1962 at the Conference of Seven Thousand Cadres.
The rise of the Red Sun was of course inseparable from the rise of Mao Zedong Thought. In addition to destroying the inner Party influence of the Soviet oriented Dogmatists, the rise required thinking, the hiring of young intellectuals to articulate Mao's Sinification of Marxism, and the seizure of power in the bureaucracies controlling propaganda, education, research, the press and all other publishing outlets.
As part of this campaign, Mao – following Stalin's example – also oversaw the construction of a new, orthodox Party history: one that would of course solidify his place in it. This process was repeated in 1981 and, viewing the political and academic trajectories now visible in China, there must be scholars who today are hard at work preparing yet a third major revision of the Party's historical record.
In conclusion, therefore, Gao Hua has not only left a major legacy of his own, but also a multitude of scholarly opportunities for others. These opportunities relate not only to the issues unfolding at the present, but to further work on topics such as the 1957 Rectification, which, had he lived longer, would have been a natural progression for Gao Hua himself to work on.
