At Berkeley, we read Lucien Bianco's tour de force, a book entitled The Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (Gallimard, 1967; Stanford, 1971) in the first week of the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr.’s graduate course on Republican China. Bianco was one of the best books we read, logically constructed with meaty footnotes providing both documentation and additional counterpoints, brilliantly translated by Muriel Bell of Stanford UP. Bianco combined sweeping narrative, historical arguments, social science comparisons, historiography, and primary documentation seamlessly. Only in the footnotes could we sense Bianco's ongoing battle against the French Maoists, almost as vituperative as the Beijing struggles of those years.
In 2014, Bianco's newest book appeared in French as , coming out of Pierre Nora's famed Gallimard publishing house, just as Les origines had done forty-seven years earlier. If Mao Zedong was a practical man of action in Les origines, as he worked his way toward dictatorship, now Bianco has evaluated him more fully with an eye to the dire consequences of Mao in power. He has done this in comparison with Iosif Stalin, which is why this book, largely Chinese history, has come to Slavic Review.
There are nine chapters encompassing economics, politics, the peasantry, famines, bureaucracy, culture, the [prison] camps, and the dictators, clearly labeled “monsters” (293). In all, they construct a solid diatribe against both Stalin and Mao, both blinded by Karl Marx, both falling into the centralizing trap of Leninism, both sacrificing peasants by the million to overcome backwardness. Although Mao's originality is given some small credit in the 1920s and 1930s, from the late 1930s on, Mao is a copy, the repeat offender, as implied by the French title. What little he knew of Marxism, he gathered from his translation of Stalin's Short Course (1938), which taught him that if Lenin was Marx for a new time and place, then the same could be said for Stalin and Mao. The dynamic of “loosening, then tightening” drawn from Soviet police practice, was successfully demonstrated in the cultural realm at Mao's wartime capital-in-hiding Yan'an in 1942–43. The same technique would serve for successive purges in 1956–57 and 1966–67 (356–57). Even after Stalin's death, when Mao could safely criticize him, such critiques led only to further “leaps” along Stalinist trajectories leading to further horrifying increases in “excess mortality” (74–75; 302).
Bianco is adamant that the post-Mao prosperity should not be credited to Mao, even if his face is on every hundred-yuan note, the highest denomination in circulation (342–43). Some small gratitude accrues for sparing Deng Xiaoping, “for is it possible to imagine for one minute that a confirmed sinner like Deng, a repeat offender of capitalist restoration, might have survived under Stalin?” (314).
Although all the comparisons of similarities and differences tease out interesting and important insights on both Stalin and Mao, I would highlight those on the peasantry and the camps. For the former, Bianco shows how the tragedy of dekulakization in 1929 in the USSR was avoided in 1955 in the People's Republic of China (PRC) by allowing all peasants to join the communes (111). Regarding the camps, Bianco ascribes a greater interest in thought-control to the Chinese and to Mao, in particular. If Stalin aimed to change Russia's political economy, Mao aspired to change human nature (318).
Some of Bianco's conclusions need to be qualified. His insistence that the Chinese revolution never had universal aspirations (321) might have been true in the early years when overthrowing the imperial/imperialist yoke was the main goal, but Mao's embrace of the anti-colonial peasant revolution offered a model to the Third World that PRC foreign policy would exploit fully from the 1950s to 1970s. Bianco's treatment of the one set of meetings between the two dictators in 1949–1950 is also unnecessarily cursory. This was a crucial moment for both of them, with the Korean War as an immediate result. In general, the eminent social historian coming from the Annales tradition tends to play down issues of war and peace. The large volume of new primary materials on Mao and other top PRC founders published since the 1990s is not used in this study. Secondary materials on the Russian side appear eclectically.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong provided a valuable service by making this impressive synthesis available in English in an excellent translation, but it is marred by many spellcheck-type errors with Lenin's “mommy” in the tomb on Red Square (341) and communist antipathy for the “ruling glasses” (339). Endnotes should have page numbers at the top to help scholars back and forth to the text.
