On China by Henry Kissinger Read Free Book Online Page B

proclaimed to the French philosopher André Malraux in 1965:
    The thought, culture, and customs which brought China to where we found her must disappear, and the thought, customs, and culture of proletarian China, which does not yet exist, must appear. . . . Thought, culture, customs must be born of struggle, and the struggle must continue for as long as there is still danger of a return to the past. 2
    China, Mao once vowed, was to be “smashed” like an atom, in order to destroy the old order but, at the same time, produce an explosion of popular energy to lift it to ever greater heights of achievement:
    Now our enthusiasm has been aroused. Ours is an ardent nation, now swept by a burning tide. There is a good metaphor for this: our nation is like an atom. . . . When this atom’s nucleus is smashed the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power. We shall be able to do things which we could not do before. 3
    As part of this process, Mao generated a pervasive assault on traditional Chinese political thought: where the Confucian tradition prized universal harmony, Mao idealized upheaval and the clash of opposing forces, in both domestic and foreign affairs (and, indeed, he saw the two as connected—regularly pairing foreign crises with domestic purges or ideological campaigns). The Confucian tradition prized the doctrine of the mean and the cultivation of balance and moderation; when reform occurred, it was incremental and put forward as the “restoration” of previously held values. Mao, by contrast, sought radical and instant transformation and a total break with the past. Traditional Chinese political theory held military force in relative disesteem and insisted that Chinese rulers achieved stability at home and influence abroad through their virtue and compassion. Mao, driven by his ideology and his anguish over China’s century of humiliation, produced an unprecedented militarization of Chinese life. Where traditional China revered the past and cherished a rich literary culture, Mao declared war on China’s traditional art, culture, and modes of thought.
    In many ways, however, Mao incarnated the dialectic contradictions that he claimed to be manipulating. He was passionately and publicly anti-Confucian, yet he read widely in Chinese classics and was wont to quote from the ancient texts. Mao enunciated the doctrine of “continuous revolution,” but when the Chinese national interest required it, he could be patient and take the long view. The manipulation of “contradictions” was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of da tong, or the Great Harmony.
    Maoist governance thus turned into a version of the Confucian tradition through the looking glass, proclaiming a total break with the past while relying on many of China’s traditional institutions, including an imperial style of governance; the state as an ethical project; and a mandarin bureaucracy that Mao loathed, periodically destroyed, and, in the end, equally periodically was obliged to re-create.
    Mao’s ultimate objectives could not be expressed in a single organizational structure or be fulfilled by realizing a specific set of political objectives. His goal was to sustain the process of revolution itself, which he felt it was his special mission to carry on through ever greater upheavals, never permitting a resting point until his people emerged from the ordeal purified and transformed:
    To be overthrown is painful and is unbearable to contemplate for those overthrown, for example, for the Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] reactionaries whom we are now overthrowing and for Japanese imperialism which we together with other peoples overthrew some time ago. But for the working class, the labouring people and the Communist Party the question is not one of being overthrown, but of working hard to create the conditions in which classes, state power and political parties will die