Abstract
Few aspects of Mao’s legacy are as ambiguous and as susceptible to varying interpretations as that concerned with the relationship to be established between the Chinese people with their socialist society and the outside world. Mao himself had coined the slogan ‘Make foreign things serve China’. In other words he had called upon his people to learn from the good and socially serviceable things developed in the outside world while eschewing the harmful and the undesirable. How to distinguish between them was never made clear. Nor did Mao address the issue of how advanced foreign experience or technology could be absorbed without dragging in tow undesirable consequences. For example, he seems to have had little to say on the question as to whether technology was socially neutral. That is to say, whether technology, for instance, in the shape of a whole industrial plant with a complete set of equipment necessarily carried with it the imprint of the society in which it had been originally made. He presided over the period of the First Five Year Plan (1952–57) in which China’s doors were open wider than ever before or since to the influences of a foreign country — the Soviet Union.
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Notes and References
For the most extensive account of these, see John Gittings, The World and China 1922–1972 (London, Eyre Methuen, 1974), chapters 1–6.
See Stuart Schram’s introductory essay to his edited Authority Participation and Cultural Change in China (Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1–108.
For an account of this endeavour, see Raymond F. Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch’en Po-ta and the Search for Chinese Theory: 1935–1945 (Stanford University Press, 1980).
See James Reardon-Anderson, Yenan and the Great Powers: The Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy 1944–46 (Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 40–1.
A point made in J. R. Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity, vol. 1 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 134.
See Ishwer J. Ojha, Chinese Foreign Policy in an Age of Transition: The Diplomacy of Cultural Despair (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969).
For an account see David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan 1944 (University of California Press, 1970). See also Gittings, The World and China, chapter 5, pp. 90–115.
Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Harvard University Press, 1971). See especially chapter 6, ‘The Yenan Way’.
Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, rev. ed., 1969), p. 127.
D. C. Watt, ‘Britain and the Cold War in the Far East 1945–58’, in Yonosuke Hagai and Akira Iriye (eds), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Columbia and Tokyo University Presses, 1977) pp. 92–3.
This is well known, but for a sensitive account which gives many examples of this from the thirties onwards, see Stuart R. Schram, ‘The Cultural Revolution in Historical Perspective’, in his edited volume, Authority Participation and Cultural Change in China (Cambridge University Press, 1973) pp. 1–108.
See the many scathing references to these ‘dogmatists’ who return from abroad and who are only good for reciting ‘a stock of undigested foreign phrases’ and yet cannot till the land, practise a trade, fight or provide practical leadership’ in Boyd Compton, Mao’s China (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1952).
See O. B. Borisov and B. T. Kolosov, Soviet-Chinese Relations 1945–1980, 3rd supplemented edition (Moscow, Mysl Publishers, 1980).
For Mao’s eulogies of Stalin, see three extracts from Mao’s published writings from 1939 to 1956 in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York, Praeger, 1963) pp. 293–9.
Mao could have referred, for example, to Soviet assistance in Manchuria following the Japanese surrender although there had also been friction with the Soviet Red Army and the assistance was by no means unqualified. For the extent of the assistance see Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China 1941–1950 (University of Chicago Press, 1963) pp. 327–40
and for evidence of friction with the Soviet occupying forces, see John Gittings, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute (Oxford University Press, 1968) p. 41.
It would be futile to try to list even the main studies, but reference may be made to two relatively recent biographies of Mao which utilise the available evidence to good effect. See Dick Wilson, Mao, the People’s Emperor (London, Hutchinson, 1979)
and Ross Terrill, Mao (New York, Harper & Row, 1980).
See John Gittings, The World and China 1922–72 (London, Eyre Methuen, 1974) pp. 141–2
and Charles B. McLane, Soviet Policy and the Chinese Communists 1931–1946 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1958) pp. 176, 180–1, 195.
See account and documentation in Gerald Segal, ‘China and the Great Power Triangle’, in China Quarterly no. 83 (September 1980) p. 491.
Mao noted ‘Stalin was very fond of Gao Gang and made him a special present of a motor-car. Gao Gang sent Stalin a congratulatory telegram every 15 August’. Stuart R. Schram (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974) p. 100. Khrushchev’s memoirs stated that Stalin told Mao that Gao was his man. Gao was later purged in 1953–54 for his conspiracy ‘almost certainly’ to replace
Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. See Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution 1: Contradictions Among the People 1956–1957 (Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 47
and Frederick G. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China (New York, M. E. Sharp Inc., 1979) chapter 5. See especially pp. 191–4 which play down the Soviet connection. In the absence of evidence it can only be a matter for speculation as to whether his Soviet association was a factor in his purge. Interestingly, Mao at various points linked him with Beria, the Russian Secret Police chief who was killed by his colleagues very soon after Stalin’s death.
Jan S. Prybyla, The Chinese Economy (University of Southern California Press, 1978) p. 183 claims this proportion for 1975 which represented the highest point of China’s foreign trade until that point.
See also Christopher Howe, China’s Economy (London, Elek Books, 1978) Figure 1, pp. xxiii and 137–9.
Fenghua Mah, The Foreign Trade of Mainland China (Edinburgh University Press, 1972).
See Ann Fenwick, ‘Chinese Foreign Trade Policy and the Campaign Against Deng Xiaoping’, in Thomas Fingar (ed.), China’s Quest for Independence: Policy Evolution in the 1970’s (Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1980).
Alexander Eckstein, Communist China’s Economic Growth and Foreign Trade (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1966) p. 167. The analysis here of the balance of advantages of Soviet aid and trade with China is largely based on chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Ibid. p. 137.
Mao Tse-Tung, ‘Talks at the Chengtu Conference’ (March 1958), in Schram, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed p. 98.
Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (London, Pelican, 1974) p. 293.
For accounts of these campaigns see John Gardner, ‘The Wu-fan Campaign in Shanghai: A Study of the Consolidation of Urban Control’, in Doak A. Barnett, Chinese Communist Politics in Action (University of Washington Press, 1969) pp. 477–539
and various chapters in Doak A. Barnett, Communist China: The Early Years (London, Pall Mall Press, 1964).
Theodore H. E. Chen, Thought Reform of the Chinese Intellectuals Hong Kong University Press, 1960).
Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Contradictions Among the People 1956–57 (Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 311. See also Part Four, pp. 261–310.
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© 1983 Michael Yahuda
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Yahuda, M. (1983). Chinese Society and Foreign Relations. In: Towards the End of Isolationism: China’s Foreign Policy after Mao. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17149-1_2
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