Some say that Hitler, as a young boy, nursed his anti-Semitism after seeing his mother have a regular affair with a Jewish man. Similarly, Mao’s early experiences can explain his later anti-intellectual bias.
Mao graduated from a teacher-training college in June 1918. Some of his classmates went to France for further studies. Mao didn’t because he disliked the work-and-study program France offered. He didn’t study in Russia either. Language study put him off. Later, Chairman Mao felt threatened by his foreign-educated friends.
Mao worked as a junior librarian for 8 yuan a month at the Peking University’s library. The salary just sufficed to keep his body and soul together. Many intellectuals came to the library to read newspapers, but they ignored him. “Mao felt snubbed, and he bore his grudges hard. He claimed later that ‘most of them did not treat me like a human being’” (Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao, the Unknown Story, p. 20). Returning to his home province of Changsha in April 1919, Mao took a low-paying job teaching history part-time in a primary school. He could hardly succeed as a model-teacher because he “never seemed to change his clothes”!
Mao’s financial status turned for the better when in 1921 the Russians wanted to formalize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao went to the first CCP Congress in Shanghai. Russians funded the CCP 94 percent. After the Congress, Mao began to receive Russian aid of 160-170 yuan a month for consolidating the CCP in the Hunan province. Suddenly finding himself very rich, Mao resigned from his teaching job; and gave up journalism. Like our own Jung Bahadur Rana who regarded the country’s money his own, Mao felt the same with CCP’s Russian grant. He bought a house (for the “party”), and indulged in his three passions—sex, food, and books.
Although Mao didn’t pursue further education in academic institutions, he read “to his heart’s content.” Later on, when Mao led his troops on months of Long Marches (I, II, and III), he didn’t trudge along. Rather, carried in a litter, he read. Even when Mao approached death, his bedroom had two components—mistresses (not his wives whom he abandoned) and books.
As an avid reader, Mao should have spared schools during his rise to power. He didn’t. Wherever his “People’s Liberation Army” made base, Mao shut down schools to house his soldiers. In response to protests, he developed a dislike for intellectuals. In 1929, he denounced his old mentor Professor Chen Duxiu as an “anti-revolutionary” to win Moscow’s favor. Mao’s anti-intellectual bias would strike more ferociously later on.
Mao knew how to use intellectuals for his own benefit. Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Nationalist Party, had a pro-communist mole Shao Li-tzu in his propaganda department. Chiang wanted to win Moscow’s favor; and allowed Shao to work with Mao in bringing out a book on the latter’s life. Li-tzu succeeded in portraying the mass-murderer Mao as a kind man, a patriot rallying the Chinese to fight against the invading Japanese. The book captivated youths, and thousands joined the CCP. In our context, King Mahendra similarly used an Indian author. The latter wrote a book extolling the virtues of the Panchayat system and its founder.
Mao utilized foreign intellectuals and gave them royal treatment. The American Edgar Snow worked for the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune. In 1936, Snow wrote the Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, based on interviews with Mao. The Chinese leader told Snow that he actually walked during the Long Marches! Snow’s other books Red Star Over China and Impressions of Mao Tse-tung made the dictator very popular in the West.
Mao’s premier, Chou En-lai, had similarly impressed foreign intellectuals. Journalist Martha Gellhorn fell for Chou. Her husband, the famed author Ernest Hemmingway, said of the premier: “He does a fine job of selling the Communist standpoint on anything that comes up”.
Mao treated Chinese intellectuals differently. His cadres observed that CCP under Mao had three levels of “equality” and kitchen-privileges. The lowest of the troops got half the meat and cooking oil. The middle rankers fared better. The top leaders received the best food. A 35-year-old dedicated communist writer, Wang Shi-wei, saw through the hypocrisy; and wrote an essay called “Wild Lilies” in the Liberation Daily, the main newspaper in Yenan. Shi-wei had merely asked for equality in the CCP. In return, he got a prison cell. When Mao with his troops left Yenan in 1947, soldiers hacked Shi-wei to death; and threw him into a dry well.
On Oct 1, 1949, Mao stood on Tiananmen Gate as the absolute ruler of 550 million people but still scared of intellectuals. His annual budget spent 61 percent on arms but only 8.2 percent on education, culture, and health combined. Only one in 20 children could go to school. He killed teachers who protested poor funding. “Mao’s approach was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other ‘useful’ subjects, and leave the rest of the population to be illiterate or semi-illiterate slave labourers.” Even in cities, students had only slim chances of education.
School books, publications, and the media had to praise Mao. A typical song would proclaim: “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao”. The “great” helmsman banned old operas “starting with a genre known as ‘Ghost Dramas’, in which dead victims’ spirits took revenge on those who had driven them to their death”. Mao didn’t want anything to remind him of his murdered millions. Mao “wanted the nation to be brain-dead; in...this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics.”
In May 1966, Mao started the Cultural Revolution; and intellectuals suffered even more. All schools shut down. On June 18, students of Peking University dragged their teachers in front of abusive crowds, blackened their faces, and molested women professors. On Aug 5, girls of a Peking school tortured their headmistress to death. Educational institutions throughout China repeated these examples, and incited countless suicides. Normal schooling didn’t resume until Mao died in 1976.
Do these events sound familiar? Nepali Maoists have tried everything their “venerable” guru, the “Savior of China”, taught them. Pushpa Kamal Dahal had authors write books extolling himself and the “People’s War”. Maoist songs proclaim self-praise. YCL goons have attacked private schools, shut them with their bandas, disrupted their exams, attacked media houses, stopped the distribution of newspapers, smeared soot on professors, and burned library books.
Many Nepali intellectuals have simply parroted Prachandapath not to suffer the fate of their Chinese counterparts under Mao. “Don’t fear those who kill the body and after that can do no more…rather fear him who, after your body has been killed, has the authority to throw you in hell,” said Jesus. Courageous Nepali intellectuals will rebut Maoists’ anti-intellectual bias, and help usher in the promised land.
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