Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mao fancies himself the champion of Marxist purity, combatting the "revisionist" heresies of Moscow and Belgrade. Yet his expositions of dialectics are sometimes primitive, to say the least. In a speech in Hangchow in 1965, Mao tried to explain the complex Hegelian-Marxist concept of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" by explaining that the Communists' victory over Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the civil war was due to the superiority of the Marxist digestive system: "Synthesis in the long run amounts to swallowing the enemy completely. How did we synthesize the Kuomintang? Didn't we take enemy personnel...
...spite of Mao's crude and often ferocious rhetoric, the Mao papers show that the Chairman can tread prudently when faced with political and military realities. Several of his speeches also suggest that Mao feels there is a vital historical and ideological bond between the Soviet Union and China, in spite of what he considers to be betrayal by Stalin and Khrushchev. "In articles and speeches, don't criticize the U.S.S.R.," he instructed the Chinese High Command in 1958. "We learn from the good people and the good things in the Soviet Union as well as from...
...Mao offered that advice despite his deep resentment of Russia's attempts to prevent China from determining its own fate. "The Russians didn't allow China to make a revolution," he once said. "This was in 1945, when Stalin tried to prevent the Chinese revolution by saying that there should be no civil war and that we should collaborate with Chiang Kaishek. This we did not do, and the revolution was victorious." Mao later quarreled with Khrushchev. More recently, Moscow's border clashes with Peking and its attempts to organize opposition to Mao within China have encouraged...
...qualities that have made Mao one of the century's most powerful leaders are apparent throughout the papers. One of his strengths is his conviction that the Chinese government must be at one with the masses. He hates the bureaucracy for having interfered with this sacred relationship. His "Twenty Manifestations of Bureaucracy," one of the papers acquired by the U.S., is among the fiercest diatribes of its kind in modern history. In it, Mao inveighs against those who are "divorced from the masses . . . rotten sensualists who glut themselves for days on end . . . engage in speculation . . . call a doctor when...
Other sources of Mao's strength are his immense pride in China and his equally immense hopes for its future. In 1958 Mao observed: "Our country is so populous, it has such vast territory and abundant resources, a history of more than 4,000 years, and culture. But what a boast! We are not even as far advanced as Belgium. Our steel production is so low. So few people are literate. But now our nation is all ardor: there is a fervent tide. Our nation is like an atom. After the atom's nuclear fission, the thermal energy...