In today's Guardian Will Hutton argues for a two-sided assessment of Mao's legacy. He writes:
Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been 30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but if today's China ever completes the transition to a more plural economy and society it will be more obvious than ever that he was the man who partially laid the platform for today's China. And from this may one day emerge a country with the liberties of the rest of Asia and the west.And:
The negative side of the Maoist balance sheet is well-known: mass murder, famine, injustice, and economic waste. But there are less well-known positives. Industrial output climbed 13-fold, albeit from a tiny base. The rail network doubled. Half of Chinese land became irrigated. There was a dramatic lowering of illiteracy. Near universal healthcare was established. Life expectancy rose; and despite Mao's appetite for imperial-style concubines, women were given the same right to petition for divorce and education as men. Their position was transformed.These points are not offered by Hutton in a spirit of apologia. He insists that Mao was wrong - blindly and anti-democratically so. At the same time, a persuasive overall assessment, he thinks, has to qualify the record of Mao's crimes with an acknowledgement of his achievements. Hutton again:
The condemnation of Mao that convinces the majority of Chinese they need to change has to be more subtle than simply joining, say, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book on Mao and seeing him as unrelievedly evil.The question hovering over the article, but which Hutton doesn't answer, is this. Was there an alternative path to these same achievements that would have been significantly less costly in human terms? Emphasizing the superiority of liberal democracy over communism, he seems also to be sceptical about the possibilities of a democratic-capitalist Chinese path:
Few western critics today appreciate the scale of the task confronting any moderniser of China in 1949. Western economies created the surpluses to finance industrialisation through incredible exploitation - of their own working class, and in the US via slavery. It was never likely that China could achieve self-sustaining economic growth without great collective pain to achieve its own surpluses, or that this could be done without the involvement of the state. Spontaneous market-led industrialisation is a myth.Achievements should certainly be noted where there are such, but if they're bought at an exorbitant, a gigantic, cost, then they can't be treated as unambiguously positive. The counterfactual question of whether there were other possible routes - whether democratic-capitalist or democratic-socialist - to the same or better results is a crucial one.