Author: Brendan Green

Mao, Maoist China, and China in general during the course of the revolution is often conceived in internal terms – Chinese events impacting only Chinese people, with no real interaction with the external. If foreign entities are said to play a part at all, it is either as an amorphous states that have their set agendas reacted to by the Chinese – such as the invasion of the Japanese Empire – or as foreign observers, presented as viewing and interacting with China as one views and interacts with animals at a Zoo – detached, and almost as a voyeur of sorts.

This is of course, a deeply flawed picture – China in this period was not an island – and the foreign individuals in China at the time were more than observers. Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History, while discussing the international impacts and discourse surrounding Maoism, discusses the case of Edgar Snow. Well known for his journalistic work on the CCP and Mao in Red Star Over China, Julia Lovell does more than just using his experiences in China to discuss the CCP and Mao, but also explores western reactions to communism in China, and Mao through the story of Julia Lovell.  Describing Snow as ‘the first main character in this global history of Maoism’, Lovell first describes the initial reviews for Snow’s book¹.  Red Star Over China was a best seller received with glowing praise, presenting Mao and his CCP as both larger than life, but deeply human – one particular striking example of it’s impact described by Lovell is that of an American State Department official so entranced by Snow’s picture of Mao that he leaked KMT military plans to the CCP².

Discussing it’s longer term impact, Lovell points out how influential the book was in creating discourse and images of China abroad – from being read by revolutionaries the world over, to earning Snow the ear of the then President Roosevelt, to becoming an important text in academic circles³. Lovell’s conclusion, that Red Star Over China is a ‘powerful emblem of the international Mao cult’ is agreeable, but Lovell perhaps even understates it’s impact – in the middle of a period in the west where Communism was viewed with at best suspicion, and visions of China was dominated by orientalist conceptions and stereotypes, Red Star Over China monumentally contributed the international reimagining of China⁴.

Bibliography
– Lovell, Julia. “The Red Star – Revolution by the Book.” In Maoism: A Global History, 60–87. London: The Bodley Head, 2019.

1. Lovell, Julia. “The Red Star – Revolution by the Book.” In Maoism: A Global History, 60–87. London: The Bodley Head, 2019, PG61-62. [↩]
2. Lovell, Julia. “The Red Star – Revolution by the Book.”, PG61-62. [↩]
3. Lovell, Julia. “The Red Star – Revolution by the Book.”, PG82-83. [↩]
4. Ibid, PG87. [↩]

The Cultural Revolution’s internal strife, conflict and ideology is notable, and well studied, but one aspect of it that is rarely considered, according to Julia Lovell, is the overall international impact and view of the event. In her forward to her 2016 article, The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective, Lovell gives a short overview of the histography surrounding the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution¹. Discussing the works of Richard Wolin, Roberto
Niccolai and Robert Alexander, Lovell sums them as looking at the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution in a piecemeal manner – looking at individual regions and nations, not considering overall trends – so while these works may be useful, there is not a comprehensive overview of the trends of the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution – a void that Lovell intends to fill². One such impact demonstrated by Lovell is the way the iconography of the Cultural Revolution impacted a whole range of revolutionary and anti-establishment movements.

The focus of a great deal of Lovell’s work is on how the presentation and conception of the Cultural Revolution abroad stimulated discontented youth across varying nations and social boundaries  – from the African American civil rights movement of the United States to radical student movements in West Germany³. And while a large part of the groups discussed by Lovell are politically left wing, one of the more interesting elements discussed by Lovell is how the revolutionary iconography of the the Cultural Revolution was coopted by many anti-establishment groups, regardless of their political disposition. Lovell discusses how even Italian Neo-Fascists used Maoist slogans and language, while among the more radical arms of the African American liberation movements of the United States, Mao’s Little Red Book was seen in explicitly racial terms,  and the Revolutionary Action Movement used terms like ‘Black Guard’⁴.

Why was it Maoist iconography that took such a root in revolutionary and anti-establishment groups across the world, and why only by the mid 60s with the onset of the Cultural Revolution? According to Lovell, it was the specific aspects of the Cultural Revolution – the focus on grassroots political participation and the idea of the mass line⁵. But how was the Cultural Revolution ‘marketed’ and presented outside of China. While Lovell does mention that the Cultural Revolution both internally and externally took on meanings probably unintended by it’s creators, the way the Cultural Revolution was presented internationally does not seem to be something that she focuses on, nor does it seem to be a common area of study⁶. This seems to be somewhat of a blindspot to me, and a missing piece of the puzzle of the spread of Maoist ideas throughout the later half of the 20th century.

Bibliography

• Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 632–52.

1. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 632–52, PG633-634. [↩]
2. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG634-635. [↩]
3. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG637. [↩]
4. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG637-638. [↩]
5. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG640. [↩]
6. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG633-634. [↩]

The early writings and works of Mao, as translated in the first volume of Mao’s Road to Power is in many ways what I was expecting – letters to other revolutionary thinkers and individuals, musings on events in the west as the First World War took its course, meditations on China and its future, and more proactive declarations and calls to action. One idea that is somewhat prominent in his work that of the liberation of women – an aspect that surprised me, as it doesn’t seem to be an idea Mao would emphasize after his rise to power in 1949.

A few specific works in this volume paint a fairly clear picture as to his thoughts on the liberation of women – one of particular note is The Women’s Revolutionary Army¹, written in July of 1919. While short, this work lays out in strong terms Mao’s thoughts on the traditional roles for women in society. He compares the makeup and clothing women are expected to wear are torture instruments and the brands of criminals, the jewelry on their hands to shackles, and describes families as their prisons². What is especially unique about how Mao presents his thoughts on the liberation of women is in how it will be achieved – Mao states there is only one way to do so, and that way is through revolution, armed struggle and conflict². This idea of women’s liberation only being achievable through armed struggle and revolt in many ways resembles the thoughts of the anarchist He Zhen and the implications of her concept of nannü, as analyzed by Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko³. Nannü, a term that is difficult to directly translate to English without losing it’s unique codifiers, can be roughly thought of as defining women itself as a constructed class in a Marxist sense⁴. In presenting women as being subject to a system of class, Zhen’s form of liberation for women is singular and total – it is an anarchist revolution⁵.

Mao authored The Women’s Revolutionary Army as He Zhen was coming towards the end of her life, and had expressed her ideas fully at least a decade earlier – however, Mao as represented in Mao’s Road to Power does not seem to have any relationship with He Zhen, either direct or intellectually⁶ – something that seems curious given He Zhen’s influence during the late 1910s in China. Is Mao in  The Women’s Revolutionary Army drawing on or being influenced by contemporary Chinese thinkers that he may have not even been aware of, or is he applying Marxist ideas of class to gender in a similar manner to He Zhen?

Bibliography
– Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko. “Introduction: Toward a Transnational Feminist Theory.” In The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, 1–26. New York, UNITED STATES: Columbia University Press, 2013.
– Mao, Zedong, Stuart R. Schram, Timothy Cheek, and Nancy Jane Hodes. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1992.

1. Mao, Zedong, Stuart R. Schram, Timothy Cheek, and Nancy Jane Hodes. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1992, PG353. [↩]
2. Mao, Zedong, Stuart R. Schram, Timothy Cheek, and Nancy Jane Hodes. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. PG353. [↩] [↩]
3. Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko. “Introduction: Toward a Transnational Feminist Theory.” In The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, 1–26. New York, UNITED STATES: Columbia University Press, 2013, PG18-22. [↩]
4. Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko. “Introduction: Toward a Transnational Feminist Theory.” PG20-21 [↩]
5. Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko. “Introduction: Toward a Transnational Feminist Theory.” PG23 [↩]
6. Mao, Zedong, Stuart R. Schram, Timothy Cheek, and Nancy Jane Hodes. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. PGV-XII. [↩]

Translation, especially between languages as separate as English and Chinese, has never been a simple task, and it will never be one – however, this is not just in literary terms of conveying meaning, feeling and themes. This task, as demonstrated by the missionary arguments over the translation of God, can also have overt and important political overtones. The debate of how to translate God existed since the day of Matteo Ricci and the first Jesuit missions to China in the 15th century, and has involved many different terms. The most important and illustrative of these debates in my opinion is that of the Protestant missionary debates surrounding the terms Shangdi and Shen, taking place in the 19th century.

The term shen, literally meaning god or spirit, was utilized in an early partial translation of the Bible by a Catholic missionary, Jean Basset (1).  Thomas H. Reilly in his seminal work, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom discusses the problem with this translation, in that the term shen is somewhat generic term – without the signifier of capitalization that is present in English, Basset, and other translators that used this term had to rely on contextualization to signify shen as referring to the single Christian god (2). According to Reilly, even with contextualization, it was not always clear to Chinese audiences if shen referred to the Christian God, or multiple gods (3).  In short, it didn’t capture the essence of the Christian God – it’s singularity and it’s totality. Jean Basset’s partial translation was copied and spread amongst the missionary community, ending up with a Protestant missionary by the name of Robert Morrison, who would use Basset’s work as the basis for his full translation of the New Testament (4). Reilly presents that shen was argued for in the missionary debates of the 19th century over translating God in a way, because of it’s generalness, that it was closer to the apostolic model of the New Testament – that Shangdi referred to a pagan god, and it could not be associated with the Christian God, being too mired in Chinese cultural baggage (5).

Shangdi, which can be literally translated to sovereign on high is described by Thomas H. Reilly as being ‘incendiary’ (6). While initially used by Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits before a Papal Decree banned it’s use, the term was most notably in Walter H. Medhurt and Karl Gützlaff’s translation of the Bible (7). In a manner of speaking the argument for Shangdi drew on similar concepts to the argument for shen, just reframing them. The proponents of the term drew on it’s connection to Chinese culture as a strength, that Shangdi described a single grand god – that the ancient Chinese that wrote about Shangdi were monotheists writing about the Christian God (8). Most importantly, the term was also deeply politically charged, associated with the imperial title (9) the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (10), and when discussed in a Christian context, implies that the Chinese emperors are guilty of blasphemy (11) . Reilly presents the Protestant missionaries as being deeply aware of the political connotations of this term, citing several passages from Medhurst in particular to demonstrate this (12).

The contrasts between the two terms are obvious – the neutral, yet bland shen and the more evocative, but baggage carrying Shangdi. However the arguments for and against these terms I think paint a picture of how the missionaries approached the challenges of translation. Both terms were backed by an appeal to tradition – apostolic, western tradition in the case of shen, and the Chinese classics in the case of Shangdi. To Walter Medhurt, the political implications were not incidental, as much as they were a part of the overall goal of integrating the Christian God into Chinese culture. This perhaps can be seen as a minor saga in the key problem by Christian missionaries – if Christianity should be meshed with existing Chinese culture and systems, and if so, how to approach that task.

Continue reading “The Etymology of the Christian God in Chinese”