主题：茗谈（五十四）：库松演义第三回-1 -- 本嘉明

大家不妨自己看看访谈。我的感觉是 他对材料的整理和理解感觉并不是特别深入，似乎缺乏一种内在的分析。或许是因为他是外国人，对中国历史的理解上耗费了很大的精力。

http://asiaquarterly.com/2011/06/25/interview-with-roderick-macfarquhar/

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Interview with Roderick MacFarquhar

Posted on June 25, 2011 by the Editor

Interviews by Ben Lowsen and Ouyang Bin

The text below is based on exclusive interviews conducted by the Harvard Asia Quarterly with Professor Roderick MacFarquhar in spring 2010 and spring 2011, respectively. In accordance with the interviews, it is divided into two parts. In Part I, we solicit MacFarquhar’s general opinions on Chinese politics since 1949, placing especial emphasis on the Maoist legacy and the enduring rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In Part II, MacFarquhar discusses his personal biography, including his time in military service, journalism, British politics, and academia.

Part I: Reflections on Chinese Politics

The Maoist Legacy

Harvard Asia Quarterly: How would you characterize Chairman Mao Zedong as a person?

Roderick MacFarquhar: Well I think that Mao was obviously, as many Chinese colleagues have suggested, very much a romantic revolutionary in the sense that he was not a cold, precise planner like Stalin or Lenin. He was someone who reveled in upheaval, because he became revolutionary in the upheaval. And to be fair, he was involved in upheaval himself as a young man in the Autumn Harvest Uprising. But later on, after 1949, when there was upheaval he was far distant from it; he started it, but was not directly involved in it, which was convenient. But I think that as a politician he was, to put it mildly, devious – maybe all politicians are devious, but I think that the way the Gao Gang episode was played by the Chairman, the way that he reneged on his Hundred Flowers promise in 1957 and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and most important, the Cultural Revolution when he purged senior leaders who had been with him for thirty or forty years – in order to do that, he was very devious. So I think a manipulative, devious politician in terms of his interaction with his colleagues, but in terms of the Revolution in general much more of a romantic, with a belief in the “human wave” tactics of revolution.

As an ordinary person, it is very difficult to separate out his revolutionary persona. But again, he was clearly in some sense of the word a romantic because he got very attached to Zhang Yufang, a young woman he took into his household who he trusted tremendously. The story is that on one occasion, they had a quarrel and she left, and that he would have gone to any lengths to bring her back. In fact, his aide Wang Luqing, was able to persuade her to come back; otherwise, it is unclear what Mao would have done to get her back.

But on the other hand, he seems to have been able to distance himself from the normal emotions of a husband and a father. Clearly, there was some form of a love life with Jiang Qing way back in the Yan’an days. When that faded, one doesn’t exactly know. But he had no compunction about abandoning women who were wives officially or not. And he does not seem to have been – I say “seem” because one can’t tell this from afar – a particularly caring father. But one doesn’t really know these intimate things. One would probably have to have a long session with one of his daughters. Of course, his son died in Korea. But someone who was able – perhaps you’d say all revolutionaries, perhaps you’d say many, perhaps all leaders have to – to distance himself to some extent from ordinary human emotions in order to do his job. But he probably did it more than most.

HAQ: Right after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping stated that we should remember Mao as 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. What percentages would you give him?

RMF: Well, Deng Xiaoping had to say that. On the one hand, he had to acknowledge that Mao had made a big mistake in launching the Cultural Revolution because that was such a devastating period. On the other hand, he had to preserve Mao’s name and reputation in general, because it was essential to the legitimacy of the whole Chinese Revolution. That’s why his picture is still up on Tiananmen. I would put it the other way around – 70 percent error, and 30 percent, from the Chinese point of view, okay.

Thirty percent would be his great achievement in leading the Communist Revolution to victory, and for the first time, really, in a century, giving China a united and peaceful country. So that was a very big achievement. But after that, I would be much more critical than Deng could be. Of course, Deng supported many things that Mao did. For instance, even in the early years, if he had persisted with new democracy, which he proclaimed before the Chinese Communists came to power, and which Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai wished to pursue, then you would not have had these terrible campaigns in the 1950s: the two campaigns against counter-revolution; land reform with all the bloodshed, there should have been land reform but the bloodshed was unnecessary; the Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns against corruption; the reform of intellectuals. All these campaigns caused many, many [deaths] – the exact figure we don’t know, the figure we have is Mao’s figure, which says that something like 800,000 people died or were executed as a result of these campaigns.

Even those campaigns pale in significance to the size of the Great Leap Forward, where anywhere between thirty and forty plus million people died who should not have died. It was the result of Mao’s romanticism about what could be achieved by just hard hand labor of the peasantry, and his refusal to accept criticisms of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai midway through the Great Leap. The result was many deaths. Then of course came the Cultural Revolution, in which probably not nearly as many people died as during the Great Leap famine, but the whole country was thrown into a terrible upheaval, and the unity and peace which Mao and the PLA and the Party had brought to China in 1949 were totally disrupted. For ten years!

So I would say 30-70: 30 percent for leading China through the Revolution and bringing China together as a united, strongly led, peaceful country; 70 percent for all the damage he did to that victory afterwards.