Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Right.
Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China.
But after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party.
You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere, the newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him. And quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So that's a key commonality.
And a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that... He talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really, his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King about this legendary figure, this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down.
So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things. Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up, liked to have people on the streets clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself.
He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can't be controlled. So there are a lot of ways that they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. They're also different, and this fits with this orderliness, that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China.
And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a futile way of thought that it held China back.
So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party. And that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as well.
First of all, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So
You can have a lot of fun with these sort of axial age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation of the elite and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity.
Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past. that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely.
He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father... deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.
And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers, these were all parallels.
And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism, even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship.
It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother, and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.
Yeah. And there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non-personified deity, like the emperor was to the minister. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the texts.
We should study how the sages of old behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward-looking thing. It wasn't arguing for progress. It was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past.
So in all kinds of ways, it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.
Yeah, you could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to?
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