The Morning Deluge: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution, 1893-1954

by Han Suyin

Book

Genres: China, History, Biography

571 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Han Suyin (Pinyin: Hán Sùyīn) is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (Pinyin: Zhōu Guānghú). She was a Chinese-born Eurasian author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works, as well as a physician. She wrote in English and French. She died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012.

Reviews

[Matt Lucente · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Mao Tsetung's grasp of the future, his vision of man's true role on earth, has given him a place as a world figure. His creative genius has come from his constant return to the people, resisting all attempts to elevate himself above them. Much has been said about the "personality cult"; I have seen true, genuine love and admiration from the ordinary people of China for Mao Tsetung. The personality cult evolved round him by city bureaucrats he has done his best to put down, withdrawing himself as a person, giving to the people all homage for the Revolution. It is in this spirit, not elevating Mao as a genius, but showing him as a man, in a constant search for truth, for reality, that this book has been written.”

This book rules. It's not only a comprehensive biography of Mao's life from childhood up to the U.S.'s monstrous invasion of Korea, but also a fantastic and inspiring history of the Chinese revolution and summary of Maoist thought. This is fantastic reading for anyone here in the U.S. who wants to learn about Mao through a factually correct, actually historical and well thought-out lens (ie. a non-American lens). It's also really well-written; the author was a novelist before she was a biographer, and that's reflected in her stylistic flair and cheeky little turns of phrase. This is a biography with feeling.

The narrative that we're taught about Mao here in the U.S. is—in typical American propagandistic fashion—childish, overly simplistic, and historically incorrect slop, shoveled at us by an establishment whose vested interests are in lying to the American people about socialism at every turn. Mao is portrayed as some sort of bloodthirsty, totalitarian dictator bent on starving his people for some reason; American education doesn't teach us to think about what we're told, so this ridiculous premise is usually taken at face value.
This book shows us Mao's true nature, as someone who devoted his entire life to uplifting and liberating his people, who loved and was loved by the oppressed masses of China, and who never compromised his beliefs or origins. His efforts to uplift China's peasantry out of feudal, colonial oppression, his education and mobilization of the people, and his level-headed, people-centric analysis of material conditions is truly inspiring.

I didn't really know much about the Chinese Revolution or Maoism going into this outside of broad strokes, but Han Suyin's detailed accounts of Mao's revolutionary strategy and the incredibly complicated events of the revolution were really really helpful in teaching me about a history and philosophy which we're never taught in American curriculum/media. We are continually shown, through historical fact and eyewitness accounts, how much the masses believed in Mao and his cause, and how right they were.

His military strategy during the revolution and civil war were particularly interesting—throughout Chinese history, armies had been violent, occupying entities, leeching off of and often slaughtering the peasantry, forcibly conscripting them and horrifically abusing them. Mao's leadership of the Red Army was completely different, and was hugely effective in showing the masses that their lives would be vastly improved under communism, and in recruiting followers for the cause. Members of Mao's Red Army, most of them illiterate peasants, were educated by Mao, were taught to think about their material conditions, and were taught to read and write. In their liberation of the Chinese countryside, rather than mowing through and annihilating villages and communities like the U.S.-backed Kuomintang, the Red Army would build up those communities, constructing infrastructure, treating the peasantry with kindness and respect, and initiating liberatory land reform wherever they went. No wonder they were so popular; rather than the brutality typical of Chinese history up to that point, Mao offered the masses humanity, dignity, and liberation from exploitation.

This book was super dense and difficult, and it would take forever to type up a summary of everything Han Suyin talks about, but I found the sections detailing the intra-party ideological conflicts in the CCP, the Long March, and Mao's activities during the Yenan period, to be particularly interesting. Again, these are things that Americans simply are not taught, because if we were shown the historical-material reality, and were taught to analyze it correctly and concretely, the bourgeois capitalist establishment would have no way to manipulate and lie to us.

Mao once said in an interview with Edgar Snow "all I ever wanted to do really was teach", and this can be seen in his every action. His philosophical texts were written in a way that they could be easily understood by the Chinese peasantry, his military leadership was hugely focused on education of the masses, and his rural peasant upbringing gave him a deep connection to his people that is wholly alien to us Americans, whose politicians are completely removed and uninterested in the material reality and wellbeing of the people they supposedly represent. All in all, this book shows the true face of Mao, unobscured by western bourgeois propaganda; it shows a portrait of a man who devoted his entire life and soul to liberating his people from colonial exploitation, who, throughout the entire revolution would go door-to-door in the remotest of rural villages and simply speak to the peasantry face-to-face, learning about their lives and investigating how they could be made better. He was someone who never sought to raise himself above the masses, who detested the cult of personality built up around him after victory, and who was devoted to democracy and fairness above all else. He saw the wisdom in every person he met, down to the poorest peasants, and his philosophy and revolutionary ideals reflect this fact, as does the historical record. I will definitely be reading the second part of this biography, Wind in the Tower. I'll end this review with a quote that I feel beautifully sums up Mao's strategy in revolution and in administration; there's so much more to say about this book, but I'll leave it at that.

"The popularity of the Communist government was assured by its honesty, its integrity, the high caliber of its cadres; by fair distribution, by democratic procedure, by the security given to the population, by the abolition of extortion and the low level of taxation. This was reinforced by the help given by the Army to peasants, welfare and education movements. Army teams dug wells and ditches, helped in harvesting, substantiating the slogans 'Support the Army, cherish the people,' 'Total integration of Army and people.' In turn, this popularity eased recruiting. 'The Communist government and armies are the first in modern Chinese history to have positive and widespread popular support ... because they are genuinely of the people,' wrote John Paton Davies, an American observer in November 1944, one of a score of such favorable reports on the Communist administration. The enrollment of the population in mass organizations made for democratic platforms for expression of opinion by the people, and for social change. There were associations of women, youths, peasants, workers, schoolchildren, old people; there was even an association of loafers where the loafers met, helped to criticize each other and themselves so as to 'reform'!"

[Hatuxka · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essence of the two-volume biography of Mao Zedong (of which The Morning Deluge is the first volume) is the two-line struggle, with a succession of opponents with ultimately failed pretentions to leadership, of the early Kuomintang (KMT), then the fledgling Communist Party of China (CPC), with weak, timorous, corrupt, elitist, vapid, arrogant, flabby, vacillating (a sampling of Han's terms describing one of more of them) leaders, under each of which he was positioned in the struggles leading to the Long March. Then, as leader of the CPC himself, facing Chiang Kai Shek (CSK), intent on seeking the annihilation of the CPC, to climactically, Liu Shaoqi a lifelong antagonist to Mao’s leadership. These successive two-line struggles, especially the latter, taught Mao the imperative of pursuing renewed revolutionary change, which he would seek to enact by initatiating the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution as a final imprint. The two-line struggles were over ideology. They determined the course of the Revolution before there were direct military confrontations and the outcome of military confrontations with the CSK-dominated KMT and the Japanese Empire.
Transcending each of these successive two-line struggles of Mao with KMT and CPC leaders were mutually opposing views of the importance of the rural peasantry: the distrust to fear to dismissal by these opponents and his conviction of their centrality to successfully achieving and sustaining the Chinese revolution. Mao also struggled with the KMT and CPC over the concept of united fronts. Sun Yatsen, by 1923 disgusted with “western democracy”, following various betrayals of China by the allies post-WWI and from constantly being at the mercy of warlords, assented to the idea of an All-China United Front of the KMT and CPC first suggested by the Comintern. Sun Yatsen supported the incorporation of communists into the KMT, his third people’s principle being socialism. At the Third Congress of the CPC in 1923 a middle course was agreed to whereby the CPC would join a united front with the KMT, which Mao Zedong had already advocated for in 1922. The difference with other proposals by the “right-” and “left-wing” CPC leaders at that time) was that the CPC must keep its independence of action and leadership of the working class and the peasantry. The revolution could not be handed over to the KMT. This was in agreement with Leninist theses about a united front. Mao was appointed one of the three communists to serve on the committee to draw up the new KMT constitution. Mao cogently pointed out that there were “too many functionaries sitting in posts in Kuangchow for example and doing little and there are too few outside of the capital city”. He saw danger in the city intellectuals and elite members negotiating with each other for the future of the united front. The danger was that peasants and workers would probably be sacrificed to the compromises. “Where was the strength of the national movement”, he asked. Mao insisted on the importance of recruiting and training cadres to work among the peasantry. It was on Mao’s proposal that the KMT establish a peasant department in the central executive committee. The scheme was submitted in February 1924 and by summer the institute for training peasant cadres was working. From its inception the Institute would be in communist hands. Already in 1917, Mao had traversed Hunan Province on foot, visiting farmhouses and receiving the hospitality of peasants on his journey. He inquired into the conditions of farming, crops and weather, landlords and rents. After the forging of the united front under the supervision of Mao in 1923 he went home to the family farm and there had time to think about the future of the revolution. He spent time going from the farm to farm, sleeping in the houses of the peasants and listening to them. Han Suyin on Mao’s realization of how little Chinese intellectuals knew of their own country and their own people: “It was not the peasants and workers alone who needed education but also the proud and lordly ‘leaders’ and scholars riding high over the heads of the patient immensity, the people of China.” They needed to be re-educated. This revolutionary humanism Western bios leave out, said Han Suyin in 1972. He would repeat such grassroots fact-finding tours many times over the years. The KMT despite its disparate composition and varied cliques was wholly agreed on the necessity for rallying the peasantry, the foot soldiery of any military expedition. Mao took these decisions at their word and laid the foundations for building a peasant movement through education and organization of their massive numbers, husbanded and encouraged it, all based on information he gathered from his studies in the countryside. Independent of his influence widespread peasant revolts and uprisings had already occurred over vast areas of China. With his investigations of the conditions in the countryside, study reflection and consideration of them, early initiatives and advocacy of the primacy of the masses in bringing revolution converged with peasant uprisings and further, the thinking of Lenin and Stalin on China, Mao was galvanized. He wasn’t swept up in these changes, he wasn’t merely ready to “catch the wave", but direct it.
The climactic two-line struggle, one of the two most impactful, with the earliest origin, but less a direct conflict than with CSK, was with Liu Shaoqi. Liu never went into the coal mines with miners, listening to them and encouraging them to take their fate into their own hands, Mao did. Liu never focused on miners and peasants, for example, as the vanguard of revolution. Mao did, from early on. Mao would not disarm workers at the behest of the misguided CPC leadership, Liu did. Yet western biographies identify Liu as the leader of the proletariat. Liu never set up schools for workers in Anyuan or Changsa--Mao did. These contrasts which loom large in the struggle between the two-line” or two policies conflict between Mao’s and Liu’s respective visions of the world were to form the focus of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 40-odd years later. For many years a Liu was to base his reputation as a labor leader on the Anyuan strike, despite that the progress made was later rescinded by the owners, and a film was made in the early 1960s to extol his role as a “leader of the proletariat”. Workers at that time recalling Liu: “Liu only talked to the bosses… Did not go down into the pits…wrote Rules and regulations for us” this is the gist of what old Anyuan workers said about Liu. Examine Mao biographies for a derogated profile of peasant and guerrilla leader and organizer of rural bases, a marker of what can only be deliberate omission of his dedication to empowering the peasantry. Those failing to mention his accomplishments as a labor organizer and leader should be of questionable worth.
Invited to select students for work and study in France, Mao initiated the inclusion of women and selection criteria that included desire to serve the country and he organized groups inclusive of women. He was never to forget that “women have more oppression on their backs than men. “Whereas men have three mountains of exploitation, women have four, for men also exploit her”. “Women are a “tremendous potential revolutionary force”. He would make women’s emancipation a revolutionary goal. Mao believed that men cannot be liberated unless women are also liberated. Mao published in 1919 an article, “The Women’s Revolutionary Army” which was received tremendously at girl’s schools and sparked the formation of an alliance of women students. He wrote several articles on women’s suffrage, abolition of feudal morality, arranged marriages and the double standard of chastity. Mao would call for women’s emancipation and empowerment always. At the time of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and during a period of Cultural Revolution that spanned from 1966 to 1970, reprints of his early articles on women’s liberation including the role of woman in revolutionizing societal reform circulated again. Know the worth of a Mao biography if these parts of his leadership, at least, are left out. Han Suyin frequently touches on the glaring omissions and deficiencies of western biographies of Mao.
Other various examples these struggles Mao had with one or more KMT or CPC factions are instructive: versus the CPC left lines: Qu Qiu Bai and later one or more “left line” leaders mandating military expeditions or roving guerilla bands to engage in all-out ravaging attacks in the countryside and cities (with large losses) on all capitalist classes (the bourgeoisie, rich and middle peasants, all landlords), arbitrary seizure of goods and provisions from rural populations and land confiscation. These CPC Central committee ultraleft tactics alienated middle sectors of the economy, depriving the revolution of sustenance, thus threatening its future. Mao: concentration of forces at rural bases and focus on seizing land and provisions from rich, oppressive big landlords and land reform which had principles: 1) more land from those with much land to those with little land; more fertile land to those with little fertile land; land equally to men and women to young and old. 2) concentration on enhancing agricultural production: digging wells and improving the land. No landlords would do this, collecting rents only. Increasing the means of production would provide the resources needed to build and sustain a revolution. A presage of the Great Leap Forward. Furthermore, empowering more people through education, people’s councils. Still further, developing the revolution wherever the People’s Army had established, deepening the revolution, gaining adherents to it, cultivating Army/Party and the masses synergism in rural bases.
CSK decimated the urban worker base of the CPC in the coup of 1927, but the CPC leader Li Lisan continued to emphasize their importance while dismissing the growing rural peasant base of the party as “unready”. By early 1930 Chou Enlai began to recognize the work of Mao that had placed him in opposition to Li Lisan. Then the “28 Bolsheviks” returned from the USSR in 1930, led by Wang Ming, son of a landlord. Manchuria was conceded to Japan by CKS after it was invaded by them because CKS was solely concerned with attacking communist-won areas. These were the “five suppression campaigns” to eliminate communist opposition to him. The tortured and circuitous thinking of the 28 Bolsheviks of the CPC opposed fighting Japan since the object of the Bolshevik leadership, relates Han Suyin, was to protect the USSR, and CKS represented the imperialist partner with Japan. Thus, the sole enemy of the CPC was CKS since he was in league with Japan. Mao’s emphasized fighting the Japanese. His reasoning was that Japan would not be able to subdue China if they were defeated in their aim to create the base needed to attack the USSR. How the Bolsheviks missed this is puzzling.
A second united front was conceived by Wang Ming as an “All-China United People’s Government of Self-Defense”, a focus of the two-line struggle between the Wang Ming-led, 28-Bolsheviks CPC and Mao adhered to his concept of a united front with independence of action of the CPC above all, which by this stage encompassed leadership of the war against Japan. Japanese military documents said that 75% of the fighting against them was done by the communists.
Missed opportunities to enlarge the base of the revolution due to the intransigence of the USSR-trained Bolsheviks are detailed. Wang Ming's pursuit of his version of a united front sabotaged all of that. Wang Ming became the conduit through which CKS could exert leverage over Mao in pursuing his own quest for power.
The two-line struggles of Mao with CSK can be encapsulated in the respective paths they took in the preparations of the KMT/CPC association for a Northern Expedition “to smash both feudalism and foreign imperialism”. CKS used that illusory unity to maneuver for power and thence the slaughter of the communists. Concurrently, Mao, operating under that illusory unity to prepare for the Northern Expedition, trained a diverse set of people from the provinces, nuclei of future provincial communist peasant cadre organizations, the bones and sinew of a future communist movement that would ultimately prevail.
Han Suyin describes the deadly unfolding and ferocious execution of the coup of 1927 in which CSK seized sole leadership both of the KMT and command of the Northern Expedition that marginalized the CPC. She shows that the success of this operation to drive out local warlords to be based on Mao’s leadership, by his unceasing work in the years prior educating and organizing the peasantry. As CSK seized sole power in the KMT by cunning and deadly teachery, Mao had much earlier been the sole leader to lay the groundwork for the peasant self-mobilization that ensured the expedition’s success. The peasants had formed fighting groups, seized police stations in the warlord-controlled areas, acted as unpaid laborers for the Nationalist armies, while workers had organized strikes. All this ensured victory for CSK’s armies before any battles began. Despite all parties and factions having agreed on the importance of the peasantry to the revolution, Mao struggled against their attitude toward them by his efforts to ready them for expression of their own power. The author: “As news of these upheavals sweeping the countryside reached communist party organizations in urban areas, many were downhearted but not Mao. He said, ‘the peasants are clear-sighted. Who is bad and who is not… The peasants keep clear accounts… A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous…A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.’” Han: “There had never been an overthrow of a dynasty without peasant parties. It was they, the many-millioned, who made empires and destroyed them, but the power had always fallen back into the hands of the mandarinate and the landlord class, and after reforms by the new rulers—tax and rent remissions—the peasantry was again exploited. This repeated betrayal was the feudal pattern for two millennia. The KMT military unification of China would need soldiers, armies, food; only the peasantry could fulfill these needs." CSK recognized this: “the task of the peasantry is to provide us with information concerning the enemy, food and comforts in our encampments, and soldiers for our armies. But not one word from CKS about obligations to the peasantry or about the duties of the KMT once it came to power, towards the peasantry”.
Just as Mao’s preparation of the rural masses of China prior to the Northern Expedition ensured success, and despite it being exploited by CSK to seize control of the KMT and military advantage over the CPC for a long time, the emphasis by Mao on developing the revolutionary potential of the rural peasantry beyond that catastrophe was the vital element of the causes of the inevitable triumph of the Chinese Revolution.
The military primacy of CSK having been established by the Northern Expedition, and enhanced by western support, he then struck at the communists in Shanghai, a center of their revolutionary activity. He directed a series of horrific massacres of them there and across the country. The response of the CPC was to aid and abet this by clinging to unity and then the “left KMT” denounced the communists and further massacres followed. A shakeup of the CPC leadership then placed Zhou Enlai among the leadership of the CPC. Mao, and he then coincided in the priority of armed struggle, another turning point in the Revolution. Mao led uprisings in the countryside, Zhou Enlai in cities which were defeats for the hastily assembled worker’s and peasant’s armies. Mao led his bedraggled half-starved armies to seek refuge in the remote countryside. The ultimately successful outcome of the revolution was then to be assured in another way-by Mao’s subsequent establishment of rural bases for the communists to begin to rebuild, recruit, and establish a revolutionary linkage with the peasant grassroots.
Mao’s road to leadership of the CPC began in rural Hunan Province. Despite his mother’s clan connections to a better school than normally accessible to someone of his farming origins, he had to talk his way into being admitted (on a temporary basis, with the support of a teacher there). He had arrived on foot exhibiting all the trappings of a rural laborer: in cloth shoes, carrying his own bindle with his limited wardrobe and no servant. This is described by two brothers who knew him then, in separate and contradictory biographies, one hostile, one not. His teachers describe someone deeply devoted to his own intellectual enrichment. Han Suyin cautions against the tendency to seize on his early, callow expression of admiration of men like Napoleon or Bismarck as exhibiting a tendency to authoritarianism. He was 17. His admiration for them was as nation-builders, she says. On these foundations and desiring to learn more of the world, with his mother’s continuing support, he set out for Changsa, a noted center of learning, to the Middle School there. Mao showed in 1911, at the cusp of the Revolution who he was to become strategically. He published a poster manifesto, which Edgar Snow deemed absurd, advocating a coalition between Sun Yatsen and two noted reformers of the time. A recognition of the utility of coalitions would persist, but not for mere reform. Han Suyin perceptively describes the onset of the 1911 Revolution to overthrow the Manchu dynasty, as a first cultural revolution. Mao saw that revolution turn into a class struggle, with massacres of workers and peasants by the landlord and merchant classes. His cultivated erudition in the midst of the lower classes comprising his fellow revolutionary soldiers, drew admiration. He also noted how different he was from them based on his educated albeit poor peasant origins, and that with education he had developed a disdain for manual labor. He was beginning to be aware of class differences. At the time of the May 4th, 1919 Movement, an upsurge of national indignation over Woodrow Wilson’s capitulation to the Great Powers to give Shantung province to Japan, which irreversibly galvanized China to permanent change, he spoke of the need for a cultural revolution. Woven through the narrative are the causal concerns of and precedents for the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution.

[Jacob Woocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Completely pro-Mao, but not necessarily in a bad way. Han Suyin is a novelist so the writing is beautiful and compelling. This book tells the story of Mao from his childhood through the revolution (and a bit about post-1949 events at the end). She also gets into theoretical / organizational debates within the communist party (how to relate to the Nationalist Party, emphasis on peasants or workers, etc.). 100% would recommend as an introduction to Mao and the Chinese Revolution.

(Took me a second to figure out but this book is just a straight combination of "The Morning Deluge I: From Mao's Childhood to The Long March and The Morning Deluge 2: From The Long March to Liberation.)

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb historical account of Mao, from his childhood, his early days as a labour organiser and his position in leading the CPC to revolutionary victory

Although the author is not short of praise in detailing Mao's early and middle life, verging towards a hagiography, this is understandable given the extent of his achievements and the oral histories she relies on as well as her own analysis are compelling

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Mao's early and middle life