Mao Zedong: Exploring multidimensional approaches to the writing of biography

July 1-3, 2016

Organized by Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Department for East Asian Studies, Sinology and Wilhelm Hemecker, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Theory and History of Biography, Vienna

In recent years, quite a number of biographies of Mao Zedong attracted public attention with Jung Chang’s and Jan Halliday’s book “Mao: The Unknown Story” supposedly playing the role of a bedtime reading of the world’s most prominent leaders. Although the biography must have been quite shocking for those who had personally met Mao and applauded his insights into world politics, the critical, if not debunking style of Jung Chang’s biography rarely met with any kind of criticism. This is true despite the fact that Jung Chang while offering a lot of details on Mao’s political life hardly has anything new to say about Mao’s personal life. Except for some stereotypical remarks on how Mao showed his dictatorial inclinations already when he was a newborn, Jung Chang’s biography lacks what European readers would expect every biography to provide: insights into the inner life of the biographed person.

The absence of any explanations on the development of Mao’s personality, especially the analysis of remarks Mao made without the intention of creating an image of himself in public are not mentioned as a problem in the many reviews which appeared since Jung Chang’s biography came out. This astonishing silence seems to show how much readers are already used to this kind of biographical writing. One reason for this kind of attitude towards Mao biographies might be that they seem to conform to a tradition of writing biography prevalent at least since Sima Qian’s “Records of a Historian” (Shiji). The dynastic histories which always included biographical writings (zhuanji) perpetuated a form of necrology which was written to express praise and blame on a deceased person’s compliance with the rules of adequate Confucian behavior (sangang wuchang) not only in office, but also in family life. While including remarks on “filial piety” into the text, the author would never try to make any remarks on what kind of personal feelings, considerations or motivations the biographed person must have had.

However, if this continuity with the tradition of biography might explain why Chinese authors and readers do not feel that there is anything missing in the extent Mao biographies, it stays unclear why non-Chinese authors and readers do not voice their astonishment. Even the biography written by Pantsov and Levine is a political biography. In comparison, it goes quite deeply into analyzing the complexity of Mao’s personality, albeit always in a political context. This is even more astounding when we look at the archival situation which has changed fundamentally during the last 25 years since the end of the Cold War. When Stuart Schram published his path breaking biography of Mao Zedong some 50 years ago he solely relied on Mao’s political speeches and articles all of which, as we know today, had undergone major revisions before publication, sometimes with not too much involvement from the author himself. With the end of the Cold War, however, and the end of the Soviet Union many secrets the CPSU and the CCP had kept for many decades suddenly became accessible. Some of them shed a totally different light on decisions made by Mao and his entourage making our understanding of Mao as a political figure more complex and less designed by himself and his collaborators. Both Jung Chang and Pantsov could not have written their biographies without access to these sources.

The pressure exerted on official party historiography by the existence of otherwise top secret sources in the hands of biographers outside the control of the party historiography system was absorbed by the official biography of Mao Zedong published under the leadership of Jin Chongji. It contains many otherwise undisclosed sources and describes many political decision making processes in astonishing detail. However, also this official biography of Mao Zedong does not quote from diaries, personal letters or else from Mao’s poems and calligraphy. Poems and calligraphy are two important channels for Chinese scholars to express their personal feelings and assessments.  Mao styled himself as a politician cum scholar personality and wrote many poems during the course of his life some of which are published and highly acclaimed in the PRC. While there are quite a number of articles analyzing the poems from the point of view of literary theory, there is not enough analysis of the poems as Mao’s most direct form of expressing his thoughts and feelings. This is unfortunate also because the poems are all preserved also as calligraphies and thus offer the opportunity to relate the form and content of the poems to the writing style of calligraphy. Both poetry and calligraphy are accepted forms of expression which allow going beyond conventions and reflect their authors’ emotional world. So far, this resource has been kept largely untapped.

The symposium “Mao Zedong: Exploring multidimensional approaches to the writing of biography” will provide three different platforms to discuss the above mentioned issues.

The first platform will focus on the analysis of existing Mao biographies and is aimed at bringing biographers and reviewers together. We want to discuss the intentions, difficulties, possibilities and self-perceived limitations of the biographers and raise the discussion with them and their reviewers to the level of a meta-biographical discourse as a basis for further theoretical explorations into the field of biography as a genre.

The second platform is focused on inter-cultural dialogue about the genre of biography. It is aimed at exploring cultural differences in the writing of biography and at discussing the impact of political and societal constellations on the writing of biography as well as on the expectations of the respective readerships. For this purpose, we will bring theoreticians and historians together who are experts of biography writing in different cultural contexts.

The third platform is focused on Mao’s personality and the question how the analysis of poetry and calligraphy can contribute to filling the void which so far biographers have not been able to fill. As one way of approaching this problem we want to bring experts on Mao and on Mao’s poems as well as calligraphy together to jointly explore a novel way to go beyond conventional wisdom in dealing with Mao’s personality.

It is the aim of this symposium to overcome the boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese, Eastern and Western academia and explore a field which so far has not attracted the kind of attention it deserves. This is the genre of biography with its manifold implications for which the biography of Mao Zedong seems to be a relevant, complex and interesting example.