Mao Zedong Thought, one of the pillars of the
ideological complex that supports the People's Republic, is based on
the official writings of Mao. The printed versions of the extensive Mao
texts, however, have always taken the form of collections of selected writings
(xuanji
选集). This means that many of them have been chosen for political
reasons and that their contents may have been altered by editors to
make them fit the political circumstances of the moment. As a result,
over time Mao Thought has existed in various versions and
constellations, depending on the political priorities as they existed
at specific moments.
Mao was a prolific writer all his life. The use of
his writings as a repository of ideological truth evolved after he
attained power over the Party in 1935. In the Yan'an period
(1937-1947), Mao had the time and the opportunity to study the writings
of Marxism-Leninism in translation, to adapt them to the Chinese
circumstances and to develop his own brand of sinified Marxism. As a
result, the term Maoism started to appear in party publications in
1942. A front-page article in the Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily
解放日报)
in 1943 by Wang Jiaxing, the Vice-Chairman of the Central Military
Commission, was the first locus where Mao Zedong Thought was mentioned.
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Maoism as the new ideology of the CCP was formalized
in 1945, when the new party constitution was drafted. The preamble of
this document stated that the Party functioned under the great
leadership of Mao Zedong Thought. In the 'Report on the Revision of the
Party Constitution' delivered by Liu Shaoqi at the time,
Mao Thought was presented as 'Chinese Communism', 'Chinese Marxism' and
the 'Sinicization of Marxism'. Liu called on all party schools, party
propaganda sections, general propaganda training groups and party
publications to use Mao's Thoughts as a foundation and teaching
material and to disseminate Mao Thought in a huge wave of study. All
this clearly was a continuation of the personality cult that had seen its origins in the mid-1940s.
With Mao's writings having been elevated to the
status of a canon of the new PRC, they had to be made available to the
population at large. The decision to edit Mao's considerable body of
writings of political theory and military tactics resulted in the
publication of the Selected Works in three volumes, covering the history of the Chinese Communist Movement to the end of the war against Japan in 1945.
These volumes appeared in the years 1951-1953.
Mao himself actively participated in the editing process of the first edition of his three-volume Selected Works. He was assisted
by many others, presumably also by his exegist and chief propagandist Chen Boda.
In the process, as the famous Mao-scholar Stuart Schram has concluded,
the wording of the texts was altered, passages were deleted or altered,
and belated additions were inserted, thus making it extremely difficult
to assume that even a single sentence of the printed version was
identical to the original without recourse to what Mao had originally
written.
A fourth volume, covering the period 1945-1949, was
published in 1960. As the personality cult gathered steam, and
political conflicts became more frequent and acute, a clear need was
felt for more recent writings of the Chairman. Early in the Cultural Revolution, the Party Central Committee therefore decided to edit further volumes of the Selected
Works. Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng were given the task by Mao in 1969 to start
the work needed for the compilation of a Volume V.
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s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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