Chairman Mao — the Last Emperor
Directed and produced by Jeremy Bennett
ABC TV, Wednesday, May 1, 8.30pm (8 in SA)
Reviewed by Eva Cheng
Jeremy Bennett believes that a monstrous tyrant controlled China single-handedly for 27 years following the 1949 revolution in much the same way as other tyrants have ruled China in the last 2000 years, and he spends the entire 60 minutes of The Last Emperor trying to prove his case.
The productive forces and the relations of production in human society had moved an entire epoch from feudalism to imperialism; China had undergone a tremendous change to a post-capitalist society; the ruling ideology changed from a "mandate from heaven" to a stated goal of an egalitarian society.
None of this seems to matter to Bennett. They are basically all the same, he suggests, all "emperors" — brutal, coercive and even with similar predatory sexual behaviour based on absolute power. The documentary even features "striking" parallels between Mao and China's first emperor, Qing, whom Mao publicly defended and supposedly modelled himself on: both of them brutalised and massacred intellectuals.
These comparisons are superficial. The Last Emperor is an idealist history, lacking depth. In an attempt to make it marketable, Bennett has slipped close to vulgarism and moralism. For example, the film highlights and passes moral judgment on Mao's sex life, but lacks serious treatment of the thoughts (no matter how deficient) and other aspects of the man of wider implications.
It is also sexist, accepting unquestioningly Beijing's official line that Jiang Qing, Mao's fourth and final wife, "seduced" Mao into their relationship. It fails to substantiate the claim, or even treat it with basic journalistic caution.
The Last Emperor mentions Mao's peasant background, that he came to power by leading a peasant-based movement under the banner of communism, his closeness with Stalin and that he based his power on a ruling bureaucracy which the Chinese people have recognised with great disillusionment as being seriously corrupt and which they are keen to remove. It also suggests that Mao is a Marxist only in name, not properly educated in Marxism and Leninism, and is ignorant of economics and things as basic as the food chain.
However, there is little attempt to go into any of these themes in depth, or to examine Mao in the context of the communist movement in China and internationally, including the distortions brought to it by Stalinism, starting long before 1949.
A crucial question comes demanding an answer throughout the 60 minutes: what is the material basis of Mao's absolute power? Mao came to power at the head of a mass movement which consciously overthrew the capitalist ruling class and defeated imperialism, leading a party which makes much (at least in words) of collective leadership and democratic principles. Yet the masses in China after 1949 seemed to be so fanatical and so easily fooled, and the rest of the Communist Party so powerless in changing the course of events that seemed to be dictated by one man.
Without going into these questions at length here, the fanaticism of the masses must be appreciated within the context of their desperation to be free from capitalist and imperialist oppression before 1949 and the dictatorship of the Stalinist bureaucracy ever since. Conditioned by their largely individualistic mode of production, the peasants in pre-1949 China were not amenable to conscious class actions. The problem was worsened by the numerical weakness, repeated defeats and lack of an effective alternative leadership of the Chinese working class, compounded by the heavy burden of feudalist ideological baggage and widespread illiteracy of the peasants.
The Last Emperor makes no attempt to go into these factors, even superficially. It picks out only what is useful to the central theme that Mao was a tyrant, a monster. At least one of the key interviewees seems to be a victim of this selective approach.
Li Zhisui, Mao's physician for the 22 years to 1976, is presented in the program as commenting almost exclusively on Mao's sex life. Li expressed his great disappointment in the November 1994 issue of the Hong Kong-based Open Magazine of the BBC's selecting only his comments on Mao's sex life from a much broader four-hour interview.
Based on Li's account and the much broader treatment of Mao in his book, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li was unfairly trivialised.
If approached critically, The Last Emperor, (first screened three years ago) is worth watching, especially for a younger generation who have little feel for the Chinese revolutions and the period under Mao.