Mao: A Life
SBS TV
Parts 1 & 2 of 4, Friday December 8 and 15, 8.30pm
"Against the Tide", part one of Mao: A Life, spans from China's 1911 bourgeois revolution that overturned the imperial system to 1945 when Mao Zedong consolidated his supreme position at the Chinese Communist Party's seventh congress. Part two, "Mao: A Chinese Tale", starts with Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, ending at the eve of the 1960 Chinese-Soviet split.
Many key events are covered: the 1912 founding of the Republic of China and Sun Yat-sen's rise as president, the May 4th student movement in 1919, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and the bourgeois forces' military offensive (embodied in the Nationalist Party, or KMT) against and sometimes in cooperation with the CCP from the 1920s-1940s, the 1934-35 Long March, the Japanese invasion, which climaxed in 1937, and the rise of the CCP against tremendous odds to being the alternative government, ruling a significant section of China by 1945 are also.
Part two takes the audience from the 1945-49 phase of the Nationalist-CCP civil war, to the CCP's victory in 1949, China's involvement in the 1950-53 Korean War, the collectivisation of agriculture during the 1950s, the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957, the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958 and the dynamics of Sino-Soviet relations up until the 1960 split.
Some of the historical footage is impressive, giving life to and allowing a better feel for an otherwise distant historical period. In all, it is a useful introduction on a crucial half-century of a socialist struggle in a country that accounts for one-fourth of humanity.
I've a few criticisms though. The role of imperialism in China is too obscure in the series. Foreign concessions were only just mentioned. Their impact in distorting the Chinese economy and class politics was not explored.
The May 4th movement, for example, was a massive revolt against the imperialist powers' decision at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to transfer the former German leasehold of China's Shandong Peninsular to imperialist Japan. But an audience without previous knowledge wouldn't learn about it
in the series.
While the Sino-Soviet relationship was featured quite a bit in part two, the USSR's dominant role was not noticeable at all in the period covered by part one. In reality, through the Russian-trained Chinese communists (namely the "Twenty-eight Bolsheviks") as well as Comintern "advisers", Stalin had a tight grip over the CCP's key policies, leading especially to the repeated and disastrous "collaborations" with the KMT at the expense of CCP's political independence.
Under the first round of such "collaborations", thousands of workers were massacred by the KMT during 1925-27. That setback and further KMT military offensives against the CCP led to the Long March. Mao rebelled against the Comintern's direction. This rebellion helped found him as the key leader.
Part one is also too unfairly Mao-centric, even for the period before Mao's rise in 1935. The CCP, for example, was said to be founded by "Mao and 12 others". In fact, the Twenty-eight Bolsheviks were a major bloc that dominated the CCP before Mao's ascent.