The damage that Mao Zedong wrought in China made it much easier for that country to move away from a Soviet-style economic model and toward a new market-oriented one, a Stanford scholar says.

In fact, China has been in full retreat for four decades from Mao's disastrous rule, according to a new book by Stanford sociology Professor Andrew Walder, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director emeritus of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center.

"Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative," he wrote. "At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided."

Led by Mao, China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war. Mao launched a bloody Chinese revolution that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese over the next few decades. 

In an interview, Walder said that Mao pushed campaign after campaign against the Chinese Communist party and bureaucracy after 1966 – "The bureaucracy was basically flat on its back at the time of his death."

By contrast, Walder noted, the Soviet bureaucracy was powerful and well-entrenched, and had enormous vested interests that thwarted genuine reforms.

"In post-Mao China, the economy was so backward and the bureaucratic interests so weak that market reform was bundled together with a program of national revival – restructuring the economy along market lines while rebuilding the party and bureaucracy," he said.

Therefore, the politics of reform were much easier for a Chinese leader like Deng Xiaoping than for a Soviet leader like Mikhail Gorbachev, who had to contend with an entrenched bureaucracy still proud of the fact that the USSR was (until the late 1980s) the second largest economy in the world and an undeniable superpower, according to Walder.

He noted that Mao's initiatives repeatedly led to unintended and unanticipated outcomes.

"What is so remarkable is that after 1956 this was a recurring pattern. His initiatives repeatedly ran into trouble, forcing him to backtrack and change direction constantly – although he always insisted that things had unfolded in ways that were according to his plans," Walder said.

Class struggle, imaginary enemies

Mao's China, he added, was defined by a harsh Communist Party rule and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Mao himself intervened at almost every level, despite a large national bureaucracy that oversaw this authoritarian system.

"The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements – victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life – also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution," Walder wrote.

He said that Mao misunderstood China's real problems in advocating a top-down "class struggle" against capitalism and imaginary enemies.

"At the time of his death (in 1976), he left China backward and deeply divided," Walder wrote.

The result was a gradual transition to the market-oriented system of today, he added. Almost immediately following Mao's death, his most fervent followers and supporters in the party were arrested and detained – all of which opened the door to reform and opportunity.

China has overcome widespread poverty to become the second largest economy in the world within the span of just a couple of decades. Still, according to Walder, China's rulers seek to cling to a sanitized version of Mao as a way to buttress their legitimacy.

"The damage of his misrule, and the incompetence on his part that it reflects, are not part of the official story anymore, and certainly this is not what is taught to school children or in party manuals in the present day," he said.

World War II and Stalinism

On two other key issues, Walder said his book challenges the conventional wisdom about China and Mao.

First, he says that Mao's forces did very little of the fighting against the Japanese in WWII.

Walder said that the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 over the Chinese nationalist forces has usually been traced to the strategy of guerrilla warfare in rural regions championed early on by Mao.

"But that was simply a strategy of survival during the Japanese invasion – and Mao's forces did very little of the fighting against the Japanese, in stark contrast to the popular myth of rural resistance." (Only 10 percent of China's military casualties were Red Army, he said.)

What Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) excelled at was mass mobilization for all-out warfare during the Chinese civil war of 1945-49, Walder said.

"And this – pushing your organization and the population for all-out mobilization for war – is the real source of the CCP's success over the Chinese nationalists. This was more like the Soviet Union's war against German armies during World War II than a 'people's war' led by a party that was close to the rural people and built support by catering to their needs," he said.

Second, Walder describes Mao's thinking as frozen in Stalinist doctrine, despite the conventional view of him as an original thinker.

"In fact, Mao's core ideas were absorbed from late-1930s Soviet pamphlets put out under Stalin, and his thinking was very much frozen in that earlier era," Walder said. "The core idea that he absorbed from these pamphlets in creating 'Mao Thought' was that socialism had to be built in an all-out mobilization, like warfare, by extracting huge sacrifices from the population."

The most pernicious idea that Mao absorbed from these old Soviet pamphlets, Walder said, was that class struggle actually intensifies after the means of production are put under public ownership and former exploiting classes are liquidated.

"The sad corollary to this idea is that the Great Leader is the fount of correct ideas, and those who doubt or oppose him represent class enemies who actually oppose socialism," said Walder.

Based on this logic, Walder pointed out, the class struggle had to be waged against "incorrect ideas" as judged by the Great Leader.

"Mao's personality cult was an imitation of Stalin's own," he said.

And so, the Chinese leader held on to old Stalinist ideas long after they were rejected by the Soviet Union as crude distortions of Marxism.

"Mao was actually insisting on keeping to the old and tattered Stalinist playbook," Walder said.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Japan must transform its economy in a way that mirrors the innovation ethos in places like Silicon Valley and Stanford University, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday during a speech on campus.

As an example of how to encourage such creativity, Abe hailed a new partnership starting this fall with Stanford that will train the next generation of biomedical experts. In doing so, he urged a "fundamental change" in how Japanese society views the process of innovation, from how ideas originate to competition in the marketplace.

Japan Biodesign will be launched in collaboration with the Stanford Biodesign program and five higher education and research institutions in Japan. Faculty members will work together to create new interdisciplinary systems based on Stanford Biodesign. Stanford leaders will train and mentor their Japanese colleagues.

Abe, who is the first Japanese prime minister to visit Stanford, marveled at how the tech sector in the United States has "consistently evolved at top speed."

He said, "I want the best and brightest Japanese talent" to learn about Silicon Valley.

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Abe shared the Bing Concert Hall stage with Stanford President John Hennessy and George Shultz, the former U.S. Secretary of State and distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. Abe's talk, titled "Innovation, Japan and Silicon Valley Symposium," included an introduction and remarks by Hennessy and Shultz. The event drew a full house of invited guests and members of the Stanford community.

"It is a great honor" to be at Stanford, Abe said in beginning his remarks.

He noted that Japan is revisiting its regulatory and tax systems in order to encourage more economic dynamism and competition. "The Japanese people will benefit from innovation," he said.

The challenge, he acknowledged, has been the slow pace of innovation in Japan. Today, however, the Internet economy and big data are creating "enormous changes" in his country's economic approach, he said. "We have to catch up, or otherwise Japan will lose vitality," Abe added.

Cultural connections

In his introduction of Abe, Hennessy chronicled Stanford's long history and friendship with Japan and its people.

Japan, he said, is home to more Stanford alumni than any other Asian country, and when the university's doors first opened in 1891, the pioneer class included a Japanese student. Currently, 139 students from Japan are enrolled at Stanford.

Hennessey described Abe as focused on revitalizing Japan's economy and stewarding it toward a greater global role.

Shultz, who knew Abe's parents, shared recollections of poignant moments between Abe's politically prominent family and his own.

Abe joined a roundtable discussion after his speech with Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanford Board of Trustees Chair Steve Denning; Stanford School of Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor; Stanford political science Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang; and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, among other scholars and dignitaries. He also met with Stanford students before leaving campus.

Afterward, McFaul wrote in an email, "I think it is fantastic that Prime Minister Abe came to Stanford and Silicon Valley after his very successful visit to Washington. He demonstrated that deepening U.S.-Japanese relations requires not only strong government-to-government ties, but also deepening ties between our societies, including educational institutions like Stanford."

Abe's state visit to the United States this week included the first address by a Japanese leader to a joint session of Congress. Abe served as prime minister of Japan in 2006-07 and returned to the position in 2012.

'Working together'

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama said after a meeting with Abe that the two countries had made progress in trade talks on a massive 12-nation trade deal that would open markets around the Pacific Rim to U.S. exports. Both nations face domestic political obstacles to concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

"This agreement would expand the coverage of the free trade agreements for both Japan and the U.S. substantially," said Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi, director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in an interview. "The U.S. and Japan have been working together to maintain peace and sustain economic growth in the Pacific Asia."

Hoshi said that Abe's visit to the Silicon Valley confirms that Japan is serious about transforming its economy from one based on exports to one focused on innovations.

"Going forward, we can learn a lot from Japanese experience and their reform attempts," said Hoshi, who is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Hoshi spoke with The Associated Press just before Abe’s arrival to California, citing Silicon Valley as the ideal place for Japan to learn about innovation. He also joined KQED’s Forum to discuss the current state of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Later, he was interviewed by BBC Business about Abe's visit to Stanford.

Stanford Biodesign

Founded in 2001, Stanford Biodesign has pioneered a new training methodology in which interdisciplinary teams of engineers and physicians go through a rigorous process of carefully characterizing unsolved clinical needs before jumping to technology solutions.

For the Japan Biodesign program, the bulk of the educational activities will take place at the campuses of the partner Japanese universities.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.