Free On China by Henry Kissinger

the most pervasive famines in modern history and produced a split in the Communist Party; and the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which a generation of trained leaders, professors, diplomats, and experts were sent to the countryside to work on farms to learn from the masses.
    Millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end, destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast enterprise.
    Mao’s faith in the ultimate success of his continuous revolution had three sources: ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism. The single most important one was his faith in the resilience, capabilities, and cohesion of the Chinese people. And in truth, it is impossible to think of another people who could have sustained the relentless turmoil that Mao imposed on his society. Or whose leader could have made credible Mao’s oft-repeated threat that the Chinese people would prevail, even if it retreated from all its cities against a foreign invader or suffered tens of millions of casualties in a nuclear war. Mao could do so because of a profound faith in the Chinese people’s ability to retain its essence amidst all vicissitudes.
    This was a fundamental difference with the Russian Revolution a generation earlier. Lenin and Trotsky viewed their revolution as a triggering event for world revolution. Convinced that world revolution was imminent, they agreed to cede a third of European Russia to German control in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918. Whatever happened to Russia would be subsumed by the imminent revolution in the rest of Europe, which, Lenin and Trotsky assumed, would sweep away the existing political order.
    Such an approach would have been unthinkable for Mao, whose revolution was largely Sinocentric. China’s revolution might have an impact on world revolution but, if so, through the efforts and sacrifice and example of the Chinese people. With Mao, the greatness of the Chinese people was always the organizing principle. In an early essay in 1919, he stressed the unique qualities of the Chinese people:
    I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people. 20
    Twenty years later, amidst Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war, Mao extolled the historic achievements of the Chinese nation in a way that the dynastic rulers could have shared:
    Throughout the history of Chinese civilization its agriculture and handicrafts have been renowned for their high level of development; there have been many great thinkers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, soldiers, men of letters and artists, and we have a rich store of classical works. The compass was invented in China very long ago. The art of paper-making was discovered as early as 1,800 years ago. Block-printing was invented 1,300 years ago, and movable type 800 years ago. The use of gunpowder was known in China before the Europeans. Thus China has one of the oldest civilizations in the world; she has a recorded history of nearly 4,000 years. 21
    Mao kept circling back to a dilemma as ancient as China itself. Intrinsically universal, modern technology poses a threat to any society’s claims to uniqueness. And uniqueness had always been the distinctive claim of Chinese society. To preserve that uniqueness, China had refused to imitate the West in the nineteenth century, risking colonization and incurring humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—from which indeed it derived its name—had been to eradicate precisely those elements of modernization that