Free A Thousand Pieces of Gold by Adeline Yen Mah Page B

does not make the laws.” The western Christian belief in an almighty God who was higher than the king has traditionally, by serendipity, subsumed political power under a higher framework of reference. There is no such precedence in China to provide for the sovereignty of a rule-based legal system. In China the “son of Heaven” was always above the law. He was the one mandated by Heaven to rule and was therefore accountable to no one but himself.
    To have a leadership that is enlightened and responsive to the wishes of the people, China needs first to adopt a set of laws that are sovereign to the power of the ruling party. Otherwise, gu zhang nan ming, “clapping withone hand will produce no sound.” Unfortunately, history has taught us that it is only too easy for a supreme ruler to become corrupted by unlimited power and adulation. This was the final legacy of Mao Tse-tung.
     
    The majority of Chinese would probably agree that the most dominant figure in twentieth-century China was Mao Tse-tung. They would also draw a clear distinction between the “Great Mao” of his prime and the “tyrannical Mao” of his declining years. Before 1949, Mao was the passionate revolutionary whose vision brought about the unification of China. His achievement elevated him into becoming the supreme ruler. Mao’s every word was worshiped, and he gradually turned into a despot more powerful than any previous emperor.
    As he grew older, Mao became increasingly megalomaniac and paranoid. Seven years after launching the Cultural Revolution he said, in a conversation with the Egyptian ambassador, “The First Emperor [King Zheng] was the most famous emperor of China. In China, there are always two opposite viewpoints. Some people support the First Emperor. Others oppose him. I myself endorse him, but I am against Confucius.”
    Three years before he died, Mao encouraged his wife, Jiang Qing, to set up a group of writers to denigrate Confucius and promote the Legalist School as represented by Han Feizi. Mao claimed that he as well as the First Emperor were both Legalists who advocated reform and opposed retrogression. As soon as he seized power at the age of twenty-one, King Zheng had eliminated the Confucian prime minister, Lu Buwei. From then on, according to Mao, China’s history was characterized by a series of struggles between Confucianism and the Legalist School, between progress and retrogression, between stagnation and revolution.
    While advocating the rule of law and the consolidation of power within the hands of a single supreme ruler, Han Feizi never wrote about the adverse consequences of such unlimited authority on the personality of the ruler. In the case of Mao, absolute power corrupted him absolutely, and he became increasingly intolerant of the slightest disagreement with any of his wishes.
    Mao carried out political persecution at an unprecedented scale during the last ten years of his life, attacking most of his closest associates. He exhibited such ambiguity and contradiction that it was impossible to foretell his intentions or predict his desires. Ever since Khrushchev’s posthumous denigration of Stalin in the 1950s, Mao had been fearful of a similar revisionism in China after his own death. He was obsessed both with grooming a successor and destroying that successor as the latter’s power grew. It became extremely hazardous to assume the number two position in China.
    Back in 1961, Mao confided to Field Marshal Montgomery that Liu Shaoqi was his successor and would take his place after his death. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Liu Shaoqi was taken into custody, deprived of medical treatment, and moved to a city far away from Beijing, where he died alone in a room without any furniture. Meanwhile, Lin Biao was publicly named as Mao’s designated successor. Five years later, Mao turned against Lin Biao with the help of the Gang of Four under the direction of his wife, Jiang Qing, and Premier Zhou