The Morning Deluge,
Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution
Author: Han Suyin
Publisher: Little Brown
ISBN: 9780316342896
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of China celebrated its 100th Anniversary on July 1, 2021, and there’s great interest in the man behind the formation and growth of CCP. That person is Chairman Mao Zedung. One of the early books on Mao is his biography, The Morning Deluge, Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution by Han Suyin. Volume I of The Morning Deluge covers the period from the childhood of Mao Zedung to the Long March while Volume II continues with the history of China and the life of Mao up to the Korean War.
As a prolific writer, Suyin's talent with words and her sympathetic view of the revolutionary leader makes this biography a joy to read, although her account in the book adheres to the official narrative even when historical documents suggest that Mao occasionally made some strategic bad decisions. And these decisions resulted in massive loss of human lives as well as the destruction of precious historical artifacts during the calamitous years of Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
But as a biography of the great helmsman himself, this book offers readers an interesting insight of China and the Chinese people during the growing pains of the nation.
Suyin portrays Mao as the brooding rebel, poet, man of arms, political theorist, husband of four women and a leader of the Communist party. The book also traces Mao’s struggle against awful odds in the early years - from hunted guerrilla to supreme leader that marked him as the Marx, Lenin and Stalin combo of the Chinese revolution.
Mao is also a mortal with limitations and that’s what Suyin tries to reconcile in The Morning Deluge. She keeps her eye on the condition of the people and on the task that Mao set for himself and CCP - to eradicate the hunger, disease and oppression which made many observers dismiss China some 50 years ago as a stagnant backwater of hopelessness.
Recounting the first 61 years of the chairman's life - from his birth in 1893 at the tranquil village of Shaoshan to the end of the Korean War, the second volume takes the story on from 1954. The author brings out the studious nature of young Mao during his five years of study in Changsha and the boldness of his mind where he accepted only what he himself found to be true and then held to it unshakably.
She shows how Mao evolved, from his own unique combination of study and observation, the stress upon organising peasants and the building of a broad front against imperialism which were the two points at which he carried Leninism even further from Marx than Lenin himself had done.
Suyin is obviously moved by the towering achievements of Mao, and in the chapters on the Long March and the Yenan years which followed, she uses interviews conducted in China to unfold a drama of the new dawning day in which the Chinese people finally “stood up” and entered world history on equal terms.
The main weaknesses of the book lie in its facile putting down of all Mao's critics and in a certain unreadiness to accept that Mao is a sharp politician who has been almost a saviour for his people but also a trial for some of his colleagues.
Despite his faults, it cannot be denied that China will not be what she is today without Mao and his other communist colleagues, including Zhao Enlai, Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaoping, among others.
Whatever his faults, Mao is undeniably skilled in political and military strategy, especially guerilla warfare. That was how he managed to beat Chiang Kaishek and his KTM to finally unite China as a nation.
Han Suyin says that the Revolution made Mao as much as Mao made the Revolution. As the book title suggests, after a heavy rain, it’s time for the sky to clear and the sun to shine. That’s her hope for her country. Today, China stands proud as a transformed nation.
