Ross Terrill's Mao: A Biography was first published in 1980. It appears now with revisions, an excellent new introduction that skillfully sketches what has changed for the biographer of Mao over twenty years, an epilogue, postscript, and a new bibliography. Terrill, a Harvard-based scholar and writer, is concerned above all with Mao as an individual, and he paints a richly documented and fascinating portrait, full of insight, empathy, and even humor. Still, he points out, the historical and cultural background cannot be neglected: "In the end, Mao's qualities cannot be explained aside from the long-ripened qualities of Chinese civilization. Could Somalia produce a Mao? Could New Zealand? We cannot account for Mao's success merely by unwrapping him as an individual psychological package" (pp. 460-61).
An interpretative shift is nevertheless well under way. Mao's cruelty and destruction are now clearly acknowledged and documented by author. So, in place of the old concern with Mao's thought and social significance, which informed thought until the time of his death, the question now being asked is, how did he do it? Terrill's answer in his conclusion is similar: "[T]here was a personal fire in him.... He was certain of himself, and of the eventual triumph of his peasant army. That--beyond mere hunger for power--gave him a will of granite" (p. 459). Personal qualities, in other words, were critical to Mao's success in winning power and holding it longer and more effectively than any other figure in twentieth-century China.

Chinese have traditionally linked individual qualities to political success in two mutually exclusive ways. The first, which is imbedded in the Confucian moral mainstream, perceives power as a matter of moral influence. The true king wins followers by winning hearts through his virtue; indeed, he can even win battles that way. In the traditional account of Muye, an ancient battle at which the Zhou defeated the Shang, virtue alone ensured victory. The mere presence on the field of the Zhou leaders caused the Shang troops to mutiny, so victory was won without any clash of armies. In other words, according to this appealing Chinese belief (also not unknown in the West), the good will reliably win provided they are truly good. But it is the second approach to power that has traditionally fascinated Chinese. This one perceives the gaining and holding of power as basically an amoral business of clever deception and strategy triumphing against the odds. This is the school of Sun Zi and other writers on military affairs and it feeds, with a substantial admixture of moral content, into such classics as Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms and the story of the great strategist Zhuge Liang. According to this account the winners are the really skilled liars’ manipulators, and tacticians.

But if these approaches are still distinct in China, they have become melded together in the West. There, the rise of the sociological interpretation of history caused a general denigration of the importance previously imputed to such things as battles and the skills needed to win them and a correspondingly higher evaluation of the importance of such larger factors as demographic trends, social pressures, economic shifts, and so forth. This might sound amoral as well, but in fact Westerners rose on the redemptive stories of Christianity and Judaism had great difficulty adopting a sort of Hindu-style moral impartiality with respect to the actions of great material forces, whether creative or destructive, and strived to see some positive purpose in their workings. That was what Marxism was all about: the Great Historical Forces were propelling us objectively not just somewhere, but Somewhere Better. The twentieth century was the heyday of such views, when the tendency to spot the Zeitgeist mounted on a military steed (in Hegel's famous remark about Napoleon) was evident not only in Germany and Italy, but also in China. What this meant was that the first studies of Mao in the West paid overwhelming attention to Mao's role as a philosopher in action, the incarnation of the spirit of his age.

As a philosopher, Mao's role, so it was thought, had been to articulate the basis for a new Chineseness that would supplant that of Confucianism. The whole Chinese civilization was, by many twentieth-century accounts, of no use or value whatsoever under modern conditions and needed to be replaced in its totality. That misguided belief would unleash the most virulent orgy of cultural self-destruction ever seen in human history. Many Chinese intellectuals believed this and some still do. In the West, the late Joseph Levenson was its most articulate exponent, with his memorable argument that for the Chinese the cultural past could only exist in a museum (unlike his own Judaism, which, he reportedly discovered shortly before his death, still contained living sparks). Mao had solved this problem, so the argument went, by Sinifying Marxism and thus creating a usable intellectual and moral synthesis to take the place of the old Confucian orthodoxy. Hence the attention paid to Mao as a thinker.

Mao's role as a social reformer was interpreted in similar fashion. The social system that China carried into the twentieth century--familial, local, hierarchical, and patriarchal, with vast gulfs in income and education--was likewise unsuited to modernity. No less than a complete transformation was required, and this Mao provided by means of a new nomenclature (along with workers and soldiers, there were rich, middle, and poor peasants)--and a new economic system based on collectivized agriculture and socialized industry. Accordingly, Mao succeeded in gaining power where others such as Chiang Kai-shek had failed precisely because he understood China's objective social problems and unleashed their latent power. Locked up in the social contradictions of the Chinese countryside was the possibility of a social chain reaction: one after another of the obsolete bonds could be broken and the people liberated.

Still, when Mao died the conventional wisdom, both academic and journalistic, explained Mao's success in terms of the Great Social Forces he harnessed, and his greatness stemmed from the fact that his ideas and leadership were in accord with the spirit of the age. He had created a stable system and laid a sound foundation for further development, and he had been able to do so because he had understood how to transform values and economic structures.

Few people still take Mao seriously as a philosopher. Even Benjamin Schwartz was reported to have said toward the end of his life that if he had known more of the facts about Mao such as Dr. Li revealed he probably would not have done so either. As for the economic system created by Mao and destined to shake the world, it was, most would agree, a mirage. Certainly few Chinese pay attention to it any longer. The Maoist face of China, with its slogans in red and white and its general lack of bustle, has in the last twenty years been squeezed out of existence as gaudy new urban development takes up where pre-Communist China left off. The claim to have modernized the country, which Butterfield made for Mao, has been more convincingly appropriated by Deng Xiaoping and his successors.

So how are we to understand Mao's importance today? Very simply that he got power, held it, and molded China not so much according to historical imperatives as according to his personal will. How did he do it? He was demonstrably not virtuous by any standard of measure, so Confucianism cannot explain his success. Nor did his policies ride any irresistible tide of history, as sociological historians suggested. We need to apply an entirely new framework for thinking about where power comes from and how people get it, one that owes more to Sun Zi than to Emile Durkheim. Terrill agrees, in effect, that Mao acquired power, first, by genuinely craving it, feeling entitled to it, and convincing others of his claim. Secondly, he got power by making brilliant use of the opportunities that history provided him and exploiting them to move towards his goal. This approach is very different from the more conventional sociological interpretation. Mao's skills are most clearly visible in two situations he had nothing to do with creating: the war of resistance against Japan (1937-45), and the period of war termination and civil war in China (1945-49).