In the West, Mao has been cast in many roles, sometimes as the Mao people needed and sometimes as the one they feared. Depending on whether their story was that of liberating revolution and historical progress or one of communist expansion and destructive violence, and depending on whether China was an ally of the West – first against Japan, later against the USSR – Mao has appeared in the role of nationalist unifier, peasant rebel, Red Emperor, knockoff Stalin, humane modernizer, model of third world revolution, or leading political murderer of the twentieth century.

Mao collaborated with his audiences to produce a range of conflicting stories that cannot be reconciled because they reflect differences in politics and philosophy that cannot be corrected by reference to facts. Yet Mao is not some gigantic historical Rorschach test, an inkblot in which to see what we will. My purpose here is neither to chronicle confusion nor correct misperceptions. In this chapter I rehearse the stories told in the West, mainly those based on some direct knowledge of China, to see where the honestly competing meanings made of Mao will lead us and what they tell us of twentieth-century world history.

1789–1920: THE STAGE IS SET, THE COLD WAR BEGINS

The first Western Maos were framed in a nineteenth-century “Grand Story” that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789: Progress, in the view of revolutionaries, came from destroying the ancient regime and leaping from feudalism of the Dark Ages to the sunlight of liberty, equality, and fraternity.