Marx and Engels had their utopian visions of a classless society and the withering away of the state, and so did Mao Zedong. But Mao’s utopianism was different, in that it was embedded in the Chinese tradition, eschewed economic problems, was motivated by a subjectivist philosophy, and called for voluntarist action.

Mao’s utopian dreams and their calamitous realization

The Hundred Flowers policy, which Mao announced in May 1956, was couched in traditional terms. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend” (baihua qifang, baijia zhengming) was the political slogan that remained valid for about a year until the policy was redressed and the Anti-Rightist campaign began. The second part of the slogan, as Lu Dingyi, director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party, explained, referred to the historical periods of the Spring and Autumn Annals (8th to 5th century BCE) and the Warring States (5th to 3rd century BCE), during which many schools of thought contended with each other for supremacy, thus creating a lively intellectual atmosphere. The lineage of the first part of the slogan, which pertained to the flourishing of literature and the arts, was not officially explained and has rarely been commented on in Western publications. It had been used earlier, in 1951, to boost theatrical reform and the development of different operatic styles. However, intellectuals with some knowledge of literary history must have surmised that the appeal to “let a hundred flowers bloom” derived from the novel Flowers in the Mirror in which Empress Wu in defiance of the Flowers Fairy ordered all flowers to bloom at the same time (see above, chapter 7). I do not know whether the origin of the slogan had any bearing on its meaning, but the wording of the phrase certainly has a voluntarist connotation.

Anglo-American sinologist Stuart Schram, an expert on Mao Zedong thought, detects a “utopian vision” (1991: 33) in the idea of a Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People’s Communes in 1958. Founded on the basis of agricultural cooperatives, the People’s Communes replaced the wage system by a free-supply system. The large common dining halls that were utopian in the fiction of More, Chernyshevsky (Vera’s dream in What Is to Be Done?), and Bellamy were actually realized in the Chinese countryside.