revolutions, whatever their intentions, turned into peasant wars. Peasant wars led
in turn to the creation of new emperors. ¹

The argument that Mao was an emperor is, of course, a rhetorical one in part.
Intended to be disturbing, it nevertheless minimizes awareness of the conscious
popular support that Mao's policies might have enjoyed among people other than
peasants. But the real curiosity of this debate about the excessive centralization
of power in China lies in the fact that it has been going on for such a long time.
When a lecturer at the Marxist-Leninist Institute of the Chinese Social Sciences
Academy complained in 1980 about China's "pyramidal" leadership structure
and the ease with which the top of the pyramid could be appropriated and
occupied for long periods by the same small group of people, ² he followed the
footprints of the formidable seventeenth-century philosopher Huang Zongxi
( 1610- 1695). Huang was unfamiliar with the idea of a pyramid; but his denunci-
ation of the emperors' conversion of their empire into an "enormous private
estate" that they could pass on to their descendants made the same point. Huang
Zongxi had in turn been preceded by Deng Mu ( 1247- 1306), who had criticized
Chinese rulers for treating the world as if it belonged to one "fellow." Before
Deng Mu there had been thinkers like Bao Jingyan ( fourth century A.D.) for
whom preimperial antiquity was good precisely because it lacked coercive
princes.

The controversy over the nature of political leadership in China thus defies
the adage that history proceeds in part by changing the subject, that one day
people suddenly realize that the disputes that previously preoccupied and divided
them no longer matter so much. The question of the selfishness of the exercise of
power at the top of their political system has haunted some Chinese intellectuals
for centuries. In our own century, the explanations for what many Chinese
clearly regard as a pathological political situation have not changed very much.
The last great debate about the survival of despotism in modern China, before
the 1980s, occurred forty years ago in the last disillusioning years of Guomin-
dang rule. The vastness of the country's illiterate peasantry received much atten-
tion in this debate as well. Apart from the peasants, one writer argued in an
important Shanghai periodical in 1947 that democracy was elusive because of
China's great size. Western democracy had originated and been renewed in small
polities, like the Greek city-states or the thirteen American colonies, where high
levels of communal political participation had been possible. Because of China's
much bigger scale, poor communications, and low ideological tolerance for the
notion of permanent decentralization or disunity, however, the only successful
early exercise of a unifying political power, as demonstrated by the First Em-
peror of the Qin dynasty in 221 B.C., had inevitably rested upon violence and
autocracy. The First Emperor's triumphant use of brute force, rather than softer
options like negotiated alliances with his competitors, had created a precedent
for the construction of Chinese governments from which few succeeding Chi-
nese rulers had been able to break free. ³ This "size" argument remains a staple

-6-