Gao Mobo (; also Mobo C. F. Gao; born 1952 as Gao Changfan 高常范, Gao village, Jiangxi, China) is a Chinese-Australian professor of Chinese studies.
Biography Mobo Gao was born as the son of peasants in a village in Jiangxi that had no electricity at the time. As a child, he experienced a brief period of famine that followed the Great Leap Forward.
Gao was a barefoot doctor during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1973 Gao left the village to study English at the University of Xiamen in Fujian. In 1977 he went to Britain to study at the University of Wales and the University of Westminster in London. He graduated from the University of Essex at Colchester with a master's and doctoral degree. He specialised in Chinese language and culture and has been visiting fellow at Oxford University in Britain and at Harvard University in the United States and Visiting Professor at Qinghua University in Beijing.
In 1990, Gao emigrated to Australia and became a lecturer at the Griffith University in Brisbane. Later he became a senior lecturer at the Tasmania University. In 2008, Gao was appointed director of the Confucius Institute and professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Adelaide.
Gao frequently returns to his native village in China to visit his brother who still lives there.
On Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution Gao is well known for his argument that the perception of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution are at times severely distorted by intellectuals and in the media of both China and the West. In The Battle for China's Past and Constructing China Gao sets out to engage with the way Mao and his policies have long been depicted in both the West and in contemporary China. The Cultural Revolution is broadly considered to represent a period of widespread violation of human rights and an unmitigated disaster. Gao argues against extreme negative depictions of Mao Zedong and China. He says that most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefitted from Mao's policies of a comprehensive welfare system and basic healthcare and education provisions. Gao contends that these positive features of the Maoist period are being reversed in a contemporary hyper-capitalist China. Gao's project is to challenge and critically analyze mainstream interpretations of Maoist China and the Cultural Revolution. Gao recognizes that there is a gap between official and unofficial interpretations in the historiographical field. He observes a similar pattern in the e-media. The persistence of a large discrepancy between conflicting images and perceptions of China is Gao's subject of interpretation and understanding.
Gao writes that negative appraisals of the Mao era are often seriously misleading, he lists four ways: "First, it deprives a probable majority of the Chinese the right to speak up. Second, it hides the ugly fact that there are millions of people who are actually worse off since the post-Mao reform years. Third, it denies the enormous achievements made during the Mao era that paved the way for later development. Finally, it is misleading and it distracts from and precludes imaginings of alternative models of development and other possible forms of human organization."
Gao on Mao Zedong
Reacting to Mao: The Unknown Story Part of Gao's scholarship is in response to the Chang and Halliday biography of Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story. Gao considers this work to represent an "intellectual scandal" for its "biased and sloppy methodology." Chang and Halliday's Mao biography is laden with anti-Mao ideological agendas meant to conform with politically correct interpretations of Mao and Maoism in the West which essentially categorize Mao with leaders such as Hitler. In his research and argumentation Gao has sought to portray Mao and what Mao represents more accurately.
Gao contrasts The Unknown Story with a known story, namely the one that the Chinese people made a social and political revolution led by the CCP, the most important leader of which was Mao. In Gao's view this revolution had objectively measured benefits for China's population. Due to this revolution the life expectancy of the majority of the Chinese rose from 35 in 1949 to 63 by 1975 in a space of less than 30 years. The revolution brought unity and stability to a country that had been racked by civil wars and foreign invasions. This revolution laid the groundwork for China to become a power on equal footing with other great world powers. Moreover, this revolution instituted land reform, promoted equality of the sexes, realized widespread literacy, and finally transformed Chinese society.
Gao sets out to demonstrate that the known story of Mao who led a revolution that transformed human life on such a dramatic scale cannot be dismissed by misleading and purposefully sensational claims. For Gao, It is simply illogical to argue that social change on such a scale was the result of a few personal power struggles and court conspiracies as Chang and Halliday contend.
Mao and the Great Leap Forward Gao in his scholarship presents documentary evidence to show that Mao was in fact concerned with the shortcomings of the Great Leap Forward policy and took steps to alleviate the pressure this policy placed on rural farmers and others at the grassroots of China's rural society. Surprisingly, there is evidence to show Mao was in some respects more 'right wing' than some of his party colleagues in his attitude toward this economic and industrialization project.
On April 19, 1959, Mao wrote a letter to address six crucial issues about agricultural output and the truthful reporting of all production outputs. All the letters stressed moderation and called for cooling down Great Leap Forward hype. Mao even referred to himself as a 'conservative.' Mao took an unprecedented step by addressing it to six levels of government officials from provincial leaders down to production team leaders in villages. Gao suggests Mao was likely afraid that party bureaucrats at high levels might not pass on the instructions to the level of small rural villages . In these letters he stressed the importance of the responsibility system. Mao also pointed out that for the next ten years at least caution had to be taken so as not to boast about grain production. In Gao's telling of this history, Mao recognized that boastful unrealistic rhetoric could be dangerous.
in early April 1959, Mao at a Shanghai Politburo meeting criticized "zealots" at the Central Planning Commission and praised Chen Yun for his rational and cautious approach. Mao wanted the steel and iron production quotas to go down. In early 1958 Mao had warned the CCP leaders not to report false achievements. According to evidence published on September 7, 2007, in the Luoyang Daily it was Mao who during the Zhengzhou conference in March 1959 decided to temper hype surrounding the Great Leap Forward. This was starkly against the prevailing party trend at that time.
Gao argues that Mao should bear primary responsibility for the Great Leap famine; but other Chinese leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi were also responsible. Liu in at least one occasion in 1958 talked about forming a commune as big as a country and about revolutionizing families by having husbands and wives living in different dormitories. On September 19, 1958, when told by a local leader in Jiangsu that one mu of land could produce ten thousand jin of rice, Liu wondered whether more was possible and suggested ploughing the soil deeper to produce more. In his memoirs, Wu Lengxi, then editor of the People's Daily remembered that Mao again and again urged him to be cautious in reporting economic figures so as not to mislead the party and the public. Wu confesses that he made mistakes by not having really understood what Mao meant and what the consequences were. Wu says that at the height of Great Leap mania Mao was in the minority urging caution whereas the majority included Liu Shaoqi.
In turn, Gao is highly critical of the historical accounts of the Great Leap Forward written by Yang Jisheng and Frank Dikotter. Mobo charges these historians with essentially cherry-picking data and in some instances fabricating data all-together to paint the Great Leap Forward, the famine and Mao in the worst possible light.
Deaths during the Great Famine There is controversy surrounding the death toll of the great famine. Scholars have made different estimates ranging from 10 to 30 million deaths. These are estimates for a couple of reasons. One is that there was no reliable demographic census to make an accurate figure. Second, it is difficult to know which casualties were deaths by hunger or premature deaths due to hardship. Third, some estimates try to assess the 'missing' population on the basis of normal death and birth rates and therefore may have included millions of those who might not have been born. Fourth, currently natural disasters such as floods and droughts are not considered a factor for the famine during the period. Eyewitness accounts testify that in 1960 there was the worst flood disaster in a century. In many village case studies no death toll due to the famine is reported.
Gao makes a further argument about the nature of responsibility for the Great Leap Forward induced famine. Gao argues that Mao should certainly be held primarily responsible. Mao initiated the movement by criticizing other more cautious leaders before the Great Leap Forward started. Mao was also mainly responsible for the quick and drastic collectivization around the winter of 1957 and spring of 1958. The sudden change of organization from co-ops to big collective communes meant that no adequate supervision and monitoring system could be implemented to manage grain production. This failure undoubtedly had severe consequences in agricultural output. There was a food shortage everywhere in China and horrible famine in some areas. However, Gao argues that a policy disaster is not the same as deliberately planned mass murder.
In Gao's interpretation, the Great Leap Forward represents a disastrously failed trial of a different development model which prioritized local enterprise and decentralized industry. In this trial they attempted to create a work force that could be both industrial and agricultural, and a community that was not solely urban or rural. Some Great Leap Forward ideas were followed up during the late 1960s and 1970s when township and village enterprises that had started during the Great Leap Forward were encouraged to consolidate and develop further. China still currently faces difficulties over how to integrate the rural population into the broader economy. For Gao: "the Great Leap Forward idea was not some kind of madness, but theoretically guided rationality."
The economy in the Mao era That hundreds of millions of people were positively affected in the Mao era economy is an important part of Gao's scholarly argument. The increase of life expectancy in the era of Mao alone has given an estimated 35 billion extra collective years of life to the Chinese population. Though living standards remained low, and were at subsistence level for many, excluding the Great Leap Forward years of 1959 and the Cultural Revolution years of 1967 and 1968, Chinese economic growth was not only steady but also outpaced most developing countries. By 1976 China had laid down a sound industrial and agricultural base for an economic boom. These facts speak to the accepted consensus by both Chinese and Western scholars doing macro studies, as well as micro case studies, of Maoist political economy.