A serious entry for once or a rant of a different wangst

[alectoperdita]

The following is in response to this, thus here are my feelings about Mao and me.

Just yesterday, we were discussing different styles of Chinese cuisine in Chinese class. My professor made it a point to mention that Mao Tse Tung and many of today's Party authority are from the area of Sichuan cuisine, which is mainly hot and spicy. One of my classmates raised her hand and said, "Maybe there's something about hot and spicy food that makes for a good leader."

I was absolutely livid upon hearing her words. I probably shouldn't fault her too much. I did want to stand up and scream, "What on this fucking earth would make Mao Tse Tung a good leader?"

Fine, the bastard made the Nationalist join with them to fight off the Japanese in World War II. Then you look at it today, those Maoist bastards are still using the same trick. This is not to say the Japanese are completely without any fault in the debate, but I always get the sense the Party is milking the conflict for all its worth to divert the attention of the citizens from problems within the country (unequviable distribution of wealth, rural vs. urban conditions, the "peasant apartheid," human rights issues, etc.) by displacing it on some outside "alien" source.

It's most likely because I'm more American in most senses than I am Chinese, but I really can't contemplate how people can still adore Mao or any of the Party authority in this day and age. Then again, I live in a society of (mostly) free information and free speech. In China, you are more or less brainwashed from early childhood education on in the philosophies of Mao and the Party. As it is taught, "there is no one more important than the Party, not even family." Education is censored, books are censored, media is censored, and internet is censored. Perhaps I still have a lot more to understand about the modern incarnation of my cultural heritage, but I find it extremely difficult to view Mao Tse Tung or his "compatriots" in any semblance of positive light.

What I cannot forgive them for is the Cultural Revolution, the condemning of intellectuals, the sacking of historical antiquities, the blatant disrespect for other people's lives, the thousands and millions of people that starved as a result of the sorely misguided Great Leap Forward and land redistribution, and more. Corruption still runs rampant today. The Nationalists had their share of corruption in their day too. I cannot deny that as it is a fact. Would China really be for all the better if they had continued to rule? I'm no god or seer, so who am I to say? But I cling to that slight hope that it could have been for the better.

This is one subject I will always be very biased about. I'm probably not that coherent regarding the subject either...

And I fucking loathe simplified characters too. You (the Party) were destroying literacy pretty damn well on your own before you even introduced that.

Comments

[ketsugami.livejournal.com]

I always sort of wonder about that; people seem remarkably ambivalent about Mao as opposed to, say, Hitler. Modern historians put the death toll from the Great Leap Forward at 25+ million, easily double the Holocaust and probably more, and yet somehow Hitler is evil incarnate while Mao gets to be "great, but complex."

Even Stalin was better than Mao. Stalin's Five Year Plans killed 20+ million Russians, but at least he managed to bootstrap the Soviet Union into something resembling an industrial power. Mao's plan was a debacle that set China back decades.

[alecto-chan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing the statistics. I didn't know the gap was that large.

In Mao vs Hitler, it's mainly the fact Hilter was very consciously and methodically (and desperately towards the end) trying to eliminate an entire people. In Mao's case, the death toll could be argued as just the result of a plan gone very wrong but not of intentional malice. Yet sometimes I have to wonder. They sure as hell didn't know what they were doing.

The fact the Great Leap Forward came so soon after the Cultural Revolution didn't help either. People didn't even begin to conceive to recover from the CR and the Gang of Four hatches the next brillant plan with no real economic structure to support it.

[ketsugami.livejournal.com]

Opinions vary on the actual numbers, because obviously the Chinese government is uncooperative. But yes, nowadays most of what I see says 25-30 million. It didn't help that those were really awful years weather-wise, too...

As for not knowing what they were doing...who knows, but they modeled it on Stalin's Five Year Plans, which quite explicitly were designed to starve and kill off ethnic groups he thought were troublemakers. (Chechens, for example.)

[harinezumi.livejournal.com]

IIRC, the Cultural Revolution actually came after the Leap, and was a means for Mao to regain power after that disaster's political fallout and to eliminate his enemies within the Party. Once most of his enemies were gone and the country was started falling into anarchy, he had the Gang of Four take the fall for it and came out of the whole mess largely unscathed.

In that, he was definitely following Stalin's example. The latter started the Party purges of the mid-30's once his grip on power within the Party started slipping due to the death toll of the collectivization campaign and its famines, and shifted all the blame on the NKVD directors executing his orders.

As to comparisons between Mao and Hitler, there's the subtle matter that the former won a war, and his party is still in power, while the latter lost a war and his party was eliminated with extreme prejudice. Of course there was also the fact that the Holocaust was only one of Hitler's crimes. 22 million died in the war in the Soviet Union alone, the majority of them civilians, and if you add up the death toll on all sides in the European theater, it gets close to 50 million.

Yes, I'm a soviet history geek, why do you ask? ^^;

[alecto-chan.livejournal.com]

You're right. I suck at getting events in the right order...

Once most of his enemies were gone and the country was started falling into anarchy, he had the Gang of Four take the fall for it and came out of the whole mess largely unscathed.

No kidding, the Gang of Four are actually scorned/condemned and Mao is oh-so-worthy-of-worship-on-a-fucking-pedestal.

Heh, I'm more of an ancient/dynastic Chinese history girl myself.

[kasumi-blue.livejournal.com]

China's history and current state have always puzzled me. I study Japanese culture, so I know next to nothing about China except the fact that its current government is fucked up in too many ways to list.

I only remember tidbits of info about Mao from studying American history. But anyway, thanks for clearing up a lot for me. I have a friend who feels the exact same way as you do (she ranted on it to me too, lol).

It's not just China's government that worries me, though. It's all the greedy Americans who cash in on the country because of its cheap and plentiful labor and all this obsession over "China" nowadays. How can you invest so much in a country with a government like that? And the way the companies that do business in China (Microsoft for example) just comply with their censorship rules. I mean, not like they have a choice if they want to do business there, but... meh. I'm sickened in a way.

[alecto-chan.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's fine. I don't know all that much about Japanese history either. It's all about what we actually study.

It's not just China's government that worries me, though. It's all the greedy Americans who cash in on the country because of its cheap and plentiful labor and all this obsession over "China" nowadays.

You can say the same thing about any country in the world. I can bet a good number of people are nervous over the Hamas victory in Palestine. While our society values human rights and freedom, we are also a capitalist society. That is often where our values as a nation comes to blow. It's either overthrow them to put a friendly regime in power or support the current one because it's the lesser of two evil in terms of economics. BTW, Google is the latest to join Microsoft's company in China.