Please, go read these two posts by one of my very favorite writers right now. She knows whereof she speaks.

I remember reading how the Georgian peasants were convinced Stalin was unaware of their plight as they starved to death in the 1930s, and if there was only some way they could alert him…. But alas, millions and millions died. And Mao knew, and Stalin knew. No, I don’t believe Mao wanted the peasants to die and there’s evidence he was horrified when he learned what the peasants were eating to survive. (Stalin, on the other hand, ever the “man of steel,” showed no such concerns.) But Mao was too wrapped up in his own ideology to admit his Great Leap Forward was anything but. And the result is one of the tragedies so immense, so incomprehensible, like the Holocaust, that the more we read about it the less we can comprehend it. Xujin’s wonderful posts help us comprehend it, but they don’t make it any less of a crime against humanity.

Thirty percent bad – Deng was awfully kind.

Rick Ruffin, satirist

This may well take the cake. I mean, a skyscraper cake with a whole jar of maraschino cherries on top and enough Cool Whip to swim in. What can one say?

History has dealt China a dirty hand. It had famine, it had Mongol invasions, it had British colonization and the Opium War. It had Japanese invasion and the Nanjing Massacre. It is no stranger to atrocity. And it never had enough land. Not good land, anyhow. Fate dealt it the Gobi Desert.

In spite of these limitations, Mao Tse-tung managed to consolidate the country, to kick out the European and Japanese colonizers, to instill a one child policy (which India has yet to do), and to embark on the Great Leap Forward. And what a leap it has been.

Yikes. Could someone in this modern world actually look with a straight face at the Great Leap Backwards and praise it? Could someone actually say, without irony, that Mao’s leadership was so positive it helped balance the “dirty hand” China had been dealt? Could they? (I guess it becomes slightly more believable when the same person claims it was Mao who implemented China’s one-child policy, which began in 1979. I was always of the impression Mao was quite dead by then.)

This is via the Marmot, who caustically remarks,

Classic, Rick. Just classic. As my good friend Hamel asks in the KT comment section, this is satire, right?

Would that it were so.

I have found Howard W. French consistently disappointing when it comes to reporting China for the New York Times. In Wikipedia terms, he’s not very NPOV. He paints the Mao Zedong Wiki article as a reflection of government censorship, when really there’s alot more going on here he chooses to ignore. He says that on the Chinese version of Wikipedia, “Mao Zedong’s reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.” He goes on to describe how a debate on the Talk page includes Manchurian Tiger saying: “”If anyone can prove that Mao’s political movements didn’t kill so many people, I’m willing to delete the wording that ‘millions of people were killed.’” Rather than contribute to encyclopedias, those who wish to pay tribute to Mao, he added, should “go to his mausoleum.”"

I’m sorry, is that or is that not a mention of a death toll?

(more…)

Striving to balance out the barrage of anti-Mao posts marking the Great Helmsman’s birthday, ESWN translates an article that explores why so many in China look back to Mao with nostalgic admiration.

Of course, I can easily understand this phenomenon. Mao did a decent job of keeping corruption in check (not too difficult when you have totalitarian powers), gave the peasants free medical care and at least conveyed an appearance of caring for the underprivileged.

Someone said that in the Mao era, people lived in relative poverty. However, the social order and security situations were extraordinarily good. Everything was simple and people lived in a relaxed fashion. Nowadays, things are more complicated. People feel bored and oppressed. A counter-argument was that since everybody was so poor back then, there was nothing to steal or rob. “Sameness” was obviously a characteristic of that era, but the severe inequality of wealth today has affected social stability in China.

Actually, no matter how people argue about the pros and cons of the person Mao Zedong or the era of Mao Zedong, the fact is that Mao has returned to Chinese society, whether it is on the altar of a peasant home or by the city taxi driver’s seat. Mao images proliferate among the people. Yet, there is a difference. In Mao’s era, we treated him as the Absolute God. Later on, we determined that he was a person who could make mistakes. Today people are looking at Mao as a god who could provide peace and security.

Needless to say, I find this nostalgia rather misplaced. For all of his pretentious talk glorifying the peasantry, we need to remember that one of the first things Mao did was move into Zhongnanhai, where he proceeded to enrich himself and his henchmen. (Funny, how these Marxists so enamored of notions of being at one with the lower classes always seem to move into the palaces of the corrupt imperialist oppressors they replaced, quickly taking on all the trappings of the old despised enemies.) And of course, we all know how the farmers and peasants benefitted from the Great Leap Forward.

I won’t go on about Mao’s sins, which we all know too well. Creating a sense of peace and security is great, but this was matched and overwhelmed by the massive and needless suffering Mao thrust on his helpless people. If anyone in China today truly looks to mass-murdering Mao as “a god who could provide peace and security,” they do so either from ignorance, stupidity or blindness.

This fascinating book review by the WaPo’s John Pomfret looks at the banned-in-China biography, Zhou Enlai’s Later Years, by Gao Wenqian, a former CCP researcher for more than a decade prior to emigrating to the US.

He depicts Zhou as a tragic backroom schemer, a puppet of his master Mao, and a man who was so imbued with a Confucian sense of duty that he did almost everything Mao asked him — including signing the arrest orders for his own brother and a goddaughter.

The book challenges the view that Zhou tried his best to save hundreds of purged officials during the Cultural Revolution, portraying him instead as an eager participant in the ultra-leftist campaign during which hundreds of thousands of people were dispatched to the Chinese gulag.

“Party documents show that Zhou only protected people after first checking with Mao, his wife Jiang Qing, Mao’s no. 2 Lin Biao and others,” Gao wrote. “If Zhou sensed any opposition to protecting someone, he would drop his protection.”

Even though Zhou died 27 years ago, criticism of him is taboo in China because, officially, he never made a mistake. “In a society troubled with corruption and facing a moral vacuum, Zhou is the last good Communist,” said Gao. “This book takes him off his pedestal. I criticized what should never be criticized.”

I have to admit, for years even I got sucked into the myth of Zhou as the pearl among the swine, and I’m sad to see the destruction of the romanticized image of the kind-hearted friend of the people who subtly tried to influence Mao to be a bit less awful.

But reading about China’s history over the past year, I knew this was sugar coating; Zhou was an enthusiastic supporter of the Great Leap Forward, and while he may have saved the Forbidden City from destruction during the Cultural Revolution (another myth?), he was not divorced from all that was going on around him.

According to Pomfret, who obviously gives the book a good deal of credence, Gao shatters one myth after another:

Gao also challenges a long-held belief that it was Zhou who brought Deng back into the Chinese leadership in 1973. Deng later rose to become China’s paramount leader in the late 1970s, and held onto his position until his death in 1997. Deng’s official biographers have used what they have called his special relationship with Zhou as a way to bolster his prestige.

Gao wrote that Mao actually brought Deng back from official oblivion as part of a plot to ensure that Zhou did not become too powerful. Gao cites as proof Deng’s participation in several sessions organized by Mao to criticize Zhou.

“I wanted to write a book about a personality that had been distorted by the Communist system,” Gao said. “Zhou was such a man.”

I remember watching film clips of all the weeping Chinese people as Zhou Enlai’s funeral cortege passed by. It was as though a part of them had died with Zhou. They believed so deeply in him, that he was saintly, that he loved them and fought for them. Was it just one more of history’s cruel jokes? How sad.

Unfortunately, the book is currently available only in Chinese. I’ll be the first buyer when the English version is out.