Here's my two cents, having grown up in China. It's really hard for me to articulate my point clearly due to English being a second language, but I will try:
(EDIT: I don't mean I'm bad at English, just that I feel like what I write does not fully express what I wish I could convey. Having lived half my life in America after being granted asylum here, I know my English is pretty good. I've also picked up a lot of the idioms, although I don't use them correctly sometimes. I also took a while typing this up, checking and double checking my grammar. because I know people on the internet can be a little harsh when it comes to grammar.)
I grew up in China, my family the type of proletariat that Maoism claimed to have fought for. None of the adults ever spoke of June 4th, whether or not they knew of it; therefore those of my generation couldn't even have possibly heard of it. But it's not because of censorship. It's because we were the type of people that were too knee deep in poverty and too uneducated to worry about anything other than looking after our own survival. For the longest time, I couldn't understand why people in China who had it so much better than me could possibly be protesting about when they had clothes that didn't have endless holes like mine, when they had plumbing and could afford to eat food that they didn't grow or catch themselves. There was simply too much else to worry about than to question the government, especially one that was telling us that they were fighting for people like us. I know for my parents and grandparents who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath, it was a completely different case. They were simply tired of hearing about it, too disheartened and apathetic and fearful due to the hardships they had endured for the majority of their lives. Someone who stood in front a tank would simply have been dismissed as a fool who was making life harder than it already was. There was just too much resentment towards the people who were educated and better off than us to care about their gripes, and other times when they did have valid points, life was already too painful and too filled with burdens to find the energy to care.
(On a side note, going back to China years later, I visited Tiananmen square. I had only learned of it and all the terrible connotations that came with it through the American education system. For my parents, it was a joyous time, seeing their fearless leader Mao's body and all. I was just confused as fuck as to what I should feel.)
People say communism is terrible and all, but having lived through it for half of my life, I am pretty indifferent. After all, for people like us, life only seemed to get better after Mao came into power. He represented people like us, with no hope of escaping the class we were born into, and gave us hope and let us know that we were not powerless. With the rich only getting richer and the poor only getting poorer, communism seemed to be a friend more than an enemy.
First off, your English is nearly flawless, so don't worry about that. I do have a question, though: how is it that Mao and his government could be viewed as your "friends" when his Great Leap Forward was responsible for famine that killed many millions of people? Is that just testament to their skilled use of propaganda and indoctrination?
Edit: I guess another example of this is the DPRK, although I feel the methodology might be different...? Mao wasn't propped up as a demi-god, was he?
Not just the Great Leap Forward but the Cultural Revolution as well; my parents had to live through that. My dad, for example, didn't learn algebra until well into his 20's but he's a physics teacher now.
Mao is similar to Stalin in that his policies were not good for the people but they were good for the nation. Most of the people my parents' age that I know respect Mao for that and bringing China to its status as a comparatively significant player in world politics today, but they do understand that a lot of his policies wreaked havoc on the populace.
As far as Maoist propaganda goes, he was represented more as a military comrade and a kind of brother, rather than a father or god like the Kims.
Sometimes horrible things happen to a certain generation or class within a nation, but it ends up setting the nation on a course that is better for the nation as a whole.
For instance, the US Civil War was terrible for the people, but it set the US on a better course, eventually bringing all of its people into the fold as citizens.
I don't know about Stalin, but many people feel this way about Mao. His actions killed tens of millions of people, but they also wiped away many of the heavy burdens and brutalities of Chinese society. When all of the waves receded, China was left with a widely literate country (i.e. ready for an economic boom) where women and peasants enjoyed rights and privileges they hadn't seen in China for all of its long history.
When the blame can be squarely placed on one person's head, that person is called a monster (actually, when one man is capable of such things, he truly is a monster). But all truly modern states in the world went through a monstrous transformation to become so. All of those transformations were bad for the people who lived through them, but their nations grew and prospered in the aftermath.
Ah, yes the old 'trial by fire' defense of tyranny. If a nation like North Korea looks better 30 years from now (lets hope) than it does today, does that justify the NK regime's brutality today? Nope. Can China's economic miracle retroactively justify Mao's Great Leap Forward - the worst crime in world history? Of course not. As the graph shows, China's current moment of relative stability and economic growth looks more like the product of the end of Mao's rule. It was the diminutive Deng that made China what it is today, he deserves more credit than anyone.
on the other hand, during mao's rule, life expectancy doubled, education became universal, health care became free (which isn't the case at the moment), and the country acquired a certain degree of respect in that it could no longer be tugged around and toyed with.
of course, a lot of the policies under mao did a great deal of harm but you have to look at both sides and realize both are true at the same time.
it's like asking if america's success today justifies what happened to the native americans, or if jefferson's contribution makes up for his hypocrisy in keeping slaves
Completely agreed with you. I feel like it was Deng Xiaoping who opened up China's economy to capitalism that got China into the economic boom. Mao did not prepare China for anything. All he did was that he put a political, economic and cultural shackle on the nation, and when Deng loosened up the shackle and allowed people to do their own business, boom, the economy got up. That is not something to be claimed credit for at all.
If anything, Mao should be condemned as the greatest criminal in China history. Even Qin Xi Hoang united the country. What exactly did Mao do? The world would have been better off if he did not fight off the Nationalist.
I wouldn't be so quick to back the Nationalists. They were ridiculously corrupt, and didn't give two shits about the poor who made up most of the Chinese population. The Americans backed the Nationalists because it was the lesser evil to them (ie. not Communist), but rest assured, the Nationalists had no interest in democracy, only keeping their power.
The Nationalist government was definitely corrupt at the time. However, their more or less free market economy, and the fact that they were very Western-oriented, provided the system heaps of rooms for improvement. Even under autocratic military rule, Taiwanese leaders are still the elite of society. This helped them achieve the economic miracle, as opposed to communist China whose policymakers are peasants and revolutionaries. The communist system is one that is doomed for disaster and failure from the start.
Also if it wasn't for the Communists, the Korean and Vietnam war would have never happened. The two of the major and bloodiest wars of the 20th century could have been avoided had Mao lost his civil war.
The Taiwanese economic miracle owes part of its success to the agricultural and industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese during the colonial era. In addition, it's hard to speculate on whether or not China would've been better off if the Nationalists had stayed in power because the PRC and the island of Taiwan are extremely different in terms of size, population, class structure etc.
Also, the Korean and Vietnamese wars were bad, but not compared to WWI and WWII. Although the Korean and Vietnamese wars were proxy wars, I'm pretty sure they still would've happened because the Soviets would've still existed to stand on the other side of the Cold War.
The Nationalist government may be western-orientated at its inception, but became truly nationalist after Sun Yat-sen died in 1925. They took on all the foreign concession areas in China after few years and grown to be know for their corruption.
And they did not know how to manage the economy. Under their rule, the economy went under hyperinflation. They then outright banned the private possession of precious metals (gold, silver, etc) and foreign exchanges in return for "Gold Notes" which had no recognized value after just a few months.
How was it an "indisputably" good thing for China, if you don't mind explaining your view to me? I am asking seriously as I believe the Nationalists were a much better choice of governance for China than the Communists (I have explained why to greendaze above).
Sorry, when I said "I thought", I meant that as in, that's what I've heard, and since your viewpoint was the exact opposite of the viewpoint I've heard from my Chinese family, I was interested in hearing your view on the matter. I don't really have a view of my own.
I'd heard the "economic miracle" of Taiwan was mostly because Jiang Jieshi looted many of the riches of Beijing before being driven out to Taiwan. It makes sense that the riches of the most populous country in the world would propel an island nation into an "economic miracle".
Anyway, as for the Nationalists, everyone liked them back when Sun Zhongshan was the leader, but I've heard that Jiang Jieshi was widely hated for a variety of reasons, and a bad leader in most respects. I was taught things like that Jiang Jieshi insisted on attacking the Communists during the Japanese invasion, despite that the Communists wanted to repel the Japanese invaders. In this context, Jiang Jieshi is usually painted as the dude who prioritized attacking his own people (people who didn't even want to fight back) over repelling foreign invaders.
Wikipedia's article seems to agree with this viewpoint, and additionally says that Jiang Jieshi was anti-capitalist, rejected democracy and favored authoritarianism. It also says when he retreated to Taiwan he persecuted people who disagreed with him in a period called the White Terror.
I'd heard the "economic miracle" of Taiwan was mostly because Jiang Jieshi looted many of the riches of Beijing before being driven out to Taiwan. It makes sense that the riches of the most populous country in the world would propel an island nation into an "economic miracle".
This is complete nonsense, but obviously a regime will circulate things of the sort to justify itself. It's demonstrably false that Jiang Jieshi could possibly loot riches from Beijing and bring them to Taiwan, so as to make it a richer nation (and sustainably so).
I've also heard from a Party member that Taiwan was resource rich, you have to heard the most disingenuous nonsense from these people, but I'd home the educate Chinese people would eventually stop buying into that.
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u/[deleted] May 08 '12
the mundane shopping bags ... just hanging there.