Thursday, August 14, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Olympic Focus - Chinese World Domination?
I found this article very interesting. For those of you who are still reading the blog from Comparative Gov't last spring, I think it will make some real sense. Will China go the way of Nazi Germany? Will the aging of China force it to turn it's attention inward? One thing is for sure,the opening ceremony was dazzling and that is exactly the way China wanted it to be. Those ancient drums sent a chilling, and I dare say, militaristic message to the West. So serious was this event, that even Costas was saying they had to tell the drummers to smile more. Read this article below from the British Newspaper The Telegraph.
By Charles Moore
Until yesterday, the most famous athletic moment in Chinese history was a solitary swim. On July 16, 1966, Mao Zedong, then aged 73, was filmed crossing the Yangtze River. He appeared, wrote his doctor, to be swimming "faster and further than an Olympic champion", but this was an illusion produced by the swift flow of the Yangtze: "Mao had only floated on his back, his giant belly buoying him like a balloon, carried down the river by the current."
China wowed the world with its opening ceremony
Mao chose to put on this show for political reasons. Having created the Cultural Revolution, he had stood back from the intended chaos to see what would happen. Now he was reasserting power: "Mao's swim in the Yangtze meant that his self-enforced exile was over. He was returning to the political stage. Two days later … he returned to Beijing. Henceforth, the Cultural Revolution would follow his direction."
Beijing Olympics opens with dazzling ceremony
Read more by Charles Moore
Looking at yesterday's astonishing scroll of Chinese glories rolled out on the floor of the Bird's Nest stadium, one sees, once again, a political purpose. "This is a historical chance for us," says the Chinese sports minister, "…we are burdened with a glorious mission." One World, One Dream, says the slogan. Whose world? What dream?
We all know that China has only become the great power it is today because it has abandoned Mao's economics. Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as leader after Mao's death, broke with the past and opened China up to markets. By 2020, it will be the second economic power in the world; by 2050, perhaps, the first.
advertisementBecause the economic change is so great, we pay less attention to the political continuity. Of today's top nations, China is the only one that has not had to abandon its totalitarian past in order to be accepted. The Communist Party remains in control. A vast portrait of Chairman Mao still looks down on Tiananmen Square. The greatest political murderer of all time is still canonised.
This is not to say that Beijing any longer believes that the world should be ruled by dogmatic Marxism-Leninism. But China's current leaders are in the line of Mao, and they are achieving what he attempted and failed - an illiberal form of rule that, in a sense, works.
In The End of History, the book which marked the high tide of Western post-Cold War cultural confidence, Francis Fukuyama noted that China, by killing students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, had "become just another Asian authoritarian state", and "lacked internal legitimacy". Because it had suppressed freedom, he suggested, it would suffer. That judgment was made in 1992. It does not, unfortunately, feel right this morning. In yesterday's ceremony, huge, illuminated footprints in the sky walked between Tiananmen Square and the stadium, while thousands cheered. Modern technology seemed to give physical form to the country's traditional "mandate of heaven".
China has prospered, while those that tried freedom - most notably Russia - have suffered. Even as they fret about human rights protests, the Chinese leaders must also congratulate themselves. "We are still here," they can say privately, "richer and more powerful than ever. Repression works."
But they cannot say it directly in public, and that is where the Olympics come in. Spectacular sporting displays are the classic means of projecting totalitarian power without talking about it.
If it all goes according to plan, those returning from the next fortnight will say how wonderful it was. Sportsmen will extrapolate from the comforts and respect offered to them, and declare that China is a splendid place. "It's like you're in a Marriott," reported one American competitor from the Olympic village, as if that were a form of paradise.
I have in front of me a dispatch from The Spectator in August 1936: "Competent foreign residents here [Berlin] say that the German Government and people really do desire peace … and one has seen several things in this festival which suggest that Germany wants to impress her Olympic visitors not only with her efficiency … but also with her desire to be friendly." "Harmony", proclaimed the dominant Chinese character formed by the heaving choreography last night.
I am not predicting that, in three years' time, the West will be at war with China. But I am pointing out the similarity of totalitarian political purpose. Youth! The future! Unity! National greatness! Cheering crowds, awed foreigners, dissent crushed! The Olympics offer all these things.
You might retort that China may be a global power, but it has become so because it has westernised, and will really succeed only when it has westernised some more, and become a democracy. We in the West have not fallen for a Chinese ideology or way of life. None of us has Chinese heroes. Few of us dress Chinese or look to Chinese entertainments. They are coming our way.
Yet suppose that, rather than westernising, China simply understands more coldly than we how the world now works. It has noticed that Westerners have become consumers and borrowers, and so it has become a producer and a saver. It has noticed that we live in a dream-world of our own films and computer games and celebrities, and it is happy to profit by furnishing the technological materials for these dreams. We play: it works: it wins.
Besides, the Olympic opening ceremony shows that China is now ready to glorify its own culture (not mentioning Communism, of course). "We Chinese invented writing and paper and printing and gunpowder and the compass," it in effect told us yesterday, "and we spread our power by land and sea. We are exquisite, resourceful and unique." "We are a high and ancient civilisation, growing in strength" was the message, conveyed with breath-taking elan. I bet the London Olympics in four years' time will not dare tell Britain's equivalent heroic stories.
What we are witnessing is impressive, but also frightening. If China really does become top nation, nothing in our history will have prepared us for such a thing. And nothing in its history suggests that freedom will be on its agenda.
The late, great Sir Denis Thatcher, bored at a formal dinner for the President of Finland, turned abruptly to the President's wife and asked: "What do the Finns think of the Chinese?" She explained that Finland was closer to Russia: the Finns did not think much about the Chinese. "Well, it's about time they did," said Denis, "because there are more than a billion of the buggers."
Indeed; but this brings me to the one hope we have when confronted with dictatorships - that they are undone by their own cruelties. A great evil of Chinese Communism has been its One Child Policy, assaulting family life and creating a nation of only children with 117 boys for every 100 girls (it's 105 to 100 in free countries). The good news for the rest of us is that, just as it is poised to overtake America, China will therefore find itself burdened with an aged population - roughly 300 million pensioners by 2035. If the East is grey, rather than red, it may thus deny itself the gold medal of world domination.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The Legacy Of Mao
Aug. 3, 2008
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(CBS) They're rehearsing the fireworks in preparation for the opening of the Beijing Olympics which debut later this week. But behind the scenes, complaints continue about the blocking of some Internet sites, and journalists are grappling with government restrictions - which would probably suit the late Mao Tse Tung just fine. Martha Teichner looks back on the legacy of Mao.
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Call the Olympics China's coming-out party: The celebration of how far it's come and how fast, the Beijing skyline proof that Mao Tse Tung's determination to make China a superpower is coming to pass.
Thirty-two years after his death, if Mao miraculously woke up tomorrow, would he even recognize the capitalist colossus China has become? Would he recognize himself in the embalmed icon, the distant founding father figure, the Chinese Communist Party has cast him as in the new China?
It seems rewriting history where Mao is concerned is nothing new. He did it himself, big time.
You may have always believed the official line that Mao was the man who transformed China, a heroic leader, even if he did some bad things.
The real Mao, we discover, did horrendous things.
"Mao was responsible for well over 70 million deaths of the Chinese in peacetime, and he was as evil as Hitler or Stalin," said Jung Chang, "and he did as much damage to mankind as Hitler and Stalin."
She and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, are the authors of "Mao, The Unknown Story" (Random House), based on ten years of research.
"In China we interviewed about 150 of Mao's inner circle, in Mao's family, relatives, friends," Chang said, "and many people talked for the first time."
Even Chang and Halliday were shocked by what they learned:
"I did not realize how much of the misery and hardship he caused was done knowingly and so ruthlessly in terms of his own personal interests," Halliday said.
You've heard of the Long March? It changed history. In order to win their war against the ruling Nationalists, the Chinese Communists needed help from the Soviets. So between 1934 and '35, 80,000 Communist soldiers and civilians walked 6,000 miles across China, so they would be in a secure position to receive arms and supplies. Mao, supposedly the hero of the Long March, slogging along with everybody else, in fact, was carried.
"He even designed his own transport, a bamboo litter," Halliday said. "He said in his later life, 'I was lying in the litter. I had nothing to do. What did I do? I read, I read a lot.'"
Mao knew his political future depended on getting to the Russians first, so on the way he schemed to outmaneuver his party rivals, even though that meant the calculated sacrifice of the lives of thousands of Red Army soldiers.
"Whoever linked up with Moscow, had the communications with Moscow, and [was] recognized by Moscow as the party leader, would be the boss," Chang said.
"So at the end of the Long March, Mao is number one?" Teichner asked.
"Yes," Chang said.
"Well, Stalin I think spotted Mao as probably the guy in the Chinese Communist Party most like himself," Halliday said. "And of course Mao also like Stalin had long range vision. I mean, Mao could think strategically. He was very, very smart."
Ultimately he outsmarted Nationalist leader and U.S. ally, Chiang Kai Shek. Defeated, the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa, now called Taiwan, where they remain to this day.
On October 1, 1949, Mao declared himself leader of the renamed People's Republic of China. The crowd chanted "Long live Chairman Mao," unaware of the horrific suffering his ambition would bring, beginning with a campaign which, he claimed, was to modernize China. He named it "The Great Leap Forward."
"Thirty-eight million people died of starvation and overwork," Chang said. "And Mao didn't want to stop. He said for all his projects to take off, half of China may well have to die."
Imagine: half the population. And for what? In fact, it was to pay for the technology to build an atomic bomb. China eventually exploded one in 1964.
China's people starved, because Mao was selling what food they produced to Russia and Eastern Europe. Glowing reports to the outside world about agricultural and industrial production were propaganda.
"And when he was shown the report of, you know, food shortages, of peasants starving, Mao said, 'Educate the peasant to eat less,'" Chang said. "He even said, 'Death have benefit, they can fertilize the land.'"
It was China's president, Liu Shao-Chi, who finally stood up to Mao and rallied top Communist Party officials to put an end to the famine. But Liu and the others soon paid: The infamous Cultural Revolution was Mao's revenge.
Beginning in 1966, "It brought trauma, misery, torture, death, to hundreds of millions of people," Chang said.
We've heard the name "Cultural Revolution," but who even knew what it was? Mao didn't just purge the party of anybody who could vaguely be called "elite"; he literally stripped China of all culture. His Red Guards - violent vigilante student groups - pillaged homes, burned books and tortured party officials.
Jung Chang's family suffered, too. It is their story she tells in her hugely successful first book, "Wild Swans."
"My father was one of the few who stood up to Mao and opposed the Cultural Revolution," she told Teichner. "And as a result he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, and he was exiled to a camp and died very young."
Her parents had been conscientious Communists, but even her mother was imprisoned and denounced.
"She went through over a hundred of those denunciation meetings," Chang said, "and she was made to kneel on broken glass, and she was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and threw stones at her."
A child herself, Jung Chang was sent to a work camp, and never saw her grandmother again. She died in 1969.
While literally millions of families like Jung Chang's were enduring the agonies of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had himself photographed swimming. He wanted his enemies to know he was well and in charge. Mao loved to swim, but how's this for weird: He never bathed or brushed his teeth.
"Instead he would have his servants, his mistresses wiping him every day with a hot towel," Chang said. "He didn't like to wash his hair either, and he liked this slightly itchy feeling."
Mao was a serious womanizer, and he was famous for doing government business from his bed.
His rare public appearances were all about the cult of personality. The party faithful would wave the little red book, the collection of Mao quotations everyone in China was ordered to carry - and never to question.
"You know, we were told that socialist China was paradise on Earth," Chang said, "but if this is paradise, what then is hell?
"I blamed people around Mao, I blamed Madame Mao, but I could never contemplate Mao."
Madame Mao Jiang Xing (Mao's fourth wife) was his attack dog. She was one of the so-called Gang of Four, enforcers who ultimately took the heat. Within a month of Mao's death the Gang of Four were arrested and tried. Madame Mao committed suicide in prison.
Mao died in September 1976, after 27 years in power. The world struggled to process his impact.
Given China's secrecy, China watchers had little to go on.
What did it mean that in 1972 and again in 1976, President Nixon went to Mao, not the other way around?
The Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death, and in 1978 Jung Chang was allowed to go to Britain to study. She's lived there ever since.
She keeps with her one of the shoes her grandmother wore (on bound feet), the arm band Jung herself wore as a Red Guard, some Mao badges - a little history of 20th century China in objects.
"Mao left a tattered China," Chang said.
Teichner asked, "How do you explain the economic miracle that's transformed China?"
"The economic miracles happened because Mao died, and people had had enough of living under Mao's kind of rule," she said. "I mean, they wanted a good life."
Jung Chang is equally dismissive of claims that Mao liberated Chinese women.
"They became more equal in, you know, basically slave labor."
"If there's one criticism that has come to light in the book, is that there's such an unrelenting sort of attack on Mao," Teichner said.
"Well, one way to answer that would be to say 'No,'" Halliday said. "Should one be even-handed about Hitler, for example? I mean, Mao did what he did."
Mao has been conveniently repackaged. A generation of Chinese born after his death know only the revisionist version.
"Young people don't know that's the myth," Halliday said. "I mean, they think he is still the great hero."
"So the truth of Mao really isn't out in the open in China, even now, 30 years after his death?" Teichner asked.
"No, not at all," Chang said.
And may never be. "Mao, The Unknown Story" has been published in Chinese, but the book is banned in China.
Last week, Amnesty International released a report claiming that human rights violations in China have actually increased since Beijing was awarded the Olympics.
Repression may, in the end, be what remains of Mao's legacy.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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