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And the survivors still put portraits of him in their living rooms.
by clw8 10y ago
And the survivors still put portraits of him in their living rooms.
- mc32 10y agoMaybe it's a kind of large scale Stockholm syndrome. On the other hand, it was countryside Chinese vs City or intellectual Chinese (Han, specifically) so there isn't an ethnicity vs ethnicity aspect to it, which probably makes it less troublesome in people's minds.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoAre you saying the rural folk were more anti Mao than city dwellers?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mr_spothawk 10y ago"Han"? Does that exist?
- wodenokoto 10y agoYes, it does.
- ci5er 10y agoWhat does that question mean? If you were to refer to an ethnically Chinese person in Taiwan as "Chinese", they might get irate pretty quickly if they though you were mixing up the ROC with the PRC. And then they'd let you know that they prefer "Han" as an ethnicity marker separate from national identity. Or, that's how my limited experience has gone...
- jhedwards 10y agoThis is an interesting point. My wife is Chinese and she explained this to me: people like her grandfather are thankful for Mao while they acknowledge his failures. The reason is simple: before Mao there was a long period of Chaos, and before that the Qing dynasty was an extremely oppressive government. Without going into too many details, the peasants were being screwed for hundreds of years. Because of Mao's efforts China became a unified country. Sure, there were decades of terror and famine the severity of which are astonishing, but they were relatively brief historicaly speaking and the people were just happy that China was "theirs". Moreover, the government was stable enough that the people who came after Mao were able to improve things, which didn't always happen historically. It's not a great comparison but a similar thing happened with the Ming dynasty. If I recall correctly, the Ming emperor was terribly brutal, but people were so thankful that it wasn't the mongolians that they didn't care.
- eru 10y agoIn a broader Chinese context it makes some sense to see the suffering and rebellions of the late Ming dynasty and perhaps until Deng Xiaoping as the 'usual' chaos of a dynastic transition.
- khuey 10y agoPresumably you mean the late Qing here?
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoWell, unless one assumes the entire Qing dynasty was about suffering.
- eru 10y agoI do, thanks for correcting.
- hack_dcl 10y agoChinese author LuXun summarized China's history into two modes: 1. People had stable right of being slaves; (stable oppressive mode) 2. People didn't even have the privilege of being slaves. (chaos mode) Mao put China into mode 2 from mode 1 (maybe a most harsh and disgusting one). That is it.
- sgt101 10y agoThe dead don't have living rooms or portraits to hang there. Nor do they have children, or grand children. This is the same logic that is often heard in day to day life after corporate reorganisations "everyone now agrees that the redundancies were unfortunate but necessary."
- jacobush 10y agoLol yes
- sotojuan 10y agoNot just survivors! My girlfriend's friend (early 20s, born the USA, relatively Westernized) does too.