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> The son of two mathematics teachers who were sent to teach on farms during China’s Cultural Revolution, Dr. Chen grew up without any hope of becoming a scient
by VictorPath 5y ago
> The son of two mathematics teachers who were sent to teach on farms during China’s Cultural Revolution, Dr. Chen grew up without any hope of becoming a scientist. His parents, the descendants of landowners, had a “bad classification” from the Chinese government, and were viewed suspiciously. His father warned him he would probably spend his life as a farmer. But then Mao Zedong died.
Chen moved to the US to experience the American equivalent of this.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoIndeed. A former colleague married a Chinese lady whose parents had suffered badly through the Cultural Revolution. He told the story, how she went off to the US for her PhD and how her parents drove her to the airport and told her never to return to China. How things have changed within just a generation!
- varjag 5y agoCan you elaborate how exactly? Was your former colleague sent to kill sparrows in rice fields too?
- HarryHirsch 5y ago(It was the colleague's wife's parents.) Obviously I never got the full story, but from what I heard, the parents were academics who had their house vandalized by the Red Guards and were sent to work the countryside.
- nextaccountic 5y agoDid her parents ever leave China?
- HarryHirsch 5y agoI don't know.
- kragen 5y agoYou're confusing the Cultural Revolution with the Great Leap Forward. If you read a little bit about the Cultural Revolution the connection will be obvious.
- varjag 5y agoDeaths Hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian, Red Guards and military deaths Still not obvious.
- kragen 5y agoYou posted that response literally three minutes after my comment. That's barely enough time to read the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. I suggest you spend more than three minutes learning about a thing before complaining that things are not obvious to you about it. Three hours would be reasonable. You could spend the first hour or two just reading that article, or start with https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution, which is only about ten or twenty minutes of reading and better written, but of course much less objective. Either of those two starting points will give you plenty of links to explore. Since it's one of the most important events in human history, one with extremely important parallels to current events in the US and extremely important influences on everyone in China, and you evidently don't know anything about it at all (except that it happened in China, I guess), it will definitely be worthwhile.
- nonethewiser 5y agoI don't see an equivalent turn of events in the US. Could you share what you mean?
- kragen 5y agoNo, nothing equivalent to the Cultural Revolution has happened anywhere else ever. Hopefully it never will.
- mlindner 5y agoOh come on, lets not blatantly lie like this. China's "Cultural Revolution" was a mass extermination of the educated people in the country. There's zero comparison between the two.
- _yo2u 5y agoA 10 year event encompassing a country’s worth of people leads to many secondary and tertiary effects can mean something different for every person.
- mlindner 5y agoWhat's that supposed to mean?
- gowld 5y agoIt means that a lot happened in 10 years, so when comparing a single event to the whole thing, obviously it can only match up to part of it, not the whole thing.
- mlindner 5y agoThat's still silly as that would imply that the US is currently in the middle of a 10 year cultural revolution, yet there's no slew of dead educated people. So again, this is a poor comparison. Do you really think China's cultural revolution put people through a rule of law court system and acquitted people? Or do you think that they just went around murdering people on drumhead trials with no rule of law? (Hint, it's the latter)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nonethewiser 5y agoWhat do you mean? I don't understand what the American equivalent of demonization of personal property and a communist uprising is.
- Bukhmanizer 5y ago
- regnull 5y agoLike being accused, exonerated, and then taking a victory lap over all the major publications to the sympathetic audience. Damn you America! Just like China, no? Also: "The FBI documents alleged that Chen received $19 million from China's Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).[9] [23] On January 22, 2021, MIT's President released a second statement pointing out that these funds went to not Chen, but to MIT itself to support a departmental research collaboration with SUSTech which Chen simply directed on MIT's behalf.[25] [26]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Chen_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Chen_(engineer) SUSTech, lol.
- jrockway 5y agoI think the "accused" part is the problem. Interacting with the court system is expensive both financially and emotionally. We need to be very careful where we apply it, and that means being careful about who we accuse and for what reasons.
- mlindner 5y agoExpecting zero mistakes is unreasonable. The system worked correctly. The person who was not guilty was found not guilty.
- platinumrad 5y agoYeah the system worked correctly. He only lost a year of his life. Whoopsies!
- kragen 5y agoAnd all his grad students and the chair of a university department, based on accusations that turned out to be entirely false.
- platinumrad 5y agoYeah, what a victory lap, getting to rightfully speak out about his mistreatment. Tell me, would you trade a year of your life for the ability to take such a grand "victory lap"?