4 ms·

This author has an incredibly solipsistic worldview: Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther Ki

by temphn 13y ago

This author has an incredibly solipsistic worldview: Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time would have been willing to align themselves actively with the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the U.S. After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth, leaving little room for concern with past ideals. The "past ideals" promoted by Mao included the mass murder of tens of millions of Chinese and almost thirty years of terror and poverty, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution. Not even a single mention or nod to this in the paragraph, which would have you believe that a mass murderer who gave lip service to the US civil rights movement is preferable to a man who brought a billion people out of darkness. One might even call such a view - that all that matters is a person's professed attitude towards a black American - culturally imperialist. As the author notes in passing, post-Deng China is substantively doing a lot more for people of African origin via trade than Maoist China ever did. But all that matters are the "past ideals". A modern expression of the modern American religion: thou shalt not be saved through works, only through lip service towards MLK alone.

pradocchia 13y ago
The passage you quote seems fairly neutral to me, and you appear to bring more baggage to the conversation than the author himself. There was in fact a qualitative change in popular Chinese outlook from Mao to Deng, never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. White people were associated with rich and powerful western nations, so their prestige increased. Black people were associated with poor African nations, so their prestige decreased. This was independent of any preferences for light and delicate features. And I think this was one of the author's points, that shifts in popular outlook have affected Chinese perceptions of black people. What might once have been an asset (perception of shared suffering under capitalist/imperialist oppression) is now a liability ("we're poor but not as poor as you!").
- temphn 13y ago
  never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. "Never mind" the damage Mao inflicted? 65 million people died during his reign. Post-Mao China is more realistic, more productive, much wealthier, and much less insane (aka "ideological/idealistic"). It is less likely to foment violent revolution nearby and more interested in profitable stability. It is an improvement on every front that matters. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/m... Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years' Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known". Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said. But he said something nice about MLK once. Really, methinks that some "baggage" - aka knowledge of history - is quite necessary here.
  - pradocchia 13y ago
    temphn, I wouldn't have weighed in if I didn't already know the history. Yes, you can see those ~65M deaths in world population statistics, that's how bad it was. China had gone through 200 years of instability, strife and suffering by the time Deng took over. Since then, things have gotten better along many dimensions. However, pollution has also gotten worse. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? In a village I know, the central government is now paying for a landfill. This is great, since now the villagers won't throw their non-recyclable household waste into the river. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? This article was about black people in China, not Mao, not the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution, and you are changing the subject.
pessimizer 13y ago
Because "ideals" means "belief systems" rather than "list of terrible things that they did that temphn thinks should be mentioned whenever their name comes up in conversation"?
- temphn 13y ago
  Hard as it may be to imagine, there are things that are more important than whether someone said something nice once about the US civil rights movement - such as hundreds of millions of Chinese lives. The USA is not the center of the world and the level of platitudinous veneration of American icons is not the most important criterion by which to judge a foreign leader.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    As hard as it can be to imagine, you don't have to discuss every aspect of something while making a point about a single aspect of something.
  - moo 13y ago
    You sound like a writer for Reader's Digest beating a drum of evil empires. It is a cheap shot about deaths that cannot be argued here just as Trayvon Martin would not be a HN article. HN politics have to be circuitous, indirect and arguments depending on popular assumptions but cannot be taken to task as it would be off-topic. How can people take these death estimates at face value when academics have been paid by the CIA, death estimates in books like "The Black Book of Communism" have been proven to be exponentially inflated, child births go down during upheavals but the birth decrease gets counted as deaths.
    - temphn 13y ago
      “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?” Susan Sontag, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-commun...
noname123 13y ago
This is true. But IMO, there's a difference between the idea of "equality" in the Chairman's speech in People's Congress and black people's treatment in the open air market in Nanjing. As usual, "equality" is not altruistic. Mao during the 1970's Sino-Soviet split wanted to create his own ideological alternative as a third way to the American capitalist decadence and the Soviet revisionist. So he struck a lot of deals with African go'vt back then to give their students education grants to Chinese universities. I honestly don't think Mao had an understanding of the African American experience in the sense of "Invisible Man," "Their Eyes Were Watching God" etc. but simply had an abstract understanding of "third-world solidarity". Nowadays, the Chinese leadership is helping Africa in the name of the third-way of "peaceful rise" and "political non-interference to internal affairs" as the alternative to "America, the World Police" of UN/IMF/World Bank. Again I don't think Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping really relate to the health, socio-economic concerns of African people but simply wants access to the oil of Sudan and the soft power in the international stage. All of this international diplomacy and economic deals does very little to affect the average Chinese person's attitude towards African's which is very racist. But I'd add that in my experience, racism is China is no worse than racism in America except the difference is that the average majority-member in the States is well-versed in political correctness or guilt that they know not to offend people in public and in private. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests
moo 13y ago
I bet Marketus could wear a hoodie and walk home from the store in China without getting shot by a racist vigilante. Lin Biao, who wrote Long Live the Victory of Peoples War, Black Panther Maoist ideology, China support for Third World liberation like in Vietnam, Cuba support for liberation of Angola, and Third World solidarity and liberation struggle in general had more to do with forcing legal change in Western apartheid ( also separate but equal laws in U.S.) regimes then the civil rights movement.
wisty 13y ago
Of course, you fail to mention the land reforms (which brought life expectancies up from 35, to more like 45). He saved as many lives with the land reforms as he killed in the Great Leap (which was only about 3 years - how long should he have tried it, if he genuinely though it would save hundreds of millions of lives?) 1960 to 1970 was when China actually came out of darkness (life expectancies rising from 45 to over 60). You could argue that this was because Deng (and other reformers, when Deng was purged) had managed to seize enough control that Mao couldn't do too much damage. The Cultural Revolution (which is the time period we are talking about) was bad for the people who were targeted, but China just didn't have that many educated people that trying to kill them all would make an appreciable dent in life expectancies. China would probably have developed a lot faster if it hadn't destroyed its education system, but it still grew pretty quick (even during the Cultural Revolution). So basically, over Mao's life China went for a life expectancy of 35 to a life expectancy 60. Much of this was probably Deng fixing up the things that Mao broke. Maoism is a terrible system of government, but it turns out it's streets ahead of feudalism. Really, the heads of the Qing dynasty should really go down as the worst leaders ever (imagine a century of people dying at the same rate as the Great Leap), with Mao as a runner up.

by temphn 13y ago

pradocchia 13y ago

The passage you quote seems fairly neutral to me, and you appear to bring more baggage to the conversation than the author himself. There was in fact a qualitative change in popular Chinese outlook from Mao to Deng, never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. White people were associated with rich and powerful western nations, so their prestige increased. Black people were associated with poor African nations, so their prestige decreased. This was independent of any preferences for light and delicate features. And I think this was one of the author's points, that shifts in popular outlook have affected Chinese perceptions of black people. What might once have been an asset (perception of shared suffering under capitalist/imperialist oppression) is now a liability ("we're poor but not as poor as you!").

temphn 13y ago
never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. "Never mind" the damage Mao inflicted? 65 million people died during his reign. Post-Mao China is more realistic, more productive, much wealthier, and much less insane (aka "ideological/idealistic"). It is less likely to foment violent revolution nearby and more interested in profitable stability. It is an improvement on every front that matters. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/m... Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years' Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known". Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said. But he said something nice about MLK once. Really, methinks that some "baggage" - aka knowledge of history - is quite necessary here.
- pradocchia 13y ago
  temphn, I wouldn't have weighed in if I didn't already know the history. Yes, you can see those ~65M deaths in world population statistics, that's how bad it was. China had gone through 200 years of instability, strife and suffering by the time Deng took over. Since then, things have gotten better along many dimensions. However, pollution has also gotten worse. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? In a village I know, the central government is now paying for a landfill. This is great, since now the villagers won't throw their non-recyclable household waste into the river. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? This article was about black people in China, not Mao, not the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution, and you are changing the subject.

pessimizer 13y ago

Because "ideals" means "belief systems" rather than "list of terrible things that they did that temphn thinks should be mentioned whenever their name comes up in conversation"?

temphn 13y ago
Hard as it may be to imagine, there are things that are more important than whether someone said something nice once about the US civil rights movement - such as hundreds of millions of Chinese lives. The USA is not the center of the world and the level of platitudinous veneration of American icons is not the most important criterion by which to judge a foreign leader.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  As hard as it can be to imagine, you don't have to discuss every aspect of something while making a point about a single aspect of something.
- moo 13y ago
  You sound like a writer for Reader's Digest beating a drum of evil empires. It is a cheap shot about deaths that cannot be argued here just as Trayvon Martin would not be a HN article. HN politics have to be circuitous, indirect and arguments depending on popular assumptions but cannot be taken to task as it would be off-topic. How can people take these death estimates at face value when academics have been paid by the CIA, death estimates in books like "The Black Book of Communism" have been proven to be exponentially inflated, child births go down during upheavals but the birth decrease gets counted as deaths.
  - temphn 13y ago
    “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?” Susan Sontag, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-commun...

noname123 13y ago

This is true. But IMO, there's a difference between the idea of "equality" in the Chairman's speech in People's Congress and black people's treatment in the open air market in Nanjing. As usual, "equality" is not altruistic. Mao during the 1970's Sino-Soviet split wanted to create his own ideological alternative as a third way to the American capitalist decadence and the Soviet revisionist. So he struck a lot of deals with African go'vt back then to give their students education grants to Chinese universities. I honestly don't think Mao had an understanding of the African American experience in the sense of "Invisible Man," "Their Eyes Were Watching God" etc. but simply had an abstract understanding of "third-world solidarity". Nowadays, the Chinese leadership is helping Africa in the name of the third-way of "peaceful rise" and "political non-interference to internal affairs" as the alternative to "America, the World Police" of UN/IMF/World Bank. Again I don't think Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping really relate to the health, socio-economic concerns of African people but simply wants access to the oil of Sudan and the soft power in the international stage. All of this international diplomacy and economic deals does very little to affect the average Chinese person's attitude towards African's which is very racist. But I'd add that in my experience, racism is China is no worse than racism in America except the difference is that the average majority-member in the States is well-versed in political correctness or guilt that they know not to offend people in public and in private. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests

moo 13y ago

I bet Marketus could wear a hoodie and walk home from the store in China without getting shot by a racist vigilante. Lin Biao, who wrote Long Live the Victory of Peoples War, Black Panther Maoist ideology, China support for Third World liberation like in Vietnam, Cuba support for liberation of Angola, and Third World solidarity and liberation struggle in general had more to do with forcing legal change in Western apartheid ( also separate but equal laws in U.S.) regimes then the civil rights movement.

wisty 13y ago

Of course, you fail to mention the land reforms (which brought life expectancies up from 35, to more like 45). He saved as many lives with the land reforms as he killed in the Great Leap (which was only about 3 years - how long should he have tried it, if he genuinely though it would save hundreds of millions of lives?) 1960 to 1970 was when China actually came out of darkness (life expectancies rising from 45 to over 60). You could argue that this was because Deng (and other reformers, when Deng was purged) had managed to seize enough control that Mao couldn't do too much damage. The Cultural Revolution (which is the time period we are talking about) was bad for the people who were targeted, but China just didn't have that many educated people that trying to kill them all would make an appreciable dent in life expectancies. China would probably have developed a lot faster if it hadn't destroyed its education system, but it still grew pretty quick (even during the Cultural Revolution). So basically, over Mao's life China went for a life expectancy of 35 to a life expectancy 60. Much of this was probably Deng fixing up the things that Mao broke. Maoism is a terrible system of government, but it turns out it's streets ahead of feudalism. Really, the heads of the Qing dynasty should really go down as the worst leaders ever (imagine a century of people dying at the same rate as the Great Leap), with Mao as a runner up.