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never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. "Never mind" the damage Mao infl

by 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.
- temphn 13y ago
  I think we need to mention the sins of Mao quite a bit more before we're in danger of Godwining. You know some history. Most people who are reading that Atlantic article don't have this context at all. This is because people get their history from movies, and Hollywood chooses to make movies like the Karate Kid remake (about anti-black racism in China) or this Red Dawn farce rather than movies about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the consequences of being "idealistic" and "ideological". "Ideological" is bad. It's not good. It led to a lot of people dying. And the support for "oppressed peoples" that the OP thinks so much of is intimately tied to the rhetoric of communism, which is invariably and horrifically belied by the reality. To repeat said rhetoric uncritically is to bury those people again. Their deaths were denied in speeches at the time and they are glossed over in writing today. This is wrong. We need to remember them. So yeah, unfortunately I don't think you can hold up the Maoist era as comparatively positive in any substantive regard without acknowledging that said act is morally equivalent to "Mussolini/Hitler made the trains run on time." And the thing is - Mao didn't even make the trains run on time. He destroyed China to such an extent that people were forced to eat each other's children to survive. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-chinese-famine.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-c... For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so people could use them for food without committing the additional sin of eating their own. It has of course been known for many years that the Great Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written the most compelling and complete account of that calamity, describing it systematically as it affected the countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps for ''rightists'' and other political prisoners that China maintained at the time. I would argue that these kinds of things are much more important in forming a picture of Mao's China than whether he once gave lip service to MLK. If 99% of people who came to that page already knew the term "laogai", fine, one could arguably move on to a second topic. But we're a long ways away from successfully communicating these high order bits.
coldtea 13y ago
>"Never mind" the damage Mao inflicted? 65 million people died during his reign. First, the huge majority of those deaths were due to famine. Second, it was in a country in great turmoil, civil war, and a revolution (regime change, if you prefer). In places where such things happen -- as opposed to an country with a stable political climate like the US, people die (including by execution). Someone from a stable country cannot relate, but think of the Civil War and the tons of deaths. Or the French revolution. Those doesn't mean one leader or a handful is the only one to blame, like one does not pin civil war deaths to Lincoln or the confederate leaders. Such are the times. Countries do not get into such messes by one "bad apple" leader. On the contrary, the leaders represent the general problems in the society in general. Even Hitler was voted by a majority of Germans, which ascribed to the same ideals long before he came to power (and for the "philosophical" parts of nazism, even decades ago, e.g Nietchze, Wagner, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and tons of lesser intellectuals).
- samspenc 13y ago
  > First, the huge majority of those deaths were due to famine. Sir, that famine was in large part due to movements commandeered by Mao - such as the Great Leap Forward which completely decimated Chinese farming and agriculture.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Yes, but that does not make it a deliberate policy of killing people. It was what it was thought at the time as necessary to bring China in the modern age. One has to ask if without it China would be what it is today -- or perhaps some broken half-aggrarian society, more third-world than one of the world's economic powers. Same way, as one has to ask if without Stalin's forced industrialization, USSR would be able to stand to the Nazis (and, if it could not, if Europe could). Besides the tragic human aspect, one has to see these kind of events with an impartial eye, just for their long term effects.
    - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
      but by the time Mao died, China was a broken way-more-than-half-agrarian society, and below a lot of third world countries. Kind of like North Korea today. The best one can say is, China was a basket case before Mao, he established a strong system of central control and a level of human development ie literacy and medical care, and those paved the way for development after Mao.
RockyMcNuts 13y ago
Does that meet the definition of genocide? I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao, they were the ones who swept him to power. Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people, the famine was the result of cockamamie policies of indigenous industrialization to be made possible by massive planned increases in farm productivity freeing up labor. And the leadership was blinded by ideology and convinced themselves it was working, and the political climate was such that no one dared contradict Mao, everyone reported massive production, so even as people were starving they exported food to get industrial products. They didn't set out to kill people, it just happened due to incompetence, a bad system with bad incentives, and ideological hubris. Mao was a nutty tyrant, and yet he gave the peasants literacy, medical care, and paved the way for modern China. He was preferred by those peasants to Chiang, who conscripted/enslaved peasants, sent them to fight the Japanese, but 40% died of disease and starvation before they saw action. Even with American support (admittedly tepid since they knew him well) Chiang couldn't beat Mao. (Google 'Chiang February 28' for more about what a great guy he was). Estimates of excess deaths in Iraq, are done doing a similar methodology, range from 400,000 to a couple of million. If those were due to bad policies and ideological hubris, do those constitute genocide? Anyway, history is quite complicated, we don't judge the Brits just by the famines in Bengal either, although the 'g' word sometimes comes up. It's a good article about a black American's perspective on China, so of course it's from a very specific point of view, and in order to get a perspective on Mao and blacks, it doesn't need to say he was also responsible for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
- temphn 13y ago
  > I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a period in 1956 in the People's Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime. After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti- Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves." > Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting In the thirty years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were no clear laws governing executions, which were carried out on a massive scale. In the earliest years, millions of Kuomintang soldiers, landlords, and members of the bourgeois class, seen as threats to the new regime, were killed. In 1950 alone, 2 million people were executed as part of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign. Throughout the Mao period, the number of executions always peaked during political campaigns. In 1971, 100,000 people were executed during a single campaign, one of many such campaigns during the Cultural Revolution period. During these political campaigns, particularly in the 1950s, regional governments were often tasked with meeting execution quotas, premised on Mao’s belief that a certain percentage of the population was always beyond reform. I can go line by line on the rest - Taiwan's GDP-per-capita was more than 10X the PRC's by 1978; Owen Lattimore and the China Hands gave considerable American support for Mao; and the reason you are repeating "it was just an accident that millions of people died" is that that was the propaganda at the time, also used for the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor). But really, you should ask yourself why you decided to get into the nasty business of Holocaust Denial. Tens of millions of people died, and they were murdered by Mao, his men, and the communist regime under his total control. Google a bit, read the primary sources from the period. The famine was the same thing that happened in the USSR, and what always happens when farmers have their land stolen by communist regimes. As for the mechanics of how that happened, shooting a farmer in the back of the head or sending him to a prison labor camp wasn't an "accident". Whether you choose to admit these truths or not is up to you, but it gets to the core of why this point needs to be raised and not simply glossed over by the likes of the OP. Mao was not some mere hapless incompetent as you're trying to portray him, some well-meaning guy who f'd up. He was directly responsible for the largest mass murder in history.

by temphn 13y ago

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.

temphn 13y ago
I think we need to mention the sins of Mao quite a bit more before we're in danger of Godwining. You know some history. Most people who are reading that Atlantic article don't have this context at all. This is because people get their history from movies, and Hollywood chooses to make movies like the Karate Kid remake (about anti-black racism in China) or this Red Dawn farce rather than movies about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the consequences of being "idealistic" and "ideological". "Ideological" is bad. It's not good. It led to a lot of people dying. And the support for "oppressed peoples" that the OP thinks so much of is intimately tied to the rhetoric of communism, which is invariably and horrifically belied by the reality. To repeat said rhetoric uncritically is to bury those people again. Their deaths were denied in speeches at the time and they are glossed over in writing today. This is wrong. We need to remember them. So yeah, unfortunately I don't think you can hold up the Maoist era as comparatively positive in any substantive regard without acknowledging that said act is morally equivalent to "Mussolini/Hitler made the trains run on time." And the thing is - Mao didn't even make the trains run on time. He destroyed China to such an extent that people were forced to eat each other's children to survive. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-chinese-famine.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-c... For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so people could use them for food without committing the additional sin of eating their own. It has of course been known for many years that the Great Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written the most compelling and complete account of that calamity, describing it systematically as it affected the countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps for ''rightists'' and other political prisoners that China maintained at the time. I would argue that these kinds of things are much more important in forming a picture of Mao's China than whether he once gave lip service to MLK. If 99% of people who came to that page already knew the term "laogai", fine, one could arguably move on to a second topic. But we're a long ways away from successfully communicating these high order bits.

coldtea 13y ago

>"Never mind" the damage Mao inflicted? 65 million people died during his reign. First, the huge majority of those deaths were due to famine. Second, it was in a country in great turmoil, civil war, and a revolution (regime change, if you prefer). In places where such things happen -- as opposed to an country with a stable political climate like the US, people die (including by execution). Someone from a stable country cannot relate, but think of the Civil War and the tons of deaths. Or the French revolution. Those doesn't mean one leader or a handful is the only one to blame, like one does not pin civil war deaths to Lincoln or the confederate leaders. Such are the times. Countries do not get into such messes by one "bad apple" leader. On the contrary, the leaders represent the general problems in the society in general. Even Hitler was voted by a majority of Germans, which ascribed to the same ideals long before he came to power (and for the "philosophical" parts of nazism, even decades ago, e.g Nietchze, Wagner, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and tons of lesser intellectuals).

samspenc 13y ago
> First, the huge majority of those deaths were due to famine. Sir, that famine was in large part due to movements commandeered by Mao - such as the Great Leap Forward which completely decimated Chinese farming and agriculture.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Yes, but that does not make it a deliberate policy of killing people. It was what it was thought at the time as necessary to bring China in the modern age. One has to ask if without it China would be what it is today -- or perhaps some broken half-aggrarian society, more third-world than one of the world's economic powers. Same way, as one has to ask if without Stalin's forced industrialization, USSR would be able to stand to the Nazis (and, if it could not, if Europe could). Besides the tragic human aspect, one has to see these kind of events with an impartial eye, just for their long term effects.
  - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
    but by the time Mao died, China was a broken way-more-than-half-agrarian society, and below a lot of third world countries. Kind of like North Korea today. The best one can say is, China was a basket case before Mao, he established a strong system of central control and a level of human development ie literacy and medical care, and those paved the way for development after Mao.

RockyMcNuts 13y ago

Does that meet the definition of genocide? I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao, they were the ones who swept him to power. Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people, the famine was the result of cockamamie policies of indigenous industrialization to be made possible by massive planned increases in farm productivity freeing up labor. And the leadership was blinded by ideology and convinced themselves it was working, and the political climate was such that no one dared contradict Mao, everyone reported massive production, so even as people were starving they exported food to get industrial products. They didn't set out to kill people, it just happened due to incompetence, a bad system with bad incentives, and ideological hubris. Mao was a nutty tyrant, and yet he gave the peasants literacy, medical care, and paved the way for modern China. He was preferred by those peasants to Chiang, who conscripted/enslaved peasants, sent them to fight the Japanese, but 40% died of disease and starvation before they saw action. Even with American support (admittedly tepid since they knew him well) Chiang couldn't beat Mao. (Google 'Chiang February 28' for more about what a great guy he was). Estimates of excess deaths in Iraq, are done doing a similar methodology, range from 400,000 to a couple of million. If those were due to bad policies and ideological hubris, do those constitute genocide? Anyway, history is quite complicated, we don't judge the Brits just by the famines in Bengal either, although the 'g' word sometimes comes up. It's a good article about a black American's perspective on China, so of course it's from a very specific point of view, and in order to get a perspective on Mao and blacks, it doesn't need to say he was also responsible for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

temphn 13y ago
> I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a period in 1956 in the People's Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime. After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti- Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves." > Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting In the thirty years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were no clear laws governing executions, which were carried out on a massive scale. In the earliest years, millions of Kuomintang soldiers, landlords, and members of the bourgeois class, seen as threats to the new regime, were killed. In 1950 alone, 2 million people were executed as part of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign. Throughout the Mao period, the number of executions always peaked during political campaigns. In 1971, 100,000 people were executed during a single campaign, one of many such campaigns during the Cultural Revolution period. During these political campaigns, particularly in the 1950s, regional governments were often tasked with meeting execution quotas, premised on Mao’s belief that a certain percentage of the population was always beyond reform. I can go line by line on the rest - Taiwan's GDP-per-capita was more than 10X the PRC's by 1978; Owen Lattimore and the China Hands gave considerable American support for Mao; and the reason you are repeating "it was just an accident that millions of people died" is that that was the propaganda at the time, also used for the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor). But really, you should ask yourself why you decided to get into the nasty business of Holocaust Denial. Tens of millions of people died, and they were murdered by Mao, his men, and the communist regime under his total control. Google a bit, read the primary sources from the period. The famine was the same thing that happened in the USSR, and what always happens when farmers have their land stolen by communist regimes. As for the mechanics of how that happened, shooting a farmer in the back of the head or sending him to a prison labor camp wasn't an "accident". Whether you choose to admit these truths or not is up to you, but it gets to the core of why this point needs to be raised and not simply glossed over by the likes of the OP. Mao was not some mere hapless incompetent as you're trying to portray him, some well-meaning guy who f'd up. He was directly responsible for the largest mass murder in history.