Posted on 09/05/2010 6:33:01 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
The rulers of the Middle Kingdom are as unpredictable as they are inscrutable. They blow hot and cold in defiance of the seasons
Winston Churchill’s description of Russia in October 1939, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, is surely truer of contemporary China. The rulers of the Middle Kingdom are as unpredictable as they are inscrutable. They blow hot and cold in defiance of the seasons. New Delhi is having a spot of bother with Beijing, but that should come as no surprise to those accustomed to the variable moods of Chinese leaders down the ages: Silky one moment, brutal the next.
In 1942 Chairman Mao and his alter ego Ju Deh wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru appealing for medical aid for the beleaguered Communists in war-torn China. A mission under the iconic Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis and MA Atal was promptly despatched by the Indian National Congress and a letter of thanks was duly received by the future Prime Minister of India. Yet eight years later, in 1950, with Mao and Nehru in power, the Indian Prime Minister was subjected to a bruising personal attack in an official Chinese publication. Like Icarus of Greek legend, who flying too close to the Sun had his waxen wings burned and fell to his death in the Aegean Sea, those desirous of a close Chinese relationship with no real appreciation of the treacherous cross-currents of Chinese realpolitik do so at their peril.
The USSR and Vietnam were as lips to teeth in their closeness to China, but these flattered to deceive in the fullness of time. The Great Helmsman’s physician Dr Li Zhisui has left a revealing memoir — The Private Life of Chairman Mao — which includes numerous conversations in which Mao unburdened his soul: He hated all things Russian and marked out Russia and India as China’s future foes; he admired the United States, its distance from China’s shores guaranteeing Chinese security. All this as Beijing swore eternal friendship with Russia and India.
Without Soviet assistance, China’s Communists may never have achieved their triumph in the country’s civil war. Military historians accept that the Soviet demolition of Japan’s million-strong Kwantung Army was the swiftest and most devastating operation of World War II. The Soviets handed over Manchuria to their Chinese comrades, plus a huge quantity of captured Japanese arms and equipment. Without Manchuria — China’s Ruhr — Mao’s revolution would have been incomplete and so would his authority.
The seminal work of American author David Glantz — The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945 — is well worth reading. So also, as supplementaries, are Chris Bellamy’s Absolute War and Aleksandr Vasilevsky’s A Lifelong Cause. Marshal Vasilevsky was in command of the Soviet Union’s far eastern forces, whose victory Mao fulsomely eulogised: “The Red Army came to the aid of the Chinese people by driving out the aggressors. Such an example cannot be matched in the entire history of China.”
He understood well enough that his guerrilla legions were incapable of ousting battle-hardened Japanese formations, which if handed over by the Americans to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang would have presented an insuperable obstacle to Mao’s advance into northern China. Recognising his debt to Stalin and the USSR, he abused the former in private and the latter in public, as behoves a man whose alleged achievements were more myth and fantasy than proven fact. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their tome, Mao: The Unknown Story, have exposed, through prodigious research into Chinese and Russian sources, the falsity of many of the claims made for the Long March, as related to Edgar Snow by Mao and published in Snow’s best-selling book, Red Star Over China.
Li bears ample testimony to Mao as sexual predator and glutton: Feasting on his favourite pork dishes, even as China starved in the greatest man-made famine in recorded history. Nero merely fiddled while Rome burned! Like his disciple, the Cambodian Pol Pot, Mao was in essence a nihilist destroyer of humankind. His Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were evidence of his tryst with darkness; he plumbed its depths. The intellectual finery with which he was draped was the illusionist trick familiar to courtiers. Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath and Field Marshal Montgomery admired Mao and his political system. Orientals were best suited to Oriental despotism, they seemed to think. The nudity of the Emperor’s mind and spirit was (and still is) taboo. Otherwise the legitimacy of the regime would suffer.
Mao was much given to dismissing the US as a “paper tiger”, but, as Nikita Khrushchev tauntingly reminded him, the beast possessed nuclear teeth. It does indeed, as the US Seventh Fleet armada, which prowls China’s extensive coastline, demonstates. American naval exercises with its regional allies in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea have upset Beijing, which has given vent to its displeasure by cancelling military exchanges with Washington, DC. It matters not a jot, say American Admirals, brazenly insisting that they will do what a man has to do, including supplying arms to Taiwan. The Middle Kingdom is losing face. The 21st century is educating its rulers to the paradigm of global power.
Rumours are afloat that the People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan may have fled the country.The grist to these mills were reports from Hong Kong citing Ming Pao, a local news agency which has claimed that because of an approximate loss of $430 billion on US Treasury bonds, the Chinese Government was preparing to punish certain individuals within the PCB, including Mr Zhou. His name has been blocked from Internet search engines within China. He may well join the Falun Gong and the ‘splittist’ Dalai Lama in Beijing’s rogues’ gallery.
Having acquired military and industrial clout, Beijing believes it to be in the national interest to flaunt this before recalcitrants unwilling to perform the primordial kowtow. Ho Chi Minh, the founding father of Vietnam, desperate for an accord with his country’s French overlords in the aftermath of World War II, pleaded with his youthful colleagues to accept this as a temporary expedient: “Better to deal with France than sniff Chinese dung all one’s life,” he said.
‘Contest of the century: China v India’ is the somewhat fanciful title of a recent Economist editorial. China has most to fear from its inner demons. Consider this: Beijing’s sole genuine allies are North Korea and Pakistan, which, understandably, deepens Middle Kingdom angst. North Korea exists in the shadows, Pakistan in the glare of critical media publicity. The Beijing-Islamabad axis is Fagin breathing life into the artless Dodger. The black comedy should be enjoyed, not pilloried.
The transition was easy for them. The people were not accustomed to having liberty. Or at least, long enough for it to make a difference.
No respect for life. I will never trust them
BTT
Nice read - thanks.
You’re welcome!
keep your enemies close...
And, strangely enough, Marx thought communism was better suited for industrial Germany or England rather than agricultural Russia or China.
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