Posted on 08/13/2002 3:03:11 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
What is a reasonable view of China's recent history? To put it crudely: Does it matter that the Chinese Communist Party killed millions upon millions people, desecrated the environment and deeply wounded China's traditional culture?
Chinese intellectuals tend to avoid the issue, shrugging it off as irrelevant and anyway too unpleasant to contemplate. We need to look ahead and not back, they say. Things are finally moving in the right direction and let's not, please, do anything that may upset that hopeful movement.
I don't think it is that simple. The party in power in China today is the same as the one that did so much harm to China and to millions of Chinese. It no longer practices the policies that led to multiple disasters. But it has not formally reneged on its core beliefs or canonical texts, and the man responsible for more deaths than most people in history is still officially revered (though it is nowadays admitted that he did in fact commit a few "mistakes"). The party's leadership technique, a form of Leninism, remains basically unchanged.
There are millions of people in China today whose lives were devastated by the Communist regime. If you include parents, children and relations of the prime victims, you probably get a hundred million or more. It is reasonable to believe that they are angry, feel humiliated or wronged. A lot of people feeling this way is not good for any society.
To say, as surprisingly often happens, at least outside China, that this may be an issue in the Baltics and the Balkans but not in China because "the Chinese" somehow do not feel such things, seems to me, frankly, to be racist.
No nation that so energetically suppresses so many things about its recent past, which everyone knows to be true, can be a great nation. Such actions demand that a government habituate its people to a level of hypocrisy that will eventually find its way into other aspects of life. Nor will China attain that genuine respect from the outside world that its leaders and its people (on that score, at least, there seems to be agreement) so desperately crave, until a genuine and open reassessment of the past takes place. Not until then can China be truly at peace with itself and with the world.
While much of the communist party's view of history is now discredited, it is also true that competing views of the past are not allowed.
So the past continues to fester.
Some say that reassessing the past would be too dangerous because in China so many people did so many appalling things to so many others. The place would explode if the truth came out about what actually happened in villages during land reform and the various stages of collectivization during and after the revolution; or about who persecuted whom during the "anti-rightist campaign" in 1957; or about how many millions died during the great famine induced by the disastrous policies of the "great leap forward" a few years later; or who denounced whom in the universities and residence committees during the "cultural revolution" of the late sixties.
Reassessing the past is certainly difficult and doubtless painful. No country's history can be written in black and white. But in the long run China cannot avoid this reckoning. It finally happened even in the USSR, where -- to take but one example -- disclosure of the secret protocols of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact was both a result of and a further catalyst of democratization in the late 1980s.
Such a process has now started in Taiwan. Compared to China, it must be said to have started even in Japan. What reason is there to believe that China might forever keep itself exempt?
One may well despair about getting these points across in China, but as outsiders we must insist on not betraying ourselves -- at least. In dealing with official China it is often necessary to "sup with the devil," yes, but we need not also flatter him and pretend that we do not know his past.
But the local and regional party leaders were determined to meet their targets for delivering what had been promised to the chairman. To meet their targets, they reduced the amount of food left for the peasants to live on. Teams of cadres were sent out to the villages to search for any hidden caches of grain not turned in to the authorities. Tens of millions were left with nothing to eat.
When Mao or any of the other party leaders traveled around the countryside to see for themselves what the actual conditions were like, the local party officials would line the roads with temporarily replanted crops, to give the appearance of abundance. They would paint trees to hide the missing bark that had been torn off and eaten by the farmers. Selected peasant homes were filled with food and household objects for the visiting officials to see.
All the time, the peasants were in fact starving — in the millions. In their dreadful state, the peasants sank to the lowest form of human survival — they resorted to cannibalism. They dug up the bodies of the recently dead. They hid the fact that family members had died: first, to continue to obtain an extra food ration from the party distributors; and second, to hide the fact that the deceased had been eaten. Then, finally, at the lowest level of an instinct for survival, adults began to kill and eat their own children, usually trading their living child for that of a neighbor's, so they would not have to literally murder and eat their own son or daughter. Children would beg their parents not to let them be eaten.
And where was all the harvested grain seized by the provincial and local party officials? The vast majority of it was stuffed into government granaries. When some of the higher party officials received reports from relatives and friends around the country about the real state of the peasantry, Mao refused to be moved. He could not admit he had been wrong, both because it would undermine his own utopian fantasies and because it might shift power and influence away from himself to others in the party.
Finally, granaries were either opened or broken into. Peasant revolts occurred in various areas. Mao was forced to reverse course, but not publicly. All the shifts in policy were made to seem normal change and adjustment on the continuing road towards communism.
Thirty million people may have died because of his folly, but Mao would not forget that others in the party had challenged him — that they had made him admit that physical laws of nature had stood in his way of making China over in his own image. And in 1966, Mao launched the Great Cultural Revolution, supposedly to purify the party and to rejuvenate the Chinese revolution. Its real purpose was to serve as the vehicle for Mao's revenge against his opponents. It, in turn, cost the lives of millions more and resulted in the loss of another generation of Chinese.
Kind of like American socialists when asked the same question. Eh, Hillary?
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