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Xi, Mao, and China’s Search for a Usable Past
China File ^ | Jan 2014 | Paul Gewirtz

Posted on 02/09/2020 8:17:08 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege

...Every country is engaged in the construction and reconstruction of a usable past within a continuous history. For China today, that task is distinctively important, multi-faceted, and difficult. China’s history is extremely long and immensely complex. The People’s Republic of China that was established in 1949 self-consciously marked a new beginning, and it defined itself in part in opposition to China’s past...

...Mao himself is now part of China’s history, and reconstructing and interpreting Mao is part of what China’s leaders must do today. (They do not yet seem prepared to re-interpret the Tiananmen events of 1989, but almost surely will need to do so at some point, perhaps at several different points over time.) What is the version of Mao that will serve the Communist Party and the country?

...The first issue is where values will come from as China moves forward. China today places great value on making money and on self-interested material success, long denied to the Chinese. But values in addition to individual materialism are needed to hold a country together and make it a good country. Where will these values continue to come from in China? The announced ideology of China’s Communist Party no longer seems to be a source of moral values for Chinese society. Indeed, it is no longer clear what that ideology really is...

...A second issue concerns China’s historic relations with other countries. To an extent that outsiders rarely understand, China’s leaders and people see the world through the lens of a terrible “century of humiliation” that China suffered at the hands of Western powers and Japan between the 1840’s and 1940’s. Xi Jinping’s hoped-for “great renewal” and “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation is about a return to a version of China’s greatness that preceded the century of humiliation...

(Excerpt) Read more at chinafile.com ...


TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: china; communism; culturalrevolution; greatleapforward; mao; redchina; revisionism; xijinping
This is the root of all of China's problems: its failure to acknowledge, confront, and learn from its own recent history in the spirit of truth. The country is not divorced from its past at all, but remains on the same continuous trajectory initiated by Chairman Mao. Xi Jinping is an inheritor of his legacy. The image of Mao's face towers over Beijing and remains on all the currency. He is still the primary symbol of China.
1 posted on 02/09/2020 8:17:08 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

It’s a totalitarian society - no free speech, no freedom of religion or politics.

“Primary symbols” are determined by the party and forced on the populace by the party.

So there are not any true natural “symbols”.


2 posted on 02/09/2020 8:36:35 AM PST by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

“Xi Jinping’s father, once a Vice Premier of China, was himself purged by Mao, exiled, and then jailed during the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s actual policies as a provincial Party Secretary and many early decisions as the new national leader would clearly have been anathema to Mao. Yet some have speculated that Xi is in fact a neo-Maoist, pointing to his frequent references to “Mao Zedong thought” in speeches, visits to Mao landmarks, and revival of the Maoist concept of the ‘mass line.’”

Thanks for posting! The above outtake from the OP is very telling— and indicative of the typical blindness of today’s neo-communists! NO communist government / socialist economy ever works, and thus is forced to retreat to capitalism in order to survive. Yet every communist remains a True Believer, even when their own family has been brutalized by communism.


3 posted on 02/09/2020 8:36:52 AM PST by mumblypeg
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

The population of China knows the CCP is corrupt, and they wish things would change. However, the PLA is too strong, and the WuJing are everywhere.

Ma’s Dragonfly Eye AI system has permeated nearly every city now, and even still the public anger is growing. Dissent is growing. Passive resistance is everywhere now too.

The virus could very well be the catalyst to bring freedom to China.

A free China without the communists is in this planets best interest.


4 posted on 02/09/2020 8:42:20 AM PST by datura
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To: CondoleezzaProtege; All
In bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. […]

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change. There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” …
That’s from the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto. The “problems” are by design.
5 posted on 02/09/2020 8:42:31 AM PST by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

I remember once “arguing” with a Chinese Gov’t cadre, who was in the Party before 1949. My argument was that China is surely more than just the CCP and Government. After all, Chinese say their nation has existed for 5000 years, while the CCP has been around at most, since 1921.

His argument was that the party, government and nation are one. He actually (unwittingly) used Christ’s parable of the grain of wheat - that it was necessary that the old grain died, but was transformed with the CCP, to produce a bountiful field of wheat.


6 posted on 02/09/2020 9:26:56 AM PST by PGR88
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

[To an extent that outsiders rarely understand, China’s leaders and people see the world through the lens of a terrible “century of humiliation” that China suffered at the hands of Western powers and Japan between the 1840’s and 1940’s.]


It’s bunch of BS. All civilizations have ups and downs. The foundation of this humiliation narrative is the idea China’s place is at the front of the line. If China has been humiliated, and its historical empire is mostly intact, how should Austrians, Turks and most of Europe feel?


7 posted on 02/09/2020 9:39:17 AM PST by Zhang Fei (My dad had a Delta 88. That was a car. It was like driving your living room.)
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To: PGR88

[His argument was that the party, government and nation are one. ]


In that case, he’s a traitor to China, for having overthrown the KMT. And the KMT was also a traitor to China, for having overthrown the previous dynasty.

And this 5,000 year thing is also BS. The people currently on this planet have ancestors dating back pretty much since the first mammal crawled out of the ocean. That the current Chinese state claims credit for the serendipitous cave drawings of the first organized settlement that left archaeologically significant artifacts thousands of years ago is no reason to take that claim seriously.


8 posted on 02/09/2020 9:43:41 AM PST by Zhang Fei (My dad had a Delta 88. That was a car. It was like driving your living room.)
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To: datura

the WuJing?


9 posted on 02/09/2020 1:28:42 PM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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