Inside the Mind of Mao

(On the eve of the 57th anniversary of the foundation of People's Republic of China)

Sidney Rittenberg was the only American ever to join the Communist Partyof China, working closely with Mao while translating his works into English.

His interview published in Al Jazeera sheds interesting light on The Great Helmsman who may be dead but whose presence looms large as various groups lay claim to different aspects of Chairman Mao's thought as it evolved from the days of the Long March to the disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Understanding the mind of Mao is also to understand the reversal of the socialist revolution in China.

Understanding the mind of Mao's is to also understand the mind of the "Communist" leaders in China today, as they go about building capitalism, in the words of author Wang Anyi, "with the enthusiasm of a proletarian revolution."

Excerpts from the interview:

SR: I think it was his own ideology in Marxist clothing. Not that he was not a sincere Marxist. But his view of Marxism was to take dialectic materialism and use it to analyse Chinese reality and then develop a Chinese programme.

He had no interest in copying what was done in the Soviet Union or any other country.

In the days before the PRC [People's Republic of China] it was whether the Chinese revolution would depend on the peasants or urban industrial workers. And the orthodox Soviet line was that Marxism belonged to the proletariat. There was no Marxism in the mountains they used to say. The peasants are backward.

But Mao said when the Party educates the Chinese peasants they could be just as good revolutionaries as anyone else in the world. That was the bedrock of his thinking.

AJ: Mao has been revered across the world. Why, and does he deserve it?

SR: I don't think he deserves reverence.

I think he deserves acknowledgement as a serious historical leader at a certain period and he needs to be studied, both the good and the bad.

...

And I think he was not content with seeing China plod along. He wanted to see China advance to a prominent position in the world during his lifetime and I think he became overly ambitious.

He said in 1958 at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward that he would use the strategy and tactics of a people's war and not use the Soviet way of brick upon brick to build the economy.

This was totally unrealistic and resulted in this huge man made famine.

I think it was what went on inside his head that was the problem. His plans during the Great Leap to catch up with Britain and America met with opposition from almost all his sober-minded colleagues. This awoke the conspirator and narrow envious peasant in him.

Link via Naxalrevolution


Tags: China, Mao, Socialism

Made in China, or China Unmade

Amleft has this post on China and concludes:

One wonders, however, whether the time for a peaceful evolution has passed, given the intransigence of the regime, the support of international finance capital and the general disinterest of social justice groups in the US. With the exception of the colonial period, China has frequently made its own history, often in a turbulent way, as shown in the 20th Century through the Boxer Rebellion, the May 4th movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some China scholars contend that there is a stubborn tendency towards utopianism in Chinese society that leads to an excessive embrace of new ideas and policies, to the extent that they are adopted ruthlessly and uncritically, only to be abandoned in equally ruthless fashion. Deng's departure from Maoism promised a break with this practice, as did his unceremonial funeral, but his naive promotion of capitalism in his later years may ultimately be recognized as a poisonous weed that facilitated its return.

Tags: China, Socialism, Capitalism

Technorati Tags: China, Socialism, Capitalism

Macondo in India, China

The Chinese writer Wang Anyi, describes Panhuang, a small rural town in Jiangsu province with the rivetting imagery from Garcia Marquez's fictional place of Macondo (in One Hundred Years of Solitude):

Evening after evening would seem to be filled with revelry, yet this is also a lonely place. One might think of Macondo, and the tumult in its seclusion. Modernity hovers over the town like an iridescent cloud, but its life remains unaltered.

I felt the last sentence describes very well the kind of 'development' and 'modernity' that is today shaping India as well. Between the less than a dozen cities booming with call centers, BPOs and software companies are endless number of small towns and villages that resemble Panhuang.

From "For Whom the Bells Toll", reprinted in One China Many Paths.

A previous post with another quote by Wang Anyi in the same book here.

Tags: Wang Anyi, China, India, Macondo, Globalization

Surviving Tiananmen?

Newsreport on Yu Dongyue, one of the three men who threw eggshells filled with red paint at the portrait of Mao Zedong during the Tiananmen protests in 1989. He was disowned by the protestors themselves and handed over to the authorities.

The last of the paint-throwers was finally freed from prison yesterday a shattered and mentally ill 38-year-old man. The prisoner, Yu Dongyue, was driven insane by 16 years of beatings, torture and solitary confinement. He is reported to be incoherent and unable to communicate...

By last year, Mr. Yu was reported to be babbling incoherently and consuming his own feces and urine. “He has become deranged,” Yu Zhijian told the South China Morning Post last year. “He can't have normal conversations with people. He can't take care of himself. He talks to himself all day long. . . . His nerve is totally broken and his health is terrible. Few prisoners in China are as bad as he is.”

Technorati Tags: China, Tiananmen Square

What China Needs

...is a massive dose of Marxism, according to wisdom that has dawned on the Chinese Communist Party.

The CCP after having dumped every tenet of its official ideology, has decided to make China the center of world Marxism, a slot left woefully empty after the demise of Soviet Union.

3,000 "top Marxist theorists" and academics from across the country are to be summoned to Beijing to compile more than a hundred Marxism textbooks, each one to contain contributions from between 20 and 30 scholars.

Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the party's chief official in charge of ideology, was reported to have told a meeting of propaganda officials and theorists that the leadership saw the project as a means of resolving various issues facing the country, and had given it "unlimited" support.

...

In the past decade and a half, the party has dismantled the state sector, thrown hundreds of millions out of work, given up on collective agriculture, celebrated the art of getting rich (not least through its own corruption), embraced the market "with Chinese characteristics", dumped the principles of free education, healthcare and cheap housing for the workers and created one of the most unequal societies in the world. Workers are not allowed to form trades unions, have little job protection, suffer appalling labour conditions and routinely go unpaid for months on end: a recent study by the National People's Congress concluded that migrant workers were owed more than £5bn in unpaid wages.

...

Far from abandoning Marxism, according to Professor Cheng, China has taken the lead in its development. One of two academics invited to lecture Politburo members last year on the need to modernise Marxism, Professor Cheng said recently that the Politburo had been studying the knotty question of how to reconcile the contradictions between Marx and free-market reforms.

To employ Marxist shorthand, it is a negation of negation- that can end either in a higher form of Marxism or its demise. Or is it a case of "unity and struggle"- perhaps the CCP's dialectics has some undecipherable Chinese twist too.

Is this going to be mere lip- service to Marxism?

Or will this spawn a new revisionist Marxism, battered, post- USSR, as it is by a number of post- isms including post- modernism and the lit- crit mob?

It is more likely a device to disarm the New Left Marxism that is being espoused the more sensitive Chinese intelligentsia and their efforts to return Marxism as praxis. It is certainly a contradictory policy- it violates China's continuous slide into a worst form of capitalism.

Meanwhile the stand of the two major Indian 'communist' parties is appalling, they sincerely believe that the CCP is ushering in socialism in China. The CPM's stand is understandable, it was a product of the Soviet- China split in the sixties when it decided to go with the China line. That of the CPI is less so, but then, it wants to wag its tail too, as a loyal B team of the CPM.

Original source here.

Technorati Tags: China, Socialism, Marxism

A Quote on China

One China, Many Paths is an amazingly refreshing book that consists of interviews with a host of Chinese mainland intellectuals and represents a kaleidoscopic view of the debates in China in the light of its over two decades of economic liberalization (while continuing with political authoritarianism).

Since China started the "reform" process much earlier than India, the book is of much interest to those in India who are sensitive to the social ramifications of economic liberalism.

I particularly liked the telling and incisive quote by Wang Anyi in the following passage:

...there is little doubt that, in aggregate, the female condition improved more than the male under Mao, if the pre- revolutionary situation of each is taken as a benchmark... Wang Anyi, China's best known woman novelist whose memoir of her mother makes clear the origins of her own independence and loyalty to what was best in the Liberation. The ironic eye she casts of matters of gender and class in the euphoria of the 'second reform period' is conveyed by her dry remark that 'we are rushing towards bourgeios society with all the enthusiasm of a proletarian revolution'.

Technorati Tags: China Books

"Future of Western Classical Music is in China"

This year the Berlin Philharmonica launched its grand Asian tour in Beijing in the background of a rage for Western classical music in contemporary China, where in the metropolises a fondness for Beethoven is considered modern, as expression of aspirations for a modern lifstyle, when in the West itself, interest in this type of music is on the wane.

Professor Zhao Ping Guo, who discovered the Chinese prodigy Lang Lang explains the background of Western classical music in China:

Professor Zhao wants to correct the western misconception of a vast classical fever that has suddenly broken out in China. The country has a much longer tradition of absorbing western music. The foundation for such a reception was laid down as early as the 1930s. Beijing Conservatory was founded in 1950, he himself was one of the first piano students to attend. The best musicians were offered opportunities for advanced studies in Budapest and Moscow. The Russian school, he says, continues to have a strong influence on Chinese piano instruction. And the Cultural Revolution, in his view, did not destroy this foundation, but only interrupted it. He perceives a long trajectory of musical development in China. Highly gifted musicians like Lang Lang and Yundi Li and composer like Tan Dun have by no means simply fallen from the sky.

Zubin Mehta, currently in Chennai, puts the new found interest for Western classical music in perspective:

Because we (in India) have so much of our own (musical traditions) here. China and Japan don't have it — not in music. They have literature and painting ... very advanced, but not music. Therefore, they have espoused the [music of the] western cultures.

But what struck me was the following observation (in Die Zeit):

Parents, he informs us, have such high ambitions for their children, no one thinks of anything but a solo career. Collective music-making, chamber music, is given short shrift in China.

Western classical music is distinctive because of the large repertoire of musicians that work flawlessly in tandem- one would have presumed that the collectivist nature of the endeavour is what would have attracted the Chinese- Western classical music has for long expressed a higher organized form of society. But if the interest in solo music indeed happens to be the case, this current interest in Western classical music would soon transform into a rage for rock and pop as in the West.

technorati tags:
China, Classical Music Zubin Mehta