August 25, 2005
LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF:
China: A maverick dares to challenge the Party line (Jonathan Mirsky, AUGUST 25, 2005, International Herald Tribune)
No one living in China is more daring than the maverick writer Yu Jie. He recently said of the memorial to Japan's war dead: "We criticize the Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong's shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni. This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won't take us seriously."
For China's Communist Party, there are two first-degree thought crimes here. First, Mao's huge portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square and China's current leaders claim to be his heirs. Second, Beijing regularly condemns Japanese prime ministers for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to venerate dead soldiers, including those hanged as World War II criminals. Anti-Japanese demonstrations in Chinese cities are encouraged by the government; any other public protest risks prompt and violent suppression. Yu Jie, therefore, stepped deliberately into China's most dangerous political minefield.
What Yu stated is true. The Japanese behaved with uninhibited cruelty during their war in China from the late 1930s to 1945 and some estimates of Chinese deaths in those years approach 20 million. But because of Mao's ideologically driven agricultural policies, 30 to 50 million Chinese are estimated to have starved to death between 1959 and 1961 alone; in their new biography of the Chairman, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday suggest that during his rule more than 70 million Chinese died - in peacetime.
Mao challenged his comrades, metaphorically, to touch the hind end of a tiger. Few took him up on this dare. Yu Jie does it regularly.
Nothing more surely signals the death of a revolution than the recognition that it was rotten from its inception rather than corrupted later on. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2005 12:00 AM
For a long time, a fair number of revisionist Sovietologists argued that it was Stalin who corrupted the Bolshevik Revolution and that if Lenin had lived there would have been no Stalinist terror and Russia would have created a more liberal Communist regime.
Of course, subsequent research showed this was nonsense. Lenin himself had celebrated the use of terror, and had actually been the originator of many of Stalin's methods. As with the Chinese Communist revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution was led by human monsters from birth.
The only difference in China was that Mao was both the Lenin and Stalin of his revolution.
Posted by: X at August 25, 2005 11:33 AMX:
What amazes me is how any sane person could not view Mao as a killer thug after the Cultural Revolution.
Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at August 25, 2005 2:49 PM