A People's History of the Cultural Revolution, 1962–1976
May 9, 2016 12:12 AM   Subscribe

A New Look At China's Cultural Revolution - "Historian Frank Dikötter says newly opened archives offer fresh details about the chaos China experienced in the 1960s, when Chairman Mao urged students to take to the streets."

On the Great Leap Forward: "Mao thinks that he somehow is an even greater leader than Stalin himself. And he wishes to steal the thunder from the Soviet Union so that people understand that he is the one leading the Communist world - half of planet Earth at the time - into an era of plenty for all... Of course, it backfires very badly... By '61 we're talking about tens of millions of people, not just starved to death but also neglected, worked, if not beaten to death... Chairman Mao 1961 is very much forced by circumstances to somehow step back and allow at least an element of economic freedom to be reintroduced in the guise of small, private plots, which farmers used to more or less survive. So the famine is over by 1962."

On the Cultural Revolution: "The official accounts tend to start in 1966. But the reality is that already by 1962, Mao fears that there are party members who will stab him in the back, who will claim that he is responsible, after all, for that massive disaster he caused by starving tens of millions of people to death with the Great Leap Forward."
DAVIES: You know, the events in this book - I mean, it's remarkable to see the leaders of the party set into motion these efforts which had, in many cases, such catastrophic effects. And they - in your book, they appear to me as, you know, essentially - the cynical manipulation by these Chinese leaders to maintain their own authority and privilege, always finding a new reason to purge, an enemy to get people frightened about.

Was there any of these initiatives that - were they motivated in any way, do you think, by some belief that they really would, you know, reduce oppression, promote equality and bring a more prosperous and equitable society?

DIKOTTER: Well, it's probable that the young people who turned themselves into Red Guards at the height of the summer 1966 probably believed that there was something in communism and something in the Cultural Revolution that was worthwhile pursuing. But I think that for most people who would've lived through the 1950s, they would have been very well aware of the dangers of not going along with the flow. In other words, let me put this simply. If you have to attend an indoctrination class week in, week out from 1949 onwards, it will not take you very long to realize that it is in your own interest to just pretend that you're willing to go along.

In short, I think that already by the mid-1950s, most people in China - and in other one-party states for that matter - after a couple of years, people become great actors... They would've kept their innermost thoughts to themselves. They'd have been very, very careful to just play the part that they were asked to play without necessarily believing in it.
The cost of the Cultural Revolution, fifty years later and the parallels between China then and now
By the time the Cultural Revolution sputtered to a halt, there were many ways to tally its effects: about two hundred million people in the countryside suffered from chronic malnutrition, because the economy had been crippled; up to twenty million people had been uprooted and sent to the countryside; and up to one and a half million had been executed or driven to suicide...

In examining the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the most difficult measurement cannot be quantified so precisely: What effect did the Cultural Revolution have on China’s soul? This is still not a subject that can be openly debated, at least not easily. The Communist Party strictly constrains discussion of the period for fear that it will lead to a full-scale reëxamination of Mao’s legacy, and of the Party’s role in Chinese history...

Even with thousands under arrest, the scale of suffering is of a different order, and shorthand comparisons run the risk of relieving the Cultural Revolution of its full horror. There are tactical differences as well: instead of unleashing the population to attack the Party, as Mao did in his call to “bombard the headquarters,” Xi Jinping has swung in the direction of tighter control, seeking to fortify the Party and his own grip on power. He has reorganized the top leadership to put himself at the center, suffocated liberal thinking and the media, and, for the first time, pursued critics of his government even when they are living outside mainland China. In recent months, Chinese security services have abducted opponents from Thailand, Myanmar, and Hong Kong.
also btw...
  • Something odd is happening in China, and it echoes major financial crises of the last 20 years - "The common belief is the 'bridge to nowhere' argument that says credit is being extended to unprofitable projects just to keep the economy growing at a rate that Beijing deems reasonable. If this were the only problem, Deutsche Bank says, the end game could be delayed for several years because Beijing could simply continue to roll over the debt. In their view, the bigger problem is the 'rapid credit expansion within the financial sector itself'. New credit has surged since mid-2014, and is now about 23% of 2015 GDP. They point to the explosion of credit extended by smaller banks as a major red flag and cause for concern."
  • What is Really Worrying About the Chinese Credit Bubble - "Let me rephrase what is happening: China is stepping on the gas pedal, they put jet fuel in the gas tank, and the car does nothing but rev the engine and coast forward slower and slower. All this credit is accomplishing is a slower rate of decline. This has a number of important implications. First, this implies that the Chinese economy is in much worse shape that most outsiders wish to acknowledge. You don't give an economy this much stimulus unless you are really worried about the fundamental level of activity."
  • China's banks and bad debt: where from here? - "China's many state tentacles and lack of proper financial markets doesn't lend itself to the typical Minsky-esque crisis... Understanding the state-dominated system matters because China's set-up is unlike any, especially for an economy of its size. China is neither a command economy nor a free market one: nothing in China yet comes close to being truly free-market given state ownership in the vast majority of big companies and all the biggest banks."
  • China crackdown on data sales opens gaps in economic statistics - "A Chinese government crackdown on the sale of data from its sprawling statistics agencies has prompted a marked deterioration in the numbers that investors rely on to understand the world's second-largest economy... The gaps appeared after China's feared corruption watchdog, the Central Central Committee for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI), began a probe into the National Bureau of Statistics six months ago. The bureau's head was removed from his post in February. Much of the most detailed information is not published publicly by the National Bureau of Statistics but is sold to news agencies, banks, consultancies or other parties by departments within the bureau. In some cases, different departments will compete for revenue by issuing rival data sets... Corruption is only part of the answer... a Chinese newspaper reported that provincial officials in Shanxi had ordered the halt to some industrial production figures 'because they might shatter people's confidence in the province.' "
posted by kliuless (19 comments total) 46 users marked this as a favorite
 
The NPR interview with Dikotter, the HKU historian, is factually very informative, and the historical details about the people are heavy to read. However, interestingly, again and again in the interview I can spot examples of internal inconsistency with his interpretation and explanation of the events. He even side-steps the interviewer's questions, twice! So it's a doubly enlightening piece of reading, with many somber issues to reflect upon.
posted by polymodus at 1:32 AM on May 9, 2016


polymodus: ...I can spot examples of internal inconsistency with his interpretation and explanation of the events.

To be fair, the Cultural Revolution was possibly the most internally contradictory, confusing, chaotic political event of the past century. :-) It's not something you can tell a simple story about.

My own reading list on the subject, which has given me a very blind men and an elephant view on the Cultural Revolution, but all of which I would recommend as part of piecing together a small view of the giant crazy quilt of the Cultural Revolution: Shenfan, Chen Village under Mao and Deng, Life and Death in Shanghai, Red Scarf Girl, and Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary.

I'm looking forward to reading through as much of this new material as I can find the time for.
posted by clawsoon at 6:44 AM on May 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


> I can spot examples of internal inconsistency with his interpretation and explanation of the events.

What clawsoon said. If you're telling a simple, consistent story about that period, you're lying. It was one of the best interviews I've heard on Fresh Air, and I'm glad it got posted here.

I remember back in the '70s having heated arguments with American Mao fans (including my own brother) who simply refused to believe all those evil tales spread by the bourgeois press; I told them to go read Simon Leys and get back to me with an apology.
posted by languagehat at 6:53 AM on May 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


Well, when you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao....
posted by jonmc at 6:59 AM on May 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


...it means they were sold out of Che teeshirts.
posted by ardgedee at 7:18 AM on May 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


It's odd to hear him brush away the suggestion that there was enthusiasm for the 1949 revolution at the start. Everything else I've read - and a lot of it came from people who fled the regime and came to fear and hate it - has said that a significant portion of the population was fired up by the anti-landlord campaigns and even by the first part of the Great Leap Forward. Mao was promising exciting things, and a lot of people got caught up in the enthusiasm.

Dikötter is right that the Communists wouldn't have won the civil war without massive help from the Soviets, but that's not very good evidence against agrarian enthusiasm. The Communists wouldn't have won in Russia, either, if government forces there hadn't been weakened by three years of brutal war against Germany. Agrarian revolutions, by themselves, stand little chance against organized militaries, no matter how enthusiastic the revolutionaries are. The success or failure of an agrarian revolution is not a good measure of enthusiasm or support.

It took time for people to realize that Mao's dreams were a recipe for disaster. There were people at the center of the party who realized it early on, but they kept Mao at the center of their propaganda efforts. The pushed him away from actual power, but they kept telling schoolchildren that he was the greatest person ever. (They thought it would weaken support for the revolution if they let people know that the hero of the revolution was a dangerous psychopath. The reasoning wasn't that far away from that used to protect child-abusing priests or violent police officers.)

And schoolchildren came out in droves for the Cultural Revolution, at least the true believers... or was it the psychopaths among the schoolchildren, those like Mao who saw opportunities in the chaos and violence? I do not know. And then, like Dikötter says, people got very good at pretending. Or, rather, they got good at pretending in waves: A small wave after 1949 and the anti-landlord campaigns, another after the Hundred Flowers campaign, a larger wave after the failure of the Great Leap Forward... a wave for each campaign, until almost everyone, except the new generation of propagandized children, was pretending. A nation of people desperately faking it so that they could stay alive.
posted by clawsoon at 9:05 AM on May 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


Fascinating post - thanks.

It's scary how much Mao was able to get away with, and interesting to see the after-effects even now.

The economic impact of the Chinese growth boom faltering is also sobering, but there's not much that can be done about that.
posted by YAMWAK at 10:15 AM on May 9, 2016


> It's odd to hear him brush away the suggestion that there was enthusiasm for the 1949 revolution at the start.

I don't think he was brushing away the idea so much as providing a necessary corrective; too many people equate "lots of popular support" with "the victory of the Revolution was inevitable." I tend to get my back up in a similar way when confronted with triumphalists about the Bolshevik Revolution; of course there was a lot of support among workers and (especially) soldiers, but that's not why the Bolsheviks won.
posted by languagehat at 10:33 AM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Mao after 1957 was an abomination. But I think he stirs up a reflexive anti-communism that obscures his earlier achievement.

Look at what came before: a massive Japanese invasion which took over half the country (and by far the richest part). In the midst of that, Chiang Kai-shek literally had to be held at gunpoint to agree to resist the Japanese together with the Communists. And the US was nowhere to be seen in the war for five years. And before all that, Chiang was playing with fascism while the countryside was held by warlords. It's not just Commie terror that made the '50s seem like an improvement to most Chinese.

I think Mao came to hate experts because all the experts he'd heard had been wrong. The Soviets carefully explained that revolution had to come in the cities, through cooperation with the KMT. Chiang destroyed that path with a yearlong purge. Western advice for a hundred years had done nothing to maintain Chinese territory, much less bring modernization. To the extent that modern things were created (railroads, steamships, etc.), that just increased the burden on the rural poor. (Taxes plus rent took more than half the crop, and then there was the forced labor requirement.)

(I think it's also useful to compare Mao with Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming emperor. He also fought his way up from nothing to unite the empire, and then wasted his reign in a bloody, paranoid war against his own officials, killing at least 100,000.)
posted by zompist at 8:43 PM on May 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


Dikotter is a bad-faith revisionist neoliberal. His revisionist history of opium as "not a public health crisis" -- he's too smart to say that outright but he'll imply it strongly -- is garbage. Hey guess what, the Japanese parliamentary records have made it clear that Japan sold opium in China as a way to break the will of Chinese people. It's not a conspiracy theory anymore, it's a fact verified by archival records left by a dead Japanese imperialist.

It is possible that people both signed up for the revolution for good reasons, and also, that the revolution's methods were lousy (cult of personality, democratic centralism, I could go on). But no, Dikotter won't even acknowledge this, instead he posts some shitty counterfactuals (last time I read him) about how wonderful it all would have been if that bad bad man Mao and his bad bad comrades had just left Chiang and the KMT in charge. Probably the most damning aspect of Dikotter's counterfactual is that the KMT in Taiwan basically vindicated the Communists by pursuing a strategy of land reform, driving out drug dealers (well....not all of them but certainly a big chunk of the worst Shanghai clique) and state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy leading to industrialization. Oh and in the process they killed thousands of people too, i.e. 2/28. All of those steps essentially said "look, the Communists were right about the basic terribleness of early 20th century China, we're going to do similar things but let some rich capitalists be capitalists, because they're our family members, and also, we still like Confucius, just not the parts where he doesn't like soldiers because, wow, we're the KMT and we LOVE the military, and we're going to copy (shhhhhhhhH!) the Japanese military culture that we learned in school when we were young warlord officers-to be." And who spearheaded this? None other than Jiang Jingguo, a SOVIET TRAINED MARXIST, the son of Chiang Kai-shek. Uh huh. Yeah. Oh and the other thing? Taiwan let the KMT finally address the "contradictions" in their own leadership -- the wealthy industrialists who fought land reform and industrial planning. All the KMT had to do was say listen you fucking assholes, we tried to tell you to ease up on the peasants and workers for 20 years but nope, you wouldn't, and now, well now we're STUCK ON A GODDAMN TROPICAL ISLAND TRYING TO PRETEND WE'RE A NORTHERN CHINESE CAPITOL and if you guys can't get it together now, the only place we can run IS THE GODDAMN PACIFIC OCEAN so you better shut the fuck up and sit down.

Regarding the CR, of course it was fucking terrible. I don't think that's in dispute. But what Dikotter will not address, and does not address, was that hey, there were actually some brutally exploitive cultural practices in China, and the Communists were able to tap into a deep vein of resentment. Things like the rule of the old, and oh hey, the inherent material demands of a character driven language, and the way that it deprives intellectuals and educated people of the ability to form an independent center of power in society -- that's a real thing. And the effort to replace characters with the roman alphabet was a real thing too, done in response to that. But Dikotter is going to pretend like this shit isn't real at all, when, as someone who is fluent in Chinese, he should actually realize if he was even paying attention while he was in school to the people in universities around him and sociological ramifications of the character based language. But no. He won't do that, because like I said, he's a bad faith neoliberal.

Back to the revolution-- I have talked with so many people who have said wow, it really sucked to be poor in China before the Japanese invaded, and then MAN did it really suck after that. So in the midst of this, and generational poverty, some guys show up and are talking about human equality, ending footbinding, stopping landlords from taking your shit and raping you (and your family members), and stopping not just the Japanese invaders, but all the random white countries that would show up and set up colonies at gunpoint along the Chinese coast, and incidentally, when the Chinese government tried to stop the sale of opium, declared war, not once, but twice. Now we can argue , as Dikotter would, that opium should be legal and that a legalized regime would have made it better for everyone. Fine. Maybe the state should have set up an opium control monopoly from the beginning and underpriced the foreigners to bankrupt their merchants. It's my understanding that some imperial officials recommended this but it was not done. Then later when opium was legal, under the people that Dikotter loves so much, the KMT, the opium control board was CONTROLLED BY THE MOB. Take that, civil society institutions. And you know, legalization wasn't a panacea either, lots of people were still doing dope BECAUSE LIFE SUCKED AND THEY WERE POOR.
Yeah. Imagine that, you live in a country totally under attack from foreign powers, and also, rapacious landlords and warlords, and you decide to CHECK THE FUCK OUT by getting high all the time, WHAT A FUCKING SURPRISE. So in the middle of this insanity, some highly disciplined, ascetic, no-fucks giving Communist cadres show up and promise that they will fix this. They shoot a particularly terrible Japanese soldier to show they're serious. Then they ambush landlord and a tax collector and have a struggle session in which they strongly encourage this person to get with the program, maybe they beat the shit out of the guy who was always harassing the farmers by taking all their rice, and the next guy is like, whoa, do not want, okay , I'm on the side of the people now, and yes, you can hide your guns in the village. For good measure the cadres get villagers to participate in the beating so there's no going back now...

After all of that, then somehow, in the midst of a civil war against a US backed client state with modern weapons, your new communist friends prevail. Holy fucking shit you didn't just get rid of the Japanese (okay yes the US helped a lot) you did something almost no one else had ever done, you pushed out the US. AND THEN almost right after you beat back the KMT, you get drafted or your volunteer for Korea where the CCP beats the pants out of Douglas fucking MacArthur and the forces of the most powerful nation in the world, the USA, in direct combat, the forces that beat the Nazis.

People really did believe in the revolution, and you can see why -- unless you're Frank Dikotter.
posted by wuwei at 9:07 PM on May 9, 2016 [14 favorites]


A+ comment, wuwei. I actually had a relative working in US intelligence in rural North China during WWII and he said that the contrast between the Red soldiers and the White armies could not be more stark. The Reds were learned, dedicated and honest and the warlord soldiers were, in his words, "slovenly and ignorant." Of course, everyone was living in grinding poverty and amidst terrible conflict but, as you say, the Reds, due to their program and conduct, were quite popular. I meet many Chinese nationals today who presume (reasonably) that the nobility and popular support of the CCP pre-1949 is a myth, like every other story they have been told by the CCP about itself. However, this particular one has the merit of truth.

The Cultural Revolution is bizarre, fascinating, and confusing. It probably has the distinction of being the only mass political event that was sparked by a piece of drama criticism. It also had international resonance, inspiring many around the world (including radicals in the US). The Chinese, for their part, did interrogate the event partially during the trials of the Gang of Four, but, as mentioned above, a full-scale examination remains taboo. The former Red Guards who, in part, now run China have little interest in digging up troubled history and resurrecting old, traumatic battles which may very well paint them in a bad light. I read a short book recently which made the argument that the CR essentially provided the political and economic foundations for modern China and that the CR is not the abberation as which many view it. The most dramatic, violent, tumultuous period of the CR only lasted around a year or two and the CR itself was a ten-year phenomena. In short, the legacy of the CR still haunts China, even though the leadership wants to keep it at arms' distance.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:12 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Noisy Pink Bubbles: It probably has the distinction of being the only mass political event that was sparked by a piece of drama criticism.

Now I'm intensely curious to know if there were any others.

The former Red Guards who, in part, now run China have little interest in digging up troubled history and resurrecting old, traumatic battles which may very well paint them in a bad light.

It would be fascinating to see a network graph of the origins of those currently in power. How many have roots going all the way back to the Long March? How many got their start during the Cultural Revolution? How many came up through the ranks in "normal" times, if you can say that there was such a thing?
posted by clawsoon at 11:04 AM on May 10, 2016


Dikotter is a bad-faith revisionist neoliberal.

That's the sense I got solely from the interview transcript. The interviewer tried to challenge him at one point, too. What bothers me is you have a prominent HK professor who can get away with this sort of ideological spin (on what is otherwise detailed and informative).

I'd also read the nytimes review article later, and they have an reasonably fair review of his new book. Anyways, my expectation is with any piece of historical nonfiction, one has to read carefully, i.e. using critical reading skills. And contradictions are not acceptable.
posted by polymodus at 1:21 AM on May 11, 2016


polymodus: ...I can spot examples of internal inconsistency with his interpretation and explanation of the events.

To be fair, the Cultural Revolution was possibly the most internally contradictory, confusing, chaotic political event of the past century. :-) It's not something you can tell a simple story about.


I don't understand what your comment means or has to do with what I said originally. Real events cannot be contradictory; that is a type of category error. In contrast, if you for example critique the consistency of a narrative that I tell you, that is one way of challenging the legitimacy of what I am trying to persuade you about. It is an entirely natural and sensible thing to do.
posted by polymodus at 1:35 AM on May 11, 2016


In contrast, if you for example critique the consistency of a narrative that I tell you, that is one way of challenging the legitimacy of what I am trying to persuade you about. It is an entirely natural and sensible thing to do.

Normally I'd agree with you, but this is a special case. I think that you could create multiple narratives about the Cultural Revolution, some of them contradictory, and they could all be equally close to the in toto truth. Narratives necessarily simplify. Millions of separate things happened that have all been lumped under the name "the Cultural Revolution", and many of those things do not fit together nicely in a way that lends itself to clean, consistent narrative simplification. (It does not lend itself nicely to dimensionality reduction, to use a machine learning metaphor.) If you try to combine some of those Cultural Revolution narratives into one narrative and end up with internal contradictions, I will not be too shocked or concerned.

But we may be talking past each other, since I'm not exactly sure which contradictions you're thinking of. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 7:08 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Some left-communist polemics against Mao(ism):

Notes Towards a Critique of Maoism


Bloom and Contend
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:03 PM on May 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Cultural Revolution, 50 years on - "China is still in denial about its 'spiritual holocaust' "
IN FEBRUARY 1970 a 16-year-old boy, Zhang Hongbing, denounced his mother to an army officer in his village in Anhui province, in eastern China. He slipped a note under the officer’s door accusing her of criticising the Cultural Revolution and its leader, Mao Zedong. She was bound, publicly beaten and executed. Decades later Mr Zhang began writing a blog about the tragedy, seeking to clear his mother’s name and to explain how her death happened. “I want to make people in China think,” he wrote in April. “How could there be such a horrifying tragedy of…a son sending his mother to execution? And how can we prevent it from happening again?” Mr Zhang suffers recurrent nightmares about his mother. So does China about the Cultural Revolution...

Xi Jinping, China’s president, was himself a victim. Yet his seeming fondness for Mao, his contempt for Western liberal thinking and his ruthless campaigns against political enemies cause some to see parallels between China today and that of Mao’s later years (see article [below]). Like an unexorcised demon, the Cultural Revolution still torments China...

One reason for the silence is private reticence. But another is Mao’s unique position. Whereas in the former Soviet Union, the chief perpetrator of terror, Joseph Stalin, had not been the founder of the Communist state (that was Vladimir Lenin), in China, Mao was both. At the end of his life, he described his two proudest achievements as the founding of Communist China and the launching of the Cultural Revolution. It is impossible to separate one from the other. “Discrediting Comrade Mao Zedong”, said Deng Xiaoping in 1981, “would mean discrediting our party and state.”

That could not be tolerated, so official historians, with Deng’s guidance, concocted a careful formula. In 1981 the Central Committee published a “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party”. It argued that Mao had “initiated and led” the Cultural Revolution, which it called a “grave blunder”. But “as for Lin Biao [Mao’s chosen successor in 1969-71], Jiang Qing and others…the matter is of an entirely different nature. They…committed many crimes behind his [Mao’s] back, bringing disaster to the country and the people.” And having established that, Deng said he hoped debate on major historical questions would come to an end. It was a sort of historical omerta...

Yet however much the Cultural Revolution is ignored officially, it casts a long shadow. Widespread abhorrence of it enabled the eventual rise of pragmatists led by Deng Xiaoping, who ushered in economic and social reforms. But it also exacerbated widespread disenchantment with politics; Rana Mitter, a historian at Oxford University, notes that older generations that suffered under Mao’s endless political campaigns and policy flip-flops transmitted their disillusionment to younger ones. Perhaps, Mr Plankers suggests, Chinese people are unusually determined to succeed in business partly in order to protect themselves against the randomness of power embodied in the Cultural Revolution...

The violence of the Cultural Revolution, and the many officials it claimed as victims, may explain why China’s liberalisation of the economy has not gone hand-in-hand with greater democracy. To Westerners, the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989 may have seemed a million miles from the Red Guards who had assembled there more than two decades earlier screaming Maoist slogans. But to China’s leaders, there has always been a connection: that the Cultural Revolution was a kind of “big democracy” (as Mao called it) in which ordinary people were given the power to topple officials they hated. The students in 1989 may not have been Mao-worshippers, but had they been given a chance, they would have acted just like the Red Guards, according to the logic of Chinese officials—with chaotic, vindictive rage. They produce no evidence. They do not need to. The nightmare of the Cultural Revolution continues to disturb the dream of Chinese democracy.
Mao, diluted: Xi Jinping and the Cultural Revolution - "The Cultural Revolution echoes faintly in Xi Jinping's rule... Many liberals in China wince at a renewed emphasis under Mr Xi on the Communist Party's traditional beliefs, including 'Mao Zedong thought'. They fret about adulation of Mr Xi in the official media—faintly reminiscent of Mao's personality cult, which reached fever pitch during the Cultural Revolution. Others shrug. China needs a strongman like Mao, they say (though not his Red Guard mobs). Mr Xi wants to be seen as such a man... Mr Xi clearly worries that liberals might try to use the horrors of the Cultural Revolution to negate Mao entirely, and thus the party's right to rule. He has been campaigning against what he calls 'historical nihilism', namely attempts to blacken the party's early record by contrasting it with the prosperity of the post-Mao era."

speaking of bad-faith revisionist 'neoliberalism'*...
China asks Britain for advice on creating financial super-regulator
posted by kliuless at 4:56 PM on May 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm in the middle of reading an attack on Franklin Roosevelt, and a weird parallel between free market libertarians (like the author of the FDR attack) and the theory of the Cultural Revolution occurred to me. Part of Mao's stated reasoning for the Cultural Revolution was that, without continuous revolution, a bureaucratic elite would establish a permanent grip on power. He was right about that, of course, as any look at the family ties and family wealth of the current Chinese Communist elite will show. The free-marketeers who opposed the Robber Barons had a similar fear; without continuous market "revolutions", monopolies and oligopolies would congeal into permanent powers, cozy with government.

So they were both right in their predictions of what would happen, at least in the medium term. How bad of a thing that is compared to a state of permanent revolution is where they went wrong.
posted by clawsoon at 10:27 AM on May 16, 2016


  • What Xi Jinping really said about Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong - "I think it is not quite right to read this as Xi glorifying everything about Mao, and saying China made just as much progress during the Great Leap Forward as it did after 1978. What Xi is saying is that the legitimacy of the Communist Party China rests on the whole history of its rule, and that if the legitimacy of Party rule is questioned for one historical period, then it can be questioned for other historical periods. Deng felt the same way, and what Xi is doing in this speech is forcefully repeating Deng's own evaluation of Mao... I do not see much daylight between Xi Jinping and Deng Xiaoping in terms of their positions on Mao Zedong and Communist Party history. Xi is very much following in Deng's footsteps here, though he may be departing from Deng's legacy in other ways."
  • Xi Jinping has changed China's winning formula - "The country's most important policies have been overturned by its strongman leader"
  • Who Is Xi? - "Once Xi Jinping acceded to top office he was widely expected to pursue political liberalization and market reform. Instead he has reinstated many of the most dangerous features of Mao's rule: personal dictatorship, enforced ideological conformity, and arbitrary persecution." (via)
  • Wilhelmine China: a rapidly-industrializing country ruled by a social caste that has lost its role...
  • Climate of fear growing: people are reporting negative discussions to the authorities.
  • Why China Debt Bulls are Mostly Wrong [1,2,3]
  • How China Fell Off the Miracle Path - "After years of rapid growth, China has taken on so much debt that its economy is at great risk."
  • What Drove China's Large Reserve Sales? - "one theory argues that depreciation pressure is mostly a response to an underlying desire by Chinese savers to move funds out of China, a desire that had been repressed prior to financial account liberalization. The other argues that capital outflows—or to be precise, capital outflows in excess of China's quite large trade surplus—are mostly a function of the expectation that Chinese authorities want a weaker yuan to support exports during a time of domestic weakness."
  • China Is Pivoting Away From Imports, Not Just Rebalancing Away From Exports - "China's manufacturing surplus though has hardly moved since 2012 — the manufacturing surplus was 9 percent of China’s GDP in 2012, dipped under 8.5% of China’s GDP in late 2013, then rose to 9 percent in 2014. Even with the recent export slump, it has remained close to 9 percent. The explanation for the ongoing surplus is straight forward: China's imports of manufactures have also been moving down."
  • Chinese target Kuka would assess any European bid - "Kuka is the latest and biggest German industrial technology group to be targeted by a Chinese buyer as the world's second-largest economy makes the transition from a low-cost manufacturer into a high-tech industrial hub. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is trying to coordinate an alternative offer for Kuka, with government sources expressing concerns about losing German technology to China."
  • Camp Alphaville homework, Pettis edition - "The real challenges for China, if you believe in the social capital constraint, are not about maintaining high rates of growth in the short term but rather of raising the levels of social capital in China. This is much more difficult and much more likely to be virulently opposed by the elites whose ability to constrain economic efficiency is precisely at the heart of their wealth – which consists of appropriating resources rather than creating resources – and of their power. It is, however, the only real way to sustain growth over the medium and long terms." (Panel: China - Because Xi's Worth It)
posted by kliuless at 5:56 PM on June 6, 2016


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