The Return of Mao: a New Threat to China’s Politics
Posted: October 2, 2016 Filed under: Asia, China, Global | Tags: Beijing, China, Chinese people, Communist Party of China, Cultural Revolution, G20, Great Leap Forward, Hangzhou, Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square, Xi Jinping, Xinhua News Agency 1 CommentThe dictator is enjoying a surge of popularity. But the rise of this neo-Maoist movement could upend China’s stability.
Jamil Anderlini writes: A heavy pall of pollution hangs over Tiananmen Square and from a distance the giant portrait of Mao Zedong above the entrance to the Forbidden City looks a little smudged. It is 8am and the temperature in central Beijing is already approaching 30C.
But the heat and smog are no deterrent to the thousands of people waiting in hour-long queues to pay respects to the preserved body of the “great helmsman”. Since his death 40 years ago, Chairman Mao’s corpse — or, more likely, a wax replica — has been on display in a purpose-built mausoleum in the geographic and figurative heart of the Chinese capital. Well over 200 million people have visited.
In the west, Mao is understood chiefly as China’s “Red Emperor” — a vicious dictator who fostered an extreme personality cult, launched the disastrous Cultural Revolution and masterminded a “Great Leap Forward” that resulted in the worst famine in history. Experts estimate that Mao was responsible for between 40 million and 70 million deaths in peacetime — more than Hitler and Stalin combined.
[Read the full text here, at FT.com]
However, while Hitler, Stalin and most of the other totalitarian dictators of the 20th century were repudiated after their deaths, Mao remains a central figure in modern China. The Communist party he helped found in 1921 and the authoritarian Leninist political system he established in 1949 still run the country. “Mao Zedong Thought” is enshrined in the party’s constitution and, since 1999, his face has adorned most banknotes (something he refused to allow during his lifetime).
But this whitewashing of Mao’s legacy is a risky strategy. Thanks to the party’s tight control over education, media and all public discourse, most people in China know very little of Mao’s terrible mistakes. Indeed, the dictator is more popular today than at any time since his death. Last year nearly 17 million people made pilgrimages to his home town — Shaoshan — in rural central China. In the mid-1980s, barely 60,000 undertook the journey.
China has also seen the rise of a vocal political movement of “neo-Maoists” — militant leftists who espouse many of the utopian egalitarian ideas that China’s current leaders have largely abandoned. These neo-Maoists are by definition an underground movement, which makes it very difficult to estimate their numbers, but public petitions sympathetic to their cause have garnered tens of thousands of signatures in recent years.
[Read the full story here, at FT.com]
Several experts believe a neo-Maoist candidate would probably win a general election in China today, should free elections ever be allowed. This means the movement could enjoy the sympathy of hundreds of millions of China’s 1.4 billion people. As such, it poses one of the biggest threats facing the authoritarian system in the world’s most populous nation today.
“Speed up comrades, walk forward,” a young man in a clean white shirt with a bullhorn yells at the tourists lined up in Tiananmen Square, many of whom bow three times before a large Mao statue as they enter the mausoleum. Visitors are not allowed to take photos and tall paramilitary officers shoo people along, ensuring nobody gets more than a quick glimpse of the figure wrapped in the hammer and sickle flag and laid out in a crystal coffin behind a glass wall. Just a kilometre away is the heavily guarded compound where China’s current leaders work and live.
“Chairman Mao was a truly great man but this is not the country he dreamt of, this is not real communism.”
Many of the people visiting Mao’s remains have been left behind by China’s economic boom in recent decades. They see Mao as a symbol of a simpler, fairer society — a time when everyone was poorer but at least they were equally poor. Those who have studied the resurgence in Mao’s popularity in China see it as part of a broader global phenomenon that encompasses the appeal of Donald Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK and populist politicians on the left and right in Europe. At a time of sharp dislocation and intense resentment towards elites, people in many countries are attracted by nostalgia and tradition. For ordinary people in China, that means Mao and the classless society he envisioned. Read the rest of this entry »
China Father Beats Daughter to Death for Copying Classmate’s Homework
Posted: May 21, 2014 Filed under: Asia, China, Crime & Corruption | Tags: China, Elementary school, Guangdong, Hangzhou, Kenosha Unified School District, Restraining order, Shanxi, WISN-TV 1 CommentAn 11-year-old girl in China was beaten to death by her father for copying a classmate’s homework, state-run media said on Wednesday.
The man “ordered the girl to kneel down, tied her hands and beat her”, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The father took her to hospital after she stopped breathing but she died the next day, Xinhua said.
Doctors at the hospital in Hangzhou found bruises and injuries on the girl’s neck and back and signs she had been choked for as long as five minutes, the Xiandai Jinbao said.
The incident is the latest in a series of child abuse incidents in China that have drawn widespread outrage. Read the rest of this entry »
Police Raid Activist Dinner Party in China
Posted: May 13, 2014 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, China | Tags: Beijing, China, Gao Yu, Hangzhou, Pu Zhiqiang, Tiananmen Square protests 1989, Wednesday, Zhiqiang 3 CommentsBEIJING (AP) — Chinese police broke up a dinner party attended by activists in the eastern city of Hangzhou Tuesday night and detained a dozen people, according to an activist who attended the dinner.
“Recently, inside the country people have been getting nervous because they’ve been detaining people…”
Activist and blogger Wang Wusi said he and another 10 people were released after spending about two hours in police custody. He said police held Wen Kejian until Wednesday morning, when he was released although without his cell phone or computer. Wen is a signatory of Charter 08, a document calling for democracy and the end of one-party rule in China.
“We just wanted to get together and discuss this because we all feel the pressure growing.”
— Activist and blogger Wang Wusi
Wang said Wednesday that they had been warned by police that they would not be allowed to meet. He said they organized the event in response to the recent detentions of other activists. Read the rest of this entry »
Mmmm China vending machine sells delicious large hairy crabs
Posted: September 12, 2013 Filed under: China | Tags: China, China News Service, Hangzhou, Japan, Jiangsu, Vending, Vending machine, Wang Qishan Leave a commentBEIJING – There’s not a lot you can’t get out of a vending machine. Add large, hairy crabs to that list.
A Chinese entrepreneur on Wednesday opened up a vending machine that dispenses the chilled delicacy like a candy bar. The crabs, prized for their sweetness, always turn up in markets around China’s mid-autumn festival, a popular harvest celebration in east Asia. Read the rest of this entry »