Tags: CCP, China, Mao, Society
During the Chinese New Year, the Chinese regime’s documentary channel, CCTV-9, ran a series on declassified China-Russia foreign affair files dating back to the Mao Zedong era. One episode showed Mao’s never-before-aired famous 1957 speech in which he boasted that he had no fear of nuclear war nor how many of the world’s people would be killed, including in China.
Cheng Ming Magazine in Hong Kong reported that the negative impact of the documentary would likely have severely downgraded Mao’s image among Chinese viewers.
With two episodes broadcast nightly for a week, the 18-episode documentary presented historical events previously unknown to the public, including the relationship between China and the former Soviet Union after 1949, and details of the Korean War, and the Taiwan Strait wars.
It also revealed Mao’s relationship with Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, his successor, exposing many instances of mutual scheming, betrayal, political blackmailing and extortion through witness testimonies from Rong Zhi, who worked at the Soviet Embassy in China, and Shi Zhe, the daughter of Mao’s early Russian interpreter.
Chinese history experts on the Cold War, such as Shen Zhihua, Yang Kuisong, and Li Haiwen, provided the latest historical interpretations.
An episode titled “The One Above All” showed footage of Mao speaking at the World Communist Representative Meeting in Moscow in November 1957, giving his famous speech, “American Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger.”
Mao’s exact words were: “I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I’m not afraid of anyone.”
Although this famous quote has been passed around among ordinary Chinese, there are still many who have refused to believe it.
Some media pointed out that now the Communist Party’s television station has confirmed that Mao actually said it, that makes it an undeniable fact. Leftists and Maoists can no longer say that Mao and the Party put the wellbeing of people above all else, they said.
Translation by Alex Wu. Written in English by Gisela Sommer.
Read the original Chinese article.
Tags: CCP, China, Culture, human rights, Mao, persecution of dissidents
Two bold Chinese artists are exhibiting works in the U.S. that could never be shown in China—and Chinese netizens, taken by the hard-hitting political commentary embedded in the pieces, are applauding furiously.
The exhibition “The Gao Brothers: Grandeur and Catharsis,” was held in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, from mid-September last year to Jan. 2 this year.
It included a series of pictures of crimes committed under communism in China, but it was the remarkable life-sized statue of Mao Zedong in the exhibit, called “Mao’s Guilt,” that triggered the mass of online interest from Chinese.
The message may not have even escaped the museum if a Chinese blogger didn’t pick up the news, and pen a blistering essay reflecting on the piece titled “Repent! Mao Zedong.”
Initially published on Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, the author included a picture of the bronze, kneeling and clearly repentant Mao. Searches for “Mao Zedong” on Weibo are blocked, so the author remains anonymous, but the piece has been widely copied on Chinese websites.
The article was scathing: it says Mao was “the combination of the most evil thoughts of the Eastern emperors and the Western totalitarians. He ruined the five thousand years of Chinese civilization, killed 80 million lives, and mercilessly destroyed humanity. He is the first of the three mass murderers of the twentieth century (Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler).”
The article goes on to say: “Mao should kneel in front of all the Chinese people and repent. He should kneel in front of the Chinese culture and repent. He should kneel in front of the conscience of mankind and repent.”
Tags: CCP, China, Mao
By James Burke
Epoch Times Staff
BANGKOK—In order to help him sleep at night, 10-year-old Jiang Nai Ke ate the plaster from the walls of his grandparent’s home to dull his hunger pains during the worst period of the Great Famine.
All around him during 1960 people began dying of starvation. By the time the famine came to a halt in 1962, half of the people in the village where he lived in Liaoning province, northern China, had perished.
“People did what they did to survive, they ate anything,” said Jiang now in his early 60s and living in Bangkok. “Some people even ate the dirt; they would grab the earth and eat it.”
Some even resorted to cannibalism.
Great Leap Forward
Two years earlier in 1958, Communist Party leader Mao Zedong instigated his Great Leap Forward which he said would propel China’s agricultural and industrial output ahead of the developed world.
“The officials implemented some very weird decisions on how to conduct farming in 1958,” recalled Jiang who described the land around his grandparent’s village as consisting of sandy soil that was able to grow peanuts, corn, rice and wheat.
“It was a political movement called ‘digging the earth.’ The farmers even had to dig up crops they were growing and near ready to harvest, just to use these new techniques. The people had to dig one meter deep and the good topsoil was put one meter underground, so it was not good for planting. It was useless and crazy,” Jiang said.
Mao’s Great Famine
The famine was the result of The Great Leap Forward (1958–62), which were economic and social reforms that Mao Zedong said would propel China toward a socialist utopian future.
Based on Chinese Communist Party archives, an estimated 45 million people died in what is mankind’s worst man-made disaster.
At least 2.5 million people during this period were tortured to death or executed.
To “maintain face” during The Great Leap Forward, China exported food overseas during the worst years of the famine.
Tags: CCP, China, human rights, Mao, persecution of dissidents
Which mechanisms in humans can get them to honour and follow those who express fanatical, extreme and destructive thoughts? In fact this is still going on today.
Once the terror has established itself in a country and a terror leader or regime has come into power, delation and forcible language are among the various forms of terror that exists, from top to bottom in the hierarchy of society. Life then turns out to be a matter of life and death, and to express a personal opinion could endanger your life.
I read a great book about this, a biography written by an Austrian police who during Hitler’s regime was drawn into a destructive spiral of violence and survival, because of his profession.
This touching book made me understand those mechanisms and it is precisely this that still happens today in China and in its country of alliance, North Korea. Since the countries are closed in an informational way, those regimes can brainwash their people. For most of the Chinese and North Korean people, they have nothing to compare with and can’t resist the propaganda. With lies the populations are getting manipulated, and nationalism becomes poor food for the soul.
Mao Zedong: “Mao’s policies and political purges from 1949 to 1976 are widely believed to have caused the deaths of between 40 to 70 million people.” Wikipedia
Stalin: “Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million. In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, the various terror campaigns launched by the Soviet government claimed no fewer than 15 million lives. Others maintain that their earlier higher victim total estimates are correct.” (Up to 60 million lives). Wikipedia
Hitler: “Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians.” English Wikipedia
Swedish Wikipedia says […] In those camps (Holocaust) are believed some 9 million people have been murdered. […] 14 million Slavs have been working slaves, some 40 million have been executed and an equal number deported. The war on the Eastern Front was a mass war, unprecedented in size and ferocity. The war is estimated to have cost 27 million Russian lives, of whom 17 million were civilians. In Poland, died during the war about every six inhabitants, 6 million people.”
The book below is looking at how the West’s young people, intellectuals and workers could be so dazzled by the mass murderer Mao’s political ideology.
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin
Review | Books | The Guardian
In a notorious speech during the 2007 presidential election campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy lambasted the “legacy of 1968″ in France for having ushered in “intellectual and moral relativism”. This opportunistic gesture towards the conservative electorate was rather surprising since no politician with Sarkozy’s tumultuous private life would have had any chance of being elected president without the liberalisation of moral attitudes that occurred in France after May ’68. To confuse matters further, once he had been elected, Sarkozy chose as foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins sans Frontières, who had been an activist in 1968 and sees himself as faithful to the values of that year.
What this shows is that the legacy of ’68 remains hotly debated in France, and this readable book by the American academic Richard Wolin is an important contribution to that debate. If people tend to remember May ’68 nowadays in terms of sexual liberalisation, at the time protesters spoke the language of Marxism, and Wolin focuses on one particularly radical Marxist group – the French Maoists – whose heyday was the period 1967-73. This might seem a somewhat narrow subject until we remember that the supporters of the Maoists included such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre (who had nothing else in common).
This was a time when the language of politics was extraordinarily violent. André Glucksmann, now one of the anti-totalitarian “new philosophers” of whom the most famous is Bernard-Henri Lévy, believed in his Maoist phase that France was a fascist country; Sartre called for popular tribunals to counteract bourgeois justice. Not to be outdone, Foucault advocated a “people’s justice” without courts on the lines of the September massacres of 1792.
Another entry: A Touching Eyewitness Report – Wild Swans
Tags: CCP, China, Gandhi, Gao Zhisheng, human rights, Mao, persecution of dissidents
Both were against class divisions and attracted followers from all around the world. Concerning the rest it is difficult to imagine two more different fathers of the people. Gandhi preached non-violence, truth, democracy, freedom, celibacy, vegetarianism and was killed by a murderer’s bullet. Mao Zedong was a military genius, was preaching the dictatorship of the masses, secrecy, crush down truth-telling people and wallowed in pork and young women before he died of a heart attack.
Gandhi also never ruled India. Instead it was Nerhu who shaped India, as Mao created China of today. Today, in China 2010, appears Gandhi’s ideas as crazy radicals. One is amazed that the British did not stop him. Gandhi himself said he was “in love with the British Empire’s ideals of giving every citizen the freest possible scope to do what the conscience obliges him to”.
When the British in 1919 tried to legislate tough censorship Gandhi launched a nationwide ‘satyagraha’, a protest campaign. It was the beginning of the fight that ended with the independence of India 1947. Gandhi abhorred censorship for: “No society can be built on denying the freedom of individuals”.
Over half a century later, it is China with its strong economy that sets examples for the world. The number of democracies is steadily decreasing, freedom diminishes, the human rights situation deteriorates. The discussion in Beijing seems now not about whether they should be authoritative, but how much more authoritarian they should be.
Gao Zhisheng is today China’s most “known” dissident. A lawyer who became involved in human rights. He drew on himself the wrath of the authorities when he 2007 managed to smuggle out a letter that described how he was tortured. “The only tyrant I accept is the still small voice within me,” said Gandhi. Gao Zhisheng’s problem was that he followed his inner voice. Since more than a year, he is gone. The fears are that he is dead or in such poor condition that the authorities do not want to let him be seen. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu commented that Gao is “where he belongs”. Ma has also said that: “There are no dissidents in China”. Chinese state-controlled press does not mention Gao or the many other prisoners of conscience.
Thanks to free speech Gandhi could transform the prison sentences to a promotional method. When he threatened to starve himself to death, all of India listened, nay the whole world. The British were forced time and again to reverse. But Gandhi also noted that: “It’s not possible to fast against a tyrant.”
I asked the other day two Chinese journalists if they knew who Gao Zhisheng was? They had never heard the name.