On Being Black in China
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite
these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to
prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time
would have been willing to align themselves actively with
the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy
in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part
to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the
U.S.
After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of
alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples
gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic
development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is
glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has
fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth,
leaving little room for concern with past ideals.
One might even call such a view - that all that matters is a person's professed attitude towards a black American - culturally imperialist. As the author notes in passing, post-Deng China is substantively doing a lot more for people of African origin via trade than Maoist China ever did. But all that matters are the "past ideals". A modern expression of the modern American religion: thou shalt not be saved through works, only through lip service towards MLK alone.
There was in fact a qualitative change in popular Chinese outlook from Mao to Deng, never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. White people were associated with rich and powerful western nations, so their prestige increased. Black people were associated with poor African nations, so their prestige decreased. This was independent of any preferences for light and delicate features.
And I think this was one of the author's points, that shifts in popular outlook have affected Chinese perceptions of black people. What might once have been an asset (perception of shared suffering under capitalist/imperialist oppression) is now a liability ("we're poor but not as poor as you!").
never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China
became more materialistic, less ideological, less
idealistic.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/m...
Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China,
qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history,
an expert who had unprecedented access to official
Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival,
Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found
that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap
Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy
of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing
"one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history
from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine,
compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and
killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its
magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved
or beaten to death in China over these four years; the
worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the
Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago.
He argued that this devastating period of history – which
has until now remained hidden – has international
resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust
as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century....
It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's
genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.
However, pollution has also gotten worse. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? In a village I know, the central government is now paying for a landfill. This is great, since now the villagers won't throw their non-recyclable household waste into the river. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao?
This article was about black people in China, not Mao, not the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution, and you are changing the subject.
You know some history. Most people who are reading that Atlantic article don't have this context at all. This is because people get their history from movies, and Hollywood chooses to make movies like the Karate Kid remake (about anti-black racism in China) or this Red Dawn farce rather than movies about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the consequences of being "idealistic" and "ideological".
"Ideological" is bad. It's not good. It led to a lot of people dying. And the support for "oppressed peoples" that the OP thinks so much of is intimately tied to the rhetoric of communism, which is invariably and horrifically belied by the reality. To repeat said rhetoric uncritically is to bury those people again. Their deaths were denied in speeches at the time and they are glossed over in writing today. This is wrong. We need to remember them.
So yeah, unfortunately I don't think you can hold up the Maoist era as comparatively positive in any substantive regard without acknowledging that said act is morally equivalent to "Mussolini/Hitler made the trains run on time."
And the thing is - Mao didn't even make the trains run on time. He destroyed China to such an extent that people were forced to eat each other's children to survive.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-c...
For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good
for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning
fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great
Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the
larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the
widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most
sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of
human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so
people could use them for food without committing the
additional sin of eating their own.
It has of course been known for many years that the Great
Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from
roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing
bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written
the most compelling and complete account of that calamity,
describing it systematically as it affected the
countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps
for ''rightists'' and other political prisoners that China
maintained at the time.
I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao, they were the ones who swept him to power.
Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people, the famine was the result of cockamamie policies of indigenous industrialization to be made possible by massive planned increases in farm productivity freeing up labor.
And the leadership was blinded by ideology and convinced themselves it was working, and the political climate was such that no one dared contradict Mao, everyone reported massive production, so even as people were starving they exported food to get industrial products. They didn't set out to kill people, it just happened due to incompetence, a bad system with bad incentives, and ideological hubris.
Mao was a nutty tyrant, and yet he gave the peasants literacy, medical care, and paved the way for modern China. He was preferred by those peasants to Chiang, who conscripted/enslaved peasants, sent them to fight the Japanese, but 40% died of disease and starvation before they saw action. Even with American support (admittedly tepid since they knew him well) Chiang couldn't beat Mao. (Google 'Chiang February 28' for more about what a great guy he was).
Estimates of excess deaths in Iraq, are done doing a similar methodology, range from 400,000 to a couple of million. If those were due to bad policies and ideological hubris, do those constitute genocide?
Anyway, history is quite complicated, we don't judge the Brits just by the famines in Bengal either, although the 'g' word sometimes comes up.
It's a good article about a black American's perspective on China, so of course it's from a very specific point of view, and in order to get a perspective on Mao and blacks, it doesn't need to say he was also responsible for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a period in 1956 in the
People's Republic of China during which the Communist
Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly
express their opinions of the communist regime. After this
brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed
course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-
Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the
regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly
criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao
remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out
of their caves."
http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting
In the thirty years following the establishment of the
People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were no clear
laws governing executions, which were carried out on a
massive scale. In the earliest years, millions of
Kuomintang soldiers, landlords, and members of the
bourgeois class, seen as threats to the new regime, were
killed. In 1950 alone, 2 million people were executed as
part of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries”
campaign.
Throughout the Mao period, the number of executions always
peaked during political campaigns. In 1971, 100,000 people
were executed during a single campaign, one of many such
campaigns during the Cultural Revolution period. During
these political campaigns, particularly in the 1950s,
regional governments were often tasked with meeting
execution quotas, premised on Mao’s belief that a certain
percentage of the population was always beyond reform.
But really, you should ask yourself why you decided to get into the nasty business of Holocaust Denial. Tens of millions of people died, and they were murdered by Mao, his men, and the communist regime under his total control. Google a bit, read the primary sources from the period. The famine was the same thing that happened in the USSR, and what always happens when farmers have their land stolen by communist regimes. As for the mechanics of how that happened, shooting a farmer in the back of the head or sending him to a prison labor camp wasn't an "accident".
Whether you choose to admit these truths or not is up to you, but it gets to the core of why this point needs to be raised and not simply glossed over by the likes of the OP. Mao was not some mere hapless incompetent as you're trying to portray him, some well-meaning guy who f'd up. He was directly responsible for the largest mass murder in history.
The people Mao murdered should indeed be remembered over Mao himself, and mentioned whenever his name is mentioned. The deaths were denied at the time and they are all-too-frequently elided now. We need to remember them.
First, the huge majority of those deaths were due to famine.
Second, it was in a country in great turmoil, civil war, and a revolution (regime change, if you prefer). In places where such things happen -- as opposed to an country with a stable political climate like the US, people die (including by execution).
Someone from a stable country cannot relate, but think of the Civil War and the tons of deaths. Or the French revolution. Those doesn't mean one leader or a handful is the only one to blame, like one does not pin civil war deaths to Lincoln or the confederate leaders. Such are the times.
Countries do not get into such messes by one "bad apple" leader. On the contrary, the leaders represent the general problems in the society in general. Even Hitler was voted by a majority of Germans, which ascribed to the same ideals long before he came to power (and for the "philosophical" parts of nazism, even decades ago, e.g Nietchze, Wagner, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and tons of lesser intellectuals).
Sir, that famine was in large part due to movements commandeered by Mao - such as the Great Leap Forward which completely decimated Chinese farming and agriculture.
Same way, as one has to ask if without Stalin's forced industrialization, USSR would be able to stand to the Nazis (and, if it could not, if Europe could). Besides the tragic human aspect, one has to see these kind of events with an impartial eye, just for their long term effects.
The best one can say is, China was a basket case before Mao, he established a strong system of central control and a level of human development ie literacy and medical care, and those paved the way for development after Mao.
Whoa, that's way unfair, particularly to Nietzsche, who deplored anti-semitism and mocked it (along with Germans in general, for that matter—if there's any group he picked on it was them), and who would surely have been the first person to repudiate his thuggish sister's Nazification of his work. Nietzsche's sensibility was far too refined for him to deserve lumping in with Nazi intellectuals. I'd go so far as to say that anyone who understands the first thing about him would have to agree, though I'm far from a Nietzsche scholar and shouldn't say such things.
Wagner you can have.
Heidegger is a complex case. As far as I know the jury is still out about the relation between his philosophy and Nazism. It's certainly not obvious. (And his personal behaviour is a different question.)
Schmitt, sure, except he was born in 1888 and hardly predates Hitler.
The majority of German artists and intellectuals weren't aligned with the Nazis, so I don't think your argument is very strong here, though of course it's not true that Hitler was a lone bad apple or whatever.
He had contradictory points on those issues (even besides his supposdely falsification by his sister). But the core structure of his philosophy is compatible with the idea of nazism (if not for the masses, then as it was conceived by the elites, and for themselves).
One does not pin civil war deaths on Lincoln. But if Lincoln had led the country into ruin and mass death after the war was over, he would be blamed for those deaths, and rightly so. Thus with Mao. The People's Republic was established in 1949. The civil war at that point was over, no serious external enemies threatened, and the government's control was solid. What followed is not justifiable.
As for Hitler, he was not voted by a majority of Germans. The Nazis peaked at about 1/3rd of the vote. Hitler became chancellor through political maneuvering, not majority support. He did kind of obtain power legitimately, but don't confuse that with being voted in by a majority.
These things don't suddenly disappear with the official end of the war. It's a country of a billion people, a regime change, trouble with neighbors, fight for the leadership etc. So, "X is in power all turmoil can stop now", is not really how it works.
>As for Hitler, he was not voted by a majority of Germans. The Nazis peaked at about 1/3rd of the vote.
44% actually. And by majority it means they got the most votes of any other party at the time, not that they got 51%. (Heck, the rulling parties for the last two elections in my country didn't even have anywhere near 40%).
And besides that, after Hitler was established in power, he had an almost total following from the German people, and very little (if at all) internal resistance.
Mao's government was strong enough, within just a few years, to fight the US military to a standstill in a foreign war. What's the excuse for the millions who died after that?
That will do, yes.
Although:"relative majority (Brit) - the excess of votes or seats won by the winner of an election over the runner-up when no candidate or party has more than 50 per cent.
>What's the excuse for the millions who died after that?
Political and social struggles in a huge empire state that had made a huge change in the way it has been run for millenia?
A lot of people seem to ascribe to the "cult of personality", but with or without Mao, it would have been done.
That's why it was done almost in parallel in other countries too.
Lots of people have the crazy theory that some guys, maybe because they had too much swag or because people were of lower IQ back then or something, managed to rise from nowhere and get hundrends of millions to follow them, changed their countries etc.
The real story is that the historical currents had formed to move those countries out of their aggrarian past. They had to do something or perish in the modern age, and due to mix of circumstances and need, those kind of figures emerged to deliver that change.
It was a time of huge changes all around -- the colonial struggles, WWI, WWII, communism rising, right wing dictatorships -- those things did not happen all in parallel because some guys managed to dupe billions into following them.
Russia has a long history of serfdom, an authoritarian regime, young people passionate about change, a huge territory and large population etc. China, about the same, only much larger.
In fact, if anything it's the opposite: most countries failed to ever make the transition (most of the third world for example, Africa, Asia, Latin America).
As for the Western countries that made the same transition:
a) some made it peacefully (those that were in better position to do so, namely: small and manageable, with an established social order from before, no dangerous neighbours and plenty of money rolling in).
b) others had no "starving of millions of people to death" mainly because they got a good deal out of starving millions of OTHER people to death. E.g France, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, financing their industrial age with looting and enslaving their colonies in Africa, Asia, etc.
(And we should not forget the bloody continental European wars and revolutions that got a lot of countries out of agrarian feudalism and aristocracy and into the modern type industrial republic. Millions died in the French Revolution, the Napoleonian wars and the subsequent turmoil than made France into a modern republic, and then there was WWI. The difference is that China, more slow moving, went through a similar situation well in the 20th Century).
I thought the article might make that point, which would have explained the teaching anecdote, but instead, the author sees the opposite trend:
"Unlike their parents and grandparents, China's youth have grown up with access to information, entertainment, and art from all over the world. Many have consequently come to reconsider stereotypes of black people, and they are in turn influencing the opinions of their older, more "traditional" relatives."
I was hoping he would come back around and try to explain the apparent contradiction.
Mao during the 1970's Sino-Soviet split wanted to create his own ideological alternative as a third way to the American capitalist decadence and the Soviet revisionist. So he struck a lot of deals with African go'vt back then to give their students education grants to Chinese universities. I honestly don't think Mao had an understanding of the African American experience in the sense of "Invisible Man," "Their Eyes Were Watching God" etc. but simply had an abstract understanding of "third-world solidarity".
Nowadays, the Chinese leadership is helping Africa in the name of the third-way of "peaceful rise" and "political non-interference to internal affairs" as the alternative to "America, the World Police" of UN/IMF/World Bank. Again I don't think Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping really relate to the health, socio-economic concerns of African people but simply wants access to the oil of Sudan and the soft power in the international stage.
All of this international diplomacy and economic deals does very little to affect the average Chinese person's attitude towards African's which is very racist. But I'd add that in my experience, racism is China is no worse than racism in America except the difference is that the average majority-member in the States is well-versed in political correctness or guilt that they know not to offend people in public and in private.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests
1960 to 1970 was when China actually came out of darkness (life expectancies rising from 45 to over 60). You could argue that this was because Deng (and other reformers, when Deng was purged) had managed to seize enough control that Mao couldn't do too much damage. The Cultural Revolution (which is the time period we are talking about) was bad for the people who were targeted, but China just didn't have that many educated people that trying to kill them all would make an appreciable dent in life expectancies. China would probably have developed a lot faster if it hadn't destroyed its education system, but it still grew pretty quick (even during the Cultural Revolution).
So basically, over Mao's life China went for a life expectancy of 35 to a life expectancy 60. Much of this was probably Deng fixing up the things that Mao broke.
Maoism is a terrible system of government, but it turns out it's streets ahead of feudalism. Really, the heads of the Qing dynasty should really go down as the worst leaders ever (imagine a century of people dying at the same rate as the Great Leap), with Mao as a runner up.
“Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s
Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same
period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman.
Which reader would have been better informed about the
realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give
us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-commun...
The present-day East Asian cultures have become strangely obsessed with image. There was one Taiwanese pop star, I think her name was Jolin or something, she's rumored to have had 3 different plastic surgeries in the last however many years, and come out looking quite different in each one. It's supposedly kind of scandalous now in Korea, when a husband and wife marry and then the kids turn out looking nothing like the parents.
Doesn't seem like a bad thing, just means that there should a good market for plastic surgery for the next generation.
creating a vacuum of knowledge, drawing in stereotypes and prejudice
at some point you have to just stop giving a shit what other people think of your race/skin color.
Racist heatmaps?
Relevant (but unanswered, unfortunately) questions on the site I'm building:
>then find out that your experience there is not going to be like your friend's was.
yep, he may be a cool guy and you're a party pooper or vise verse :)
A CIA spy is on his first day scouting Moscow. Fluent in Russian, he is confident of blending into the crowd. First, he stops at a store to get an apple. The lady there gives him a big smile, "Morning Mr American, how can I help you?" Shocked, he quietly buys an apple. Next stop, an old lady on a park bench. "Morning ma'am, can I have the time please?" "Sure, Mr American, it's 9.15." He's really worried. Is his disguise that thin? He meets a cop and asks directions. Having received the usual "Certainly Mr American, it's the third block on your left," he asks, "Excuse me, how do you know I'm from the US?" "That's easy," replies the policeman, "you're black."
I'm definitely a party pooper:) I'm often suprised by the amount or racism that can be directed at you in places where there aren't any black people to be angry at, though.
Don't mistake xenophobia where the "other" at that given moment and place just happens to be, for example, a black with racism toward blacks.