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Mao Apologists
Sam
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A lot of people I know seem to have a kneejerk reaction when it comes to Mao or the PRC in general.
Apparently it is important that American neocolonialism was avoided and essential in order for China to stand its own ground against the U.S.
I just find the whole thing problematic from a logical standpoint.
I can understand the necessity to establish a strong political union in the extremely volatile region. I can even understand how democracy is an impediment in some situations, and that this was one of them.
What I have a problem with is the fact that the People's Party is still basically an exploitative lord over the people, the same way it was during "communism" which was basically leftist fascism that bore little resemblance to the Marxian concept.
Can it be argued that China would've been worse off under Chiang Kai Shek? Wasn't Mao allied with Russia before the U.S even wanted to support Chiang? (Their first bet was Mao's party)
Apparently it is important that American neocolonialism was avoided and essential in order for China to stand its own ground against the U.S.
I just find the whole thing problematic from a logical standpoint.
I can understand the necessity to establish a strong political union in the extremely volatile region. I can even understand how democracy is an impediment in some situations, and that this was one of them.
What I have a problem with is the fact that the People's Party is still basically an exploitative lord over the people, the same way it was during "communism" which was basically leftist fascism that bore little resemblance to the Marxian concept.
Can it be argued that China would've been worse off under Chiang Kai Shek? Wasn't Mao allied with Russia before the U.S even wanted to support Chiang? (Their first bet was Mao's party)
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Playing 21st century quarterback is pretty useless. Saying "that was a bad play" is useless and stretches the outer limits of the imagination, but saying "that was a good play even though millions died" is just lunacy.
And Stalin apologists. Is it that surprising?
I suppose not, Stalin is oddly beloved. I've just never heard an actual argument by a person stating they were cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
So I could try to get a handle on what your talking about. I assume Mao apologists are saying things could have gone worse for china, Mao didn't do too bad.
To the best of my knowledge your correct that the Chinese government is still more like communism then a republic or democracy. Would they have ended up with a different (better?) system of government if Mao had never existed/lost? Maybe. It's hard to second guess history though, chaos theory and all that.
It's just a uniquely fucked up version of 'the good old days' by the elderly. And who knows, if you managed to survive this long it may have actually not been that bad for you. They didn't get sent to a Gulag, afterall.
Yes. Often you'll here them spouting the Party line that Mao was responsible for the Japanese leaving China. Sometimes you'll get idiots that think good intentions are vastly more important then the means used and the end result of those intentions.
"He wanted to make a workers paradise. The 20 million dead from starvation was an oops."
And no, he's not a lefty, he's an investment bank Romney supporting douche
And then we have one crazy one that thinks Mao was the greatest guy ever and thinks all of Tibet should be razed, but he's around 82 so he's a touch more old fashioned.
However, once he was there, obviously, he was a colossal fuckup.
This person is just silly. Does he expect China to maintain a completely isolationist policy in today's world with respect to financial, political, and cultural influences?
As a higher-ranking Chinese American, I hereby revoke his Chinese heritage for being a dolt.
To say he had a lot of good PR back in the day is a massive understatement; people were conditioned to view him on par with the way the religious might view high ranking saints or prophets. He wasn't god, but he was as close as you could come in a forced secular country. A lot of younger (mid 30's or so) people from those countries have rosy impressions of him as well. It's kind of a trip talking to them about their own history.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Not today obviously. It's like a binary between Chinese and Western exploitation of China.
A Nationalist victory would have created a situation like South Korea- a Western pocket regime opposed to the Soviets, not democratic...but certainly more stable and wealthier than the PRC ever managed. South Korea eventually became a democracy, as well.
More likely you'd have a North China and a South China sort of situation, with the country split between a Communist, Soviet-puppet regime in the North and a Capitalist, American puppet regime in the South. I know which one I'd rather live in, but the addition of such a major flashpoint in the Cold War could have had unpredictable side-effects like "global thermonuclear war."
Not so much an "apology" but as an explanation Mao fits in perfectly to Chinese history. The founder of every Imperial dynasty was that type. Driven, ambitious, egomaniacial bastards. You don't become emperor otherwise (and there really was no functional difference between Mao's position that that of, say, Ming Taizu.
You get a Founder type, followed by (if he is lucky) one or two generations of moderately competent successors before the bureaucracy takes over again and eventually the country splits apart sufficiently for a new warlord Founder type to come to power. Some dynasties were luckier than others in having competent successors (the Ming in particular had a long period of growth early on) but they all fell apart in the end.
That makes Mao a good emperor, although it's more accurate to say Deng became the next emperor then they swept the whole one guy's fantasy come to life thing under the carpet to some extent
I don't think the People's Party is going to lose power anytime soon. As for democracy, not a day before 2047, and when that time comes it will depend on stuff that hasn't happened yet.
His suspicion against anything intellectual and scientific made him order the population to produce worthless pig-iron, and pride made him continue with it even after informed and then slowly and quietly abandoning the project months after the fact.
Then leaving them all to starve
So... you're like... what, a colonel? How does this work?
My flatmate seems to like Mao. Seems to think that the Cultural Revolution was good, even though his family lost everything. I think he should do more research on it personally.
Wiki has a good article on the Sino Russo split as well which goes to some length to explain the interpretation of communism between Russia and China.
Then of course there's the cultural revolution which arguably destroyed millenia of chinese culture, but which can't be blamed for its economic tenets since it was basically a civil war.
As for the North-South scenario proposed earlier. I'm not so sure it works that way. What's more likely is a satellite Manchuria, seeing as the Soviets were in control of it after WW2 (previously a Japanese puppet regime).
You know the type, with Che Guevara on their shirts and so on.
All those dead Chinese he killed.
No, those guys aren't the worst. The worst is the guy the OP described, the "investment banking ethnic chinese romney supporting douche." That's pure racial-political nationalism; I'd bet $50 bucks that this guy would never want to give China's own colonial possession, Tibet, independence. It's not a point of insane principle, but sheer "my country right or wrong" crap. It's really unpleasan and makes me glad to be an american who is happily post-bismarckian-conception-of-state-and-citizenship.
I've known a good number of Chinese people who hold this basic view, even if it doesn't go so far as actual Mao apologism. A common argument is that China is too large and disparate to have anything but strong centralized powers. On (highly educated) Chinese woman I know told me that Chinese culture was too lazy and conniving to be trusted with anything but a dictator. There's also a lot of running resentment against Taiwan and Chiang Kai Shek, and I guess Mao is seen as the historical alternative
Actually yeah, he thinks Dalai Lama is a lying sack of shit. While Lama is a politicker, and the Lama system is essentially serfdom for Tibetans (Although one would assume Dalai would change it were he in power, what he would've done had he not been kicked out is anyone's guess)
But yeah the guy thinks China is best for Tibet, in terms of quality of life, infrastructure, etc.
well he only murdered political prisoners, the majority he let starve by single handedly causing a famine.
We're talking about recovering from 30 (effectively 40) years of deterioration that isn't justifiably necessary and was the result of a power seizure.
That's a matter of perspective. Today rural development is stagnant, there's the arguable social cost of controlling information and life to that degree- The guy I mentioned in the OP made the same claim mentioned about the necessity for controlling the crazy populace. And China is a pretty dangerous place. I don't see what the status quo is doing to change that aspect of rural society.
It's a highly exploited and alienated population overall. This generally fosters poverty and crime. Their justification perpetuates itself.
Oddly, the Chinese famine was caused by the same guy as Stalin's Russian Famine - Trofim Lysinko, who tried to apply communist ideology to agriculture with disastrous results. Mao gets extra points for stupidity because he hired Lysinko after Lysinko caused the Russian famine.
Also, Mao's ideas on industrialization - backyard smelters and high quotas for metal production - were disastrous to Chinese economy and industrialization.
Really, though, China seems to have a long history of revolutions/ coups followed by disastrous policies enacted by central authorities followed by revolutions/ coups.
Obviously Mao's policies were faulty, but the rest of the government just kind of exacerbated it.
Well, the production rate thing was really a top-down edict. Basically, a lot of Chinese peasants in trying to meet these ridiculous quotas, started smelting down their pots, pans, agricultural implements, plowshares, tools and basically anything that could smelt. So they ended up with a lot of useless pig-iron for the central government rather than tools that could keep their agricultural production going and their lives basically working.