Re: china

Even if one accepts Randy McDonald's numbers that "tens of thousands of
people were imprisoned or murdered" during the Cultural Revolution in China,
isn't it a bit of exaggeration to then refer to the so-called "human costs"
as being "immeasurable" as Randy McDonald concludes.  By that definition of
"immeasurable" what would one say of U.S.-organized situations, such as the
tens of thousands of civilians murdered in Chile, the 80,000 civilians
murdered in El Salvador in the 1980's, the 100,000 civilians murdered in
Guatemala, the half million or so murdered in Indonesia, or the several
million civilians killed in Vietnam?  And why is it assumed that all the
people imprisoned or killed were innocent? There was something of a civil
war, and while I don't want to justify the killings of innocent people, one
has to be somewhat circumspect about much of the reporting.

Just some thoughts,

Alan Spector


-----Original Message-----
From: The McDonald Family <mcdonald@isn.net>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: Monday, May 01, 2000 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: china


At 03:22 PM 4/28/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>This has been an interesting and illuminating exchange on state
>"socialism," its pluses and minuses.
>
>In the course of more in-depth discussion of the USSR and Europe, China
>comes up again, and again, it is asserted that terrible, terrible things
>happened during the Cultural Revolution.
>
>What were they?  What is the evidence?
>
>The catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward is widely acknowledged -- Mao
>himself acknowledged it.
>
>But I would like to know exactly what are the claims about the Cultural
>Revolution (how many are supposed to have died?), and what are the
>sources.

OK, first what happened:

In 1964, Lin Biao, radical, Defence Minister, and Chairman o0f the Community
party for the Socialist Education Movement to destroy a so-called
spontaneous desire to become capitalists among the peasantry. Mao took it
upon himself to widen the scope of Lin Biao's movement to the entire
bureaucracy, to use it as a weapon against moderates.

In 1966, Beijing students -- with the support of Mao -- began to organize
themselves into the Red Guards. The Red Guards were aimed against the Four
Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Members of the
Red Guards attacked things that could be associated with capitalism, the
West, or the Soviet Union, not to mention pre-Communist China -- shops with
Western goods, temples, monuments and old gardens were destroyed, academics
assaulted, officials who failed to meet their quotas were beaten. Tens of
thousands of people were imprisoned or murdered -- in Wuxuan, in Guangxi in
1968, Zheng Yi has documented the ritual cannibalization of some five
hundred people. (He has been corroborated by John Gittings, who wrote _From
Cannibalism to Karaoke_ after a 1995 visit to Wuxuan.)

In August of 1966, Mao turned his attention to high-ranking members of the
Communist party. Liu Shaoqi died in prison in 1969; Deng Xiaopeng was fired
and assigned to a menial role, his son crippled after he was thrown off  a
balcony; Peng Dehuai simply disappeared.

In 1967, the situation with the Red Guards deteriorated even more rapidly,
as attacks on the British Embassy and fighting between Red Guard factions
escalated to the point of civil war in some provinces of China. In August of
that year, Mao ordered the arrest of the leading Red Guard leaders; after
streetfighting broke out across China in the spring of 1968, he sent the
army after the Red Guards. Millions of former Red Guards were rounded up and
shipped off into the countryside, supposedly to spread Communism among the
Chinese peasantry.

The Cultural Revolution can best be thought of as a radical attempt by Mao
Zedong to eliminate all opposition, and to create a personality cult around
himself. He may have succeeded (for the time being), but at an immeasurable
human cost. Depending on how you interpret the Lin Biao incident in 1970, it
might even have led to some kind of a military coup d'état against Mao, and
the subsequent destabilization of all China.

Now, sources:

Fairbank, Resichauer, and Craig. _East Asia._ This undergraduate textbook on
East Asian history and culture includes a chapter on the People's Republic,
and provides a general overview of the Cultural Revolution and its immediate
aftermath.

Khristof and Wudunn. _China Wakes._ Yes, this was written by journalists for
the _New York Times,_ and tends towards the superficial, but it gives an
interesting take on China, including Chinese pop culture.

Peyrefitte, Alain. _Quand la China s'éveillera ..._ In this book -- my copy
is actually a two-volume set -- Peyrefitte describes his travels to China in
the middle of the Cultural Revolution. It's particularly interesting for
Peyrefitte's descriptions of

Rodzinski, Witold. _The Walled Kingdom._ Rodzinski is a Polish sinologist
who wrote this Marxist history of China, from its prehistory up until the
1980's. As I recall, he did not approve of the Cultural Revolution at all.

The above sources are taken only from those books that I have at home with
me. If anyone enquires, I'll be happy to look up more sources at my
university's library.

>Richard Hutchinson

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada