Re: china

At 02:08 PM 5/1/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Well some evidence is better than none, but what is presented is far from
>establishing that there was an "immeasurable human cost" to the Cultural
>Revolution.  (The one about "ritual cannibalization" is a good one -- of 
>course everyone knows the Bolsheviks ate babies too.

No, they almost certainly didn't, any more than German soldiers in 1914
Belgium ate Belgian babies. In China, the cannibalization was undertaken
without the support of the central government -- when Beijing learned of it,
the Red Army was quickly dispatched

>Cannibalism really
>gets a bad rap, though -- after all it's central to Christian ritual.)

How true. All religions seem to have some kind of cannibalization or
justification of murder.

>It could more rationally be said, given the direction that China has since
>taken, that there is a mounting, if not immeasurable, human cost because
>the Cultural Revolution failed to stop the reintroduction of capitalism to
>China.



>If "tens of thousands of people were imprisoned or murdered" (which one is
>it?  how many murdered?, and that is from one questionable source), that
>is still not in the same ballpark as the Great Leap Forward, which was a
>natural famine exacerbated by stupid but not malicious economic policies.

An ideological civil war between radical factions in the major cities
deliberately instigated as part of a purge of non-Maoists from the CCP isn't
both stupid and malicious?

>There is plenty of documentation of the progressive goals of the Cultural
>Revolution, to check the "capitalist roaders" who wanted to overturn the
>revolution.  There is also documentation of the factional fighting
>within the CCP between Mao, supporters, and various rivals.  Both can
>logically be true, they are not contradictory claims.

Cites?

>I remain convinced that denouncing the Cultural Revolution is a popular
>product of CIA propaganda, diffused throughout the West via the personal
>horror stories of individuals from better-off families who suffered
>various indignities during that time.  That those on the Left, who are in
>favor of reducing inequality, would uncritically join this chorus of
>denunciation, reveals a curious form of hypocrisy.  Maybe the Right is
>right about the Left, and we are just hypocrites who want tenure.  Maybe
>the Left has more sympathy for the urban intellectuals and others who were
>"sent down" in the 1960s than for the ordinary Chinese peasants who
>benefited from the Revolution, and who are suffering from its dismantling
>now as inequality skyrockets in China, and the huge and
>growing dispossessed peasantry is transformed into an urban proletarian
>powderkeg...

Would Chinese peasants have been any better off living on pre-reform
communes? In the early years of the economic boom, rural incomes did rise in
tandem with urban incomes. 

Some kind of income disparity between rural and urban areas seems to have
been inevitable, with or without Deng Xiaopeng -- just look at Russia. Even
before Gorbachev, Soviet agriculture was hardly close to western European or
North American standards, or even that of the wealthiest satellite states.
That was bad enough in a state that was something like 60% urban -- it would
have been catastrophic in a state that was 75% rural. At least China is
largely self-sufficient in food.

>Maybe inequality is really good after all, as long as you get to be on
>top...

I did not say that. I just think that cold-bloodedly organizing university
students into radical paramilitary groups and sending them against your
ideological opponents, bringing the country near collapse, is a very poor
policy -- both from the human rights standpoint and from the long-term
economic standpoint.

I don't really like the revolutionary myth of blood as an agent of
purification, cleansing reactionary elements of culture from the body
politic. Blood is precious; people are precious; everything possible should
be done in order to ensure the maximum happiness of the maximum number of
people in ways that don't make other people suffer unjustly. The Cultural
Revolution made people suffer for no good reason.

>RH