Mao: Poet and Hero

...In any case, what little money the people see is useless without the ration cards and permits required for non-trivial purchases and travel...

...Soon Mao counterattacked with his "Yenan Talks," while Wang was set up as the usual scapegoat against whom the rest could "struggle," "unite" with Mao, and survive...

...the government is kept in power by the Victor Baras teaches political science at the New School for Social Research and is a research associate at Haus Rissen in Hamburg, Germany...

...Such slogans rationalized a last-ditch struggle, in the manner of the last Dowager Empress, by ideologist-bureaucrats to stay (as they said during the anti-Teng campaign) "on top" at all costs, while pretending to give priority to "class struggle" against the new-rising technocrat class...

...This prevented Chiang Kai-shek from eliminating Mao, and permitted Mao to develop "people's war" to "resist Japan"--but take China...

...Here we have it...

...The logical result was "revisionist" oppression...

...Vie are not dealing with a Hitler or Mussolini, or latter-day Stalin...China is being led by historically conscious, strong and enormously competent men who as far back as the 1920s identified themselves with the people and knew their needs [italics added...

...In history, after the death of a revolutionary thinker and leader...the oppressing classes lend his name a certain regard, in order to comfort and fool the oppressed masses...

...Even on Greene's argument, the low level of actual consumption of the bicycles, watches, sewing machines, and other goods that the Chinese long to own cannot reconcile them to what Mao called "revisionism," what three ex-Red Guards called "feudalistic social-fascist autocracy" (in a famous wallposter of 1974 in Canton), and what the present regime blames on the "Gang of Four' ' - - t h e system by which the people spies on and bullies itself under threat of "reform through labor camps" (and worse) for the benefit of those "new bourgeois" (Party cadres) who are not themselves undergoing "class struggle" in kangaroo court or in Red Guard torture chamber, or hard labor under masses' surveillance or in prison...

...or, to be more precise, it produced a marked decline in the general level of grumbling...

...In March 1942, Soviet-returned Party veteran Wang Shih-wei wrote a series of articles in the Party organ Liberation Daily exposing the development, in the safety of the revolutionary base at Yenan, of a privileged Party hierarchy such as could not exist in other beleaguered strongholds, where what the Nazis called the "front-experience" kept comrades and allies together...

...First, of course, it stemmed the outflow of population...

...He preferred swimming...

...also I am supposed to "let followers go to extremes," also I "wilt not turn around until the wrong has reached its end," and "once I change, I make a complete turnabout," having deceived you, "drowning you like fishes" and "resembling Tito...

...This was the real dilemma of the regime...

...All attempts to organize a rural counterforce through Maoist "education" and alternative peasant organizations were sidetracked by the Party apparatus (including Unions and Youth League): Mao turned back to the city, to the newgeneration students and workers...

...Mao liked to compare himself to the tyrant who first united China in 221 B.C...

...Meanwhile, the privileged few, as in 1942, had "special food, special clothing," and now, "special cars" too, separated from the masses by an immense gulf of power rather than property...

...The moment he died, other politicians and pontiffs of the media broke into an ecumenical chorus of unprecedented praise...

...In all this, millions died by execution, in labor camps (15 million), in Red Guard struggle meetings and factional battles, by being driven to suicide, by drowning while escaping, etc...

...Chen Tu-hsiu set up an ad hoe Central Committee of the Party in Shanghai in May 1920...

...As for material development, World Bank figures for 1974 show mainland China, in the temperate zone and possessing the most numerous workforce on earth, with a GNP of $300 per head and a growth rate from 1960 to 1974 of 5.2 percent: better than India but worse than Thailand, Malaysia, many African countries, and all Latin American countries except Bolivia...

...Carter is a more naked power struggle than anything going on in Peking...

...No one was supposed to be able to talk before me except you leaders...

...This, I fear, is precisely what attracted the Mao-worshippers...

...On August 13 of each year, East Germany commemorates the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall...

...to pick one paper-tiger "common enemy" at a time to unite a band of rebels against, dramatizing himself as victimized leader of the artificial, permanent "class struggle" which would cement the unity of the chosen, the "proletariat...

...In the People's Republic since 1949 industry has grown to account for about half of GNP, but much of this is related to defense...

...The Mao-the-Good-Shepherd delusion is much more interesting and complicated...

...In his words, he was part monkey and part tiger...

...What does the factual record say about Mao's style of leadership and its results for economic and political development...

...The spurious solidarity of the small groups depended on continually reviving the frontline stress by "mass movements" and ritualistic scapegoating of"5-black elements" with "bad class origin"--losers dubbed "counter-revolutionaries" or "property owners"--whose outcast status was like that of the Jews in Nazi Germany or, as Peking Red Guard Research Group put it, the blacks in the U.S.A...

...They know that their standard of living, the highest in the Soviet bloc, does not approach that of their West German cousins...

...Marxism means "Rebel...

...It is also absurd to compare the Communists' achievements (as is usually done) with the chaos of 1949, which they had a hand in creating...

...To begin with, it is absurd to praise or blame him for everything that went on in China after he declared the People's Republic in 1949...

...In fact, he alternated these roles like the dynastic cycle of Chinese history itself(unification-decay/rebellion-reunification by a new dynasty...

...unlike leeks, their heads wouldn't grow again...

...The logical conclusion was Luddism, if not the annihilation of 2,000 years of Cambodian history...

...Some of the recent "expert" accounts of "the real China" are reminiscent of what people wrote in the thirties after visiting Manchuria under the Japanese (such an improvement over the Warlords), not to mention the admiring reports about Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin...

...Holed up in remote Yenan after the Long March, Mao adapted his chop-change method of "rectification" to bring under control the "mountaintop" feudalities of which his bandit Party consisted...

...From childhood on, Mao's world was one to chop, chew, and change: his way, to act ruthless (tiger), unpredictable (monkey), and first...

...Marx, after all, intended his revolution to take place in Germany...

...These upheavals threw up massive evidence that China's "masses" know as well as we do that freedom to eat and to speak go together...

...This is the real difference between the People's Republic and comparable societies such as Taiwan...

...and had the Great Wall built by forced labor...

...It is precisely this problem which merits attention from the society that exposed Watergate, and which Professor Edward Luttwak recently raised in Commentary after taking one of those farcically stage-managed tours of China...

...For the balance-of-power delusion, see Leibniz--he was glad God put the rough Muscovites between China and Europe, so we could gradually grind them fine...

...Here, we can only scan a few specimens of what has been said about him by those who should have known better, and quote some of the reams of evidence to the contrary, much of it from the dragon's own mouth, which refutes the prevailing hagiography and which fashionable China charlatans have never, it seems, set eyes on...

...In December 1930, according to Party documents, Mao killed thousands of Communist cadres as "anti-Bolsheviks" (i.e., opposed to him), finally gaining military control of what ended up as the party-inarms' main body during the Long March of 1935...

...Born when and where he was, Mao, like Heraclitus, had reason to think that change and uncertainty are the only things one can be sure of...

...but factional struggles diverted the accompanying mass movements into a repeat of 1966-69...

...The "proper securing of the state border," as the official journal Neues Deutschland described it, has enabled the GDR to become the most prosperous Communist country in the world...

...But, as Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching summed it up before he was broken in the Cultural Revolution, China's military forces add up to nothing more than a "heap of meat" in comparison to those of the USSR...

...they are interested in freedom to eat, to have schools and barefoot doctors, and "to look at the future with hope...

...The authorities do not just let the day pass in silence...

...With his other side and the "leftist" factions Mao unravelled, as much as he wove it, the Sino-Stalinist synthesis of modern and foreign techniques with millennial and Chinese political culture...

...It was the Imperial pattern of a great schoolroom, with the innovation that the orphans policed each other against growing up, and ensured total dependence on the father/mother officials (the "gun in the heart") by a modernized "rectification" system that differed only in intensity between prison and "society...

...Compensation for fear of being let down by flesh and blood may explain his "dropping" over the years of brother, children, third and perhaps fourth wife, not to mention comrades-in-arms, and ending up "alone with the masses...

...Earlier reformers had debated whether to rely on material modernization or socio-political changes...

...Until 1961, when the Wall was built, the GDR had been the only Soviet-bloc country whose borders were not totally sealed against escape...

...The Cantonese authors of the wall-poster cited above have reportedly been arrested...

...In recent years there has been some confusion in the GDR The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 15...

...In the world's time of troubles, the enthusiasts bring laymen little more than confusion...

...Yet life in the German Democratic Republic is incomparably "better" today than it was before the construction of the Wall--if one ignores the fact that people are no longer free to leave--and the improvement has come about largely because of the Wall...

...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 Sublimely ignoring Mao's own disclaimers, the obituaries made him a man of peace, a builder...

...But the real cause lies in the origins of Mao's style and its convergence with the evolution of the Party in its struggle to survive...

...but since it was dogma that he "knew the people's needs," the appearance of a gap between him and them and/or a change of "line" had to be blamed on some anti-People who had infiltrated the People, to be unmasked by fresh "study" of the true (new) meaning of the mantras--those in the Red Book were even recited backwards-and sent down for "re-education through labor...

...I am supposed to be "vain" and "pompous" and one-sided in accepting and trusting some of you...

...Lin, as I said at the time and the Chinese confirmed years later, inflated the Mao cult with the hope of floating him up out of the way...

...Under cover of "Sino-izing Marxism-Leninism" and "rectifying" Soviet-influenced cadres, Mao substituted his personal authority, rationalized as his Thought (an open-ended series of oracles), for the codified foreign doctrine which had hitherto legitimized the Party...

...Mao wanted to avoid Stalin's economic mistakes and not kill too many people...

...By "revisionism" he meant a "bloodsucking bureaucrat class" (his words) oppressing the masses--as officially existed during the ascendancies of Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao, Teng Hsiao-ping, and the "Gang," i.e., for most of the time since the People's Republic was established...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 13 It is not true, as is often alleged, that Mao founded or invented the Chinese Communist Party, the Red Army, and peasant guerilla warfare, or contributed significantly to Marxist-Leninist theory...

...According to Sun Yat-sen, father of Chinese nationalism, when the British tried to get him to join in World War I he refused, because that would have led China to develop military forces of several millions, making it far more dangerous than Japan...

...The situation is so bad that only you people can rescue it...

...In this Lin was smarter than Liu Shao-chi, who had prepared a dossier for the 7,000-cadre conference of January 1962 to show why Mao was responsible for the economic disasters, but dared not use it to bring him down completely because the survival of the Party empire depended on Mao's personal prestige...

...The construction of the Wall led, after an initial period of unrest, to a tremendous improvement of morale in the GDR...

...they really celebrate--with public festivities, a parade, all the trappings of a national holiday...

...Between the deaths of Marhsal Lin (1971) and Premier Chou (1976), a start was made by reshuffling commanders from their fiefs, dismantling their cardhouse of a co-Shogunate, and easing China onto the road Japan took with the Meiji Restoration in 1868...

...He deprecated it to his wife in 1966 and to Edgar Snow, yet he argued that Khrushchev fell for lack of one and that "members of a squad must worship the squad leader"--because, like Stalin, "he has truth in his hands...

...Earlier enthusiasts saw him feeding and clothing the millions, and compared him to George Washington (Senator Charles Percy) or Woodrow Wilson (Edward Friedman...

...For most East Germans, the Wall appeared to confirm the futility of overt dissent...

...As Lord Macarmey reported in 1794: ...we find that the boasted moral institutes of China are not much better observed than those of some other countries, and that the disciples of Confucius [read: Mao] are composed of the same fragile materials as the children of Mammon in the western world...

...But then this would not further the half-conscious hankering not just to roll back industrialization, as the "Gang of Four" did, but to get back to the age before metal and money and so, eventually, with the votes in the hands of the Many, put the world 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 upside down...

...Frankly, all those whom he dropped one after the other...are actually substitutes for the crimes he committed himself...

...he only buried 460 literati, we buried 46,000...

...As the "left"-Maoist "Gang" used to complain, when the Sputnik goes up, the Red Flag falls to the ground...

...Throughout, Mao and his band may have honestly been out to modernize China...

...Mao, his own Principle Contradiction: He was another of those would-be modernizers of the 1920s, too "Confucian" an anti-Confucian to grasp that scientific truth is the product of skepticism, tolerance, suspended judgment--in a word, uncertainty-and not a spell to pacify anomie, fix relationships, and dam Luan (chaos...

...the warrior-farmer People's Liberation Army could only do everything when all was very simple...

...Above all, he was unclear about how to achieve a stable balance or synthesis of anarchy and authority...

...he didn't believe that one could test out (e.g., by elections) what t h e ' 'mass line" really is...

...D O g O O O U O O B t O O O # O O O O O O Q O O O O I Q I O O O Q O O O O g O O O O O O D ~ O D D I D D Q O O I O ~ O O p O O O O O I ~ O . . . . . O O O D U ~ 0 Q U O I Q O I O O ~ O S Q ~ O O I Q Q # O O O O ~ O 0 ~ I . . . . QOI4 . . . . . O m J O 4 0 0 . . . . O g O J 4 Q B I O D O 4 O t e W.A...

...Then, as now, one finds a streak of power-lust and racism disguised as concern for humanity in the abstract: Victims of alienation--most notably intellectuals--find it intensely satisfying to identify with those awesome movers of men who are able to "guide" so many individuals "for their own good," and find it appalling that we would try to foist our GrecoRoman-Judaeo-Christian ideas of democracy and freedom and dignity on "swarming" Asiatics...

...While the Communists formed a "bloc within" the Nationalist (KMT) Party he rose to alternate member of its Central Committee...

...As they riot and form resistance groups, many use slogans about Mao's heirs, Chou, and Teng, or "socialist legality" because they are too "Maoist" anti-Maoists to know another vocabulary...

...Abroad, Maoists are beginning to abandon their dead god...

...And in fact, the rulers of East Germany have good reason to be happy with their Wall...

...So, back came traditional attitudes to leadership and social order, with Mao as the infallible Teacherpatriarch capable of withdrawing legitimacy from the actions of subordinates for "misapplying his policy" and coming temporarily between him and the "hoodwinked masses," whose will ("mass line") he--rather than the collective wisdom of the Party--axiomatically incarnated...

...Wang was killed before Yenan was abandoned to the Nationalists in 1947...

...So I am supposed to have reached "the declining years of Stalin" and to have been "arbitrary and dictatorial," not granting "freedom" and "democracy...

...On this side the Communists inherited the aims of the last great Mandarins of the Empire, who tried to save it through railways, arsenals...

...Lenin, State & Revolution...

...Part of the reason was that his "guerilla style" was all right for capturing the cities, but not for running them...

...Now the Party's over...

...It might be better to say that he was cast ashore, for he was never quite at home on land...

...not to mention Taiwan with $810 and 6.5 percent, or Singapore with $2,240 and 7.5 percent, or Japan...

...Mao Tse-tung was born on Boxing Day, 1893 in landlocked Hunan province...

...Eat them before they eat you, that's materialist dialectics...

...Or, as Joan Robinson revealingly put it in 1972: The success of the Chinese economy in reducing the appeal of the money motive is connected with its success in economic development...when there is complete social security at the prevailing level of the standard of life and employment for all, then it is possible to appeal to the people to combat egoism and eschew privilege [italics in original...

...everything is, i.e., can be, split into two and so can be absorbed piecemeal...

...Mao was ambiguous on his cult...

...he was also (as he put it) "a complete outsider when it comes to economic construction [and understood] nothing about industrial planning"--but that was a lesser failing...

...James Strachey Barnes suffered ostracism and lonely death...

...Confucius wanted Gentlemen and got Players...

...Then with the Cultural Revolution (1966-69) Mao knocked it all down, like the man who burned down the house to get roast pork, briefly coopting the tyranny of chaos...

...The "hundred flowers" of criticism were crushed by an "antiRightist" campaign, and the Party emerged stronger than ever...

...V.I...

...Thus Mao, throwing his "comrades' " words in their teeth in 1959, acted the victim of disloyalty in order to turn them all against Defense Chief Marshal Peng, who had candidly warned of the dangers to Party and state arising from Mao's "Great Leap" policies of top-speed social and economic transformation...

...As for scholars and gentlemen, Professor John King Fairbank, doyen of China-gazers, attacked the press for talk of power struggle among "dedicated revolutionaries": "Unlike us China has no crisis of inflation, unemployment, crime or corruption...Ford vs...

...Hua's press has explained that the Great Disorder Mao said would bring in a Great New Order was strictly for chez l'eunerai and not for periodic purges of Chinese revisionists (as hitherto believed), and that those who are for nonstop revolution and against socialism in one country are Trotskyites...

...One side of Mao and the "rightist" factions chose the former and ended up rationalizing the 8-grade wage-scale, town-country and other kinds of polarization, techno-bureaucracy, and professionalism by the requirements of production and defense-security...

...And the people at the bottom have an idea of human dignity and freedom different from ours...

...But by then, it was clear that the neo-primitive, alternative society Mao had been able to synthesize in Yenan could not be scaled up to suit China's size, or its cities...

...Wages have risen little since 1950--one reason for the increasing strikes and riots these last years--and the rural majority of the population does not receive set wages but rather a share, based on "work points," of what the collectives have left after paying taxes and making compulsory deliveries to the state...

...Goodnight, sweet-sour Machiavelli...

...Agriculture has been held back by a preference for mass mobilization over investment and free enterprise, though prices have at times been adjusted to let the rural sector buy more industrial products for less of its own, and taxes on it have been reduced...

...It was perfected as a method of"turning round" and enlisting the latter, but Mao sought to apply the system after 1949 to the entire population (see his rescript on correct handling of contradictions among the "people" in 1957...

...Under Peng's successor, Lin Piao, a military team investigating the resulting famine and unrest recommended exploiting the grassroots grievances to try and restore central control: Leaders "who witnessed or heard the deplorable incidents of oppression forced on the innocent labouring masses would weep if they had any feeling towards the Party and the proletarian class...

...he was only a delegate to the first Congress in 1921...

...China sought a Teacher and got a nanny but, as a dissident said during Mao's 1957 attempt to "solve contradictions" by the "hundred flowers" movement, "the child is getting big and Nanny [i.e., the Party] will be out of a job...

...East Germans know, better than anyone, that the "anti-fascist defense wall" was built not to keep fascists out but to keep East Germans in...

...East Germany, a country of seventeen million people, lost some three million of its best educated and most vigorous citizens through the open border in Berlin before 1961...

...The second consequence is less widely appreciated...

...What he taught came from the outlaws' tradition, the "University of the Greenwoods," he said...

...As he later liked to tell apologetic Japanese visitors, he owed his victory to Japan...

...It is difficult to gauge what real harm they do, but it seems reasonably clear that at such times they offer laymen little aid, less counsel, and still less responsible judgment...

...against anti-Maoists...

...This characteristic ploy of managing a three-cornered combat by expediently combining "unity and struggle" (let's you and him fight) is a key to Mao's ambivalent character, dialectical philosophy, transitional role in history, and self-defeating policies...

...In 1956-59, Mao set the adult intelligentsia and the Party managers to "rectify" each other--in that order...

...With Mao, said French President Giscard d'Estaing, s'eteint un phare de la pensde mondiale...

...But when Chiang Kai-shek put a bloody end to their game, Mao joined Chu Teh who did start a Red Army in the hinterlands, and the strength of the movement shifted to traditional outlaws rather than urban workers...

...In September 1920, Mao was still agitating for the independence of Hunan Province...

...Ten years later, Lin himself wrote in his coup manifesto (as officially circulated by Mao after, as Chiang Ching put it, he had "applied a drop of disinfectant and Lin was finished' '): Today B52 [read: Mao] woos A and strikes B, tomorrow he will woo B and strike at A. Those who are wooed by his blandishments today will be put to death for undetermined crimes...

...That is, why do so many distinguished journalists and scholars, including veteran Sinologists, systematically rationalize (and even dissemble) when it comes to Mao and China, encouraging 1) a right-wing Sinophilia of those who abhor what they think they know of the system, but for the same reasons think it necessary to "balance" Russia, and 2) an equally flawed Sinophilia of those "who see inherent virtue in a society which combines a maximum of unfreedom with a maximum of inefficiency" ? This lacquering of Mao's image has been done both abroad and within China...

...The East German regime is repressive, even by the standards of Soviet Eastern Europe...

...presence of 300,000 Russian troops...

...If we followed your suggestion...then the whole world, including your country, would probably fall prey to China's arms...

...But Felix Greene deserves quotation at length: ...Mao Tse-tung is not surrounded by yesmen fearful of arousing his displeasure...

...The old argument that cultural and political change was primary ended up caricatured in such forms as "factories are to produce revolutionized people rather than goods" (Lin) and "rather socialist trains late than revisionist punctuality" ("Gang of Four...

...Even Mao rejected this formulation when he told Andr~ Malraux "we're no longer eating bark, but we've only got to one bowl of rice a day...

...Mao was obsessed with struggle, continually striking out as if swimming on people (see his poems...

...at the same time, however, they mutilate the contents of the revolutionary theory...destroy the revolutionary vanguard and vulgarise [the revolution...

...C. Adie Mao: Poet and Hero What separated Mao from the masses was an immense gulf of power, which is precisely what attracted his worshippers abroad...

...So arises the dilemma," goes another version, "who can strike the balance between freedom from starvation for the majority against freedom of thought for the minority...

...His officially and unofficially published works and other Party documents reveal him to be full of unresolved "contradictions," like the Party and China themselves...

...The system of "teaching a lesson" or rectification by "struggle" or "unity-criticismunity" (bullying sessions) was institutionalized as a parasuperstitious weapon to divide and control families and all other family-substitute small groups (hsiao-tsu), such as squads and offices and especially cellmates in prison and POWs...

...What cheer, Kim Il-sung ? [] Victor Baras Triumph of the Wall Iafe in East Germany today...

...The documents also show that Mao did more than anyone to p r e v e n t China from developing as Japan did...

...and Drieu La Rochelle took his own life...

...Chang Kuo-t'ao, who led the rival column, said Mao betrayed his route to the pursuing Nationalists in order to have him eliminated...

...Western-style development which was precisely its poison...

...We approach Mao through minefields of fallacies...

...and the victorious Hua released quite enough details to belie Fairbank's assertion...

...The Wall had two vitally important consequences for the GDR...

...and under Mao they were even falling behind technologically...

...Party moguls may reimpose "order" on the young workers, but they will be hard to keep down on the prison farm after witnessing the Commune...

...Similarly, Mao used his troops and agitators in government-controlled cities and units to provoke war between Japan and the Nationalist Government, as proposed in a Party document of 1927 (not his...

...but the southern Generals are restive too...

...East Germany today is the only place where one can see something like what Marx had in mind: the productive capacity of an advanced industrial society linked more or less successfully to a system of public ownership...

...Such claims as his exemplify a peculiar sort of myopia which has caused otherwise intelligent men to attribute a unique moral superiority to Mao and his China...

...Since Herodotus, China has best fulfilled the need for a happy land as far, far away in space and time as the spiritual 6migr~ felt from his own society...

...The trouble was that the discarded enemies and the swallowed proletarians (or "people") get defined by their relation to Mao...

...For a few clays during the Cultural Revolution, Paris Communes did appear, probably in accordance with the original vision of Mao and some of his "radicals," but they were dropped, mainly because "Communes are too weak when it comes to suppressing counter-revolution...

...Stalin created a Gulag Archipelago, but Mao's regime perfected a convict or rather reformatory continent...

...Such figures don't tell us, though, what each average "head" actually gets...

...the thousands who swam to Hong Kong or crossed into the USSR preferred the unknown to a "security" too close to that of the prisoner, conscript, or monk...

...But he saw himself first and last as a Teacher, as he told Snow...

...In 1966-69, their Cultural Revolution smashed the Party for him, but the Generals emerged as winners--a step back to 1949, as Chou En-lai said...

...to accept revisionism is to throw away the bowl of rice...

...for Kissinger, too, he was a Titan of our time...

...There was, says Greene, no "jockeying for power" at the top in China...

...It warms the socialist heart to identify with the thirty grades of commissars in their blue camouflage as they mobilize the masses to do by corv~e what could better be done by letting them go in for free enterprise, sell on a market, and buy machinery to dig their waterworks...

...Hence, there is an almost irresistible tendency to construct a false dichotomy between material progress and socio-political " development...

...His secretaries have either committed suicide or been arrested: his few close comrades-in-arms and confidants he also sent to prison...he is suspicious and sadistic...once he thinks someone is his enemy, he is determined to treat that person as a sworn foe and blame all evil deeds on him...

...During last year's celebration East German television showed schoolgirls presenting flowers to uniformed border guards while the voice-over boasted, "The children of the German Democratic Republic love their idols and heroes, the defenders of the state border...

...It could be that Mao's real claim to fame has been to hold China back, thus sparing the world upheavals, of which the rise of Japan from 1868 to Pearl Harbor would have seemed a mere kriegspiel in miniature...

...Unluckily, Mao was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of diagnosing the causes of this Soviet-type oppression and so he could not find a cure...

...There, of course, the less scholarly and gentle Hua Kuo-feng and the "Gang of Four" (led by Mao's widow, Chiang Ching) were indeed locked in a power struggle...

...As philosophy, this becomes Contradictions Theory similar to the pre-Socratic doctrines and the Chou dynasty Book of Changes (1150 B.C...