Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 4/4

July 2, 2011

As for Bo Xilai, the so-called darling of the Maoists according to The Economist, the weekly rag failed to mention that last year when this Chinese “Maoist” splinter of the Communist Party thought they had a leader in Bo Xilai, he had thirty Maoist hard core leaders arrested and locked up. Source: Serve the People

Bo Xilai may be a leader among Chinese conservatives but those conservatives are not Maoist revolutionaries dreaming of a return to the upside down world of The Cultural Revolution, which would turn China into a train wreck, and most Chinese have worked too hard building a modern, capitalist China to throw all that away.

Maoists have followers as well as critics in modern China. While these supporters of Mao claim that it was during his era that China witnessed mass development in terms of economy, industry, healthcare, education, and Infrastructure, his critics (that have ruled China since 1976 leading to a middle class of about 400 million) hold a different view.

According to them, the history of Maoist China was marked with uncountable deaths, and an extreme economic crisis that damaged China’s cultural heritage.

What is the difference between the Maoists in China that are a minority in the Communist Party and the American Nazi Party in the US? Do we read pieces in the Western media criticizing the US for having an American Nazi party after what the Nazis did during World War II?

In fact, in 2006, NPR.org reported, “New schoolbooks were about to be introduced in Shanghai that were moving a bit further away from the traditional communist ideology. And in them Mao was actually only mentioned once, and very fleetingly, as part of a lesson on the custom of lowering flags to half mast at state funerals.”

In that interview at NPR, Louisa Lim said, “The official verdict on Mao that the Party came to in 1981 was that he was 70% good and 30% bad. And their mythology about Mao was really that he was a great national hero who unified the country. He sort of threw off the yoke of Japanese imperialism and freed people from poverty, and that any later mistakes were made when he was older and should be weighed up against his great contributions to China.”

If Bo Xilai sounds as if he wants to bring the Maoism of The Cultural Revolution back, he is probably doing what all “good” politicians do (even in the US), and that is telling people what they want to hear to gain support. After all, in 2012, China’s leaders are changing and Bo wants to get as close to the top as possible. That is not a secret.

Start with Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 1 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 3/4

July 1, 2011

When Mao Zedong‘s Great Leap Forward failed and millions died of famine (1959-1961 — no one knows exactly how many died), most estimates by mainstream Western sources are usually high. Henry Kissinger in his latest book, On China, says over 20 million. Other Western sources claim as high as 60 million while some say 10.

This tragedy was not caused by a Nazi or Stalinist purge where people were executed or sent to concentration camps to die in gas chambers by the millions. It was a famine caused by flawed agricultural policies leading to crop failures. Most of these deaths were caused by starvation.

In fact, a few experts argue that the famine was not all caused by those flawed policies but severe weather played a role in the crop failures too and there is evidence that this may have been a fact since China has a history of famines. Records show that between 108 BC and 1911 AD there were no fewer than 1,828 major famines in China, or one nearly every year in one or another province. For example, there were four famines in China in 1810, 1811, 1846 and 1849 that caused 45 million deaths. Source: List of Famines

However, during this time of famine, China’s population increased from 563 million in 1950 when Mao first ruled China to more than a billion by 1980. Mao encouraged families to have many children.


Raymond Lotta says Mao’s Great Leap Forward was not the cause of 30 million deaths.

Even with those deaths from starvation during The Great Leap Forward, we discover from this chart, that China’s population has never stopped growing.

As for the Cultural Revolution, which is credited for another two or three million deaths (mostly from suicide due to depression), Mao Zedong put his wife in charge.  At her trial, when she had a chance to speak in her defense, she said, “I was Mao’s dog. When Mao told me to bite, I bit.”

Mao Zedong was 73 when the Cultural Revolution was launched, and he spent little time outside of the Forbidden City where he lived mostly in isolation with limited contact with others, which could also be seen as another sign of someone suffering from PTSD.

His wife, Jiang Qing (twenty-one years younger than Mao) was the architect of the Cultural Revolution since her husband put her in charge, and she was planning to take over and rule China after Mao’s death.  In fact, during his last few years, he was not that healthy.

Continued on July 2, 2011 in Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 2/4

June 30, 2011

Another fact that The Economist left out of Boundlessly loyal to the great monster was that Mao was not in charge of The Cultural Revolution. He started the movement to retain power then put his wife in charge. While she was busy dismantling the nation, Mao was hanging out inside the walls of The Forbidden City.

His wife put students in charge of the schools and made teachers victims.

Before that, Mao turned butchers and peasants into doctors without any medical education to guide them in the healing arts. These untrained doctors were known as bare-foot doctors with little to no training, which I wrote about at China’s Health Care During Mao’s Time.

However, as crazy as it may sound, the bare-foot doctors worked.  Life expectancy was about 35 when Mao launched this program and by the time Mao died, life expectancy had increased by twenty years.

The people that Mao liberated from feudalism know that Mao Zedong was also a poet long before he ruled China. The years of Civil War from the early 1920 to 1949, assassination attempts and broken promises by Chiang Kai-shek , and fighting the brutal Japanese during World War II must have changed Mao. For sure, The Long March was a bloody influence that possibly led to a bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which tends to make one paranoid.

After all, fighting a Civil War for almost 25 years and living in caves had to have an impact on Mao.  If US soldiers come home with PTSD after one tour of combat, imagine more than two decades living a life of combat.

The Maoists that The Economist mentions mostly want to have the power back but not necessarily the purges and/or denunciations of The Cultural Revolution.

With nostalgia, this minority of Maoists remembers a different time from a different perspective since they may have been the peasant leaders of the adolescent Red Guard.

Many in the West probably do not know that the Red Guard and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were two different forces and the PLA for the most part was not involved in The Cultural Revolution.  In fact, several times the PLA stopped the rampaging Red Guard from some of its destruction of all things old in China.

Continued on July 1, 2011 in Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Keeping Mao Alive in the West – Part 1/4

June 29, 2011

Even though he’s been dead since 1976 and his politics were swept away decades ago as if they were dust to be replaced with a Chinese socialist form of capitalism, there must be a reason for the Western media keeping Mao Zedong alive.

In fact, The Economist is doing its share to keep this ghost in the mind of a Western audience.

The answer might be to feed another kind of monster. The Economist for May 28 published Boundlessly loyal to the great monster to feed the Sinophobia mob’s fears of China and probably to boost sales.

To achieve this, The Economist left out a few facts and threw truth into the flaming maw of a Western fire-breathing dragon.

The only thing worth repeating was a quote from Mao Yushi (no relation to the Mao that died in 1976).  Mao Yushi says it is time to end the “idolization” and “superstition” surrounding Mao Zedong and assess him as an ordinary man.

Although this may be a good suggestion, it will not be that easy to make happen. Too many people in China think of Mao as the George Washington of China and the man that liberated China from feudal landlords and the brutal upper class supported Nationalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.

In fact, most of Mao’s mistakes were made during the last decade of his 83 years during the Cultural Revolution, where he flipped society upside down by putting adolescents and those that were mostly illiterate and living in severe poverty in charge of the country while demoting the educated and middle class to the lowest socio-economic status level after stripping their wealth and privileges away.

Many of the people that Mao liberated from feudalism also know that Mao had a softer heart and was a different person long before he ruled China. Discover Mao Zedong, the poet

Continued on June 30, 2011 in Keeping Mao Alive in the  West – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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The “Vanishing” Street Art of Chinese Calligraphy

June 19, 2011

Chinese calligraphy is not vanishing. What I’m talking about is demonstrated in the videos included with this post. In China, many artists use sidewalks as a canvas and a brush with water to paint the beauty of calligraphy. As the water evaporates, the art vanishes.

In fact, calligraphy is more popular than ever. After the Cultural Revolution, many people turned to calligraphy in the hope of finding solace in the calm repetition of its exercises. Then, in 1981, the authorities took the lead in setting up a Chinese Calligraphers’ Association, the first such nationwide body ever to be established in the country. Source: Fathom.com, The British Museum

Both a language and an art, Chinese calligraphy has been traced back more than 4,000 years to the crude form called “Jia Gu Wen” found on turtle shells from the Shang Dynasty.

Calligraphy first bloomed as an art during the Han Dynasty but by the time of the Tang Dynasty, it had declined as an art. Source: Chinese Calligraphy History

It would be difficult to talk about Chinese art without understanding Chinese calligraphy and its artistic inspiration. A painting has to convey an object, but a well-written character conveys only its beauty through line and structure.

In Shanghai on sidewalks, or Beijing at The Summer Palace, I’ve watched men with long handled brushes, as seen in the first video, using water for ink and concrete for paper. With grace, they exhibit the skills of a Rembrandt breathing life into the characters.

America’s so called street artists should copy the Chinese that practice calligraphy and trade in their cans of spray paint for brushes and water, which would save US taxpayers much money.

Lin Yutang writes in My Country and My People that Western art is more sensual, more passionate, fuller of the artist’s ego, while the Chinese artist and art-lover contemplates a dragonfly, a frog, a grasshopper or a piece of jagged rock—more in harmony with nature.

Owing to the use of writing calligraphy with a brush, which is more subtle and more responsive than the pen, calligraphy as art is equal to Chinese painting.

Through calligraphy, the scholar is trained to appreciate, as regards line, qualities like force, suppleness, reserved strength, exquisite tenderness, swiftness, neatness, massiveness, ruggedness, and restraint or freedom.

Maybe this helps explain why the Chinese are not as warlike as Christian and Islamic cultures.

This revised and edited post first appeared on July 3, 2010 as Caressing Nature with Chinese Calligraphy

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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