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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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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Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 4/4

June 27, 2011

If you are interested in the challenges China faces from mother nature, I suggest visiting the Asian Disaster Reduction Center Site (ADRC) to discover that China has survived earthquakes, extreme climate changes, floods, storms, storm surges, forest fires, drought, insect damage, landslides and slope failure.

In particular, earthquakes, droughts and cyclones have caused major damage.

In fact, China is one of the countries most affected by natural disasters, which occur frequently affecting more than 200 million people every year and these disasters have become an important restricting factor for economic and social development. 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.

In addition, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake has continued the country’s revision of their disaster relief plans. One year after the earthquake, the government announced its continued efforts to improve disaster response. A white paper published on the anniversary details plans to increase the state-level storage facilities for relief materials, such as tents, blankets, medicines and rescue devices, from 10 to 24 so that China may react faster to deal with another serious disaster.


American Red Cross – China Earthquake: One Year Later

On May 12, 2011, according to the Pakistan Defense Website (I couldn’t find this information from a Western media source), China’s expenditures and reconstruction efforts since the Sichuan earthquake have cost 885.15 billion yuan, which was 92.37% of the overall rebuilding budget.

Also reported was, “China’s first earthquake museum was opened in Sichuan. It covers 140,000 square meters, and is made up of six theme sections with 270 exhibits and 559 photos.”

“In Sichuan alone,” Pakistan Defense said, “nearly 3,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and more than 5 million homes have been built or renovated, according to Wei Hong, executive vice-governor of Sichuan province.”

Before condemning China for the schools that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake, do not forget that the US has allowed nearly 400,000 people to live in the potential path of death and destruction from Mount Rainier, which has been labeled American’s most dangerous volcano. Source: KOMO News

Jesus Christ said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Return to Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 3 or start with 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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 3/4

June 26, 2011

Before I focus on Sichuan‘s recovery from the massive 2008 earthquake in China that killed about 90,000 (compared to more than 300,000 dead in Haiti‘s earthquake in 2010), I will point out what I discovered from The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN to offer a glimpse of the criticism leveled at China from the Western media.  There has also been some criticism leveled at China’s recovery efforts.

The themes of these reports were, “Thousands of the initial quake’s victims were children (about 5,000, but more children died in Haiti and those that survived are still threatened as you will soon discover) crushed in shoddily built schools, inciting protests by parents. Local police harassed the protestors and the government criticized them. At least one human rights advocate who championed their cause was arrested.” Source: The New York Times, CNN.com and Fox News

Note: While searching for information on the recovery efforts in Sichuan, I had trouble finding anything from the previous three sources. It was almost as if those three Western media sources had an unwritten rule that said we never print or say anything postive of China.


UNICEF and IKEA aid China earthquake recovery

However, I did find a report from Time Magazine on China’s recovery but also discovered from UNICEF that a year after the Haiti 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s 22,000 schools still lack safe drinking water and sanitation while health specialists expect cholera to remain endemic in Haiti for years to come.

Time Magazine’s Austin Ramzy reported, “I went back to Sichuan six months after the catastrophe and was amazed at the speed of physical and economic recovery. In Dujiangyan, the largest city in the quake zone, the rubble and tent cities had disappeared. The jumble of debris was replaced by piles of new bricks, lumber and other construction materials.

“There was a building boom across the region, and dozens of temporary villages were erected to house the 5 million people who were rendered homeless by the quake.

“The prefab housing was made out of blue aluminum siding lined with Styrofoam insulation. It had concrete floors and was arranged in neat rows in flat spots at the bases of the mountains. Conditions weren’t luxurious, but the camps were clean and the housing dry and fairly warm.”

Note: Time Magazine couldn’t resist mentioning the collapsed schools using similar language to the other Western sources mentioned above as if it were China’s fault that the earthquake took place and the children died.

These reports offer unproven allegations, which may or may not be true but what does that have to do with recovery efforts? In fact, many buildings/homes in rural areas of China were not well built and may have dated back centuries, which is common in third world and developing countries such as China.

Continued on June 27, 2011 in Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – 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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