iLook China

Ninth Question [Lofthouse]:

What is your opinion on Tibet as part of China and how would you describe the Tibet issue?

Answer [Parfitt]:

Westerns tend to idealize Tibet and know little about its history or society. I wonder how many readers are aware, for example, that Tibet was invaded by Britain in 1903, with the British killing 3,000 Tibetans and sending the Dalai Lama fleeing to Mongolia.

Tibet remains an acutely backward society, filled with superstition, quackery, sorcery…. Until recently, mutilation was considered a valid punishment.

Tibetan history is riddled with violence; Tibet was once an ambitious military state. Tibetans often fought against, and defeated, the Chinese. They toppled China’s emperor in Xian in the eight century, illustrating that the mighty Han were really limp wristed. The Tibetans withdrew after the Chinese acknowledged the Sino-Tibetan border, etc., but the Chinese never forgot how the long-haired barbarians caused them to lose face. Revenge is such a potent element in Chinese culture; an ever-present theme.

Savage-brimming “borderlands,” like Mongolia, Tibet, and Taiwan would have to be Sinicized. Taiwan got away. Mongolia became a Soviet suzerainty in exchange for aid. Tibet, which had swapped its martial tradition for Buddhism, was ripe for the picking. With the Korean War, larger powers were distracted. There were several reasons for China’s invasion and annexation of Tibet, but the paramount one was revenge.

Chinese rule in Tibet vacillates between cultural suffocation and cultural genocide. Oh, and murder. It isn’t known how many Tibetans have died under Chinese occupation. Thousands, tens of thousands…. Nobody is sure, and estimates from Dharamsala have been unreliable. Tibetans are forced to sign conduct agreements; life in Lhasa is closely monitored by the police; there are informants, spies; Tibetans who aren’t deemed patriotic citizens are jailed, tortured…. It’s a shitty situation.

Probably the saddest part, beyond the death and repression, is that Western governments have been reluctant to act. UN resolutions are useless, too. The West criticizes China’s involvement in Africa, accusing the Chinese Communist Party of doing business with any two-bit thug-state, but China represents the biggest thug-state on Earth, only its leaders often wear nicer suits and have American PhDs.

For further reading, see Patrick French’s Tibet, Tibet and Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue.

Response [Lofthouse]:

In October 1885, Robert Hart wrote a letter to his London agent saying China did not want Tibet exposed to Western trade and influence.

Then in a 1903 letter, Hart mentioned the 2,000 British troops that invaded Tibet. Since China claimed Tibet as its territory, the British were warned to leave or risk war.

As for claims of cultural suffocation and genocide in today’s Tibet, anyone that reads the article in the October 1912 issue of National Geographic Magazine by a Chinese medical doctor sent to Tibet in 1907 would discover that Tibetans are better off today.

If Tibet returned to the situation Dr. Shaoching H. Chuan described in National Geographic [including many photos], it would be an inhuman act. Under the CCP, the quality of life in Tibet has improved dramatically from that feudal culture where 99% of the people were slaves to a dogmatic religion and rich landowners.

Final Word [Parfitt]:

Stick Out Your Tongue, which should erase any idealized notions of Tibet, was blasted by the CCP for failing to depict “the great strides the Tibetan people have made in building a united, prosperous, and civilized Socialist Tibet.”

Yes, China has made improvements in Tibet. Even the Dalai Lama admits this.

Still.

Canada is less advanced than America. Canadian news stories sometimes conclude: ‘Unlike the US, Canada doesn’t have a law/committee/policy/plan to deal with ‘subject.’ But I don’t think America should invade, force the government to London, destroy the hockey rinks, ban national institutions, torture new and ungrateful “American citizens,” or put them in front of firing squads – to rescue them from their own ignorance.

If China hadn’t invaded, Tibet might have gotten assistance from the West. But China’s concern about Western influence in Tibet was one reason it invaded.

It was not for Tibetans that China annexed Tibet.

Continued on December 7, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 11 or return to Part 9.

See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Seventh Question [Lofthouse]:

How would you describe the differences between urban and rural China?

Answer [Parfitt]:

In some respects, urban-rural differences are not unlike those in North America. In others, they are profound. People are generally more sophisticated in Chinese cities, especially along the coast. I found country folk to be friendly (one family put me up for the night in their home in the middle of nowhere), but impoverished. I spent a day driving through the backwaters of agricultural Hunan and never saw a single piece of farming equipment. Something else that struck me was the voluminous countryside pollution, which some Chinese will tell you is mist or fog. Apparently, Chinese mist and fog smell like turpentine.

I’m aware that in some villages, Party officials listen to local concerns and try to make improvements, but there’s so much graft in this “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” that rural people regularly lose out. Sure, they can migrate to cities, but the hukou, or household registration, makes this illegal (China does not have mobility rights; the hukou creates a sort of caste system), and migrant workers are often discriminated against and denied state services.

Naturally, many of China’s peasants are not happy with their situation or local cadres. A lot of “mass incidents” – riots, protests, strikes – transpire in rural areas, and, from the Ministry of Public Security’s own admissions, we know these number in the tens of thousands per annum. And this is the flipside to China’s glorious development, its Tom Sawyer cleverness in turning itself into the world’s factory floor: farmers forced to irrigate crops from factory-poisoned rivers decide to complain one day and are rounded up, beaten up, locked up, tortured – perhaps in an illegal or “black jail.” This is what China has become. Cadres seize land, sell it to developers, force citizens out of their ancestral homes, pay them a pittance, and threaten them to shut up. Scenarios like this play out literally hundreds of times a day, and except for the occasional corrupt-official-show-trial-and-execution the people are the losers. What the Party calls socialism is really state-capitalism, kleptocracy, Orwellianism, and coercion.

“If there is hope,” wrote Orwell, “it lies in the proles.”

Here’s to hope.

Response [Lofthouse]:

Graft in China exists at the provincial and local level, but is not as bad as India where corruption/graft is estimated at about 50% of GDP and those living in poverty [more than ten times China] are worse off.

The hukou Parfitt describes exists but to understand why requires one to know China’s history before 1949 when life in rural China was worse.

David C. Schak’s paper on Poverty in China points out social unrest in rural China was also common during the 19th century, which had to do more with an unsustainable population than anything else did.

Schak says prior to 1949, marauding armies often confiscated crops and forcibly conscripted men leaving the peasants with no resources, and he describes factories hiring day laborers by throwing the number of tallies for the number of workers they wanted into the crowd of job seekers and letting them fight.

Final Word [Parfitt]:

Corruption in India isn’t germane to this debate.

A June 29, 2011 article in The Atlantic reports the People’s Bank of China announced “17,000 Communist Party members and state functionaries… illicitly obtained and… smuggled out of China… $124 billion from the mid-90s until 2008.”

One would hope that the CCP made rural life better. When it came to power (1949), things couldn’t have been much worse. China was broken, having experienced 22 years of warfare. This is part of what makes the Communists-as-heroes-of-the-people argument so weak; this, and the mayhem, murder, and neglect ushered in by Mao, whose desire to transform China into a socialist utopia resulted in a famine that caused the deaths of millions.

How anyone could purport to love China and its people, and downplay or deny such an event, as Mr. Lofthouse does on his site, is a grave insult to China and its people.  [Referring to Mao’s ‘alleged’ Guilt in the Land of Famines]

Continued on December 5, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 9 or return to Part 7.

See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Fifth Question [Lofthouse]:

Pearl S. Buck [1892 – 1973], the winner of the Pulitzer and Noble Prizes for Literature, expressed her dissatisfaction with Chiang Kai-shek’s policies while remaining anti-Communist.

The FBI classified her as a Communist sympathizer and kept a file on her that ran in the hundreds of pages. The Chinese Communists [CCP] under Mao called her a “running dog” of capitalism. In China, Buck was critical of both the Nationalists and the Communists.

However, she said the Chinese people would be better off with the CCP than being ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists.

What was it about Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT that caused Buck to believe this?

Answer [Parfitt]:

I can’t speak to Buck’s thought-process, but I agree with her appraisal. I don’t know how anyone could read 20th century Chinese history and not, during the second phase of the Civil War (1945-1949), root for the big Red boot. Although Mao was a heartless bastard, he was right when he likened the KMT to a toilet that, no matter how many times flushed, still stinks.

It wasn’t that Mao won the Civil War so much as Chiang lost it. Whole armies defected when generals realized the Generalissimo was up to his old tricks. Chiang’s post-WWII China-rule was aptly described by one US diplomat as “one of the biggest carpetbagging operations in history.”

It had taken the Nationalists six years to even face the Japanese in battle. Chiang’s officers were yes-men, his troops poorly trained and press ganged. At war’s end, the Nationalists deemed anyone residing outside the wartime capital of Chongqing a traitor, never mind they had left 40 percent of the populace at the mercy of Hirohito’s merciless army, defeating that army only once.

The KMT forced citizens to hand in all money and valuables. Hoarders were publicly executed. The KMT intercepted international aid and sold it on the black market, unsurprising given it had sold US military equipment to the Japanese.

Chiang Kai-shek was an inept, extortionate, dictatorial thug responsible for the deaths of millions of Chinese.

The KMT has always been very “business-minded.” It controlled the opium trade, and once extorted every bank and enterprise in Shanghai. The party’s collection agency was the Green Gang. Not keen on extending a “loan” to China’s new government? Perhaps you’ll have a change of heart when your own coffin is delivered to your door.

The Nationalists remain hopelessly corrupt, but at least in Taiwan they ended martial law and allowed for democratic reforms. For that, they deserve a medal, and can probably forge one from gold stolen from China.

What Buck couldn’t have known was that China’s peasant liberators were led by a madman whose reign was an exercise in revenge and would turn the nation on its head.

Response [Lofthouse]:

From what I’ve learned of Pearl S. Buck, I’m sure she would agree with your assessment of Chiang Kai-shek. However, she may have disagreed with the description of Mao as a totally heartless bastard and lunatic.

A better description would be that Mao feared China would revert to its Western dominated feudal past, and this paranoia contributed to Mao’s disastrous blunders.

If Mao had been “totally” heartless, there would have been no improvement of living standards in China as PRB.org reports, “For three decades after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, China’s economy grew and stabilized, and the living standards of most Chinese citizens greatly improved. But China remained a very poor country…”

Mao was a product of the era. To understand how a sensitive, young idealist turned into the man that launched the Cultural Revolution, I suggest reading Mao and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Final Word [Parfitt]:

China does not have a “Western dominated” past. How could it? Europeans didn’t arrive until the mid-16th century. China’s modern history has been influenced by the West, but – to reiterate – that theme is just one of dozens.

Mao’s personal physician, Dr.  Li Zhishui, a man who knew Mao intimately and saw him nearly every day he was in power, wrote a 736-page biography about the ruler called The Private Life of Chairman Mao. In it, Li decribes Mao’s thought-process as “prescientific,” adding that Mao himself was “incapable of love and devoid of human feeling.” Numerous health issues are mentioned and explained, but nowhere does Li mention anything resembling PTSD.

To understand Mao, one must read books.

I arrived at my assessments of Mao, Chiang, China, etc. by reading copiously about the nation’s past; a broad spectrum of books, mainly by academics, none of whom, to authenticate their claims, cite themelves.

Continued on December 3, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 7 or return to Part 5.

See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
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About iLook China