iLook China

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.

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About iLook China

Third Question [Lofthouse]:

In your book trailer, you claim that China has nothing to offer the world culturally and in a stereotyped blanket statement say that the Confucian hierarchy of China’s culture causes businesses and industries to have a rigid chain of command that exerts total control over the people below them. Due to this, you say it leads to inefficiency and a lack of coordination.

However, how do you explain that under the same collective, cultural Confucian hierarchy you criticize, China was the wealthiest, most powerful and technologically advanced nation on the planet for more than two thousand years until the 19th century?

Answer [Parfitt]:

In addition to directing the reader toward a particular conclusion, begging-the-question language assumes a premise has already been established. However, it hasn’t been established that China was the world’s greatest nation from the Qin (221 BCE) to 1800. Was China really wealthier, more powerful, and more technologically advanced than the Roman Empire (44 BCE – 1453 CE)? Says who?

Most cultures devise a gilded-age myth. Conspicuously, China’s gilded-age spans two millennia, from the First Emperor to the Opium Wars. It speaks to patriotism and victimization, and is a Communist Party fabrication. An eighth-grade social science textbook begins, “Our motherland… was once an advanced and great nation… but after the invasions of the… capitalist powers, a profound national crisis occurred.”

Specious and hyperbolic declarations only obscure a reasoned analysis of China’s contributions. A relevant example is Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. China’s 15th-century age-of-exploration is truly remarkable, but Menzies overreaches to where the Chinese built a Danish granary in America and a Loyalist farm in Canada. Like many Sinophiles, he specializes in mythomania. The Cambridge scientist Joseph Needham (1900–1995) is guilty of overstatement, too. Needham accurately noted China had made contributions to science never documented, but he grossly inflated their scope and importance, explicating that the Chinese had invented virtually everything – only to forget it all just before the Europeans arrived.

In Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, no gilded-age appears and European presence is not treated as the prevailing theme. Chinese civilization is portrayed as highly complex but infinitely troubled, by poverty, lawlessness, chaos, violence, warlordism, rebellion, warfare, despotism, etc. Spence, the foremost China scholar, does not indicate China represented the most advanced nation, nor does he propose its achievements were the result of Confucian values.

China’s achievements have occurred despite Confucian values. Overwhelmingly, Confucianism works only to stifle creativity, stymie critical thinking, and nullify questioning. It is a form of authoritarianism, tyranny of the mind and soul. If the Chinese wish to genuinely advance, they must scrutinize this antediluvian rubric. They must ask if it has served to advance them, or kept them subjugated.

Response [Lofthouse]:

Spence is not “the” foremost China scholar. At best, he is widely recognized as “a” leading scholar of Chinese history, among “many” others.

As for China’s Han Dynasty being superior to Rome during Emperor Marcus Aurelius time (161- 180 AD), Discovery Channel’s Neville Gishford and Archaeologist Charles Higham, a world famous authority on ancient Asia, sets the record straight in Xi’an (Chang’ an).

In ‘The Indiscreet Charm of Tyranny’, Buruma writes, “Confucius, and especially Mencius, believed in the people’s right to rebel against corrupt rulers,” and the Chinese people are aware, explaining The Mandate of Heaven.

In addition, “Ancient Chinese Inventions” published by Cambridge University Press reveals that China gave birth to numerous scientific and technological inventions, and for centuries led the world in such innovations.

In conclusion, Spence explored ‘Why Confucius Counts’ and said, “In the hands of major current thinkers it (Confucianism) is neither farce nor fraud.”

Final Word [Parfitt]:

Whether the Han dynasty was “greater” than Marcus Aurelius’s Rome has nothing to do with the claim that China represented the greatest civilization on Earth.

I don’t deny China’s scientific achievments; I have read about them and Science and Civilisation in China, the pertinent, authoritative work. Chinese innovations should not be disregarded. However,  it must be asked why so few have appeared in modern history. Of the 976 Nobel laureates to date, only 1 has been a citizen of China: Liu Xiaobo, awarded the 2010 Peace Prize while in prison for subversion.

If Confucius had focused more on reasoned thinking than tautology, and encourged his compatriots to question and investigate rather than imitate and obey, the Chinese might not have a government working under the directive of an inanimate entity with a dubious existence. The Mandate of Heaven is no more meaningful than the Mandate of Earth, Wind, or Fire.

Continued on December 1, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 5 or return to Part 3.

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”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China