Body hair

First of all, an article about Baidu that relates to last week's post about censorship. It appears that Baidu is doing really well, which certainly couldn't please the Chinese government more. This is perhaps the latest type of censorship in China, but it's certainly not the first. Emperors from the beginning of time burned books and killed writers with whom they disagreed. Mao liked to bait traps, like in the Hundred Flowers Campaign when he asked for suggestions and got rid of anyone who made one. And of course, there was the Cultural Revolution.

This week I'm supposed to be writing about Mao. Some other sites have had retrospectives over the past two weeks. Interestingly enough, there has not been a major retrospective from out of China. Perhaps this is related to the initiative to take Mao out of the history books! In fact, in the years after his death, the high cadres decided that Mao had been "70% right and 30% wrong" and considered the book closed. More specifics were left out: most Chinese under fourty continue to revere Mao without knowing much of anything about him.

It is difficult to assess Mao's legacy. As a revolutionary, he was a great, a genius, and generally improved the plight of everyday Chinese. In Communist areas before the full takeover in 1949 and for some time thereafter, the Party redistributed land, largely ended child slavery and opium abuse, instituted more equal rights for women, schools and basic healthcare. As a leader, Mao presided over massive crackdowns like the Hundred Flowers and the Cultural Revolution, as well as the greatest famine in human history (and one that probably could have been avoided). And if you look at China today, it bears little resemblance to the socialist paradise that Mao aimed at creating.

You might say (as many have before you) that Mao was Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. The question this raises is how Lenin would have ruled had he lived. There are indications that Lenin would have been more of an internationalist, more of a moderate and less of a tyrant. There are also indications that Lenin would have been every bit as ruthless as Stalin. Different times call for different leaders. And you know what they say about power.

While it is true that Mao was a theorist and a true revolutionary in his youth and a vicious tyrant at the end, and probably made some poor judgements in between, this comparison suppreses another aspect of Mao's legacy we should look at. Mao was a nationalist every bit as much as he was a socialist (please note the lower case, I do not mean that Mao was a Nationalist as much as he was a Communist in terms of party affiliation [i.e. guomindang a.k.a. KMT] although he, like all early Communists, was a Nationalist early on). There is a big division between the international communists and the national communists. No major internationalist socialist has ever lead a Communist country. True, the USSR (sucessfully) sponsored Communists in Korea, Eastern Europe, China (sortof), Southeast Asia and Cuba (who in turn sponsored unsucessful Communists elsewhere in Latin America and Africa) and unsucessfully elswhere. But this was largely out of nessessity and a very national rivalry with the US. Real internationalists like Trotsky never came fully to power and probably never could have.

In fact, revolutionaries in many of those countries were oppsed simultaneously to a leadership supported by foreign capital or even foreign occupation, putting class and national interests in the same camp. This was certainly the case in China (Japan and to a lesser extent the US-supported KMT), Vietnam (France, Japan and the US) and Cuba (the US). Ho Chi Minh discribed himself as a Vietnamese nationalist first and a Communist second; arguably this was the case for Mao as well. During the war with Japan, the Communists were willing to form common ground with the Nationalists to force out the foreign threat. Following the take-over, Mao insisted on rapid industrialization based on heavy industry largely for reasons of national pride and security; allowing light industry to develop first would likely have resulted in smoother progress.

In this respect, the China of today is a real legacy of Mao. He lead the effort to drive out foreigners and develop China as a powerful and independant country. He would certainly be proud that China is a major force on the global scene and has begun to export technical expertise with development loans and has been asserting itself in the UN. He certainly would have liked the Three Gorges Dam. And in terms of the culture, China shows Mao's legacy in it's very language: Mao, like several emperors before him modernized the writing system and required everyone to learn Mandarin. This is a legacy that I can certainly appreciate.