Click here to read all of David Frum’s blogposts from China.
Western visitors to Beijing usually start at the Forbidden City or the Great Wall. On my first day here, I found myself at a very different site: the Museum of the People’s Liberation Army.
What a mob scene! The huge square in front of the Stalin-era museum was thronged with senior citizens disgorged from tour buses. A huge line queued at the entry point. Inside, people jostled and elbowed their way past exhibits of antique tanks and howitzers, captured Japanese sabres and Korean War-vintage jets.
Unlike other Beijing attractions, here almost every visitor except for my companions and myself was Chinese. Most looked of an age to have served in Korea themselves.
Venture beyond the great hall, and suddenly you were cast back into China’s totalitarian past: statues of Red Guard militants, Socialist Realist portraits of Chairman Mao striding into the future, explanatory wall panels (in English and Chinese) explicating the heroic history of the Communist Party.
This junk spilled over a dozen large rooms. As I wandered deeper, I noticed that I was very suddenly alone, or nearly so. Did the Mao material repel those who had endured his rule? Or did the material just bore its intended audience: old dusty legends irrelevant to modern times?
Either way, such a reaction would make sense. Everything good that has happened in China over the past three decades has come from discarding and reversing Mao’s destructive legacy.
But as the museum reminds, much of that legacy remains in effect — and none of it has been formally repudiated. Mao’s picture still overhangs Tiananmen Square, still defaces the currency. The museum-goers may turn their backs on the myth of communist heroics, but the lies depicted in the museum continue to be repeated in the school curriculum. An expert from the U.S. embassy explains that every university still houses a Department of Marxism-Leninism studies, and every university student must complete a required course in the subject.
How much influence does this indoctrination exert? Very little, it might seem. China is a land overwhelmingly devoted to money-making and money-spending. Today’s “long march” is the march through the country’s colossal glittering shopping centers.
And yet at the same time as Chinese people live raw capitalism, the only stories they hear of China’s recent past are those that represent Mao as a hero and his revolution as a triumph. How do people make sense of a world like that?
Can they somehow try to believe two contradictory things at the same time: that Mao was a great leader — and also that China has escaped poverty by repudiating everything Mao ever stood for?
Or do they deaden their minds, stop asking questions, mumble the slogans and live without thinking?
There can hardly be a living Chinese who has not suffered some horrible family loss directly attributable to Mao’s decisions. It’s plausibly estimated that Mao’s reckless rule caused somewhere above 40 million excess deaths, half of them during the terrible famine caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-61, when private farming was banned and peasants were ordered instead to make steel in their backyards.
Yet nobody is allowed to mention these things. This is a country of forcibly silenced victims. Rising prosperity is supposed to heal the unmentionable old wounds, yet everybody can see that the greatest share of the prosperity is seized by the former victimizers. Everybody can see it, but nobody may say it.
It’s a grim irony: The huge magnitude of Mao’s crimes is sometimes cited as a reason for forgetting those crimes. If this society ever allowed itself to talk about who suffered what –and who did what–it would open itself to an explosion of recrimination and revenge. The translator who asks $10 to guide you through the Forbidden City might have been a university professor if his education had not been arbitrarily halted during the Cultural Revolution. The billionaire who travels in a fleet of Mercedes limousines made his fortune from control of land that was confiscated from somebody else’s grandfather. The old peasant riding the rural bus may have beat the driver’s mother to death in a village purge; the construction worker who lives in an illegal dormitory because he lacks city residency may be the child of a city-dweller sent to a labor camp in an anti-deviationist campaign.
How do you begin to do justice in these cases? But how does a society cohere and advance on the basis of the silent disregard of such massive, horrible and unexpiated wrong?
Originally published in the National Post.
nhthinker // Apr 17, 2010 at 8:48 am
We need to inflict China with a plague of Western style lawyers.
Then they can get in touch with an unhealthy victimized mentality that the American left loves to revel in.
Is that what you are wishing for, David?
sinz54 // Apr 17, 2010 at 9:28 am
Nations are born in contradictions.
National pride, and pride in your nation’s history, is not necessarily negated by such contradictions.
The United States, beacon of freedom and liberty to the world, had slavery till 1863 and had states whose laws treated blacks as second-class citizens till the 1960s. It became a nation from coast to coast by ethnic cleansing of the AmerIndians.
That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of my country or its history. Heck, I’m proud of the fact that we took North America away from the AmerIndians. And of the fact that we finally did overcome widespread white antipathy toward the black race, and accepted them as intellectual and and moral equals.
Mao did do a few things that are worth mentioning.
He led Chinese against the Japanese invaders in World War II. (Mao even radioed bombing coordinates to Curtis LeMay’s B-29s.)
Mao’s theories on guerrilla warfare have become required reading for guerrilla movements worldwide. Including the Vietnamese Communists, who managed to outlast both the French and the Americans in the various wars in Indochina. And despite all the extreme Marxist rhetoric, Mao and Zhou En-Lai began the process of detente with the U.S., which pulled China away from the USSR, and laid the groundwork for today’s more cordial relationship between the two countries.
But the Chinese Communist Party agrees that Mao’s economic policies, like the disastrous Cultural Revolution, were a failure.
You learn from history. And you move on.
JonF // Apr 17, 2010 at 10:21 am
The Russians have something similar, but unofficial and smaller scale with Stalin these days: they are revering a strong leader who saved their nation from foreign conquest and made it a power to be reckoned with in the world. That he also killed tens of millions they gloss over. I am told by someone whose word I trust that in the Russian Orthodox Church here in Baltimore (a church with a congregation of mainly first generation Russians) there is a picture of Stalin hung in the church hall, in a place of honor– thankfully at least not with the icons!
dendup // Apr 17, 2010 at 10:34 am
Sinz: “You learn from history. And you move on.”
Were it that simple. Every day on this blog people post wildly divergent lessons of history with absolute conviction and certitude.
I know, we should disregard all of them except for Sinz’s, but nobody seems to understand that.
History is about the present and the future as much as is about the past. Which is to say that it is a dynamic process. Of course we can say Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14 hundred and ninety two, and that stays the same, but what its lessons are depends on our present day concerns as much as the raw facts.
There is a middle path between ignoring the path and obsessing about it. But there is no final “moving on”.
ymw // Apr 17, 2010 at 11:00 am
I’m glad that, finaly, Frum goes to Beijing.
As a big-name Western intellectual, Frum once again demonstrated the short comings of someone who lives in one side of the world for all his life. Frum asked, “Can they somehow try to believe two contradictory things at the same time: that Mao was a great leader — and also that China has escaped poverty by repudiating everything Mao ever stood for?” Frum tries to view China through a pair of black and white glasses, just like many other western observers do. But the world is a rainbow.
China did escape poverty by repudiating EVERYTHING Mao ever stood for. Instead, China achieved this by prolonging some and denouncing some (although not publicly) and ignoring the rest of what Mao ever stood for. China did not follow the steps of the former Soviet Union that, at the advice of American scholars, view its own history in black and white. China sees the world as a rainbow and is trying hard to find a blance of colors. Of course, in the process, China also, inevitably, is inflicted by some troubling western diseases that Mao tried to avoid (e.g., over-commercialism).
My advice to Frum: forget what you have learned about China. Find a teaching post at one of the universities and stay there for three years. It will open your eyes to see different colors and you will find your own answers to your questions.
mlindroo // Apr 17, 2010 at 1:12 pm
As others already have pointed out, Mao & co. were mostly wrong about the economy. I’d imagine Chinese nationalists and patriots remember him as the person who successfully fought the Japanese and transformed China into a major power after centuries of Western domination. The Chinese seem less interested in democracy and individual rights, which probably explains the apparent contradictions of a “communist in name only” dictatorship running a country of 1 billion people.
MARCU$
CK MacLeod // Apr 17, 2010 at 3:35 pm
I think you mean the person who successfully avoided fighting the Japanese.
Nothing surprising, really, that a country now building a property bubble that in relative terms dwarfs the US housing bubble would also perpetuate a kind of intellectual bubble. The two are, arguably, related by more than coincidence. The same lack of historical transparency that Mr. Frum describes equates with other forms of denial – psychological denial, denial of rights, denial of economic realities, and so on.
The popping of the economic bubble may be accompanied by several simultaneous collapses, including the credibility of the China bulls and cheerleaders. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again.
Zombie Contentions - The Great Psychological Wall of China // Apr 17, 2010 at 4:46 pm
[...] Frum’s latest message from China concerns a visit to the the Museum of the People’s Liberation Army, and occasions some musing [...]
ktward // Apr 17, 2010 at 10:23 pm
David:
Yet, cohering and advancing it is.
Your column sure is a whole lotta editorial drama– My god, how can the Chinese live with themselves?! Seems an Emmy-worthy effort to stir an ugly recrimination pot that evidently won’t be stirred, no matter how incensed you clearly feel about it. I’ve really no idea what it is you expect the Chinese people should do to save their horribly lost souls; shall they risk their present-day prosperity and personal well-being to rise up against their notoriously heavy-handed gov’t in revolt against long-gone Mao and his museum legacy?
My time spent with a Beijinger:
One of my son’s closest friends is from Beijing. Bin, 26, a talented music performance grad student here on visa for the last 4ish years. A lovely young man in every respect, wholly impressive in his command of English (mandatory language education, btw), and his humble manner and gracious etiquette made delightful his occasional stays in my home. As a green tea drinker for nigh on 3 decades, I was easily flattered by his kind praise that I knew how to properly brew it in sophisticated Chinese tradition. Finally, someone who appreciates one of my finer skills as my own children never have. [cough.]
We’ve had many conversations, long and short, on Chinese politics, culture, people. Bin is comfortably open about his own experiences and points of view, and sincerely interested in Western observations. He takes no offense to critical challenges. Ultimately, wherever I discovered that my own academic perspective fell apart in contradiction to Bin’s own personal experience & deeper knowledge, I gladly deferred without the defensive posturing so common among many self-absorbed Americans.
In the main, Beijingers are cultured, urban sophisticates. They travel through China and are aware of regional inequities that exist, but they appreciate China’s rich geo-cultural diversity. Enough of them have traveled abroad to recognize the governing distinctions between China and the West. Tech literate, if they’re really jonesin’ for a hit of Western crazy they’ll find a way around internet censorship. Those that have studied in the West are sensitive to the scarlet-letter C (for Communism) branded on their forehead, and they’re also aware of the more glaring disparities within China’s own historical record.
For the most part, Beijingers are simply pragmatic: if they’re allowed–indeed, encouraged–to peacefully prosper both as families and within communities, they’ve not much use for dwelling on injustices of the past. That’s a really long checklist for a very old civilization. As for Mao, they endured inarguable hardship at his hand for only a brief sliver of time on their old clock, but it’s a recent enough memory for them to not want to risk re-inviting the worst parts of it back.
Communism in China has succeeded where Soviet Communism failed: the people and their restrictive gov’t have managed to find a workable detente that addresses both their personal economic well-being and their future as a nation in the world economy.
This is difficult for many Americans to accept. We cannot imagine living peaceably in a country where we could not be having this very blog conversation. I’m an American, and I unquestionably prefer here to there. But I’m not sure why we feel obliged to insist the Chinese people share our American sensibilities. Human Rights* violations are another matter, but if the Chinese people are prospering and are mostly okee-dokee with it all, who are we to judge their souls as David seems to?
*Tibetans surely have a different take on Chinese gov’t activities than Bin. He’s of course aware of that conflict and the controversial strategy on the part of the Chinese gov’t to flood Tibet with Han relocatees. As a pragmatic Beijinger, he struggles to understand why Tibetans aren’t happy with China’s ‘modernizations’, but he sympathizes with the painful cultural impact.
DaveEliason // Apr 18, 2010 at 12:46 am
On a working trip to China in 2005 several coworkers and I ate dinner with our hosts at a restaurant in Zhu-Hai named “The Chairman Mao.” It was reputed to be one of the better places to get spicy food in the city. With the bill came little souvenir pins of Mao for everyone so I put one on.
Later that evening I was sharing an elevator in my hotel with two 20 something Chinese women. One of them saw my pin and got the others attention and gestured to my pin and said “Mao” and then they both laughed.
Both that incident and the conversation at dinner with our hosts about this topic made it clear that veneration of Mao is viewed as a an anachronism and when a foreigner partakes in what is mandatory lip service for them, it is funny.
The Chinese people that I have dealt with are very good at ignoring the dissonance inherent in so much of their lives. Not because they can’t see it, but because worrying about it is pointless. They are masters of my favorite ancient eastern philosophy. That effort spent on things which cannot be changed is wasted and would be better spent on something that you can effect.
nameless // Apr 18, 2010 at 3:17 am
“Everything good that has happened in China over the past three decades has come from discarding and reversing Mao’s destructive legacy.”
Here’s a point that you may have overlooked.
During the 30-something years Mao was in power, Chinese literacy rate went up about threefold (I think that they started at 20% and, by the early eighties, they were at 60% to 70%), and their life expectancy went from under 40 to over 60.
It’s remarkably tough to build a modern economy when you lack infrastructure and your people are barely out of the stone age. Which is more or less where China was in 1945. China has done better than essentially all countries of Southeast Asia except Taiwan, thanks to the legacy of Mao.
nameless // Apr 18, 2010 at 3:41 am
P.S. much of the same can be said about Russia and Stalin. Most people don’t quite appreciate how primitive Russia and China were 100 years ago compared to their “civilized” counterparts. Japanese people were, on average, more educated in 1860 than Chinese were when Mao came to power. Louis XIV’s France was more educated than Lenin’s Russia.
sinz54 // Apr 18, 2010 at 10:06 am
nameless:
Most people don’t appreciate how much better Russia could have done, if Stalin hadn’t sent millions of the most intelligent Russian intelligentsia to the Gulag; and if he hadn’t shot his best army officers.
Don’t compare Stalin to the czars. Feudalism was already dead in the rest of the West.
Try comparing Stalin to what Russia could have accomplished under a democratic, capitalist Kerensky regime.
sinz54 // Apr 18, 2010 at 10:08 am
nameless:
The Mao regime was an economic failure. Even the Chinese Communist Party will now admit that.
That means that decades were wasted.
China could have been a superpower 30 years ago, if it had done then what it’s doing now.
nameless // Apr 18, 2010 at 10:39 pm
“if Stalin hadn’t sent millions of the most intelligent Russian intelligentsia to the Gulag”
There wasn’t any intelligentsia in Russia before Stalin. There was a thin layer of educated aristocracy which produced most well-known 19th century Russian scientists, composers, etc. The literacy rate outside the Baltic and Moscow/St.Petersburg was around 15%. There was a couple of universities in Moscow and St.Petersburg. Most citizens would’ve considered themselves lucky to have attended a church school for two or three years. Then Stalin came along, instituted mandatory seven-year primary education, created a network of universities, started an explosive growth of college-educated population. The only reason there was any intelligentsia in the country by 1937 to send to the Gulag was that Stalin created it.
You want to see what Russia could have accomplished under a capitalist Kerensky regime, you can probably look some other populous countries that were at the same level of development in 1917: maybe Indonesia or Nigeria.
You want to
Then