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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARCU$