Thread: Mao's legacy

Originally Posted by cdude

This is for smart girls, dumb ones go to Guangdong making Ipods

If they're lucky.

If they're not lucky, they poison themselves while burning microchips off circuit boards to be counterfeited and re-sold.

Originally Posted by xinhui

Mao promised "hope" and "change" Deng offered something completely useless, like jobs.

HA! Quote of the day...

Me thinks we should enshrine this line in the "quotes" thread.

Originally Posted by xinhui

Mao promised "hope" and "change" Deng offered something completely useless, like jobs.

Maybe that's why I've always admired Deng?!

Originally Posted by bolo121

Ah but the cost of it..horrendous.

Anymore than WWII or Chiang Kei Shek's incompetence?

Originally Posted by bolo121

Millions dead, the economy in ruins

Oh, he did far, far, far worst than that. As I stated elsewhere, there were no concentration camps nor killing fields anywhere. Homicidal neglect was the main weapon used. You were sent to a re-education camp. Whether you lived or die is dependent upon you to lie and steal enough from another poor bloke so that he starves instead of you.

Originally Posted by bolo121

and the intellectual cream of the nation dead.

They weren't dead. They were mutated into Mao's High Priests.

Originally Posted by bolo121

If you asked me would i live in messed up but somewhat democratic India or mighty but dictatorial China I know what i would choose.

You're thinking that the ordinary Chinese ... or even the ordinary Indian had a choice. Life is never that simple. For most during the period in question, stepping off the farm meant starvation ... as some Chinese had learned when they were forced off their farms.

Originally Posted by Vinod2070

Stalin also made USSR a super power. I think most Russians don't think very highly of him today.

You'd be surprised.

Dictator Stalin voted third most popular Russian | Reuters

Originally Posted by Vinod2070

Some Chinese seem to argue that China needed that iron hand to turn around. May be they are right. It does boggle the mind though.

It wasn't an iron hand, it was sweet talk and charisma. He talked children into turning against their parents. Look at the Tibetan Red Guards.

Originally Posted by Vinod2070

Are you saying that most Chinese look at his legacy positively? Even today?

I don't know if I would go that far but most today don't know what waking up from the GPCR nightmare was like.

Originally Posted by gunnut

HA! Quote of the day...

Me thinks we should enshrine this line in the "quotes" thread.

It was for you.

Here is a review from The New Republic on Mao's legacy. This is a good read for anyone who thinks that others did terrible things seduced by Mao's charm. He as every bit as ruthless, hypocratic, deranged and cruel as Stalin.

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, reviewed by The New Republic Online

Quotes:

They quote from a series of three handwritten confessions by an interrogation victim who had to keep changing her story until she could satisfy her questioners that she had participated in a particular plot, even though she knew nothing about it. (In fact, the plot never existed.)

The irony of this theory has been clear ever since Li Zhisui, in his memoir of his life as Mao's personal physician, exposed the self-indulgent way Mao lived: his multiple villas, private trains, and serial mistresses; his personal cruelty to everyone around him; and his lack of interest in the suffering of the masses. Mao was given to apparently jocular but genuinely chilling remarks such as that China would do fine even if two-thirds of its population died in a nuclear war, and that the universe would survive even if the Earth were destroyed.

Here is another one:

Children and families suffered in Mao purges - Telegraph

Originally Posted by randomthoughts

Here is a review from The New Republic on Mao's legacy. This is a good read for anyone who thinks that others did terrible things seduced by Mao's charm. He as every bit as ruthless, hypocratic, deranged and cruel as Stalin.

And if you have read the link, you will note that the Red Guards were his creation. Who the hell are the Red Guards? It certainly was not the Army.

Originally Posted by randomthoughts

Here is another one:

Children and families suffered in Mao purges - Telegraph

Yeah, you might want to check that

Mao: The Unknown Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A detailed examination of Mao: The Unknown Story was published in the January 2006 issue of the The China Journal. The editors divided Mao's life into four periods and had scholars on these various periods review the relevant portions of Chang and Halliday's book while also evaluating the work overall. Professors Gregor Benton (Cardiff University) and Steve Tsang (University of Oxford) argued that the book was "bad history and worse biography" which made "numerous flawed assertions." Chang and Halliday "misread sources, use them selectively, use them out of context, or otherwise trim or bend them to cast Mao in an unrelentingly bad light." They discussed a number of specific errors and problematic sourcing practices before concluding that the book "does not represent a reliable contribution to our understanding of Mao or twentieth-century China."[25] Timothy Cheek (University of British Columbia) argued in his review that "Chang and Halliday's book is not a history in the accepted sense of a reasoned historical analysis," rather it "reads like an entertaining Chinese version of a TV soap opera." Cheek found it "disturbing...that major commercial Western media can conclude that this book is not only history, but terrific history."[26]

And about deaths under Mao in China

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls

# Analysis: If we line up the 14 sources which claim to be complete, the median falls in the 45.75 to 52.5 million range, so you probably can't go wrong picking a final number from this neighborhood. Depending on how you want to count some of the incomplete estimates (such as Becker and Meisner) and whether to count a source twice (or thrice, as with Walker) if it's referenced by two different authorities, you can slide the median up and down the scale by many millions. Keep in mind, however, that official Chinese records are hidden from scrutiny, so most of these numbers are pure guesses. It's pointless to get attached to any one of them, because the real number could easily be half or twice any number here.
# Perhaps a better way of estimating would be to add up the individual components. The medians here are:

* Purges, etc. during the first few years: 2M (10 estimates)
* Great Leap Forward: 31-33M (14 estimates)
* Cultural Revolution: 1M (13 estimates)
* Ethnic Minorities, primarily Tibetans: 750-900T (8 estimates, see below)
* Labor Camps: 20M (5 estimates)
* This produces a total of some 54,750,000 to 56,900,000 deaths. The weak link in this calculation is in the Labor Camp numbers for which we only have 5 estimates.

# Notice that many early body counts (such as Walker) completely miss the famine during the Great Leap Forward, which was largely unknown in the west until around 1980. There are two contradictory ways to assess those early estimates which ignore the famine:

1. "If these are the numbers that they came up with without the famine, imagine how high the true number will be once you add the famine deaths."
2. "Can we trust any of these numbers? After all, if they missed such a huge famine, they can't have known very much about what was going on inside China."

# ... so this line of reasoning will get us nowhere. In fact, the median of the 7 estimate that predate 1980 is 45.7M, which is almost the same as the median of the 7 estimates that post-date 1980 -- 58M. (At this scale, a 12M difference counts as "almost the same".)

What should be noted that no one remembered villages being abandonned nor Ethiopia style migration for food occured. Old folks died younger and infant mortality did jump and jump big time ... but so that couples deciding not to have children (which somehow is counted as deaths in a few estimates).

No doubt the famine did have an effect but not to the extent of collapsing the society.

2nd thing to note. There were no gas chambers nor killing fields. Does not excuse Mao but it doesn't put him on par with Hitler ... nor even Pol Pot.