From October 1 to October 7 the city of Beijing, this hot, crowded, polluted, fire-breathing city, was peaceful, quiet and eerily empty (for Beijing). Most Beijingers had exited the city in favor of a vacation. Almost everyone gets a week off to celebrate National Day, which is October 1. It was on that day in 1949 that Mao Zedong stood atop Tiananmen and declared that the People's Republic of China was formally founded.
61 years later and what has become of Mao's revolution? The China that Mao knew would be little recognizable to the Chairman today. Of the many changes, what would have particularly outraged Mao, if I may speak for the Chairman (a very dangerous proposition), is the abandonment of one of his core principals: permanent revolution. Mao believed that a society in conflict, big or small, was a society that could properly resist the restoration of capitalism. So every couple of years the Communist Party would launch a major campaign to force out capitalist-roaders, rightists, revisionist sympathizers, imperialist aggressors, sheep's in wolves clothing, and their running-dog friends (all actual names that I have translated while doing research). Meanwhile, how is National Day celebrated today? Quietly, with signs encouraging China's citizens to make their country beautiful, and to work toward a harmonious society. This is, in a very important way, the true abdication of Mao's revolution.
Can we still, therefore, recognize the remnants of October 1, 1949? Here we arrive at a very important bit of recent news- Liu Xiaobo became the first full Chinese citizen to win a Nobel prize. This announcement was greeted rather poorly in Beijing (despite the fact that for most of the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese authorities were obsessed with winning a Nobel). For those of you who haven't kept up, Liu is currently serving an 11 year jail sentence for subversion. Even before the announcement, however, the Chinese government warned against awarding the prize to Liu. Beijing fell back on one of its tried-and-true methods of trying to control public debate: Officials suggested that awarding the prize to Liu Xiaobo, a man who had "broken" the law in China, would be tantamount to the West interfering in China's internal matters.
As I live and breath! There's Mao's revolution. It has a pulse, as faint and sometimes imperceptible as it may seem. Some explaining: From 1949 to 1976, Mao and the Communist Party launched some truly disastrous campaigns that caused untold suffering. And yet, for some, Mao is a national hero. And the reason is that October 1, 1949 not only represented the beginning of the Communist reign in China, but it also officially ended 100 years of Western semi-colonialism (OK, maybe this ended in 1997 when Hong Kong was returned to the mainland). The point is that from 1839 to 1949, China was severely abused by the Western powers, and then invaded by Japan. Things got so bad that China could not stop the British from importing tons and tons of opium, the summer palace in Beijing was burnt to the ground by a foreign army, and Chinese law was no longer recognized in cities like Shanghai. This was not India, but it was close. There's a strong argument to make that the parasitic policies of the West in China so weakened the state that they could not resist the Japanese invasion in 1937. That invasion killed 21 million Chinese citizens, the second highest death-toll in World War II.
After World War II, the Communist forces fought a civil war against the ruling government. The Communists were far outnumbered, and controlled not one Chinese city. But over time, more and more people came to the Communist party (or at least grew apathetic enough not to resist their march to Beijing). The party won many converts by claiming that that the ruling government in China could not safeguard the country against future foreign threats.The Communist, so argued Mao and his colleagues, were the true nationalist party in China and had always stood up to foreign influence. When the Communists took over in 1949, they reminded everyone of the party's anti-imperialist history by building the Monument to the People's Heroes (pictured below) right in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Around the monument are twelve panels, each of which depicts an epoch in China's modern history. The panels begin in 1839 with the start of the Opium War and end in 1949 with the founding of the People's Republic. The two are inexorably linked. For the Communist party, they are the alpha and omega of modern Chinese history
So the party may have abandoned almost everything that Mao bequeathed, but they've held onto his anti-imperialist tradition, and it has proven invaluable in the past twenty years. In my opinion, the real story here is not Mao's ability to use an ideology to his advantage. In all fairness, the Communists were the most vocal opponent of imperialism. Before World War II, Mao attempted to forge an alliance with his enemies in the government in order to strengthen China's defenses, but he was rebuffed. Back then, however, the party was mostly peasants, poor workers and small-time intellectuals. Joining them in their fight against imperialism were usually regular citizens and desperate students, some of whom went on a hunger strikes over the government's policies (a method repeated in 1989). The West, by the way, has not forgotten its old roles, and continues to rely on an imperialist foreign policy. The United States has filled in quite nicely for the Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the story here is that populist anti-imperialism has been co-opted by elites and brandished in such a way as to crush dissent and insure conformity; a story that can be told over and over again throughout history. The 1949 revolution may lie cadaverous in the annals of history, but part of its spirit lives on today, and is being used for nefarious reasons.
That National Day and the announcement that one of China's citizens had won the Nobel Peace Prize (something that should stir more national pride than some silly holiday) came a week apart is of extraordinary coincidence. And while the state founded in 1949 is so very different from the state that lives on today, one should not be so quick to completely dismiss Mao's revolution. The current iteration of the Communist Party may have abandoned Communism, but they have not abandoned Mao himself. Indeed, Mao speaks through the party whenever the government decides to silence dissent and then accuse foreign governments of interfering in Chinese politics Now, however, the guise of "anti-imperialism" is being used to manipulate public opinion about a man who has challenged the very party that Mao controlled. In doing China has only confirmed the divorce between the populist anti-imperialism of the early 20th century and the party that these sentiments empowered..
The Monument to the People's Heroes. Around its base is a history of modern China, beginning with the Opium War and ending wit the founding of the People's Republic of China.
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