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What's common knowledge about China, Mao, the US history? Well, in 1949, after WWII, Mao took advantage of the government's weakness for a revolution and seized power, which was tyrannical, and that CCP has ruled China ever since, but has become a much bigger 'business economy' after Mao. There was great starvation. That about right?
As I was watching the China youtuber I mentioned recently, I learned a bit more about the history. That Mao actually ordered all Chinese culture and history destroyed - it was all to be replaced by the Communist Party.
Mao went so far as to try to destroy the Chinese language, replacing it IIUC with English, but he only half-succeeded, mostly ending the traditional Chinese alphabet and replacing it with a simpler one. Sorry if this isn't quite right from impressions from someone not that familiar with it.
But to this day, there are many observations about China that come from that history about what's missing in China today - even as the country has found at least for propaganda reasons, that *claiming* things about Chinese history can sometimes serve their purposes, and they've made a habit of forcing minorities to live in rebuilt areas, dressed in 'cultural clothing', and literally dancing for Han Chinese tourists.
Another side note is that Mao, with all that starvation, didn't like sparrows eating crops so he ordered the killing of all sparrows in the country, and again to this day apparently it's rare to see any wild birds in China, though there are a few, especially some migrating from other countries. As often with such authoritarian measures, it backfired, causing lotuses to explode who ate many more crops.
But what triggered this thread is that I was reading a book that mentioned a 1951 speech by state department official Dean Rusk - during the Korean war - talking about the topic of Mao's government being recognized as the government of China, and it rang much more true with the above background. He said, the problem was that Mao's government wasn't even Chinese - 'it doesn't pass the first test'.
Seems like a prescient statement given how Mao went on to try to destroy China's culture and history to replace it with the party - something we see from authoritarians sometimes, like the Taliban blowing up ancient statues because they're someone else's culture.
This seems popular for authoritarians to try to gain more control over people. We all remember the old Soviet practice of erasing people from photographs... on a smaller scale, Republicans removed or reduced Jefferson from school textbooks because they didn't like his religious views, and they'd point out how Democrats want to remove statues of confederate figures.
It was also interesting to see the dynamics of how issues like this had effects - that speech, Mao felt showed the US was dedicated to pushing a civil war to remove his government as soon as the Korean war ended, so it was said the speech removed any interest Mao would have in peace talks to end that war. Interesting history - that even has some relevance still.
Some of these issues have similarities from then to now - for example, there are some real resemblances between the USSR rolling tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Putin's attack on Ukraine - Ukraine much worse - and how the US felt it could and couldn't respond; and unintended consequences, like how that history had a strong influence on Czechoslovakia later joining NATO, as they're now arming Ukraine.
We didn't realize just how much some of that history wasn't as much in the past as we thought, until Putin's war - and the same but even bigger is on the horizon with China. When we fought to a stalemate with China in the Korean war, imagine the changes with coming conflicts with their growth in power.
As I was watching the China youtuber I mentioned recently, I learned a bit more about the history. That Mao actually ordered all Chinese culture and history destroyed - it was all to be replaced by the Communist Party.
Mao went so far as to try to destroy the Chinese language, replacing it IIUC with English, but he only half-succeeded, mostly ending the traditional Chinese alphabet and replacing it with a simpler one. Sorry if this isn't quite right from impressions from someone not that familiar with it.
But to this day, there are many observations about China that come from that history about what's missing in China today - even as the country has found at least for propaganda reasons, that *claiming* things about Chinese history can sometimes serve their purposes, and they've made a habit of forcing minorities to live in rebuilt areas, dressed in 'cultural clothing', and literally dancing for Han Chinese tourists.
Another side note is that Mao, with all that starvation, didn't like sparrows eating crops so he ordered the killing of all sparrows in the country, and again to this day apparently it's rare to see any wild birds in China, though there are a few, especially some migrating from other countries. As often with such authoritarian measures, it backfired, causing lotuses to explode who ate many more crops.
But what triggered this thread is that I was reading a book that mentioned a 1951 speech by state department official Dean Rusk - during the Korean war - talking about the topic of Mao's government being recognized as the government of China, and it rang much more true with the above background. He said, the problem was that Mao's government wasn't even Chinese - 'it doesn't pass the first test'.
Seems like a prescient statement given how Mao went on to try to destroy China's culture and history to replace it with the party - something we see from authoritarians sometimes, like the Taliban blowing up ancient statues because they're someone else's culture.
This seems popular for authoritarians to try to gain more control over people. We all remember the old Soviet practice of erasing people from photographs... on a smaller scale, Republicans removed or reduced Jefferson from school textbooks because they didn't like his religious views, and they'd point out how Democrats want to remove statues of confederate figures.
It was also interesting to see the dynamics of how issues like this had effects - that speech, Mao felt showed the US was dedicated to pushing a civil war to remove his government as soon as the Korean war ended, so it was said the speech removed any interest Mao would have in peace talks to end that war. Interesting history - that even has some relevance still.
Some of these issues have similarities from then to now - for example, there are some real resemblances between the USSR rolling tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Putin's attack on Ukraine - Ukraine much worse - and how the US felt it could and couldn't respond; and unintended consequences, like how that history had a strong influence on Czechoslovakia later joining NATO, as they're now arming Ukraine.
We didn't realize just how much some of that history wasn't as much in the past as we thought, until Putin's war - and the same but even bigger is on the horizon with China. When we fought to a stalemate with China in the Korean war, imagine the changes with coming conflicts with their growth in power.
