The Xi’s of China: From the Famine to the Suppression of Industrialization in the 1930s to the Rise of the Communist Party and Beyond
Mao is widely regarded today in the West as, at best, a flawed patriot and, at worst, a brutal dictator. The famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese occurred as a result of his misguided attempt at rapid industrialization. Ordinary Chinese on raising steel production were so intent on leaving them without a work force that they melted down hoes, plows, and other iron implements in backyard furnaces.
If play acting were the extent of Xi’s emulation of Mao, no one outside of historians would much care. It is more than that. Xi, like Mao, asserts the primacy of the Communist Party. He is squeezing private enterprises and foreign businesses. His people can’t access foreign sources of information because he relies heavily on propaganda. He harbors resentment towards nations such as Japan, Britain, and the United States, who he believes humiliated China in the past to stop its rise to greatness. Mao and the Nationalists fought a civil war that ended in 1949 when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan.
The 1980s were not all smooth sailing when it came to market freedom and political opening in China. The decade was a major disappointment for the reformers, especially with their experiment with removing price controls that led to runaway inflation and ruinous state subsidies. The political maneuvering between the two sides of China’s politics brings to life the ferocious battles that are going on over who has the best idea about what China should become.
Now known as China’s “zero-Covid” czar, Ms. Sun has become the enforcer of the country’s strict pandemic restrictions. When she arrives in a city in the midst of an outbreak she is often the object of ridicule and frustration because she is cast as a doomsayer that a lockdown is coming.
Ms. Sun said that any deserters would be “nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”
The Communist Party of China in the Eighty-Year-Old: Predictive Memories of a Woman in the Upper Echelons
As the rare woman in the upper echelons of Chinese politics, it is a role to which she has become accustomed, driving the Communist Party’s will and bearing the country’s criticism. “Women most of the time get pushed to the frontline when male politicians don’t want to deal with a crisis,” said Hanzhang Liu, assistant professor of politics at Pitzer College.
Gewirtz focuses much on the fascinating character of Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the party during part of the tumultuous 1980s. The officials argued successfully for China to increase international trade, to import foreign ideas and technology, and to disassociate the party with the blemished legacy of Chairman Mao.
The party now faces a new raft of challenges, including hostile relations with the United States which has sanctioned some of China’s once most-promising technology giants. Will the party survive another round? China’s economy remains self-hobbled by unwavering Covid controls, its technology firms bound by dramatic American export restrictions, its officials sanctioned over the country’s possible crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang region, and its diplomatic clout has been marred by a nasty dose of nationalism and a refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine.
She believed in the government’s misinformation about the West’s health problems so she supported locking downShanghai in April. She wants the party to apologize to all the innocent people who died under zero Covid, the people who lost their income during the shutdown, and the people who were exposed to propaganda.
The Communist Party has never apologized to the Chinese people for any of the atrocities they have suffered during its 73 years in power. Not after more than 20 million people starved to death during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, nor when the country was thrown into a decade of chaos and economic destruction by the Cultural Revolution. And not for the one-child policy that forced many abortions and is now helping bring about a demographic crisis with one of the fastest aging populations in the world.
The party even killed a literary genre called “scar literature,” which emerged after the Cultural Revolution in late 1970s and portrayed the sufferings that people endured during that political campaign. The party doesn’t want people to look at their scars too much, even though they will inevitably ask where their scars come from, according to a senior research scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.