China celebrated its Double Ten for October 10--now called something else--anniversary of the Republic, this last weekend. Parades, phalanxes of women clad in uniforms and white (!) jackboots, flags, all kinds of speeches, amnesties for no one. I am from there, you know. Now I look at them and think that it was right for my husband Renato not to let me get within 50 miles of the mainland when we went to Hong Kong in 1970. He knew he could not trust me to behave myself. American citizen by then or not, chances are I would have ended up in detention, on call for the U.S. Embassy to bail me out. My Chinese mother would have wept for her China of old. But the China of old had a history that almost justifies what the new China became. In the 1963 film "55 Days in Peking" a square-jawed Charlton Heston showed up the Chinese troops for what they were, hopeless wimps who believed in magic. Door's still open, folks! come on in and exploit! Certainly explains why there is a Communist China now that is trying to steer between a capitalist society and a socialist one. Hard fists on both tillers.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
In 1952 when you were still in China, the Cultural Revolution was getting under way. My wife is Chinese. She was born in Shanghai. She didn't come to the United States until she was twenty-eight.
She lived through all of the Cultural Revolution and spent three years in the labor camps. Her father and mother were sent to re-education camps for different reasons. Estimates are that thirty-seven million died as a direct result of Mao's policies during his twenty-seven years as China's modern emperor.
It was a brutal time to be alive in China and everyone suffered. I talked to a Tibetan who lives in the United States today and he told me that he realizes that the atrocities that took place in Tibet during Mao's time were happening all over China--everyone suffered.
To this day, my wife's father still distrusts the Communist government and I agree with him. However, to be fair, the current government is not the same as the one that ruled China under Mao. That changed after Mao died and I've written about those changes in one of my other posts.
The best way to be while visiting China is to not talk openly about politics and listen politely. The Communists still don't take kindly to others telling them what is wrong with their governance.
My wife, when in China, does not talk politics--she goes to see family and enjoy the country she was born in. She sees that attempting to change China would be like spitting in a hurricane force wind blowing toward you. All you do is end up with the spit coming back to hit you in the face.
And yes, you are right. What happened in China that brought Mao to power was a direct result of the way Westerners treated China during the 19th century before the Ch'ing Dynasty collapsed to be replaced by warlords and controlled chaos that still benefited Western corporations and Christian missionaries.
China has never had a democracy in the American or British sense. There are two Chinas—the seventy million card carrying Communists that sort of run the country and the other 1.3 billion people that's the real China. The people of China know how to get around the government restrictions if they want to. The best way is to keep a low profile and a closed mouth.