Read Online The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Shaun Rein
Tags: General, Business & Economics
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conversations was when Lili Li told me that, overall, she liked Mao Zedong. She mostly blamed Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four for the tyranny and suffering they had caused the nation. Sure, Mao made mistakes, she said, especially as he aged, but overall he did good things for China.
For me, whose view of Mao until then had been mostly shaped by Western professors and media, I was surprised that she had anything nice to say about the former supreme leader. Westerners portrayed him as evil, on par with Hitler or Stalin, who killed his own people to maintain power. I thought anyone who liked Mao likewise must have been evil, or brainwashed by Chinese propaganda. But Lili Li was not easily swayed by propaganda, cowed by fear, or complicit with the horrors of the Gang of Four. She was someone who personally knew Mao and other leaders, and who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution for standing up to tyranny.
Listening to Lili Li, I began to question my preconceptions about China’s government. If Lili Li, a hero for fighting tyranny and her sacrifice for the country, felt Mao Zedong was not pure evil and had actually done good for the people, what else could the Western media and academia have gotten wrong about China’s leaders and the country overall?
As I spent more time meeting senior officials over the years in informal gatherings, my understanding of the leadership and how they acted started to change. I found the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were fresh and raw wounds for them, not a long-forgotten stage in history. Many Chinese look at contemporary problems through the lens of the suffering they experienced firsthand.
Being from America, where free speech is bedrock, censorship to me was the hallmark of a brutish yet frightened bureaucracy keeping a viselike grip on power. As I learned more, I realized my lens, having been directed by Western media, had analyzed China too naively.
Perhaps government actions that seem thuggish to Western observers are actually protective measures to ensure that the country never faces instability again, and that tyrants like Jiang Qing are prevented from rising. Chinese in general are happy because they compare their current lives with the past, and the progress is obvious to them. They look to freer societies like America as a different path; or perhaps the same one, but at a different stage of the journey.
Criticism of Chinese government actions by Western observers often stems from the misconception that the current leadership led the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The opposite is most likely true, as many current leaders and their families suffered the most.
Lili Li’s son Luo Dan, my father-in-law, eventually married the daughter of Marshal Ye Jianying, Ye Xiangzhen, sometimes known as Lingzi. Marshal Ye was ranked number three in the Party hierarchy during the Cultural Revolution, behind only Mao himself and Wang Hongwen one of the members of the Gang of Four. Despite Marshal Ye’s power, or perhaps because of it, his children were jailed during the Cultural Revolution, some in solitary confinement.
As soon as Mao died, Marshal Ye led the arrest of the Gang of Four. He acted as the president of the country in the 1980s when he was Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s highest governing body. Deng Xiaoping was another leader at the time; he ranked behind Marshal Ye in the Party chain of command and had also suffered at the hands of tyranny. His son, Deng Pufang, was paralyzed after the Red Guards threw him out of a three-story window at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards denied him medical treatment, which doctors later said might have saved his ability to walk, because his father had been denounced as a capitalist.
Together, Marshal Ye and Deng took charge of China and set the nation on its path towards reform, by creating stability and implementing broad-ranging market reforms that gave rise to
For me, whose view of Mao until then had been mostly shaped by Western professors and media, I was surprised that she had anything nice to say about the former supreme leader. Westerners portrayed him as evil, on par with Hitler or Stalin, who killed his own people to maintain power. I thought anyone who liked Mao likewise must have been evil, or brainwashed by Chinese propaganda. But Lili Li was not easily swayed by propaganda, cowed by fear, or complicit with the horrors of the Gang of Four. She was someone who personally knew Mao and other leaders, and who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution for standing up to tyranny.
Listening to Lili Li, I began to question my preconceptions about China’s government. If Lili Li, a hero for fighting tyranny and her sacrifice for the country, felt Mao Zedong was not pure evil and had actually done good for the people, what else could the Western media and academia have gotten wrong about China’s leaders and the country overall?
As I spent more time meeting senior officials over the years in informal gatherings, my understanding of the leadership and how they acted started to change. I found the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were fresh and raw wounds for them, not a long-forgotten stage in history. Many Chinese look at contemporary problems through the lens of the suffering they experienced firsthand.
Being from America, where free speech is bedrock, censorship to me was the hallmark of a brutish yet frightened bureaucracy keeping a viselike grip on power. As I learned more, I realized my lens, having been directed by Western media, had analyzed China too naively.
Perhaps government actions that seem thuggish to Western observers are actually protective measures to ensure that the country never faces instability again, and that tyrants like Jiang Qing are prevented from rising. Chinese in general are happy because they compare their current lives with the past, and the progress is obvious to them. They look to freer societies like America as a different path; or perhaps the same one, but at a different stage of the journey.
Criticism of Chinese government actions by Western observers often stems from the misconception that the current leadership led the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The opposite is most likely true, as many current leaders and their families suffered the most.
Lili Li’s son Luo Dan, my father-in-law, eventually married the daughter of Marshal Ye Jianying, Ye Xiangzhen, sometimes known as Lingzi. Marshal Ye was ranked number three in the Party hierarchy during the Cultural Revolution, behind only Mao himself and Wang Hongwen one of the members of the Gang of Four. Despite Marshal Ye’s power, or perhaps because of it, his children were jailed during the Cultural Revolution, some in solitary confinement.
As soon as Mao died, Marshal Ye led the arrest of the Gang of Four. He acted as the president of the country in the 1980s when he was Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s highest governing body. Deng Xiaoping was another leader at the time; he ranked behind Marshal Ye in the Party chain of command and had also suffered at the hands of tyranny. His son, Deng Pufang, was paralyzed after the Red Guards threw him out of a three-story window at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards denied him medical treatment, which doctors later said might have saved his ability to walk, because his father had been denounced as a capitalist.
Together, Marshal Ye and Deng took charge of China and set the nation on its path towards reform, by creating stability and implementing broad-ranging market reforms that gave rise to
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