Denouncing Mao

I wish Mao should have been dead in early 50s.

I have been in and out of beijing as if she is my second home. With so many opportunities, I refuse to go to the mausoleum knowing full well that i will remove my belt from the waist and wipe him into pieces earning myself life sentence in doing so.

Mao, together with Hitler and Stalin, were the three giant monsters men have seen in the last century. The ease with which they eliminated their own peoples were appaling, senseless and cold blooded. Of course, Jews or class enemy could hardly be described as their own peoples is perhaps their justifcation. I don't recall Imperial Japanese killed his own peoples. In this sense, the Imperial Japanese looked like saint, no wonder they still are to many right wing Japanese.

I just read Anne Applebaum's book on The Soveit's Gulag. This history was not easy to read. Too sad, too tragic. The cruelty, the brutality and the babanality of the communist system meted out against their opponents, very often perceived if not imagined, make the reading very painful.

The numbers of peoples subjected to the gulag system was enormous. One conservative count gave the figure of almost 28 million peoples in 30 years between 1920s to 1950s.

Who were these peoples? Why suddenly such a huge rise. Even the Tsarist system that Lenin and Stalin were fighting against made them seemed like amateur gaolers. There were peoples arrested simply because they were late to work or an adolecent stealing just piece of bread. Many were detained by virtue of association having the bad fortune of being the spouse or the children of the enemy of the peoples, a political crime. Some told a bad joke on Stalin.

These peoples were made to walk through a system only enduring is the survival strategy. What they experienced? It was an experience of arbitrary arrest, brutal interrogation, unjust trial, disproprotion penalty even if guilty, the often fatal journey to the designated gulag camps in the far north or the far east, the hard labor in the mine, forest occassioned by the sub-zero temperatures without decent warm clothing and safe equipment (if there was any equipment), the poor food ratioining (as low as 300g of bread for a day), the bugged and infested living conditions, and the not infrequent crime from gang rape to theft and murders.

Whatever the ideal of the classic Communism, its association with the repressive regime the ideology help created render it eternally notorious.

The gulag is known as the labor reform camp in China. I don't know how many peoples went through the hell. It must have been enormous as well. Deng himself went through it too. The numerous campaign launched during Mao's era to eradicate, landlord, land owning peasants, business owners, intellectuals, former officers, right wings must have erased million of peoples besides the very often published 30 million casulty in the great leap forward disguised as "the three year of natural calamtiy" in the mainland propaganda.

After reading the book, it becomes easier to understand why there are so many peoples apprehensive of the CCP. The highly repressive and brutal system CCP installed and is now gradually dismantling remain alive in the memory of the peoples living today, especially those who escape the mainland. Those who stayed were probably dead and if they survive, they become deaf or amnesia on the matters.

There was a girl who survived because her mother was determined enough to bring up the three children on her own after her husband, a small time bourgegeoius, was made a collateral casulty in the class struggle. What was his guilt? There was no crime against society, no rebelion against the party. The life was taken away simply because he was a bourgegeoius. You and I are unlikely to survive either in those conditions. That girl grew up and eventually became my family member.

I am asked how do I feel with Mao's portrait remaining in the RMB 100 dollar bill. It is more than ironic. It is actually tragic to the Chinese. As far as I am concerned for the last 20 years (after I know China better), my answer is outrage of the highest order.

To my mind, his corpse should be removed at once from public scene and his portrait from Tiananmen Gate to the dollar bill should be removed as well.

Think of Hitler, it is even now a crime to praise him in Germany! Think about Stalin, there was even a secret speech denouncing him only few years after his death. (I find it repugnant that many places in the world, Lyon included, still name a street after him.)

What about Mao, the CCP and the peoples treat too kindly of him. He should take his place with the other two monsters.

Chinese peoples gotta be taugh about this history. CCP has to face its record, as much as the American democratic party faces its pro-segeragation past. Mao maybe the father of PRC but he is not the father of China. He is not China's Washington; he is China's Stalin.

If the orignal sin of America is the slavery and the original sin of PRC is Communism ( admittedly much has been removed), removing it's final ties with Mao as the symbol help create a modern, progressive, liberal and democratic China.

We can go down that shinning path.