Full Thread: China under Mao
View Single Post
Old March 17th, 2012 #21
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default

Quote:
Mao's country was not socialist or even communist at all, but a despotic meritocracy
That is beyond ridiculous. The author spends half the book pointing out that people were afraid to criticize the leader and his stooges - even when they were literally freezing and starving to death. Does that sound to you like 'merit' is running things? Quite the opposite - it was all about loyalty to Mao, not merit. Merit had nothing to do with what was going on, it was as pure party hackdom as you'll find anywhere. And to say it wasn't communist or socialist beggars belief. Again, Dikoetter's whole story is peasants being coerced into giant collectives, forced to work in the fields all night, given nothing to eat, forced to turn over the bricks in their houses, their kitchen utensils, the farm implements to the collective. That's what socialism is. That's what communism is. The farmers are just peasants who want to be left alone to cultivate their plots by methods proven successful over centuries, just as they want to think their thoughts by the Confucianism that has supplied their spiritual guidance for centuries. Mao is going to change this because he is vain and the captive of an insane ideology. He can't do this by choice or persuasion, as the masses never want communism, so he does it by gun and whip.

I seriously wonder at your reading comprehension when you conclude exactly the opposite of what the author lays out on literally every page of this book. But you do know how to make an umlaut online, I'll give you due credit for that.

Last edited by Alex Linder; March 17th, 2012 at 02:40 PM.