Mao’s China? Ask a leper.

November 2024 Forums General discussion Mao’s China? Ask a leper.

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  • #235215
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Source: The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikotter.

    Cadres in the south-west (under Teng Hsiao-ping’s purview) decided to solve the problem of starving lepers begging for food by having them burned alive.
    Locals had been burying them alive.

    In one village in Kweichow, eight lepers were burned at the stake (c. 1954). “In some cases the militia acted on the orders of the local authorities: ‘The militia tied up a leper and burned him to death. His parents cried all day and night.
    “But the worst episode was probably in Yongren county, Yunnan, where a hundred lepers were set alight in June 1951. The idea was first proposed in a conference held by the county party committee a month earlier. Ma Xueshou, a high-ranking cadre in charge of rural affairs, proposed: ‘The lepers from the hospital in the fourth district often come out to wash and run about. It creates a bad impression among the masses, and they demand that they be burned.’ ‘We cannot burn them’, answered the county party secretary. But Ma insisted, and a month later he volunteered to take full responsibility: ‘If the masses want to burn them, then let’s burn them. We should do it for the masses, it is their request. Just do it and I will assume responsibility.’ Several others agreed. So the militia assembled all the lepers, locked them in the hospital and set the building on fire. The victims screamed for help, to no avail. Only six of 110 victims survived.”

    (pp. 272-273)

    #235295
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Did they have a Torquemada ? The Spaniard burned alive the Indians that did not want to become christians or catholics, one of them known as Hatuey said: If you are going to heaven, I prefer to go to hell

    #235382
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Mao’s most prominent Torquemada was Kang Sheng. There were many answerable to him, and he was answerable to Mao, who, like Hitler and Stalin, loved to play his underlings against each other.

    Mao despised his own origins, the peasants, and he despised the workers. He feared anyone educated.

    We in the west were never told of the misery the CPC inflicted right from the beginning of Mao’s ascendancy, back in the 1930s and 40s in Yenan, and through the 1950s – and all before the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 60s, which most of us assume was the start. The population was not passive, in spite of Mao’s propaganda machine, which insisted that everyone smile all the time, even while starving to death. There were open rebellions and calls for Mao’s arrest.

    #235432
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Proof of Mao’s derangement, or just plain cynical contempt.

    During the famine his policies had engineered, he launched this slogan, to be shouted through loudspeakers, printed, daubed on walls, and repeated vocally:

    “CAPABLE WOMEN CAN MAKE A MEAL WITHOUT FOOD!”

    Accepted death toll from the famine is 30 million.

    #235433
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Chu Teh, on walking by the Silk River: “Szechuan is indeed a heavenly place.”

    Secretary: “Pity that lies and false communism are ruining it.”

    (Source: Wild Swans by Jung Chang)

    #235444
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Still there are many Maoists who have not read the works of Mao Tse Tung, probably, more catholics have read the Bible . It is defined as the modern Confucianism

    #235452
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    I wouldn’t insult Confucius, in spite of his feudal ideas, by comparing him with Mao.

    #235463
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Well, it was the definition given by the Albanian leaders, it is not my invention. I do not think Confucius was a feudalist, Marx called it Asiatic Mode of Production or despotic asiatic, that is the reason why the soviets did not want to dig too much on Marx research because their society was similar to the soviet society. I have read Marx ethnological notebooks and both societies are very similar, the IML skipped that one

    #235464
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Confucius lived when China was actually feudal, in the Chou dynasty.
    Feudalism ended with Chin Shih Huang’s conquest of the feudal kingdoms in the third century B.C.E.
    Confucius was hated by the tyrant Chin, and the first emperor’s book-burnings were emulated by Mao in the 20th century.

    China’s imperial mode of production was consolidated under the Han, in our Roman times. Confucius’ writings were deemed useful by then, and adopted by the throne. But he himself had lived in the past feudal society.

    #235469
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Starting in 1965, Chinese were ordered to pull up grass and flowers, and kill their pets. All three, grass, flowers and pets, were called “bourgeois.”
    Prior to this, in the 1950s, all dogs were rounded up and starved to death in compounds. Everyone had also to kill all sparrows that could be found, and make noise under trees so that birds couldn’t rest.

    #235512
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    In June 1966 all teaching stopped in Chinese schools. Instead, pupils had to gaze at a portrait of Mao every day.

    #235590
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    From WILD SWANS by Jung Chang, pp 387-88:

    “Books were major targets of Mao’s order to destroy. Because they had not been written within the last few months, and therefore did not quote Mao on every page, some Red Guards declared that they were all ‘poisonous weeds.’ With the exception of Marxist classics and the works of Stalin, Mao, and the late Lu Xun, whose name Mme. Mao was using for her personal vendettas, books were burning all across China. The country lost most of its written heritage.”

    #236241
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Mao caused road havoc and some deaths when he ordered his most ardent followers to drive on the wrong side of the road.
    “A true Communist must drive on the left side of the road. Driving on the right is counterrevolutionary!”

    #236290
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Chinese CP members were sent to Russia in the 1930s to assist the Stalinist purges by purging those Chinese CP representatives who were residing in the Soviet Union.

    #236293
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Anti-fascism = fascism.

    Bizarre fact related by Edgar Snow.
    One of Mao’s coterie left China, went to the USA and joined the KKK!
    Snow does not elaborate.

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