At 06:44 PM 6/2/99 -0400, you wrote: >Jim, you are more fortunate than us Chinese. We did not have an option to >choose the kind of socialism to fight for. The pincer action of Western >imperialism and Confucian feudalism was so oppressive that most of us would >have gone to hell to escape it. We have a popular song" "The East is Red, we >in the East has produced a Mao Zedong." This is not naive propaganda. The >Chinese thank Heaven for Mao Zedong however he failed to measure up to Western >liberal standards. Obviously, I am lucky to live in one of the richest countries. I don't expect someone like Mao to live up to Western liberal standards. After all, objective conditions at the time didn't allow it. That was my point. >Communism was not the first social experiment in modern Chinese revolutionary >history. Capitalism was and American style democracy also had its chance via >Sun Yet-sen who, as you know, borrowed from Lincoln the Three People >Principles. The Communists came later, after capitalistic democracy failed, >and I may added after having more of the comrades shot by Koumingtang security >policy than in another political struggle. I wouldn't expect Sun Yat-Sen's principles to succeed in the China of his day. The objective conditions were hardly ripe. The best kind of democracy one can expect in those conditions is the kind of US/IMF/World Bank-dominated bourgeois democracy one sees today in many poor countries. >Mao would not be a good American president, but he was a great Chinese >revolutionary leader. Without Mao, more deaths and destruction would have >occurred under fragmented chaos and was evident under the War Lord periods >immediately after the fall of the Qing dynasty. I'm not a big fan of counterfactuals: we really can't know what would have happened without Mao. Isn't it possible, for example, that someone else could have substituted for him? The problem with counterfactuals is that we don't have a good enough theory of the way history works to say "if Mao is removed from the equation, result X occurs." >If one look at the total span >of all political regimes in Chinese history, the death numbers, even granting >DeLong's exaggeration, in the PRC so far rank among the bottom of the list, >less than the Qing dynasty, less than even under Koumingtang rule. >One has to compare the record of the PRC with other regimes within the context >of Chinese history, not with England. I wasn't trashing the PRC for the death numbers. But you're right that the _additional_ context of looking at China in terms of its history is needed. BTW, by the absolute standards of current liberal morality, England didn't do very well during its industrial revolution (and never did well vis-a-vis the Irish or other colonized peoples). But it was lucky, unlike China in the 1950s and 1960s that it wasn't invaded, didn't have as much "feudal" baggage to deal with, etc. That was my point. >I may add that I find you position very reasonable and you attitude >encouragingly tolerant. thanks. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out of Serbia!
