My Theory of the Brontosaurus

is the god-hood of Mao the legitimacy of the party dynasty?

China has no tech, just people. People imitating pixels. No tech means no capitalism, no polution; cycles of seasons, years, recycling: the land feeding the human, the human cultivating the land. Obedience to obedience, without ultimate law (just ultimate force, wu), keeps the excessiveness of the human in check so that the cycles can continue. The use of men for machines, in lieu of machines, and hence capitalism, is very Heideggerian: techne is artificial energy. China has no margin for error in substituting industry, and capital growth, with which to buy food from abroad, vs. removing land from agriculture. But this is the problem Fairbank highlighted: the impetus to use all labor available even as it diminishes returns and the availability of labor inhibiting tech.

Article in Times says that China is pushing high tech growth and preventing low tech growth, which is pushing Walmart to seek other labor markets.

I was going to say that the Chinese didn't build--didnt leave human mark on the land (waste?): but the disappearance of the great Chinese cities may not be meaningful. Beijing is only about 400 years old, but modern London isnt that much older. 

Why did the Times describe the opening of the games as China's claim to be big and powerful but not a threat? Who said they were a threat? They think they are the world, taking it over would seem redundant.

My theory of China

What is remarkable about China is its continuity as a state. Which is all that it is? Confucianism pulled the elite into the state; no local elite. The state is indifferent to religion, ethnicity, language (the Chinese script is the basis not just for Korean and Japanese, from a different language family, but for very different varieties of Chinese.) The state has been, in a way, perfected by the party. Fairbank noted that the autocratic state appears early in China and shapes all that follows, but he doesnt give the impression that it is separable: indeed, it is all that he talks about; Chinese history is the history of the dynasties. The variability of the population below is not discussed in a way that makes clear the function of the state in being China.

Or maybe what I'm calling technology is just media, the proliferation of news. Are the Chinese students here in the US who counterprotested the pro-Tibet protests mostly hard science students? Do they learn English? Are they ever out of their comfort zone re ideas and information?

China grew because its soil--the loess--was incredibly rich and efficient for farming. This also explains the rise of a warrior class fighting among themselves for control.

Two statistics: China has half the inhabitable land area of the US and five times the population (probably more now). China has one quarter the worlds population and one tenth the arable land.

Overpopulation inhibits technology: need to clean up algae, send in the troops. Need to polinate all the trees because the bees have died?

China had to develop an authoritarian system of obedience or else they would have killed each other?
It's population makes the choice between wen and wu a zero sum.

NB the translator in Holland Carter's article on visiting the Mao mauseleum, the very hip and sharp (western?) woman who has a Mao medallion hanging from her rearview mirror. I worship Mao. Mao did, by being unorthodox marxist, care more about the peasant than the worker, and fit mold of traditional emperor.

To be Chinese is to submit to absolute power. China is being Chinese. There is no content to the power. It is wu. There is no concern with corruption of power, because China is the world. Force with ends is barbarism, the practice of the nomads on the steppes. The power dictates what the truth is. Its only limit is famine; the will of heaven is bounded by natural disaster. As technology develops there is more potential for power to diverge from the will of heaven and create evil. The people will see a gap between China, the leadership, and the truth. China cannot be in the world, play upon that state, and keep its people ignorant. Mao was apparently not paranoid and self-serving like Stalin, evil in that sense; he really cared about the peasants. But his having  the power he did allowed his delusions to produce great evil, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and perhaps as many dead as Stalin accomplished. So two means of creating politics in China: one, a non agricultural economy splits the rulers into the competent and the incompetent; two, the outside world comes in. The outside world is not culture, and thence politics, itself, not truth itself.  There is an internal culture. Perhaps the oldest continuous culture--continuous culture because autocratic (and lucky in location, climate, etc, producing a huge population).  Western culture is not a wedge prying open China to the world, to the existence of the world, to reality and truth, cracking open its simulacra (a non technological  simulacra, that is educated into the enormous populace and will take a long time to modify).  The man who posted the patriotic video on YouTube uses proxy servers to make the Chinese censorship of the internet meaningless; the Times story about journalists having limited access to outside sites at the games doesn't mention this. In and out. The continuity and breadth and depth of Chinese culture is not disentangle-able from its autocracy. The same autocracy that now protects itself by controlling Chinese culture, but also enjoys the patriotic support of the Chinese people. A culture that believes deeply in the importance of face is not one  that tolerates individualism. Protestors would not be pitied when the police crack down on them, because they would be embarrassing China. The US isn't embarrassed by what a city does in hosting the games. We won't even pay for it. China has built, anew, the sites for the games. There is nothing old in China, except the Chinese. Age is wisdom and to be revered.  We sideline the aged but love a romantic ruin. I could do this forever.

What I've been trying to say--are you ready?--is that the Confucian ideal of obedience to obedience, precisely by leaving out law, allows the human to wrap around nature and claim it for itself, as its unnamed law, while being merely man harmonizing with man. The absent law of nature is the subordination of women, man fitting literally to man. The fantasy of the landscape tradition is the harmony of man and an inhospitable nature, of man alone. Chinese involution is not merely the decreasing productivity of an agricultural economy with too many people working each acre, it is the essence of the culture. Night soil seems an apt metaphor. Because of its size China could be self sufficient, could believe that to be civilized was to be Chinese, that the world ended at the sea and the steppe. The sinologists effort to timeline China and Europe in China's favor is an effort to divide the world in two and hence make China a world unto itself, to repeat the involution that China chose (most notably after the Zheng He journeys) and reinforce an isolation that makes the narrative of national humiliation possible. Humiliation feeds on past greatness and scapegoats failure (Manchus, British, Japanese); one would not wish China to follow Germany, Serbia and Islam.

I may have been too quick to dismiss the Chinese guy in the NYer story. If we do view China as competitor, as Americans are trained to fear other countries, then his identification of a subtext that China must be held down is not crazy. But the people who fear China's "rise" are not the same as the people who are concerned about Tibet.

This is from NYer's article on Chinese nationalist youth (ever notice how things come to you when you are ready for them, ie when you can see them?):

Like many of his peers, Tang couldnt figure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet--an impoverished backwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize. Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake city Olympics to protest America's treatment of the Cherokee. (Evan Osnos, NYer July 28. 08)

This is tricky because it's attributed to the man Osnos interviewed but is not in quotes, yet assuming Tang really said just this, the question becomes how someone so well read and with so much media available to him (Osnos notes his huge book collection and internet access) could be so ignorant and how a philosophy PhD could be so illogical. Tibet is ongoing, the horror of the Cherokee relocation is, unfortunately, beyond reparation (though I would listen to anyone who has ideas about it). The combination of China and civilize is a dangerous one, as they could be taken for synonyms by a Chinese. The mere fact of the movement of Han into Tibet is proof that it is not, and never has been, China. I'm not sure why they--the communist government--has insisted so vehemently on including it, unless for military reasons (it is a plateau extending from India into the Chinese heartland, or between north and south). In any event  this nationalism, whether imbedded in  the Chinese civilization  or  a modern  phenomenon, is  troubling:  Chinese power,  which seems  just economic power,  is  being taken  as  proof of a  Chinese  exceptionalism, which in turn is  viewed as recompense for the weakness demonstrated by the fall of the Qing, the imperial impositions from the coast in the treaty ports, Japan's invasion, and the communist retardation (infighting (CR), isolation, and Mao's faith in political faith in the GLF vs. economic change). China went from being the world unto itself to being the plaything of the world. Can they tell the difference between the existence of other states and imposition or constraint of their own? Can they see their own state as a state, demand accountability and see the parts within the whole, like Tibet? Or is every criticism evidence of jealousy, and all Chinese united in their victimization?

As Mao maneuvered on the Long March to take control of the party from Soviet advisors and Chinese veterans, asserting his 'mass line' dogma of peasant empowerment and guerilla warfare in opposition to building the party in the cities and working with the GMD to expel the imperial powers, being carried up and down the hills on a litter...

Mao becomes the emperor, impatient with his gentry class of party. He seems seriously concerned with the improvement of life for the peasantry, even as he kills them in the 10s of millions. Such is the irony of absolute power.

The Soviets are much more oriented to the party and its orthodoxy. Absolute obedience and sacrifice to the party are the bargain made with hell for a new heaven, in the name of humanity (we won't kill all of them).

But Mao reaches the point where he is willing to fight against his own party, qua party, in the guise of fighting the intelligentsia and returning power to the peasants.

The Soviets are much more internationally active; their greatest accomplishment is pushing back the German invasion and defeating Hitler. They are heirs to half of Europe after that. Mao doesn't know from Europe.

Is the CCP, without Mao, an internationalizing, industrializing, nationalist government, what Jiang Jieshi had intended? Thus Mao was an entirely traditional emperor, containing within himself all wu, and content that the countryside remain eternally the same (if unexploited)? And the fate of too populous peasantry under the CCP is force abortions?

and Fairbank comes to an end...

Although the GMD won power, it was composed of so many disparate elements that it was unable to function as a party dictatorship. Instead it soon became a Jiang Jieshi dictatorship. It its early history, the driving impulse had been nationalism, first after 1905 against alien Manchu rule, second after 1923 against the imperialism of the treaty powers. The GMD ideology, so necessary to inspire student activists was nominally Sun Yatsen's three People's Principles, but these were really a party platform (a set of goals. more than an ideology (a theory of history). The GMD had got no further than regional warlordism at Guangzhou until in 1923 it allied with the Soviet Union, reorganized itself on Leninist lines created an indoctrinated party army, and formed a united front with the CCP. The four years of Soviet aid and CCP collaboration together tithe patriotic marxist leninist animus against he warlords domestic 'feudalism' and foreigner imperialism helped the GMD to power.  This tangled story suggest that here has been at bottom only one revolutionary movement in twentieth century China, that of socialism mainly headed by the CCP. Perhaps this puts the GMD in a better light, as devoted to state building and reform rather than to the unending violence of class struggle .Jiang Jieshi's treacherous slaughter of the CCP at Shanghai in April 1927, though it lead to the powers recognition of his Nanjing government in 1928, tended to dissipate GMD revolutionary spirit. Soon it found itself on the defensive against both the CCP and Japan.

The early party supervision of local administration, its political work in the army, its special criminal court s to try counterrevolutionaries, all were reduced or abandoned. So also the mass organization of workers, peasant, you, the merchants and women. These mass movements had mobilized popular suport for the Norther Expedition, but the Nanjing power holders now looked askance at processions, demonstrations, and mass meetings. They discouraged student movements...Far from being business oriented, the GMD destroyed the semi autonomy of the Shanghai businessmen. Using gangster methods of abduction and assassination, it intimidated merchants into contributing large funds for the military..[T]he Nanjing regime lived parasitically on trade taxes, handicapping the industrial sector it should have tried by all means to encourage. ...This anti Communist stance had the effect of discouraging if not preventing all sorts of projects for the betterment of the people.

This disaster put a heavy burden on Jiang Jieshi, who remained an austere and dedicated would be unifier of his country. By 1932 he was thoroughly disillusioned with his party as well as with the Western style of democracy, which promised no strength of leadership. He began the organization of a fascist body, popularly known as the Blue Shirts, a carefully selected group of a few thousand zealous army officers, who would secretly devote themselves to building up and serving Jiang Jieshi...

During the warlord era, local administration deteriorated. The landed ruling class, no longer the top elite of the country, no longer indoctrinated in Confucian ideals of community leadership, became more narrowly self seeking. Secret societies like the Red Spears in Shangdong or the Society of Brothers and Elders in Sichuan became tools of the local families of property, helping to protect them against both popular disorder and official exaction.

In place of the magistrate and gentry of imperial times. the new administrators from Nanjing tried to spread their reform, and the police organized their anti communist security net. Both came further into the local scene than had been the custom under the empire.

The first and foremost object all such effort was to increase the productivity of the farmer. This was the crux of China's problem but the Nationalist Government was unable to get at it. No comprehensive plan was ever devised, much less given effect.

Mao Zedong excelled his colleagues in achieving a unity of theory and practice, a major motif in Confucian philosophy. ...Peasants are oppressed he said...Behind this whole system lay the cooperation of the imperialists, who sought to maintain order for profitable trade in China..He must closely examine he villager's needs and complaints, hopes and fears; only then could he articulate the peasantry's demands and follow the tactic of uniting with he largest possible number to attack the smallest possible target as a step in the revolutionary process.

The CCP followed the advice of the Comintern and continued the united front with the GMD at all cost, toning down its ideas of mobilizing he peasantry on the basis of their misery until such time as imperialism had been expelled from China by a new national government. Giving up the social revolution in the countryside seemed to be an unavoidable part of maintaining a united front with the nationalists. [This was in 1926, before Jiang turned on the communists in Shanghai; the Soviet influence was still emphasizing the cities, Mao the country; the GMD was looking for order and stability, its constituency in the cities and the old elite, not the peasantry.]

[After the Japanese invasion] from being the central government of China, the Nationalist regime was now a fugitive in a mountain ringed redoubt, obliged to work with reactionary provincial militarists and landlords...Meanwhile, the CCP in building up its base areas, maintained order, encouraged economic production and kept on recruiting poor peasant activists; party membership grew from some 40,0000 claimed in 1937 to an alleged 1.2 million in 1945...Yan'an in WWII became to a few foreign observers a never never land full of sunshine and bonhomie. The revolutionary enthusiasm was infectious, as Edgar Snow and other journalists reported to he world. The homespun democracy apparent among the CCP leaders was in startling contrast to Chongqing.

In short, the idea of the 'mass line' was here adumbrated: the party must go among the people to discover their grievances and needs, which could then be formulated by the party and explained to the masses as their own best interest. This from-the-masses to- the-masses concept was indeed a sort of democracy suited to Chinese tradition, thwer hte upper class official had governed best when had had the true interest of the local people at heart. and so governed on their behalf.

American ignorance and sentimentality reached the point where President Roosevelt pictured the Nationalist Government moving into the East Asian power vacuum that would be created by the fall of Japan. ..As Jiang Jieshi had depended in the clinch on the Shanghai underworld, so now he began to depend on the Christian impulses and logistic supply of the Americans.

Meanwhile, observers on the spot under the American embassy and military headquarters foresaw a post WWII civil war in China, which held the danger of Soviet takeover of North China...It therefore became American policy to head off a civil war, and the device thought of was "coalition government"

In these circumstances for Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalists to lose the civil war was remarkable achievement.

In 1947, when unarmed demonstrators protested the corruption of the Nationalist occupation, the military government shot many of them down, sent for mainland reinforcements, and then for several days pursued a pogrom of murdering Taiwanese citizens. A sober estimate is that 8000 to 10,000 were killed...When JJ took refuge on the island in 1949, he found a scene of economic and political collapse. Starting form this low point, the next 40 years saw the unfolding of a remarkable succes story in the ROC. Of the several factors in this success one of the first was the sinoliberal refugees from the mainland whom Jiang welcomed.

Thus the early campaign to eliminate counter revolutionaries, resist America, and aid Kora, and the Three Antis and Five Antis campaigns, provided an expanding framework for reaching all Chinese who lived in cities. Campaigns not only uncovered then knocked off victims who were of doubtful use or loyalty, they also uncovered activists of abiilty who could be recruited into the CCP. While this gradual and piecemeal, though sporadic and often terrifying process of consolidation was going on the cities and modern economy, a parallel procedure was the land reform campaign....The public trials. mass accusations, and executions created an atmosphere of terror. Estimates vary, but apparently some millions of people wer killed.

CCP leaders like Mao, Zhou and Deng felt the non party intellectual talent should continue to be persuaded to collaborate and their needs should be catered to; whereas hard line organizer like Liu Shaoqi and the mayor of Beijing, Pen Zheng, were intent on party unity and orthodoxy at all costs In intellectual and educational circles this issue was raised in the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956-7, so named after the phrase "let a hundred flowers bloom together, let the hundred schools of thought contend." ...in May 1957 they began to criticize the CCP regime in rapidly escalating terms...Within 5 weeks the Hundred Flowers campaign was closed down.. Mao then shifted to the principle of class struggle against recalcitrant intellectuals by making them the targets of an anti rightist campaign from June 1957. ..Up until 1957 two categories of administrators had been leaders in the PRC. One was the patriotic non communist liberals who had stayed in China ..the other was the outside cadres, party members who had been assigned by the CCP before 1949 to make professional careers in Free China. These two categories of people possessed much of the experience, view of the world, and talent needed to set up the new regime...Their idea of revolution was to emancipate people not control them. ..In the cities, just as in the countryside, by 1957 a new crowd were coming into power, rising from worker or peasant ranks, not well educated, ignorant of the outside world and suffused with both xenophobia and antintellectualism.

[The Great Leap Forward:] In 1958 to 60 some 20 to 30 million people lost heir lives through malnutrition and famine because of the policies imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. ...The economists remedy for this problem would have been to slow down the rate of investment in heavy industry, which at first had reached 48%, and direct some of it to light industry which could produce consumer goods. The availability of consumer goods in turn would provide a material incentive for peasant productivity. ...This slow approach did not suit Mao..and he persuaded his colleagues that the countryside could be made over and agricultural production could be increased by a massive organization of rural labor power. The incentive would be the same revolutionary determination that bought the CCP leadership to success.

[The Cultural Revolution:] But what did Mao think he was doing? Perhaps it can be summed up as an effort to make "democratic centralism" more democratic less centralist. He saw the new bureaucracy following he ancient pattern of autocratic government from the top down. This would leave the peasant masses where they had always been, at the bottom of society, being exploited by a new elite. To combat this tendency Mao wanted to to use the mass line approach by which the party should elicit and respond to peasant concerns. ..To be sure, by arousing and giving a lead to urban young people, Mao flouted all the principles of party rectification within party ranks. In effect, he declared war on the leaders who had come with him from Yan'an. [the urban intelligentsia and professional and the party bureaucracy would be the target of the young Red Guards]

After Zhou Enlai [leader of the party targeted by Mao and the Gang of Four that had been with him since the beginning] died in January 1976, the Gang of Four banned any mourning..but hey could not prevent a great crowd of hundred of thousands from gathering around the Martyrs Memorial in Tiananmen Square..The demonstration was suppressed and ..Deng Ziaoping [Zhou Enlai's named successor, who ran the mimeograph machine for him in Paris when they were students, a victim of the CR] was for a second time removed from power. But the Gang of Four could not suppress he Great Tangshan earthquake that in July suddenly killed half a million people east of Beijing. ..Every peasant believed in the umbilical relationship betwwen man and nature, and therefore between natural disaster and human calamities. After such an overwhelming portent, Mao could only die. He did so on September 8, 1976. In October the Gang of Four were arrested and held for trial. In the complex maneuvering for power, Deng Xiaoping won out in Late 1978.