I've learned over the years of traveling and speaking with ethnic Chinese and Chinese nationals that I make my acquaintance with, that there are numerous tragic stories like this in China and throughout the diaspora. Many are only preserved through family oral traditions and many of those will die out with the population decline. I've heard it expressed that modern day China has a lot of spirit (energetic vigor), but is still seeking its soul (embodied contemplative wonderment and compassion for all around ourselves, as opposed to dogmatic spirituality per se), and was struck by how apt that was to political leadership in all nations, and to an equal or lesser extent their peoples, depending upon the nation.
What I've heard is that the great leap forward and associated famine are acknowledged in official accounts, but the cultural revolution is increasingly downplayed.
The latter is more worrisome to me because it required enthusiastic participation by lots of normal people to get off the ground. That lesson should be remembered.
Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, there were the Four Cleanups, which are even less remembered, probably because they mostly affected the countryside and didn't hit urban citizens as hard as the Cultural Revolution did.
From Huang Shu-min's The Spiral Road:
We decided to attack the five bad elements first, to set an example for the villagers and to intimidate anyone who dared to challenge our authority. Members of the five bad elements were brought up to the podium and forced to kneel down facing the crowd. There was a middle-aged woman among the bad elements. The high-level cadre from the prefecture signaled a poor peasant to come and asked him at close earshot: 'Is that a "landlord's wife" (dizhupo)?' The poor peasant answered: 'Yes, cadre,' went up to that woman, and pressed her head down to the floor throughout the struggle session. At the end of the meeting the high-level cadre asked this poor peasant, 'Why did you force that woman's head down for so long? I thought that this campaign was supposed to avoid unnecessary physical abuse.' The poor peasant answered: 'But, cadre, I thought you had given me the order to force her "head down" (dizhetou)!'
In the west we can't even seem to hold on to the lessons from 1930s-40s Europe, despite an incredible amount of documentation and retrospection. What hope is there when the history of the cultural revolution is being actively suppressed?
Somehow, our ancestors built a free democratic world without having all our advantages. As what we've taken for granted as been assaulted and damaged, it would be good to remember what they acheived, and how they did it, from much worse positions - without even a prior example or history to build on.
They created democracy, women's rights, etc. despite almost an entire human history of doing otherwise. We only have to look back 10 years.
The lack of modern technology is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
It is harder to start any democratic revolution against authoritarianism now than in the past. The modern information age makes it harder, not easier. To search someone's papers, you used to have to get police officers to physically enter their home and break their locks, in front of all their neighbors.
You used to need to enlist 5-10 people to spy on a single potential dissident 24/7, and that surveillance is easier to detect. To effectively spy on a population, you used to need to enlist 10-30% of the population to spy on their neighbors and filter reports.
To get the people's attention, you didn't have to get your message through a chaotic attention economy powered by the platforms that filter the information overload. There was literally a public square where you could reach your audience by handing out hand produced pamphlets.
What an interesting tale and gripping read. I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of this before.
For those unaware, not a whole lot has changed since that time unfortunately. China has had certain periods where they had opened up somewhat, but those days are long gone to my knowledge. If anything the repression may be even greater these days in some ways, though at least there isn't any kind of mass starvation going on as far as I'm aware.
The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system rather than something fundamentally new. In the past it was an imperial examination to join the Mandarin class[1], now it's a test to join the CPC [2]. Either way, if you don't get in your opportunities are limited.
> The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system
From a distance it seems like government policy is, in many ways, also the imperial system returned, almost like the CCP is the new dynasty (though not hereditary). The focus on corruption (not among political allies, of course), which the imperial system saw as its eventual downfall - IIRC Chinese history at least traditionally taught there were three repeating phases to a dynastic cycle: ascendency, corruption, chaos, then ascendency again .... The perspective on other countries as inevitably inferior. The attempt, post-Opium Wars, to hold onto power by adopting Western technology without adopting Western culture, such as political, intellectual, and economic freedom (it never went well, as you might expect). Even the nine dashed line geographical claims are, IIRC, from the Qing dynasty.
Yes it does, but they also imported the credit based fractional reserve monetary system. This really does require constant growth for positive (or even near zero negative) interest rates. Although there are a lot of monetary controls, there are really only trade-offs not fixes, if loans are made for which the asset does not cover a loss. You have to pick winners and losers.
That said monetary controls are much stronger than you'd see in an open market country, and one could force a digital currency with negative interest rates.
Constant growth in monetary terms doesn't require real growth. Most currencies are at least somewhat inflationary.
Bad loans, like broken promises, will always be with us. Sometimes you take a risk and trust someone, and it doesn't work out, so you're poorer than you thought. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take risks.
Bad loans usually are not about mistrust and deception, but about business risks that don't work out. Lenders very much expect that to happen, and charge interest accordingly.
When I get a business loan from a bank, I make no promise to pay it back. I promise to pay it back with interest if the business succeeds, and we agree that it might not succeed and they might lose their principal.
When I tell my romantic partner that I won't sleep with other people, it's an absolute promise.
Infidelity happens. So do divorces. Also, people get sick. People die. Society has procedures for these things.
There are very few absolute promises. Most contracts have some provision for what happens when they're broken. If there isn't one, it's poorly written.
"If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Though I don't know enough about Chinese politics to tell how much the quote actually fits.
Born and raised and stuck here, I can tell you that it absolutely fits. It is kind of a vicious cycle, the government breed ignorant people and these people cultivate the ruthless authoritarian regime continuously. But I do believe history is on an upward trajectory, just with some twists and turns, or "spirals" as the people here call it. The problem is that maybe few of the people alive will live long enough to reap the benefit of it.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
In my home country, Indonesia, many of us were not aware of the scale of the genocide of the left, or the massacres of civilians after World War II and the War of Independence. Most people pretend that it never happened and avoid discussing it. Only recently have people started talking about it, but they often face backlash.
Additionally, you will not find books on this topic in the local library.
I think it is normal for a community to choose selected amnesia.
The system described in the second link has a lot of interesting implications. That is one of those systems that reminds me a bit of Enron - it sounds like a good idea, it probably looks like a good idea in superficial results, but that sort of elitism doesn't have a history of working out well.
The comparison to the Ivy League for example. I don't think there has been a plain Ivy League president in the US since George W. Bush. I don't really see how to comment on him without being political, but I note that his presidency was such a success the right wing of politics is uniting behind a man who very publicly said "[Bush] lied us into a war" as an argument for why his family members weren't competent to lead again based on his record. Elitism doesn't lead to excellence outside a fairly narrow definition of the word.
Many years ago I read Animal Farm (1945) and Wild Swans (1991) almost back to back. It was startling how much of China's post-WW2 history was already written before it happened.
There is some irony in the fact that the Bolshevik newspaper was also called spark (iskra) and from a similar saying as the one that gave the name to Zhang Chunyuan's newpaper
Edit: thought it would be obvious I meant “After reading this in its entirety, I realize that compared to the troubles these people went through, my life is so sweet and easy”
The political stronghold in China appears well fortified. With every year that passes, the optimization gradient from government to people re-enforces the complicity. The differences in written and oral language make clandestine operations difficult. How many of the 2600 Politburo members are intelligence assets? Likely few to none.
The situation is clearly suboptimal from a human perspective: oppressive power is categorically bad, we take this truth to be self-evident.
In terms of catalytic change, what are some out of the box ideas that would rise to the challenge?
1. New forms of biotechnology minorly resemblant of targeted mind control. For example, any nanotechnology-based vector sufficiently power to trigger behaviors like a voluntary mass resignation of party members. Alternatively, a controlled pandemic that somehow interfaces with compromised electronics to temporarily modulate behavior. But this ask is too high, and such technology would surely be deployed towards even geopolitical goals first.
2. Incredibly high velocity targeted counterpropaganda that is also historically truthful. Some of the earliest StarCraft bots that defeated humans were simply very good at controlling mass mutalisk swarm. A rapid and unexpected infiltration with truth bombs, ideally physical or written rather than electronic to make censorship challenges, could cause a (probably uncontrolled chain reaction).
3. Inducement of a Taiwan takeover, and subsequent loss. Very high collateral damage and seems widely destructive rather than more “peaceful.”
4. Weird deus ex machinas. In the Three Body Problem, theoretical physicist start hallucinating a countdown timer. A covert leap in physics or technologies to induce “mystic breaks” in relevant sub populations, particularly those in power, could lead to mostly voluntary abdications of power.
5. Something more insidious or pernicious related to improved clandestine operation.
6. Straightforward domination, such as through a deployment of a sovereign but appropriately aligned or controlled AI fleet that maintains the balance of a covert takeover / disassembly of the power structure but phase transitions organically to redistribute power to the wider populace before halting or terminating itself.
A lot of these require sci fi, non-existence technology, or risk of armageddon. Are there alternatives (that don’t require classified information or a SCIF) that don’t rely on these or is the task complexity simply at that scale?
Dictatorships look strong from the outside, but are weak inside. What looks like a monolith is in fact multiple tribes seeking a position closer to the throne.
The most brutal few that make it to the top have to spend much of their energy to get there or defend their position. That is not saying they don't have any ideologies, but leadership in these systems rewards obedience and tribute paying first of all. So you get a system that optimizes optics for a hierarchy of overlords.
Contrast that with the chaotic looking processes that happens within free democratic societies. Leadership has a much broader accountability, faces scrutiny from all sides, has to tolerate opposition, are bound to laws and have term limits.
This system, with all buts and ifs, allows societies to innovate, learn, adapt and prosper.
Chinese leadership should thank the late Kissinger for the enormous transfer of wealth, intellectual properties, and highly favorable trading conditions from the West. It is still very dependent on it for its economics. Totalitarian states will in the long run not be able to compete with free states.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, but that stuff can take decades.
Almost all of the proposals in your comment seem authoritarian to me. I think at this point we should have learned that deploying totalitarianism to fight a regime the West doesn't like both doesn't work and, to use your words, is "self-evidently categorically bad".
Dreaming of some mind-controlling bioweapon to change the minds of politicians we don't like seems particularly dystopian to me.
If this technology existed, you can guarantee it will be deployed in your country, wherever that is.
All of these technologies would be very useful to a government, especially an authoritarian government. Who do you imagine wielding this technology, exactly? Agents of a foreign power? Internal dissidents? In either case it is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which the same technology is not already available to the CCP themselves.
(2) wouldn't work. People agree with propaganda not because they think it is telling the truth. On the contrary, they agree with propaganda and then they start believing it. I'd say it is more like a social adaptation, you need to be like others.
(3) wouldn't work either, I think. Propaganda can absorb losses and paint them as a heroic struggle against overhelming odds.
> Are there alternatives (that don’t require classified information or a SCIF) that don’t rely on these or is the task complexity simply at that scale?
I don't know any, but I think that some way to form societies independent from the government might help. Some way to meet people, to discuss things with them, to plan actions and to do it at a large scale. But the problem is how you can distinguish a goverment spy from a freedom fighter? It is the key problem, everything else is just an implementation detail.
The first questions should be more things like "Why are the current stakeholders willing to play along with the CCP system" or "How can a more 'western-norms' approach be packaged to appear less threatening and more compelling so it won't be instinctively rejected" and less "how do we invent MIND CONTROL NANOBOTS to make people change their political affiliation."
Any political system survives because some core percentage of the population benefits from it and buys into it. The cartoonish stereotype examples tended to be the small third-world countries where it was clear the local leader was financing the army to keep him afloat to the detriment of other services. The CCP has a far broader buy-in. I'm sure some of that might be people trying to use the Party for personal economic or social gain, but right now it's still easy for them to say "you're better off today than your parents were 30 years ago" and trade on that.
They also happen to be sitting around at a time where a lot of the original guardrails of good faith happen to be falling off of Western institutions. Situations like Brexit, runaway income inequality, the rise of fascist-adjacent leaders in Europe, and the non-function of the US legislature seem to scream "this nifty 'Capitalist Democracy' product we're selling? We can't even make it work on our machine!"
If you want to win over China, you have to show them that your value system will provide better outcomes. You can't exactly trot out Liz Truss and Kevin McCarthy and say "this is the sort of stable, respected government that will preserve the progress you've made over the last century." It's also inherently antagonistic to present a message that's "we'd love if if you voted out your current leaders"-- just look at the glare Schumer is catching over that type of language to a country that already has a multi-party norm.
I almost wonder if the way to sell democracy is less as a values-oriented Freedom(tm) message, and more pragmatic, like trying to apply the Toyota Process to government-- empower citizenry and look for ways that they can incorporate feedback at the ground level to root out performance and waste and enhance value for existing stakeholders. That could get to a government that's more responsive and respectful of its citizenry through an internal process it can own and see as "organic", rather than "foreigners insist we must have elections."
