Mao's Revolution: What Remains

tonight we have Roderick MacFarquhar here and I can't think of anybody who's better qualified really to introduce us to this topic it's an interesting topic because it raises the question of does history just vanish or do historical periods that countries go through particularly ordeals leave indelible traces recessive genes if you will that keep expressing themselves as time goes on rod mcfar war is a Leroy B Williams professor of government at Harvard he was trained at Harvard and the London School of Economics he is now the director of the Fairbank East Asian Studies Center at Harvard and has written numerous books one hundred Flowers movement and Chinese intellectuals the two volumes of the Cambridge history of China which he edited with John Fairbank the secret speeches of Chairman Mao and the origins of the Cultural Revolution multi-volume work which is really unsurpassed in its field what's interesting about professor MacFarquhar is that he's not only a scholar but I'm happy to say he did a time wearing the journalistic cloth in Britain and was also a member of parliament so he brings to I think the discussion of politics a very well-rounded perspective after a short talk he and I are going to have a conversation on the ways in which the Cultural Revolution and Mao's revolution in general still does express itself in China today and then we'll throw it open to questions for you all on the floor so Rob the floor is yours Thank You oval Thank You Chancellor for having us there wonderful party and honor Richard Lee oh and I feel particularly element to give this lecture having heard in some detail the enormous benefits which mr. Luo has conferred upon this university I won't try and seat him don't worry Chancellor I know I couldn't do it all we'll say the short talk this talk has varied in size over the weeks that we've discussed it but of course what he calls short I will just be clearing my throat so we'll see how shortages but we will get to a chat and you do talk cause I originally thought that we are going to talk just about the cultural revolution but the title I see is Mao's revolution what remains or what might be called Mao's revolution what's left of the left and I suspect most of you in this room today have been to China read regularly about China have seen the skyscrapers going up in Shanghai and the ring roads and the traffic jams in Beijing and in many other places how this country is developing at an incredible pace and the debate of course going on in Washington is it a promise or is it a threat and that debate of course will continue but what I thought I would do is to talk about the subject that I was given but link it to the Cultural Revolution because it is inevitably linked to the Cultural Revolution because in his dying year Mao confided to a few of his confidence that he had done two things in his life he had captured China from the nationís he defeated the Nationalists and he'd launched the Cultural Revolution and clearly he thought the Cultural Revolution Eclipse to all his other achievements and as it turned out literally it did that's what it did do and I want to talk about that before over than I continue our conversation the achievements of Mao's revolution after 49 were really enormous ly really great by communist standards what we see them doing within a few years of the revolution is transforming the pattern of ownership centuries indeed millennia old in China in the countryside in the cities among traders among industrialists at above all among peasants into collective or state ownership in a way in which the Russians took much longer and with catastrophic impact upon their agriculture there was impact in China but nothing of the same order so that by the mid 50s China had apparently transformed its whole system of society and they went on Mao was ambitious and he went on from there of course many of you will know of the Cobb Yoon's which were set up in the Great Leap Forward 1958 a further development of a socialist society one which Mao for a time claimed would overtake the Soviet Union because it would be totally sotius and in a few of the communes they even had separated husbands and wives from children that were happiness homes for the aged and the the normal eating patterns at home was stopped and people began to eat in communal mess halls this was a experiment which fortunately for Chinese unfortunately for Mao did not go on for too long but it was a major attempt to transform what China was into something totally new and we'll come back to that in the Cultural Revolution so by the mid to late 50s China had already transformed its society and this was one of the great goals the revolution social transformation the other great goal was the goal of Patriots for 150 years and that was to transform China in a developmental manner and by the mid fifties when Mao began to get impatient and launched the catastrophic Great Leap Forward by the mid fifties copying the Soviet Union the Chinese had already made considerable advances in their first five-year plan until Mao's utopianism took them astray and you have after the Great Leap Forward year 58 the largest man-made famine in human history the exact death toll we still don't know the Chinese admit to about 20 million the demographers say 30-some in Chinese investigators after the Cultural Revolution suggested it might be even 40 sir it's a figure which none of us can comprehend and it was a disaster and in the wake of that disaster an attempt was made to go back to retreat a bit from the collectivism to give more incentives to families and now vetoed them and he decided at that point that he felt that despite the fact they had fought the revolution together to fight the fact they had built a strong united China together in the 50s that maybe some of his colleagues were going soft and he looked at what had happened in the survey you now the Soviet Union was no longer backing China in various ways and he came to the conclusion a very Maoist a very Chinese perhaps had certain non Marxist conclusion that what was happening in the Soviet Union was that the leadership was transforming the society and the economic base you know the Marxist would say that the economic base will determine the nature of the superstructure as a society and the chairman said no what has happened under the rule of Christian and others was that the leadership were transforming the society back towards capitalism he became obsessed with this idea how do we prevent from going capitis how do we prevent our people from becoming revisionist as the term was revising Marxism Leninism and going back towards capitalism and out of that came the theory the theory of successes what was necessary was to train let me just turn this one on to so I can work around the necessity was to train successes so that the next generation would be more revolutionary than the current generation they might have fought in the revolution against the Nationalists but they were now they were now in their places of power and it had made them soft in fact what Mao was developed in a very crude manner was what the Yugoslavia certain calmness mean evangelist had developed in the 50s a theory of the new class how when Communists come to power and there's no challenge they are able to become a bureaucratic overlay upon society upon which they feed and now it grasps that idea he didn't formulate it clearly as a theory but he grass that has an idea and he determined to change it and in the process of thinking about how to change it he decided we must have a new generation of revolution successors how do they become revolutionary in a non revolution situation and that's where we come to the Cultural Revolution the Cultural Revolution which really negated all the achievements that he and his colleagues and even the ones that he specially personally had that had already been brought about the idea was we must unleash society against the state we must initiai turned out the young people of China but not just the young people we must encourage them to make revolution by bombarding the headquarters as maz phrase was by attacking the seat of potential revisionism namely the party itself now never attacked the party before and no one had ever attacked the party for Stalin purged millions but he used one institution to purge another institution he would never be so stupid as to unleash society against the state but that was what Mao's idea was but what happened in the first instance was in order to be able to give the young people a fair run he had to first unseat some of his closest colleagues and I don't have the time to go into this into this here we go into a co-author and myself go into a book on the Cultural Revolution which we'll be publishing next year but basically now using his old guerrilla instincts started a campaign against a series of leaders taking them picking them off one by one so that by the end of the year 1966 all his major enemies in the party people who he thought might stop him were eliminated now many people in China began to think later that Cultural Revolution was just a power struggle and had it just been a power struggle and it was partly them had it just been a power struggle now could have stopped there but Mao you could say we had been worried about was that just as Khrushchev had been overthrown by his colleagues in 64 so perhaps now could be overthrown by his colleagues because he had done things which were even more stupid than Chris Jeff had been had done and was accused of by his colleagues so there was an element of paranoia on mouse part in getting rid of these people but he didn't stop there this was when after the series of red guard rallies in gen'l'men square I'm sure many of you have seen some of the movies of those rallies at which youth came from all over the country to worship at the at the feet of the chairman then the went back infused and encouraged by his words and by the example of the Red Guards in Beijing and Shanghai went back to the provinces to attack the headquarters to undo the whole party structure which had been set up over the previous 13 years and I want to try to emphasize for you how important this was the Chinese party was perhaps the best organized and best led party in the Communist world at the time of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution it had survived this fantastic famine which had gripped the country it had survived all sorts of buffetings and now it was being undermined from within and yet this was one of the most important ways in which China was held together and the Communist Party of China has to this day never recovered the legitimacy and the authority which it had in 1965 before the Cultural Revolution started that's one of the blows which Mao dealt to the revolution which he helped to create which he led in 1949 the undermining of the authority of the Chinese Communist Party to make up for that of course there was an enormous hype of Mao's ideology Marxism Leninism muds and thought this was what was going to show people how to be revolutionary how to be militant how to find the way towards a different future and here I want to emphasize what Mao is about in a sense I think he was the last of Chinese conservatives this may sound very odd there was a famous historian of Stanford and Yale Mary Wright who who wrote a book called the last stand of Chinese conservatism about mandarins in the nineteenth century who attempted to refurbish the Chinese system in the face of Western imperialism and ever since then there has been an instinct among Chinese of whatever political flavor that we have to develop the country yes we've got to make it strong we've got to eliminate the possibility of our being held to ransom by imperialism or anyone else but we must do it on our own way the phrase in the 19th century was Western studies for the practical use Chinese study for the basis the problem was by the early 20th century wasn't clear what the Chinese basis was Confucian Empire collapsed Confucian social ideas were under attack by the intelligentsia and what Mao and his colleagues had provided in 1949 was a new essence admittedly a foreign essence but a new one which embraced the whole society and the whole polity exactly like Confucianism an and what Mao was trying to do I think in the Cultural Revolution was to go a step further and to make a revolutionary society almost in continual movement and so make China different from everyone else this is something the Russians hadn't tried is something no other communist country had tried and he was going to show how China could be different it was the attempt the last attempt I believe it will prove to be to ensure that China would be special China would be modern eventually but China would be special and different from everyone else the result of these endeavors I think was that he will defeat it himself because as you know the Cultural Revolution was a period of enormous chaos followed by a period of stagnation until Mao died and the result was a terrible reaction by the people who survived him notably dunshire thing but many others contributed to it during the 80s and 90s in reaction why because they looked around and in East Asia they saw that while they had been tearing themselves apart other countries other places have been able to develop Taiwan which had been me the refuge of the beaten remnant of the Guangdong was now a prosperous society South Korea where Chinese armies had marched only 15 years earlier was now a prosperous society Japan had recovered from atomic bombing and American occupation and was a prosperous society and China which in 49 had the best chance of being the most developed by 1979 had totally thrown away that opportunity so there was an enormous reaction as a result of the cultural vision the coal problems is really a massive dividing line in modern Chinese history and not just in modern Chinese history but in Chinese history let me give you one example why Chinese history mandarins wanted China to be prosperous of course and so did the calmness but mandarins never said to get rich is glorious that kind of idea that profits are not a dirty words not a dirty word would never been said and the idea that the state should allow private enterprise to grow up perhaps even to be big like it was before the Revolution and maybe even to be a power that could challenge the state that would never be tolerated for so what you're seeing in China today is a massive reaction not just to the communist system but also to the traditional Chinese system and this was brought about by the extent of the damage and the waste of talent of time of the economy that Mar brought about in the Cultural Revolution and the another thing which has resulted is been the discarding of doctrine Markson and the mountain fort was so hyped during the cult revolution that Dan sharping decided he had to go it could not be it could not be accepted in the way that had been trumpeted during the previous decade of course it's still there it's one of six cardinal principles but no one refers to mouths little red book or even to Marx or to Lenin to find out what to do next how to negotiate with a Western lawyer about some business contract which is going to erect a skyscraper in Guangzhou Asami like that that's no longer practice as Duns people were fond of saying practice is the sole criterion of truth if it works we'll do it so what you then lose is the glue that kept China together just like Confucianism was abandoned so Marx and Lenin as vandals and so you have in China today a party which has been undermined it's 65 million strong or weak whichever way you like to look at but many people join that party pence the great majority on it because it's the Rotary Club to a better career and that spirit of service of commitment to the nation and to the people which I think that the party had in those early years when it won the revolution that I think is gone I'm not saying every single party member is a cynic and a careerist that's obviously would be silly but that basic commitment throughout the party which made it so dynamic sometimes in a bad way as in the great leap for but so dynamics so well then so disciplined that's gone and the doctrine they that justified the party people being in charge because they needed option they leave the past only with the president they knew the future so they had the right to rule that doctrine has been effectively abandoned and that is why dam shopping and his successors have been seeking for a new Chinese essence or something to put in its place spiritual civilization is one of the watchwords which has been used but no one is quite sure what it means some have talked about the need to revive Confucianism that hasn't got very far so people are groping in China today which is one reason why there's been this enormous growth of Christianity both official and their in-house churches or one reason why there's growth of cults like the Falun Gong and so on people are groping for what life is about what China is about and what the what the administration what the regime is giving them is what China is about is making us more prosperous as fast as possible and for many people perhaps that is enough but not for everyone and not for all the time Chairman Mao was fond of saying out of bad things come good things and I think that out of the Cultural Revolution did come good things without the Cultural Revolution China might have gone on with service now five-year plans and it might have been East Germany when it grew up you know a very efficient communist system but not making the best use of the enormous talent and dynamism which exists in the population so the change in China today are direct result of the extremism the madness the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and let me now the benefits as well one was the choice by mouth of done shopping to revive him his career in towards the end of the Cultural Revolution having discarded him at the very beginning is one of the first big wigs to bite the dust in late 66 by bringing him back in the middle 70s and allowing him an important position and to try to revive the economy in 1975 and then purging him again because he thought he was going too far he was becoming revisionist he made sure that when he died Dan Xiao ping was the obvious person to lead China not what Wilfong who me through whom he chosen who had no standing at all but done shopping because Deng Xiaoping was a person that Mao chose to help run China when Jo and I was diagnosed with cancer and dong Xiao Peng was the person that mal allowed for a year to transform the economy in 95 and dung swapping was a person who's purged again and therefore had no responsibility either the beginning or the end for the terrible things of the Cultural Revolution and the Chairman had chosen him so he became the the indispensable natural leader of China and I think with all the criticism one may offer about his political blindness his failure to to embrace mr. democracy that slogan of the may 4th movement as well as mr. science as shown by the suppression of the student movement in 1989 for all that his basic determination to let nothing stand in the way of China moving forward has been enormous if fruitful for the country and the other great benefit which were at or whatever happened anyway but which is much easier because it happened during the Cultural Revolution under Mao was the opening to America the very fact that Mao was shown on the front page of the people's daily with Richard Nixon meant that a development of a normal relationship with the United States was much easier from mouths successes then it would have been had it been in Charlie hostile throughout the Cultural Revolution and you have to remember that this was a very odd development why had there been a Cultural Revolution because man thought the Russians were going revisionist what was one of the proofs they were going revisionist because they keep kept talking to the United States who frightened that there was going to be a war and China scorned that but what was the opening to to America on the Chinese side about it was because the Chinese don't worried that the Russians were going to attack them and they thought it might be a good idea to open a link to the other superpower but whatever the reasons it was a good thing which came out of the Cultural Revolution what I think we can hope for Orwell was talking about the effective history and I think we can hope for is that the Cultural Revolution was such a terrible lesson not just a lesson about what one leader can do to a people but what a people can do to her people because the really terrible thing about the Cultural Revolution was that when the young people were unleashed they fought each other not just the not just the party leaders did they torture that they fought each other there were pitched battles until finally Mao worried that it would be done without his acceptance Mao finally ordered the military to suppress them and I think that that terrible memory of the Cultural Revolution which a number of scholars here and in China very few because the Cultural Revolution is not a subject which the Chinese wish to have explored a number of scholars are trying to keep that memory alive and that's important because people have to face up to the fact of the horrors that were committed and to try to understand why the society turned on itself in this way when there's no one giving the orders just a vague idea we have to defend Chairman Mao so you fight some other group that also says it's defending Chairman Mao so there are many lessons to come and one day the Chinese will be able to confront that goes lesson the reason why my colleague and I have written a book on the Chinese Revolution which we've dedicated to the Chinese historians of the future is because no Chinese historian can deal with this topic fully and frankly at this moment why because although the party resolution of 1981 declared that Mao calls the Cultural Revolution put the blame fairly on his shoulders it also attributed most of the disasters to the Gang of Four and Lin BL and others of his acolytes and one reason why they cannot deal with the Cultural Revolution straight on is because if you do you find that the Chairman was not just a sort of mad ideologists thinking utopian thoughts he was actually a conniving politician engineering the unseating of his colleagues in a way that no one else could have done for him and that cannot be brought out into the open because Mao now is still the legitimating factor for the Chinese Communist Party there's no doctrine aylonga there's no leader to bring the party it's been the country together in the way that Mauer done could so there has to be the Mao symbol has to be preserved at least even if it's tarnished as the grounds for the continuation and power of the Chinese Communist Party but one day Chinese historians will be able to get at the archives will be able to write thank Li about what happened in the Cultural Revolution Chinese sociologists will be able to explore why society turned on itself and not just on the state it will be a long and painful reckoning but it will come and until that time we in the West you know a little bit about China have obligation to try and find out some of the ways in which that understanding can eventually come well thank you rod you know looking at these flowers I was just thinking there was a song something to the effect that you know all workers are sunflowers turning towards the bright Sun of Chairman Mao or some such words as that this was a pretty horrendous and violent and tectonic episode that shook Chinese society I mean I think the likes of which with the possible exception of the civil war that America has never come close to and you spoke in the end about a need for reckoning and I think we both admit that there has not been such a reckoning do you think it's possible for China to escape digesting this experience in some way perhaps the German example would be one worth contemplating or do you think inevitably they're going to stumble on this and have to have to come to terms well I think that and you probably know her too there is a Chinese scholar in this country who has been documenting one small horrific set of episodes which is the beatings and killings which took place in schools in Beijing during the early cultural evolution and this is something which people have pressured her not to do because there's a lot of skeletons in many people's closets and many people responsible right and but she's going on and there'll be others there is now just there's going to be produced a big bibliography of Chinese of cultural evolution sources by Chinese scholars again in this country and let me be fair there have been one or two books which I'm sure you know oval written by Chinese scholars in China on the Cultural Revolution which have been very revealing even if they're not able to give a final verdict what they do very Chinese way of writing history is they don't say this man was an this man was evil they will give a long quote so that you will see from the quote what you need to think about this man but one one historian who comes out of the National Defense University Wang Nene has gone even further he in an article which he wrote in the special supplement to an agricultural journal in northeast China which never normally had a special supplement and this article wasn't an agriculture he in effect accused Mao being a liar in something he said about Lin BR and that articles already published there and I think it's republish tout Hong Kong I want people want the truth though that's an interesting statement I would have to say having just returned from China do people really want the truth or are they just as happy to go about their lives and do business and you know get ahead in other ways and you know it seems to me very often when you raise these vexing and really deeply troubling question people just say oh you know you don't talk about that I've never had someone say that all my Chinese students from China undergraduates or always always say that they have asked their parents or their grandparents in some cases now and you're right in some cases the grandparents say you know you're too small to know later but I think gradually there will be pressure from the younger generations to know what this is all about and because it is such an important watershed China today would not be China today but for the Cultural Revolution and you must know where all this came from so then what's the I mean actually the logical extension of that thought is that in in very considerable ways the whole of Mao's revolution was pretty catastrophic and then what do you do with the question that you asked about and in the fact about Chinese identity and believing in your country being proud of your country having a sense that that that there's something there worth esteeming if you take your history in cashier it well I think that the the Chinese are fortunate in having such a fantastic history way back before the 20th century so that they can see that out of their past they have constructed enormous things of great importance and I think that that will always be a bulwark against the total despair there this is not I suppose you could say that the Cambodians could look back on Pol Pot and say well these three ones had a career empire but China's in a different category totally from that so that I think they will be able to come to terms with it as just a most terrible episode in a long history in which there were previous terrible episode just not of this nature mm-hmm and yet Mao's portrait still hangs his body lies in repose in the mausoleum what do you think the effects on the way in which this country has sort of exploded with dynamism our of this past is it just now forgotten until later when it will be remembered or do you think there's some effects that still that we see made manifest in this rather amazing period that they're undergoing well we know that it's only now that it seems that Putin in Russia is approaching the possibility of moving Lenin from Red Square so one can see that this is a big big political problem in the case even after the discernment of the Communist Party exactly even after communism but collapsed in Russia they just have moved him yet what's left of it in the case of China I think there's a different dynamic also in play and that is that apart from the fact that Mao in my view is a major legitimation of the party still I think that there is a sense in large parts of the country which are less well-off then the coastal areas in Beijing that at least in Mao's time we are all poor together with more equal and as many people know the the rise of the Chinese developmental model has been very unusual in Asian terms East Asian terms because it has been on a very unequal basis Japan Taiwan and others all kept their Gini coefficients much much lower than has happened in China so I think there is still a sense of Mao as being someone who was you know they don't know who to attribute all the bad things to when Mao was there things were more equal then of course he become for something just a household god sounds in a taxi character prevent you bill having an expert I guess I have one of them Michael there's been a new biography which I think many of you are aware of about now written by a Chinese woman John Wong and her British husband John Holliday which really is 800 pages of incredible research which scandalously portrays now I think as a involved and sort of non-stop power struggles with very little idealism that ideology was merely a masquerade for his own personal power aggrandizement how would you assess looking back at the Cultural Revolution and the Revolution as a whole the mixture between that realpolitik and Mao and genuine idealism and and concern for society well as I said I there was an element of power struggle there was a fear on mouths part I believe that there were I can prove that he kept his cards very close to his chest even when the archives are opened we won't know I think there was appear in his part that he would be treated like Christophe was in the Soviet Union dumped I don't think there was ever a possibility but he believed it secondly however as I said I think that the fact that he pursued the Cultural Revolution after he got rid of his main putative enemies shows that there was idealist we did believe in a utopian society but thirdly I think there's something came out of it the country was perhaps it's even more important came out of his personality Mao was very restless Stalin was a nuts-and-bolts men even Lenin was a nuts-and-bolts man they'd like to run the country Mao mostly China became a sort of settled society after the first few years of strong party activism to make sure that people are bathed the partying and the government after that things were settling into a soviet-style routine and now without a routine man he'd loved revolution for its own sake he didn't like anything would save it of settling down I remember one of his slogans was world in disorder a great disorder excellent situation right situation and he loved he loved the the idea of a civil war he used those words and of course there's very good reason why he might like it because he was never going to be affected by it he hooked God so I think that it was his personality as well while there was revolution in some form of the term and the Cultural Revolution was certainly that in spades he was in control of the agenda this was his major revolution running a country was not his matey and he ran it into the ground do you think ultimately when he is dethroned he will live on in some sort of tutelary god fashion or do you think there will come a time when people will look at him as as the monster he isn't portrayed in this new rather extraordinary biography or is he already gotten an iconic status which will never be complete well let me just say one word of the biography I think that it's very unfortunate I've only read the section which I needed to read see if there's anything relevant to my buy book on the convolution I think that it's I envy the time that they had to spend I envy the access they apparently had and I deeply regret them what you say put it because it's a monomaniac or portrait of Mao which is not convincing and which makes bad use of evidence a piece of the part that I've looked at leaving that aside I think that I think now will become will remain a sort of household tutelary deity for many generations to come right that's my guess because for many generations to come many Chinese people are going to be living rather simple lives they're not going to be in the skyscrapers of Shanghai but I think that in the long run of history Mao will emerge as yet one more Conqueror and there be many conquerors many people have you not all very nice people no Jin Chuang D to whom he liked to be compared as part of nice person but he still looked back on as a person who stopped finding a united China so I think mal will be seen in that light as someone who after a century of foreign invasion and civil war United the country and then almost destroyed it of course the idea of uniting China is very important to Chinese after that century of predation by the West but I wonder you know as China tries to kind of reconstruct its its sense of itself after being sort of canceled these various times how do you imagine it's going to finally conceive of itself I mean it's had Confucianism it's had john kai-shek and his sort of nationalist Christian Confucian synthesis then you had mouths revolution then you had done shoppings pragmatism and now you have heavens knows what but so what what is this country to think of itself as standing for from him this time henceforth one of the leaders of China have not yet been able to think what that is it's going to be difficult for me too but it's a pretty essential question which it's a very sensual question especially if you're running China fortunately I'm not which probably answered whether or not fortunately for the Chinese I'm not I think that I think they will come to terms with I mean you remember in the early years of what was happening after done Xiao ping came back to Pi in the 80s in order to disguise what he was doing which was encouraging East Asian type capitalism or one of its forms he said we're building socials with Chinese characteristics and what I say to my students is that's nonsense if you want socialism with Chinese characteristics you are a Singapore if you want capitalism Chinese characteristics you're the Hong Kong if you want democracy with Chinese characteristics you go to Taiwan so what is China 1.3 billion people with Chinese characteristics and that is the problem and I think what what the Chinese will have to accept and they will not accept this until they are a democratic system what form of democratic system I don't know but until they are in a position to choose their leaders and to be able to feel that they are masters in their own house until that time they will not accept the fact that to be Chinese is simply to have be the heirs to a great civilization to be the creators of a modern state and society and to live prosperously and hopefully peacefully with their neighbors and that should be enough but it will only come when people feel their masters in their own country it's only when you have a leadership which says we are the only leaders but that leadership has to say and we're about this and this betta ship doesn't know what they're about so you can imagine the time when China would be sort of pluralistic and it were it would not be such an essential a question of who we are what's the race with Chinese yeah and we live in China we have a great civilization well we have we have remnants of Confucianism in our daily social practice even if for Chinese Americans you know that those sort of things will persist well given that situation how do you think the United States might best deport itself towards this country in terms of sort of not exacerbating cultural tensions or political attentions what's what's the right line of attack or perhaps attack is the wrong word in this particular case what's the right angle of repose so to be a little more passive about for America and its relations with this incredible country wherever it is that it is it reminds me of the question how do hedgehogs make love the answers carefully carefully is how America should approach China I mean there is there is this debate about is China going to be a threat is it not going to be a threat how should America comport itself I think that America should walk on two feet it should as Chairman Mao is to say on the one hand you try to bring China in as successful administrations have done and the Chinese have responded to into the world community the global community and you argue about trade deals you argue about quotas and all the rest of it and on the other hand because there will always be people while China is a communist country worried about it you will have the people in the Pentagon just keeping up whether I open my own one of my colleagues in the Fairbanks Center have just written an article on this subject about Chinese military strength and his belief is that China no that it will only seem a real threat to the United States two people know about threats if it tries to build a Bluewater Navy one that can project power way beyond the Chinese coastline where the Navy at the moment is really just defensive and he thinks they're not going to do that because they're far too smart to do that they're gonna build up build up gradually Chinese have time on their side they can think what's your answer to people who say you know perhaps you've lived through regimes like this and you say you know once a Leninist always a Leninist you cannot trust them do not count on peaceful evolution the Communist Party is not going to go it's not going to allow itself to be evolved peacefully out of power how do you respond to that scenario well I think I think that scenario is absolutely correct I think that the that Huijin Chou did not come into power in order to preside over the demise of the Chinese Communist Party he has the example of Gorbachev who also thought he was strengthening the Communist Party and brought about his demise and so they are going to be huge each child seems to me to be a very cautious man he's had to be cautious as he maneuvered his way to the top so I don't think that there is a plan which is going to emerge from the Politburo as to how to gradually transform China into a democratic country at that peaceful evolution the word which they they hate which which was what John Foster Dulles originally foisted on them that that's something that they're going to embrace that's what I think that the in fact looking at all the possibilities and many people have examined this much more closely than I and looking at the Taiwan example where there was a move towards democracy peacefully I think get in China and unless something very strange happens at the top of the party it will have to be a big bang not a very enormous nationwide Big Bang perhaps but you know we almost saw it happen in 1989 you were there I think at the time in 1989 there were peaceful demonstrations with done shopping with the memories of what happened to his son in the Cultural Revolution and memory what Red Guards did saw as a real danger and done shopping in line and I proved why Mao had been right to select him as the person to bring back in 75 and had been the person that he had always admired and whom he never allowed the gang of four to sack from the Communist Party because done shopping had the determination and the prestige to hold that society together to save Mao's 49 revolution he threw out Mao's Cultural Revolution but he saved the 49 revolution now what could have happened then was there could have been this is what the students wanted is what a number of intellectuals wanted and this apparently wanted a senior official wanted mr. Wan Li was a summoning of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress because as you remember the Politburo Standing Committee was split three ways five people two votes for martial law two votes against martial law and I'm not sure you know the Politburo was was could not decide so the company was not summoned the party was paralyzed and you had extra party people in the sense of dance er pain and seven other dorando crowds coming together and saying this what we'll do at the PLA took their orders now I had that not happen at dance yeah ping been dead or not quite as determined as he was you could have seen a peaceful revolution but that didn't happen and I think that no those 65 billion party members have not joined up in order to have their perks and privileges taken away by who Jintao saying hey boys we need democracy so I gather that you you were not an optimistic sort of proponent of the idea that peaceful evolution is the best course and most likely to happen well let's separate that out is it the best course yes is it likely to happen No so in other words your by your prognosis you don't see China being able to get out of this old model that was laid down in the 50s that still coheres in certain ways underneath all of the economics change you don't see it as being able to slowly molt out of this old system into something new without some major bump in the road in the 80s I thought so yeah sadly I no longer do and you think this will turn on economic problems triggering something or how do you imagine that's it'll come apart you asked me to predict about the future again well I'm asking me to fly I've been wrong I've been wrong on this before I could be quite frank up so I could be what we all have I mean I remember in January 1989 we had a very distinguished by then dissident but former deputy chief editor of the People's Daily was at the Fairbanks Center for a couple of months he said before he came to America he'd asked one of his caller friends who were taught at Peking University said one of the students like these days is well they're in Sidon TOEFL and peg ma job and he proved wrong in a few months so the Chinese got it wrong there and then I thought after that it'd be very unlikely that the students would go on the streets to be shot again so maybe be the disenfranchised the fired workers who were gone you know there'd be some explosion in the northeast some police chief would get itchy and people will be shot in there beer turned out a bit the Falun Gong none of us have a thought of it I don't blame myself because trans men didn't think of it either nor this state security of public security so I don't know how it's going to happen but that it will happen I am sure because this is this is a society of 1.3 billion people it cannot be run from one Center as Russia was in 1917 as Marx planned in the 19th it cannot be run that way you can run it if you're going to have a dodgy type approach to economic development where you say da guy is fantastic every farm in the country no matter what its economic ecological climatic conditions were copied our joy and disasters use their car run the country that way and no one wants to run it that way now so it's a country which is going to have to be I the only peaceful evolution I can see is that the central government relaxes its control over the economy of the problems is as to some extent it has done that we talk of fiscal federalism and that gradually some of the coastal provinces the jung-soo the jae-joong's begin to experiment and say please can we experiment with Township election can we spend with County elections and use that as a way of going forward but I think that that even that is less likely because I just think that the party officials do not want to lose control and it's the people of the grassroots who may depend on to control the country who do not want to give up their positions of leadership so all very well if your Politburo remember you're going to lose your perks but down below it comes for a lot well thank you join me and thank you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 26,675

Rating: 4.7587938 out of 5

Keywords: Communism, Mao, politics, China, Roderick, MacFarquhar, commuist

Id: G5tn3LvgRVY

Length: 56min 2sec (3362 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008