Posted on 05/15/2016 3:55:26 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Fifty years after Mao Zedong unleashed the decade-long Cultural Revolution to reassert his authority and revive his radical communist agenda, the spirit of modern China’s founder still exerts a powerful pull. Millions of people were persecuted, publicly humiliated, beaten or killed during the upheaval, as zealous factionalism metastasized countrywide, tearing apart Chinese society at a most basic level. […]
It was only in 1981 — five years after Mao’s death — that China’s government officially pronounced the Cultural Revolution “a catastrophe.” But in the ancient city of Luoyang, the old, the poor and the marginalized gather daily in the main public square to profess nostalgia for the political movement, downplaying that period’s violent excesses. […]
… The legitimacy of the Communist Party is staked upon both Mao’s legacy and a tacit promise of bettering people’s lives. Those two pillars may prove difficult to maintain as China navigates a painful economic transition that threatens to shed countless miners and factory workers and widen social inequality. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
I’ve been in China the past few weeks working in Shanghai and some other big cities. While the government blocks Google and many other Western websites, Free Republic always comes through. It loads so quickly that I use it to test WIFI service.
In the big cities at least China seems very bustling and prosperous. There is a huge divide between rich and poor. I’ve heard older people say that in the old days everyone was poor, but at least they were poor together. I’ll see big pictures of Mao hanging in some restaurants and he’s all over their currency.
Of course they’re still a force, they’re armed and savagely violent. They will be a force until someone stands up to them and destroys them.
Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. That’s why they have no equivalent to the 2nd Amendment.
Pronounced: mousey dung.
The Maoists run the military.
Far easier to be the guy with the gun, and let people live with pretend freedoms, as long as they don’t get out of line.
“Millions of people were persecuted, publicly humiliated, beaten or killed during the upheaval ...” sounds bad but hides the truth.
Mao, the man who murdered 153,000,000 people ...
Most of MAO’s victims died of starvation.
Being deliberately starved to death counts as murder. Do not minimize the evil that was Mao, who was more than willing to lose half of the Chinese population in a nuclear exchange.
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