The Five Vermin Threatening China
The China Story has posted a translation of ‘Where Are the Real Threats to China?’ by Yuan Peng, which was originally published in the overseas edition of People’s Daily in July. In his introduction, Geremie R. Barmé focuses on the essay’s most controversial element: Yuan̵ ...
« Back to Article
« Back to Article
I take strong issue with your characterization of the old “black categories” under Maoism as including, so you put it, “right wingers.” If you bother to check the actual identities of the people denounced in such a fashion, I think you will find that a great many of them were socialists who simply objected to the Party’s suppression of criticism and are certainly not “right wingers” at all, especially in the sense that the phrase has acquired in this country. The Maoist slander for these people is usually rendered in English-language texts as rightists; also a mischaracterization, but in this case, a deliberate one which then confers on the Maoists the title of the only “real” socialists by default. Some China scholars have adopted the sensible construction “rightists,” [quotation marks included] which shows the term as an attribution not necessarily proven. This is avoids doing the slanderous work of the Maoists for them and obscuring the actual political indentities of the people so described.
Concur that “rightist” is the better term. It helps reveal the propaganda dishonesty of Mao & his fellow felons.