Mr Mao lamented China’s backsliding on economic reforms and its recent surge of political repression.

He dismissed the country’s incoming leaders as being beholden to the current ones and for being focused only on protecting the Communist Party regime.

And he said officials and wealth have fused together into formidable vested interests that resist reform.

But he is nevertheless convinced that the country is on the brink of democratic change. ”I don’t know how it will happen but I feel confident,” he said. ”We will witness reform in the next five to 10 years.”

Read more about Mao Yushi’s essay about Mao Zedong which sparked such controversy:
* “Forces of Darkness” Bring Down Nationalist Chinese Website
* Boundlessly Loyal to the Great Monster
* Mao’s Legacy Still Divides China

Read all of CDT’s coverage of Mao Yushi.

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Post tags: leftist, Mao Yushi, Mao Zedong, political reform
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Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang are not only provincial Party bosses, but rivals for coveted spots on the nine-man Standing Committee of the Politburo – the top of China’s power pyramid – during the once-in-a-decade leadership shuffle set to take place over the next year. And the regions they now govern offer starkly differing models for the direction China should head next.

The rivalry between the two men reflects a split within the Chinese Communist Party that, no matter how good the Party is at presenting a united front to the world, some see as a struggle for China’s very soul.

On one side, there is Mr. Bo’s Chongqing model, the favourite of a powerful faction of hard leftists who are prone to harkening back wistfully to the era of Chairman Mao, and want to see the country’s pursuit of growth balanced with a renewed focus on social stability, including more equitable distribution of China’s new-found wealth.

On the other is Mr. Wang’s more open Guangdong model, the choice of a smaller clutch of free-market liberals, who argue that now is not the time to pause the country’s economic and political reforms.

The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed the visionary behind China’s most prominent leftist internet platform, Utopia, who called on Bo Xilai to usher China into a new age of socialism:

Like many leftists, Professor Han places huge expectations on Bo Xilai, the Politburo member who has revived Maoist rhetoric and leftist policies in Chongqing city.

”The Chongqing model is the only hope for China’s future,” said Professor Han.

He said Mr Bo had merged the liberal and revolutionary streams of the Chinese left but would soon dispense with the liberal part. He predicted that Mr Bo would upset the pecking order at next year’s Communist Party Congress by being promoted to premier.

”Only Bo can save communism and save China,” said Professor Han.

The Guardian profiled Wang Yang, who spoke of the pressure building on Guangdong to overhaul its development model to keep its edge in the face of today’s global economic environment:

The global financial crisis in 2008-09, however, was a wake-up call for the province. Thousands of rusting, labour-intensive factories closed as western orders evaporated while rising production costs shaved profit margins to unsustainable levels.

Years of rampant industrialisation and urbanisation had taken its toll in making cities “not so pleasant to live in”, Wang said, and change was needed.

“These realities must force us to change our mindset and change the economic development model.”

“If we do not change we would have even more problems in environmental issues and in (industrial) production … it is pressing for us to take action,” said Wang.

See previous coverage, via CDT, of shifting political winds, the ideological battle underway between left and right in China, and the unusual response to recent riots in Guangdong.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, development, Guangdong, ideology, leftist, socialism, Wang Yang
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The flagship website of China’s resurgent New Left movement was brought down by hackers yesterday, interrupting its ferocious campaign against critics of Chairman Mao Zedong.

“Our website has been attacked by the forces of darkness,” Fan Jinggang, the co-founder of Utopia (www.wyzxsx.com), told the Herald. “I believe it is related to our recent campaign against Mao Yushi and Xin Ziling. This is a struggle between patriots and traitors, not leftists and rightists.”

China’s “leftists” tend to want to limit the market, glorify the country’s socialist past and protect it from foreign influence, while liberals typically call for constraints on the state in the economy, democratic political reforms and “universal values” ….

Mr Fan claimed the Chinese government was on its side and had even pledged to send technicians to restore its website.

Others, however, speculated it was the government that had brought down the site down yesterday morning (and then partially restored it) out of fear that its cultural revolution-style campaign could spill onto the streets.

The site appeared in a recent Economist article on the furious response to Mao Yushi’s essay:

“The whole nation is waiting for the dawn, the dawn of a day when Mao Yu-Shit (sic) and other anti-Mao reactionaries who vilify Mao are annihilated,” one person commented on Utopia, a website which is leading the campaign to get Mr Mao indicted. Utopia accuses Mr Mao of subversion and libel. It says funding given to Unirule by the Ford Foundation, based in New York, is evidence of “collusion” with foreigners in his alleged crimes.

Mao’s essay itself is available with translation and explanation on China Media Project. See also CMP’s explanation of why the Left is up in arms, and a New York Times article on Mao’s still divisive legacy, via CDT.

Another far-left website, that of the “Progress Society”, gained some notoriety last year by appearing to advocate the hanging of Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and other “slaves of the West”.

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Post tags: leftist, Mao Yushi, Mao Zedong, nationalism, rightist, websites
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All year the Communist Party has been jittery about the possible spread of Arab-style “jasmine revolution” to China. (The word “jasmine” has been all but banned in the media, as has the flower itself in markets.) Now the party is all the more anxious as it prepares to celebrate, on July 1st, the 90th anniversary of its founding. It does not want the occasion to be clouded by misgivings about the man who led it to power. Mao is too intimately linked with the party’s identity to allow any further examination of the “mistakes” the party sheepishly admitted he made, five years after his death in 1976.

Mr Mao’s essay said the party’s takeover of the country in 1949 did not bring happiness to China: “On the contrary, it plunged [the Chinese] into an abyss of misery for 30 years.” Mr Mao said 50m Chinese died as a result of Mao’s policies, “for which he felt not the slightest remorse”. He did not fully account for the figure, but the 30m deaths he attributed to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s is a mainstream estimate among historians; meanwhile around 2m were slaughtered in various political campaigns. A portrait of “the backstage boss who wrecked the country and ruined the people” was still hanging in Tiananmen Square, Mr Mao noted. (The boss’s corpse also lies, unmoved, in the square.) It was time, Mr Mao said, to end all the “idolisation” and “superstition” surrounding Mao and assess him as an ordinary man.

Mr Mao says that people have since telephoned him, threatening to beat him up. Language on the internet is strong. “The whole nation is waiting for the dawn, the dawn of a day when Mao Yu-Shit (sic) and other anti-Mao reactionaries who vilify Mao are annihilated,” one person commented on Utopia, a website which is leading the campaign to get Mr Mao indicted. Utopia accuses Mr Mao of subversion and libel. It says funding given to Unirule by the Ford Foundation, based in New York, is evidence of “collusion” with foreigners in his alleged crimes.

For more on the left-right debate, see: “Why China’s Left Is Up in Arms” from China Media Project and “China’s Party Princelings Fight for a Chance to Go Back to the Future” from Sydney Morning Herald.

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Post tags: ideology, leftist, liberalism, Mao Yushi, socialism
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“History is a genuine depiction of the past, but it can never be completely genuine,” writes General Liu Yuan, in a preface to a book with the same name, Changing Our View of History and Culture.

And for anyone who misses the point: “History is a mirror which reflects the present, and the future as well.”

Liu’s father, Liu Shaoqi, was China’s second-ranked leader until he was vilified in 1968 and then air-brushed out of history after dying in jail in 1969. Liu writes his father back into contemporary relevance while also boosting the patriarchal claims of his institutional vehicle, the People’s Liberation Army.

[...] “Both Liu Yuan and [the fellow expected to be the next president] Xi Jinping are demanding a return to the founding fathers and to the basics of the party ‘s ideology,” says Sun, referring to a speech by Xi last week at the party school. This, together with the Mao-singing antics of a third important princeling, Bo Xilai, begins to explain China’s backsliding on economic reform and aggression in foreign policy in recent years.

Bo Zhiyue, from the National University of Singapore, says the leadership is at the crossroads, the retreat to socialist ideology is being driven by fear, and now “there is also jockeying for power among princelings in the name of the legacies of their fathers”.

Read more about the current ideological battle between left and right in China via China Media Project.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, leftist, Liu Yuan, princelings, Xi Jinping
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The “deep reds,” with their wistful talk of the glories of Mao Zedong, the “Four Basic Principles” and socialism with Chinese characteristics, seem to have been emboldened.

But how, and why?

While the hawks on the left seem to have greater visibility (and perhaps greater political pull) right now, they are only half the story. It takes two to tango, right?

We have seen interesting, even historic, shows of strength from the liberal right in recent weeks. The first of two recent examples, of course, was the essay from social critic Mao Yushi (茅于轼), which enumerated the various crimes of the CCP’s revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, a critical act of historic proportions. The second was an editorial in the Party’s official People’s Daily that urged tolerance for “differing ideas” and seemed to be pointing at the grumbling powers on the left when it said the “hurling of epithets and the yanking of pigtails” is “fundamentally is a sign of weakness and narrow-mindedness.”

It must be noted that the People’s Daily editorial, which according to a well-placed source at People’s Daily Online was an independent effort by moderate journalists with senior-level blessing (not, as some have suggested, a cynical public relations ploy), has drawn fury from the left. During a recent speech on Marxist theory, Chen Kuiyuan, the very same man whose prominent place at the national meeting of propaganda ministers signaled tighter ideological controls on the media, said that “so-called ‘tolerance’ cannot become the ‘stealthy substitution of one thing for another’,” a clear reference to what he saw as the dangers of the kind of thinking expressed in the People’s Daily editorial. “If Marxism is stealthily substituted, and changed out slyly for ‘democratic socialism’, ‘neoliberalism’ or other such bourgeois thought systems,” said Chen, “the nature of our Party and our country will change.”

Last but not least, of course, we have Premier Wen Jiabao (温家宝), who has stepped out on numerous occasions over the past year and harped on the need for political reform, most recently meeting with student leaders on the anniversary of the 1919 May Fourth Movement and on a diplomatic mission to Indonesia. And one of the most interesting (and perhaps revealing) rumors now going around in Party circles is that a deputy propaganda minister recently referred to Premier Wen as a “troublemaker.”

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, ideology, leftist, new left, socialism
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In his first essay, which prompted the exchange, Wang Wen issues a series of character attacks against academics and journalists he views as representatives of China’s so-called liberal faction, or ziyoupai (自由派). His words are what S.I. Hayakawa once called “snarl words,” full of emotional implications and associations rather than substance.

Pretending to a courtesy that masks a deeper nastiness, Wang chooses to identify none of the people he sets up as examples of the general churlishness and depravity of “liberal” or “reformist” figures in China. He speaks to the reader, as though in a whispered aside, of a certain “very famous professor from the Pearl River Delta” who verged on shouting at a forum on universal values. Then there is “the chief editor of a certain famous special ‘weekly supplement’ launched by a certain newspaper” who, Wang intimates (like the big-mouth gossip who vouches secrecy before spilling all), had possibly carnal relations with a female student from Taiwan ten years ago after delivering a “harangue” to adoring students.

Then, in a further act of pretended grace, Wang actually confesses that a couple of liberals are not so bad. By that point, however, he has successfully confuted moral righteousness and intellectual substance. And how can liberal thinkers possibly have valid points to make if their personal conduct is so odious?

Wang’s conclusion is the conservative mantra: “Let’s take our time.” China is a big and complicated place, after all. And what is needed, above all else, is stability.

In his rebuttal to Wang’s arguments, Ye Fu (野夫) tells the story of how he met Wang at a dinner hosted by a friend, how the two were amiable but had widely diverging views, so that he saw real friendship as impossible. Then, earlier this month, Ye came across an online video on China’s t.m4.cn website in which television pundit Sima Nan (司马南) and Wang Wen speak about the detention of artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) ….

The story continues …

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei detention 2011, Global Times, leftist, reform, rightist
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First of all, in answering the question of “who governs,” socialist democracy and capitalist democracy are clearly delineated in their answers. Socialist democracy adheres to a people’s democratic dictatorship (??????), truly realizing the people as the masters [of their country] and carrying out among the people the most extensive democracy, and meanwhile to those enemies within carrying out the most effective dictatorship in accord with the law. Capitalist democracy, on the other hand, is only democracy among the very few, and it is limited within the bourgeois class, at its most basic seeking to protect private ownership of the means of production and thereby safeguard the interests of the bourgeois class. These differences in “state system” are of critical importance, showing us the class nature of democratic politics. Therefore, if someone does not recognize clearly the question of “who governs” before they argue specific political questions, they are like blind people groping the elephant, prone to all sorts of errors.

On the question of “how governing occurs,” socialist democracy and capitalist democracy are also poles apart. Socialist democracy adheres to the basic political system of the National People’s Congress, thoroughly ensuring the position of the people as the masters [of their country] and giving full scope to the sense of ownership and responsibility. While capitalist democracy also advertises itself as “rule by the people” and [holds that] “all people are equal,” under the system of private ownership the few still exercise control, regardless of what form the system takes. These basic differences in political systems are important background as we observe actual realities, and if we disregard these we will reach prejudiced or preposterous conclusions.

They also translate online reactions to the editorial, which include:

“Guangming Daily is a monument to whoredom!”

“You have no shame, and you still call yourself ‘bright.’” (“Guangming” means “bright” in Chinese).

Guangming Daily talks about drawing a clear distinction between socialist democracy and capitalist democracy. The problem is that the former is totally invisible and untouchable, so how can anything be distinguished at all?”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: leftist, political reform
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Here are two sample posts of how Chinese netizens themselves typically define “left” and “right”. The first post was written by netizen Minyue in a nationalistic (“leftist”) online forum Tiexue, in which someone posted a question asking others to define ‘leftist’ or ‘rightist’ in Chinese cyberspace. Translated by CDT:
(...)
Read the rest of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Chinese Cyber-Politics (935 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, leftist, nationalism, rightist
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