(Above: image from Deutsche Welle article captioned: The first detour of the Chinese Communist Party-the Long March (Art performance for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party on June 28, 2021) )
Review: "The Great Detour of the Communist Party of China: The Birth of
a Nation" ("Deutsche Voice" 2021-06-29)"
(Translator’s
preface: This article originally
appeared on the Chinese language website of Deutsch Welle. Deutsch Welle
is s a German public state-owned international broadcaster funded by the
German federal tax budget. It includes Chinese amongst its 30-language news
website. The original author used the pseudonym Ke Bo (Victorious Wave). A
commentary was then provided by a person using the pseudonym Wu Tao Ku Han (The
Trouserless Man), perhaps a reference to the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.
While the commentator agrees with some of Ke Bo’s analysis, he is critical of
the misrepresentations of Maoism and of Chinese politics during the era of Mao
Zedong, and places his comments in parentheses. I have added bold type to
clearly identify them. I hope I have translated both authors correctly, but
there are bound to be some mistakes and clumsiness. I have added footnotes where I thought they
might be useful.)
Date: 29.06.2021
Original author Ke Bo. See https://p.dw.com/p/3vkhM
Commentary by Wu Tao Ku Han on 2021-07-09
Guest Commentary: The Great Detour of the Chinese Communist Party: The Birth of
a Nation.
In the century since its birth, the Chinese Communist Party has undergone several circuitous turns in its choice of path. After several metamorphoses, it has gone from a revolutionary party that was constantly revolutionary and pursued liberation and democracy to a counter-revolutionary party that feared all revolutions and went completely to the opposite of democracy and socialism. [The fake Communist Party founded in 1976, the Party of Special Characteristics, and the True Communist Party led by Chairman Mao are completely opposite and mutually hostile parties of different class nature and supporting different social systems. The True Communist Party is only fifty-five years old (1921-07-0 to -1976-10-06)]
In the early hours of 13 September 1971, a Trident jetliner carrying the Communist Party's number two figure, Lin Biao, and his family took off from Beidaihe airport, first to the south, then to the west, then to the north, slowly drawing a long arc before turning in the direction of the Soviet Union and finally crashing in the desert of Vindur Khan in Mongolia.
Technically, Aircraft (Division) Commander Pan Jingyin either flew an
equidistant shuttle route through the radar network of northern China, or flew
north instead of the original southward escape route to avoid premature
detection by those on board, but as the last detour of Lin Biao's military
career, along with Kissinger's visit to China two months earlier, the
"913" marked the beginning of a major detour in the latter part of
the Communist Party's fifty-year history. On the occasion of her centenary, it is
extremely difficult for a revolutionary party at its inception to present to
the world a party that wears a Marxist coat but is a far-right nationalist
party on the inside.
The Great Detour, perhaps not the earliest but the most famous in Eurasia, originated with the Mongols eight hundred years ago. In addition to the Western conquest, Kublai detoured to Dali in order to conquer the Southern Song Dynasty, but Mengke[1] detoured to Ezhou and then died at the city of Diaoyu. Kublai gathered the forces of the left wing of the legions involved in the Great Detour and succeeded in staging a military coup to seize the throne of the Great Khan. From 1251 AD, when Kublai was appointed to the East, to 1260, when he was elected Khan at the Kulitai Congress, the Mongol Empire took on a whole new shape, and the nomadic Great Detour changed the course of world history.
This was the great detour of the Chinese revolution. But on the other side of the successful detour of the revolutionary road, and the other side of the encirclement of the cities by the countryside, lies a detour that runs through a century of Chinese Communist history and at a deeper level, a deviation from Marxism from the very beginning of the formation of Maoism in 1937. For, if anything, Marx's greatest contribution was to shape an underclass, suppressed since time immemorial, into a visible political force and to see the proletariat as the only possibility for fundamental human freedom and emancipation. [Russia and the subsequent "Third World" countries, including China, were all countries that had moved from a feudal social system to capitalism or were on their way to capitalism through the revolution of the oppressed classes and nations against feudalism, although they had not yet reached the same level of capitalist development as the Western countries. But the Marxist prediction of a situation in which the proletariat would defeat the bourgeoisie and come to power, even if it does not occur for the time being, does not mean that Maoism has deviated from Marxism, but rather that the backward nature of the Eastern and Asian countries has determined that the formation and consolidation of the proletariat lags behind that of the West. To say that it deviates is to say that it is deliberately opposed or scorned for being anti-Marxist, regardless of the reality and the specific circumstances. But these are two different concepts which need to be clarified.]
In The German Ideology, Marx says that "only the modern proletarian, completely deprived of autonomous activity, can acquire his full and no longer restricted autonomous activity, which is the appropriation of the sum of productive forces and the consequent exercise of the sum of his talents." For Marx, this communism of common appropriation and common economy is a renunciation of the contradiction between particularity and universality, between private and public, in the Hegelian sense of civil society.
However, even the German proletariat had, as Weber put it, a "politically vulgar civility", and in realpolitik neither the Junker class nor the civil or working class could take on the role of political leader. The Nazis behind Weber exploited this and transformed the vulgar civic nature of the German workers and citizens into the "banal evil" of hatred of all revolutions that was the basis of a far-right regime.
[Weber's view of the lower classes of society as inactive "rogues" is not confined to the West. The ruling class of the private system is confident that the lower classes are rogues, so-called passive citizens with a vulgar civic nature, "Adous"[2] that cannot be helped. This is the Western version of the uniquely condescending "the people can be made to do, but not to know" and the so-called villain, both in China and abroad. The Nazis took advantage of the fact that the petty bourgeois masses were desperate to get ahead but were suppressed by the large and middle bourgeoisie and unable to move up the social ladder and were used by the Nazi party as pawns to suppress and control the working class and to do their bidding. It was the German petty bourgeoisie that was the backbone of the Nazi Party, and the working class was not only not a supporter, but a constant and reassuring opponent of the Nazi Party. As for the argument that the working class is incapable of being a political leader, one need only look at the political capacity of the Chinese working class during the first Cultural Revolution to see that this is not true. The problem is that the seizure of power by the working class is only the first step towards the seizure of political power; it is the consolidation and retention of hard-won political power and the avoidance of being overrun from within by the class enemy that is the fundamental condition for the working class to become political leaders. There is no doubt that the working class, having gone through and learned the valuable experience and lessons of the Great Cultural Revolution, will be able to sweep away the bulls, the devils and the snakes during the Second Cultural Revolution as a battle-hardened, tactical and heroic revolutionary leader.]
In the Chinese revolution, as opposed to the universal utopia sought by Marxism and the particularity of socialism that Lenin and Stalin believed could be developed under the conditi.ons of one country, the difference in Maoism was the abandonment of the emerging working class as the main body of the revolution and the shift to the mobilisation of China's large and ancient underclass - the displaced class in the rural areas revived the politics of the traditional Chinese underclass with the CCP as its embodiment. [If the goal of Marxism were utopian, it could not be accepted as a theoretical guide to revolution at all, let alone to building socialism on the backs of that class. No, it is not a utopia nor is it a quest for so-called universality (regions that are still in what resembles primitive or slave societies are excluded), but a revolutionary programme determined by the numerical and political maturity of the working class. The peasants were the most reliable political and social allies of the working class against the private ownership of the landowners and the capitalist class, of which the stragglers were a minority, the majority being the poor peasants. The political structure of the workers' and peasants' unity is precisely what Lenin and the Third International actually said: "Proletarians and oppressed peoples unite!" was realised in China. The landowning and capitalist classes, in opposition to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, curse Marxism as a utopia, an untrue hoax which fewer and fewer people believe or support as the contradictions of capitalist society rise, while the number of working people and intellectuals who support Marxism is growing, and this is especially evident among the young people of the world.]
This tradition of underclass politics, which can be traced back to the White Lotus Sect that emerged at the turn of the Tang and Song dynasties and lasted until the middle of the Qing dynasty, and which was repeatedly refreshed under the guise of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement and the Boxer movement, was long rejected and suppressed by orthodox Confucian politics under the rubric of "chaotic power and strange gods, eating vegetables and doing devilish things". However, due to the influence of the new cultural movement of the May Fourth Movement after the end of World War I, and in particular the unprecedented popular circulation of the Water Margin and similar literature promoted by the vernacular literary movement, the underclass political tradition of rebellion, chivalry and fanaticism was revived under the cover of Marxism, through the theorists of Yan'an such as Ai Siqi[3] and Chen Boda[4], and the greatly simplified Marxist theory of the Soviet Union. The combination of the philosophical dogma of Stalinism, which simplified Marxism, resulted in a new Maoist theory and discourse that quickly subjugated the Confucian intellectuals within the CCP. [Why did they survive and subsequently develop without the cover of Marxism, when the politics of the underclass, that is, the struggle of the oppressed classes and nations for their liberation, had been present in all countries and places of the world for thousands of years before Marxism was born and widely disseminated? Exploitation and oppression were the fundamental causes of their revolt against the reactionary ruling class; human social classes and struggles have been around for millennia, and have nothing to do with the emergence of Marxism. The reason why Chinese pre-Qin moral philosophy was abandoned by the intellectual class had nothing to do with Marxism either. Confucianism was the school of Confucius (551-479 BC) and Mencius (372-289 BC), reactionary schools of thought representing the declining slave-owning class during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Criticism of Confucianism dates back to the early Warring States period with the Mozi school (Mozi [468 BC? - 376 BC]), which represented the interests of the small producers. -376 BC], surnamed Zizi, of the Mo family, named Zhai, from the late Spring and Autumn period and early Warring States period) had already begun. For thousands of years, Confucianism, because it represented an ideology that was behind the times, had rightly been fiercely opposed by untold numbers of aspirants and scholars, which needed neither the assistance of Marxism nor the May Fourth Movement to push it through. Maoism came from the theory and practice of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat by combining Marxist doctrine with the reality of the Chinese social revolution, and it was not at all necessary for Stalin, Ai Siqi or Chen Boda to do so.]
This is the historical origin of the Maoist "surround the cities from the
countryside", but it was later concealed by the Confucian communism model
that ostensibly combined Leninism and Confucianism, and it was reduced to the
"three magic weapons of the party's leadership, armed struggle, and united
front." As the core theoretical resource of the CCP, it is also the
"three bodies" that have not changed in any way from the
"Chinese Revolution" to the "Chinese Model". [This paragraph can be said to confuse
strategy with theory. The "encirclement of the cities by the
countryside" and the "three treasures" of "party
leadership, armed struggle and the united front" are both applications of
strategy rather than theory, let alone theoretical resources. Maoism had its
preparatory or rehearsal phase, and its theoretical basis was still Marxism
rather than the tactics from the preparatory phase. Maoism is the result of a
long accumulation of revolutionary experience over a period of forty-five years
(1921-1966), guided by Marxist theory.]
The second great detour took place in the early years of the Communist Party's rule, particularly after the split with the Soviet Union in 1959. Having just received 156(5) Soviet-aided projects and the beginnings of a basic modern industrial system, Maoist irrational fervour emerged in the face of internal Soviet criticism of Stalin and external attempts at détente with the US: internally, it launched the "anti-rightist" and "three red flags" totalitarian campaigns, and externally, it tested US-Soviet relations by launching the "Jinmen Artillery War".[5] In the years that followed, the Maoist radical line of "continuous revolution" gradually escalated into a militant mode of competition with the Soviet Union for the leadership of the Third World Communist Movement and a "two-fisted fight" with the US and the Soviet Union. [There is a similarity between this paragraph and the error in the previous one - elevating tactics to doctrines or theories and then pinning them on Maoism. It is important to point out that the struggle between Marxism and modern revisionism is not an expression of militancy, but is key to the question of the survival of the working class socialist world revolution. Modern revisionism began with the traitor from the former Soviet Union - Khrushchev - and continued through Brezhnev, Gorbachev and up to the chaos of the four revisionists Deng, Jiang, Hu, and Xi in China, and it will not fall without a fight. This is why the theory and practice of Maoism - the continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat - is of such importance. Moreover, "continuous revolution" and continuing revolution are completely different and opposed doctrines, and should not be confused with each other. See: "Defending the Leninist Theory of the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" ] http://marxistphilosophy.org/Hongqi/64/1964z2-04.htm
In the ten years between 1959 and 1969, the CCP launched the Four Clean-up Campaigns, the war against India, the Sino-Soviet War, the Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet border conflict. As a far-left revolutionary party, the Communist Party not only continued to revolutionise internally, purge the bureaucratic class and create a whole generation of "Red Guards" and "rebels", but also continued to export revolution. In an era when globalisation was divided by the Cold War, the "1968 revolutions" from Jinmen to Indonesia, from the Sino-Indian border to the Sino-Soviet border, from Hong Kong to the British Chargé d'affaires in China, from Vietnam to Europe and America, all formed a picture of a world revolution in which "the countryside surrounded the cities". [Big mistake, see above].
2. The Shift to the Far Right
However, the climax of the ultra-leftist line brought a swift end. On the one hand, the 1968 meetings of the leaders with the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, the convening of the Ninth Congress in 1969 and the beginning of the military's involvement marked both the triumph of the Cultural Revolution and the end of mass mobilisation, and the peak of military leader Lin Biao's political status. But all this fervour was no match for the imminent threat of the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party was forced to seek a détente with the United States, which was also anxious to end the war in Vietnam.
On the other hand, these Zoroastrian-White Lotus-Boxer-style fanaticisms,
though irrational in their subjective idealism and described as "good and
evil in one mind", could still be checked by the minimal rationality of
the Party's Confucian bureaucrats. The latter, like Lin Biao, issued a mobilisation
alert of the Soviet threat (Order No. 1 of 1969) with a transcendence and
insight close to that of Wang Yangming's "the heart of a sage is like a
clear mirror"[6],
which, although it provoked Mao's suspicion, brought the CCP back to
realpolitik.
This kind of
betrayal and opportunism, which has astonished outsiders and comrades alike,
has been a tradition in Chinese Confucian politics since the Song dynasty. As
the Canadian sinologist Jiang Yien once concluded, the discrepancy between
Confucian culture and the politics of the lower classes in China is rather a
difference between the higher and lower cultures, and the source of the
long-standing "saying one thing and doing another" of Confucian
intellectuals, who have had to seek strategic coherence by resorting to the
power of cultural realism. The collapse of Lin Biao in 1971 and Nixon's visit
to China in 1972 finally initiated a new detour in the last fifty years of the
Communist Party, which, although it had never nominally abandoned Marxism, had gradually
left the revolution and embarked on a path of integration with the capitalist
world system well before 1989. For the CCP, nothing was more important than
keeping the party alive and maintaining the dominance of the bureaucratic
class.
Since then, after China's accession to the United Nations in October 1971 and Deng Xiaoping's comeback at the end of 1973, it has undergone reform and opening up in the 1980s, the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, the market economy of the 1990s, WTO membership at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the dramatic changes since the 18th National Congress. Looking back at some of the historic events and their significance, we can roughly recreate the great turn of the Communist Party of China over the past 50 years, and see how a country created a nationalist trajectory: For the Hungarian Marxist theorist Lukács, the hidden, vibrant, free public opinion that existed before the two Tiananmen Square protests of 1976 and 1989 were an important engine of socialist democratisation. The regime's repression of these protests, on the other hand, meant that they abandoned and also closed the path to socialist democracy. On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) made a rare reference to the 1989 events, enough to confirm this point.
Around the
Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996, the return of Hong Kong in 1997 and the bombing
of the embassy in South China in 1999, the CCP began to incite xenophobic
nationalism, which gradually filled the ideological vacuum of the authoritarian
era. While liberalism and civil society emerged with the market economy,
various cultural conservatisms and statist ideologies also rose in turn to
complement nationalism.
In particular, after returning from the Balkan battlefields, Hu Xijin[7], a
graduate of the PLA's Institute of International Relations, began to revamp the
Global Times in imitation of Serbia's
nationalist tabloids. In the era of the rise of urban media, the Global Times also managed to carve out a
large nationalist market in the ideological competition of the 1990s with its
urban newspaper style, its creepy ground-floor literary headlines and its
sophomoric editorials. Of course, in recent years, with the rise of more
radical anti-American and anti-revolutionary nationalist social media, the Global Time's nationalism has come to
seem outdated and stale.
After the Jasmine Revolution in 2011 the Chinese Communist Party began to see
civil society as the enemy and the subject of colour revolutions, and so
launched a purge one by one against groups and areas related to civil society
such as internet activists and public intellectuals, liberal media and
university campuses, independent NGOs, human rights and labour organisations,
human rights lawyers and entrepreneurs. Theoretically, the political aim of
Marxism, as Lukács argues, is the empowerment of civil society. The authorization
of civil society is not only the result of regarding the liberation of human
beings as the main body of citizens, but also the popularization of political
power, that is, socialist democracy. In this sense, the development of civil
society, as the market is neutral to capitalism, is the prerequisite for the
establishment of any democratic system. Therefore, the rejection and repression
of civil society by the Communist Party of China is not only a negation of
democratic development, but also a philosophical negation of human liberation.
She went from a revolutionary party that revolutionized, pursued liberation and
democracy to a counter-revolutionary party that feared all revolutions, and
moved radically towards democracy and socialism. And the empowerment
of civil society is both the result of seeing human emancipation first and
foremost as a civic subject, and leads to the universalisation of political
power, i.e. socialist democracy. The development of civil society is in this
sense as neutral as the market is to capitalism, a prerequisite for the
establishment of any democratic system. The CCP's rejection and suppression of
civil society is therefore both a denial of democratic development and a
philosophical denial of the liberation of the human category. It has gone from
being a revolutionary party in constant revolution and the pursuit of
liberation and democracy to a counter-revolutionary party that fears all
revolutions and is completely moving towards the opposite of democracy and
socialism.
(Image from Deutsche Welle article captioned: "The status of the working class is in ruins.")
While any fascist ideology is nihilistic, and even Nazi Germany had few philosophical pursuits, there is something new about the Communist Party's turn today, and there are some efforts to expand it. For example, when Mussolini chose 'Roman Fascism' as the symbol of his movement, he was extracting the military part of the 'two bodies' of Rome, the Roman citizens who originally lived in the military barracks and the city of Rome respectively, and Fascism sought to reorganise them along the lines of military life. Fascism sought to reorganise the social archetype according to military life, that is, the totalitarianism of anti-communism. For the Chinese Communist Party, the tradition of the 'Three Great Treasures' may be a metaphor for the three bodies of the Communist Party: the Party, the army, and the alliance[8]. The combination of these three, in the view of the Party, is the historical combination of two bodies with the army. The rise of nationalism has undoubtedly helped to drive the two closer together in a real sense, creating a state of unity similar to that of 1989 or 1969.
Secondly, the past thirty years and the future of the CCP’s development of capitalism are similar to Lenin’s original question of whether socialism can be built in one country: Can capitalism be developed in one country? The answer is obviously no. The Hungarian economist Maria Jonati once argued that socialism could not be sustained due to self-exhaustive evolution. The stagnation in the later period of the Soviet Union and the popular "lying flat"[9] of the people proved to be vivid examples.
In China, the only way to avoid the collapse from self-exhaustion is to resort to a political "united front" if we are to avoid "decoupling". However, the political alliance of the United Front, which is based on Mao Zedong's statement that "who is our enemy and who is our friend is the fundamental question of the revolution", seems to be facing a new turn in the last fifty years towards the West and the capitalist world, and is thus unsustainable. All it seems to be able to do is to wake up the middle ground where revolutions were exported and actively infiltrate the democratic world of Europe, exporting authoritarian models of governance to Asia, Africa and Latin America in exchange for infrastructure aid under the name of "One Belt, One Road", thus leading to a worldwide democratic decline.
[The “special party’s”[10] One Belt One Road is a strategic project in which the bureaucratic comprador bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of various countries along the One Belt and One Road unite to exploit and oppress the working classes of various countries. It invests the over-accumulated, excessive, idle capital due to over-production in the Belt and Road without raising the investment in variable capital by the distinctive party state, thus both oppressing the working class of the “special party” state and brutally exploiting the working class everywhere in the countries on the Belt and Road; so called killing two birds with one stone, why wouldn't the bureaucratic comprador bourgeoisie be happy about that!]
And finally, and perhaps not unimportantly, it is not just a few elements of traditional culture, such as Yangming Xinxue[11] or Han Di Buddhism[12], that underpin the Communist Party's great detour towards a far-right nationalist party, but a rare "theory of civilizational superiority". It looks slightly different from the old racism, advocating Chinese civilisation as the only surviving and continuous core civilisation in the world, and the CCP as playing the vanguard of this particular civilisation, which is naturally no longer the vanguard of the working class. This would explain why Beijing is so keen on the "Xia, Shang and Zhou project"[13] and the excavation of various indigenous Homo sapiens fossils in an attempt to find evidence for the origins of a 5,000-year civilisation or even an independent modern Homo sapiens. In this way, the CCP would have a seemingly sufficient exceptionalist justification for the Chinese nation as a civilised state rather than a nation-state, thus escaping the obligations of a nation-state in terms of civil equality and international order, and resurrecting the Mongol empire.
On the eve of July 1, 2021, and in the wake of the G7 meeting in the UK and the US-Russia summit in Geneva, and China's unprecedented international isolation, the Russian and Chinese leaders announced the extension of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Good Neighbourliness and Cooperation. This scenario resembles the signing of the 1971 Egypt-Soviet Friendship Treaty, when relations between Egypt and the Soviet Union had deteriorated and the conclusion of the Friendship Treaty only confirmed rather than saved the deterioration of relations between the two sides. Then the great detour, whether for fifty years or a century, seemed to return to the fateful end of Deputy Commander Lin's time.
[The author exposes the manifestations of modern revisionism; but his view of the Maoist era, and Maoism in particular, is marked by glaring inadequacies and errors.]
[1] Mengke
Khan (10 January 1209 - 11 August 1259) was the Great Khan of the Great
Mongolian Empire, who reigned from 1 July 1251 to 11 August 1259. He was the
grandson of Genghis Khan and the eldest son of Tolay, the fourth brother of
Kublai, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty. After his accession, he was
mainly responsible for the conquest of the Southern Song and Dali kingdoms, and
sent Xuliyu on a western expedition against the West Asian states. He died in
1259 during an attack on Diaoyu Mountain in Hechuan, Sichuan.
[2] Adou was the infant name of Liu Shan
(207-271) last emperor of Shu Han (221-263), known for his lack of ability and
weakness of character; hence any weak-minded or foolish person.
[3] Ài Sīqí (2 March 1910 – 22 March
1966), a Yunnan Mongol philosopher.
His most important works are Dialectical Materialism and
Historical Materialism and Philosophy for the Masses. He was a delegate to the
1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.
[4] Chen Boda (29 July 1904 – 20 September
1989), was a journalist, professor and political theorist who became
a close associate of Mao Zedong in Yan’an during the late 1930s. After
1949, Chen played a leading role in overseeing mass media and ideology; at the
start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao named him Chairman of
the Cultural Revolution Group, entrusting him with the task of guiding the new
mass movement. However, close ties with Lin Biao eventually led to his
downfall in 1970. In 1980 he was put on trial at the same time as the Gang of
Four and sentenced to 18 years in prison. However, his sentence was commuted
due to illness.
[5] The Jinmen Artillery War, also known
as the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis,
refers to 83 battles that took place between August 23 and October 5, 1958, in
and around Jinmen. The Chinese People's Liberation Army Fujian Front Forces
carried out punitive large-scale shelling blockade operations against the
Guomindang troops guarding Jinmen Island in Fujian Province. The U.S. Navy
intervened to maintain the GMD’s Jinmen supply lines.
[6] Wang Yangming (1472-1529) was a distinguished
thinker, writer, military man and educator of the Ming dynasty. One day, Lu Cheng, a student, asked Wang
Yangming, "Can a sage be infinitely responsive?” Wang Yangming said,
"How can a sage have the energy to take care of many things? The mind of a
sage is like a bright mirror, and it is because of this clarity that it
responds to all sensations and illuminates everything. What was illuminated in
the past no longer exists, and what was not illuminated could not have existed
in advance. If, as has been said, the sage has studied everything beforehand,
this is a great departure from the doctrine of the sage.” In other
words, a successful life requires no planning. The reference in the passage
above was no doubt intended to convey sarcasm.
[7] Hu
Xijin, born in April 1960, joined the Communist Party of China in 1986. He has
covered news in the United States, Japan and other countries, and has been into
Taiwan. He has written numerous exclusive stories and participated in planning
a series of major news interviews. He is the author of the book "War
Interviews in Bosnia and Herzegovina". He is currently the editor-in-chief
of the Global Times.
[8] Presumably the worker-peasant
alliance.
[9] A phenomenon in contemporary China
of social passivity and withdrawal in response to the Party’s demands on the
young and the workers.
[10] The
term “special party” is used to refer to the Chinese Communist Party since the
adoption of the policy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. A 2016 article on the RedChina website,
explains: “What kind of political party is this "special party"?
Actually, we all know it without saying it. "It is the abbreviation for
the ruling party of China during the special period. Is this abbreviation for
the sake of simplicity? Of course, we cannot exclude this factor, but the main
reason for using this term is to distinguish the "special party" from
the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong. Why the distinction? Because
there has been a debate on the Internet over the past few years about whether
the Communist Party is real or fake, and those who propose the term "
special party" probably mean that the "special party" is not the
Chinese Communist Party of Mao's time, but the ruling party of China during the
special period; the reason for this distinction is still a rejection of the argument
that there is only one Communist Party of China in the world. To put it
bluntly, the ruling party of China in the first thirty years from the New
Democratic Revolution to the establishment of New China was the Chinese
Communist Party, while the ruling party of China in the special period after
the departure of Chairman Mao should be called the "Special Party".
Since they are two names, they are of course two parties and not one. This is a
much better way to distinguish between the two names than between the real and
the fake Communist Party of China, because the two names are two different
political parties, and the one name is divided into real and fake, so is it one
party or two parties? It makes it difficult to distinguish clearly.
As to why
netizens describe the ruling party under Mao Zedong and the ruling party during
the special era as two different parties with different names, it is of course
because the CPC under Mao Zedong was the party of the proletariat, whose
mission was to eliminate private ownership and establish public ownership. The
"Party of Special Characteristics" of the Special Characteristics
Period, on the other hand, was the party of the nascent bourgeoisie, whose
mission was to abolish public ownership and introduce private ownership.” (See
Chinese original here: 关于“特色党” - 红色社区 红色中国网 (redchinacn.org)
[11]
Yangming Xinxue refers to a school of Confucianism advocated by Wang Yangming
in the Ming Dynasty. As a school of Confucianism, Xinxue was highly respected
by Confucian scholars of the past generations. “Xinxue” is made up from the
words “xin” (heart) and “xue” (study), for the ancient scholars believed that
the mind was situated in the heart. Xinxue’s advocacy of self-cultivation and
calm was adapted by Wang Yangming who proposed that the purpose of mind theory
is to "develop conscience."
[12]
Han Buddhism is a Buddhist sect divided geographically, spread across China,
Japan, the Korean Peninsula and other places, and is mainly Mahayana Buddhism.
The influence of Chinese Buddhism accompanied the spread of Chinese power to
the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Vietnam and other places, and it also influenced
the later generations of Tibetan Buddhism. In essence, Chinese Buddhism can be
said to be one of the main forces shaping the face of Mahayana Buddhism;
however, unlike Tibetan Buddhism, the sects of Han Buddhism are more prominent.
[13] The Xia Dynasty (2100-1600
BC),followed by the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, are the earliest dynasties in
China.
