China’s mandarins tap into past to shore up power
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By Andrew Redmond
The recent protests around the Chinese http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3729 Torch Relay and China’s reaction are better understood by looking back at Chinese history. Between 1899 and 1901 China saw an outbreak of widescale racial violence directed against the foreigners who were deemed to be “exploiting” a China only recently dragged out of millenia of enforced isolation. Rampaging mobs lynched Western missionaries and their families and slaughtered Chinese Christian converts in a nationalist campaign that has gone down in history as the Boxer Rebellion.
The name “Boxers” was a Western translation of the name of a Triad secret society called the Society of Right and Harmonious Fists, which mixed traditional Chinese religious beliefs in magic spells and kung fu with the ethnic nationalist call to overthrow the foreign, ethnic Manchu Qing (Ch’ing) Dynasty in favor of Han rule. The Han Chinese had long suffered Manchu oppression; the famous Chinese pigtail was enforced for all Han males to remind them that they were the “pigs” of their Manchu overlords.
Secret societies, the ancestors of today’s feared Tong organized gangs, periodically led enormous peasant uprisings, and kung fu martial arts developed largely because Han where not allowed to possess weapons. This kind of organizing would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Manchus in 1912 and later on would mark both the Nationalist and Communist causes. We see it today in the Olympic upheavals.The Qing Empress Dowager Cixi skillfully redirected the anger against her regime by chanelling it against the white and Japanese trade settlements, as well as against the earnest Christian missionaries whose humanitarian efforts led millions of Chinese to abandon their ancestral worship. Empress Dowager Cixi faced an uprising against her rule in 1898, but defused it by offering edicts in support of the Boxers’ opposition to the “round eyed foreign devils.” Eventually the Boxer Rebellion ended in an industrial age bloodbath; poorly armed Boxers relying on magic potions were mowed down by machine guns and disciplined Western resistance, unable to get close enough to test their king fu skills on the besieged whites. But the violence was so intense that riots against local Chinese broke out in San Francisco and the Western diplomatic backlash soon ended Manchu power forever.
The tradition of mass violence manipulated by a ruling class to redirect dissent was deeply rooted in Chinese political culture, in a society in which collective concerns overrule personal interests as a matter of course. Much later, Communist dictator http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3422 harnessed the energy of the masses in his “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” the GPCR which destroyed countless numbers of invaluable Chinese artifacts and monuments, and led to an orgy of destruction whose effects are still felt in China to this day.
Mao was an absolute incompetent as a statesman. His various campaigns, like “The Great Leap Forward,” when Chinese were forced to “make steel” by stripping the landscape for fuel and melting their woks and household implements, caused starvation on a scale that is difficult to imagine. But while http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2985 was not a manager, he was a seasoned faction fighter, and by the middle of the 1960s faced growing opposition within the upper caste of the Communist leadership. Much of the opposition came from venerable veterans like Deng Xiaoping, whose programs actually worked (at least by Communist standards), as well as from younger cadres. As a result, Mao engineered the Cultural Revolution to “overthrow” the allegedly decrepit elites inside the Party, who supposedly wanted to “restore capitalism” and were really the ones responsible for the continuing economic hardships of the Chinese people. What this meant in practice was that all of Mao’s rivals were taken out in an orgy of carefully constructed national hysteria meant to break the Chinese from millenia of tradition. The ancient Chinese respect for age was thrown aside as elderly teachers, authors, artists and political activists were paraded and humiliated in public. Ancient monuments and relics were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people herded into labor camps.
Eventually, Mao’s death allowed his rivals to liquidate the GPCR hardliners around the Gang of Four, who were led by Mao’s wife. Deng was restored to power and today the GPCR is officially denounced by the Chinese heirs of Deng and Co. as a national catastrophe. But the lesson has not been forgotten: as Cixi and Mao had both taught, in China popular unrest is easily re-routed into a tool if handled properly.
Worldwide protests against the Olympic Torch Relay and China’s repression of the Tibetans have ignited a huge campaign against the West inside China, where “saving face” is paramount. Foreigners have been threatened, and the French chain Carrefour has seen militant protests and a boycott. The Carrefour actions stemmed from rumors, largely driven by the internet, that Carrefour supports Tibetan independence, a stance Carrefour was forced to deny holding.
Outside China, sizeable overseas Chinese communities, some http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4282 by the Chinese government, have mounted staged protests against the Dalai Lama and in favor of the Olympics. “Love China” tags have been added to emails and websites, and YouTube even hosts pro-China rap songs. The Beijing Olympic slogan, “One World One Dream” was amended on signs carried by pro-China groups on the relay route to read “One World One Dream One China,” a reference to the Communist Party’s claim that Tibet is an integral part of a united China which the West seeks to disintegrate. The idea of Western interference in Chinese affairs goes back to long before the Boxer Rebellion.
An exiled Tibetan living in Utah was subjected to an orchestrated campaign of phone harrassment after being falsely identified online as one of the people who attempted to wrest the torch from Jin Jing, an amputee who was part of the relay in Paris. (Jin is also the subject of a syrupy YouTube video and has become the best known new face in China, where state run media hails her as a heroine.) Irrelevant as usual, a leftist http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4172, where the relay had to be hidden from view and the farewell ceremony witched to a secret location at the airport in the face of huge protests.
It goes without saying that none of the protests inside China could have happened without some level of government approval. A source even reported that one Carrefour protest miraculously ended within minutes after the cops had a word with the organizers. Certainly, outside China the torch relay has had official support, not only from the allegedly paid counter-protesters but from an army of paramilitary goons kung fu chopping demonstrators. Inside China, the media reports glowingly about the great love for China expressed by the teeming crowds who come out to greet the relay.
What we are seeing in the Chinese Olympics campaign is part of the same tradition that forged the Boxer Rebellion. China faces serious problems that are bound to only get worse. Deng Xiaping’s market reforms forged a new economic structure that mixes state intervention with private enterprise and partnerships with transnational corporations, taking advantage of globalization, with the lid kept on by a ruthless police state. As a result, the basic (notional) “gains” of the Communist Revolution have been abrogated: guaranteed work and wages, schooling, healthcare and housing.
With the cracking of this “iron rice bowl” has come serious social dislocation. Annually, millions of peasants flee the countryside for life in shantytowns in the urban east, where they are confronted with the sight of serious economic inequality. China’s “one child” policy has given China a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2111, who are now reaching marriageable age. Russia fears that China may look for mates to its west, colonizing Siberia and its women. And the vagaries of the free market have much greater impact when one considers the sheer size of China’s population, and the problems associated with feeding, clothing and housing it.
While China’s rulers keep a mailed fist on the population, the free market has also led to freer minds. One such consequence was the Falun Gong (Falun Dafa), a New Age tai chi cult that, free of government control, has led to a state backlash that pales in comparison even to the West’s treatment of Branch Davidians, polygamists and others. Falun Gong “practitioners” are regularly arrested and subjected to organ harvesting, but despite this, both it and other religious groups are thrving, underlining the loss of control the Communists have in China.
One effect has been a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1238 from Party loyalists sick of all this liberalism and the globalization they say is behind it and anxious to bring China back to the Marxist straight and narrow. Apart from demands for internal change, the hardliners call for a return to the “Theory of Three Worlds” of Mao, which holds that the Third World, led by China, must be revolutionized and eventually wage war on the First World — the West. To this end it has openly supported Maoist insurgencies in India — long a rival of China — as well as the very serious uprising in Nepal. There the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has waged a “people’s war” against the monarchy in the Himalayan kingdom that is close to winning. The Chinese hardliners are in direct opposition to the official Beijing stance, which has said that the Nepalese CPN(M) insurgents “misuse the name of Chairman Mao, which impairs the image of the great leader of China and could serve as an excuse for the international anti-China forces to create troubles.” Beijing is especially paranoid about “anti-China forces” attacking its human rights record, ongoing occupation of Tibet, threats to Taiwan, organ harvesting, widespread abuse of animals and various economic problems, such as the recent food scares and use of slaves.
All of this comes against a backdrop of Chinese aggression overseas. Apart from the allegedly paid “ringers,” China increasingly tightens its interests in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2465 component.
In short, the upheaval we see in China now, while it has a “patriotic” face, may be a consequence of the larger social changes gripping China. Napoleon once warned about China as a “sleeping giant,” which as the result of the treasonous globalization of Western governmeents on behalf of corporations, now has access to the wealth that may someday soon threaten us all.