RedStarOverChina

I remember being horrified when I first read about what China was like before the 1949 revolution. One thing that really jumped out at me was that the American consul-general in Shanghai estimated that in the late 1940's-right before the Communists took power- the minicipal city sweepers cleared up 25,000 dead bodies from the streets every year, men, women, and children who had starved, died of diseases, or had been murdered during the night. Or that nearly one fifth of the China's entire population were opium addicts! Or the tens of millions who died in famines in the countryside in the 19th century while European capitalists looted China wholesale. And if there was any resistance, the British and French would bombard China's cities with their navies and kill literally thousands of people.
We so often are lectured about the human cost of revolution, but mainstream discourse never considers the human cost of not having one.

Yes, it is good that you point out the class backgrounds of those who were persecuted and singled out during the Cultural Revolution- nearly all of those memoirs that are widely promoted, such as 'Wild Swans' are of people of a bourgeois background, even if their families came to support the Communists later on. It's not that their accounts are not true, its just that it's from a very skewed perspective. It would be like reading an account of the French Revolution soley from the point of view of an aristocrat or the American Civil War from the point of view of a Southern slave-owner. If that's how we viewed such events without also hearing the point of view of the Parisian slum-dwellers and the freed black slaves, we would probably see those events too as unmitigated disasters and atrocities.

I recall reading somewhere that one of the women who contributed to 'Some of Us', the collected memoirs of Chinese women who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, was on a literary panel a few years ago in Berkley, California, where I believe she now teaches as a women's studies professor. She brought up that she didn't recall the horror stories that you always hear about the Cultural Revolution and that her experiences of that time were positive and uplifting, as both someone from a peasant background and as a woman. The response from someone else on the panel was that some Holocaust survivors were nostalgic about their time in the concentration camps(???). It's like Uppercut said, an astonishing number of people, even on the so-called 'left' are so hooked on anti-communism that they can't bring themselves to say a single positive thing about the revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, or Cuba.

Excellent post on Mao, comrade. It's good to hear from people whose relatives actually lived during Mao's time. Unfortunately, it's difficult to convince others of the good deeds he performed for the party and the workers/peasants. It seems no matter how many facts I provide, they simply get ignored when debating in real life.