I’m still in Pingyao so here’s one more from the archives. It’s one of my favorites.
————————–
“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.” – Somerset Maugham
“As a scientific truth, Marxism fears no criticism.” – Mao Zedong
As sometimes happens with couples, by 1956 the relationship between Mao and the Party had begun to suffer from a seven-year itch. Still only in their first decade of rule, the CCP were shocked by events in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s legacy vexed the aging Mao, while the Party leadership (more concerned with maintaining order and control in the “here-and-now” than protecting their legacies in the forever after) listened warily to the news out of Hungary and Poland.
At the same time a lot was actually going right in the PRC. It’s easy to forget this now: but between the end of the Korean War and the start of the Great Leap Forward, there was a period of increasing prosperity, economic recovery, and a certain relaxation of ideological and social controls. It was all relative of course–this was still Mao’s China–but compared to later periods of PRC history, the mid-1950s had much more in common with the early