From the Granite Studio Archives: Mao and the Marriage Counselor, The Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957

I’m still in Pingyao so here’s one more from the archives.  It’s one of my favorites.

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“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

April 5th, 2009

From the Granite Studio Archives: Zhou Enlai, the Qingming Festival, and the spring demonstrations of 1976

Today is the Qingming “Tomb Sweeping” Festival, which is a day to honor the dearly departed.  It’s also a day with political significance, particularly after the death of a popular leader.  This post, originally published on the anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death (January 8, 2007) looks at the legacy of Zhou Enlai and how the celebration of Qingming led to a major demonstration and crackdown in the spring of 1976.

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Perhaps no 20th century Chinese leader is as beloved inside China nor respected abroad as much as Zhou Enlai (1898-1976). Even so, Zhou remains something of an enigma. He is revered for being a rock in the storm of mid-century Chinese politics, holding fast to his integrity and working to moderate the excesses of the Mao regime as best he could. (It was Zhou who told the rampaging members of Mao’s Red Guards that the Forbidden City was off-limits in their destruction of all things “Old.”) And yet one wonders how Zhou could have watched as his closest friends and oldest allies, men such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi along with their wives and families, were cast aside and made to suffer–quite cruelly in the case of

April 4th, 2009

Off to Pingyao…

I’m off on another student trip, this time a weekend visit to the historic city of Pingyao in Shanxi province.  I’ve always wanted to go and with spring finally hitting the North China Plain, it looks to be a lovely weekend.

Apart from the lovely architecture and a well-preserved set of city walls (Pingyao is one of the few cities in North China to have survived successive rounds of KMT, Japanese, and CCP attempts to remove walls and defensive structures), Pingyao also has many sites and artifacts left over from its days as a financial center in the Qing Dynasty.  Last month I posted about an IHT story on “Pingyao as case study in financial crises,” the story itself was not great, but be sure to check out this insightful comment left by a fellow history buff who completed a school thesis on the Qing banking system.

April 3rd, 2009

Bad History: Qianlong, Xinjiang, and Western Aesthetics

I’m used to having history get mangled in the newspapers, goodness knows the People’s Daily does it all the time, but this piece in the New York Times by IHT art editor Souren Melikian probably deserves a special award of some kind.

For example:

At the height of its maximum extension around the first or second century A.D., the Chinese empire ruled by the Han dynasty nominally controlled the area. Many centuries later, the Mongols overran Uighur lands in the course of their conquests, which embraced territories stretching from the borders of present-day Poland in the west to the Pacific shores of China and included the Middle East. But the great Song dynasty, under which Chinese culture rose to an apex around the 11th or 12th century, showed no interest in such undertakings. Neither did the Ming, who re-established Chinese unity after defeating the Mongol dynasty, who ruled China from 1279 to 1368.

Calling the Song the “apex of Chinese history,” especially from the perspective of an art historian, is a judgment call, but the Song were certainly not much of a military power.  Hemmed in by a bevy of hostile groups and eventually overrun, the Song hardly had an opportunity

April 1st, 2009
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