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Does singing “Red Songs” really mean a new revival of the old Party spirit? Or is it something that has been happening all along but makes for easy headlines with Bo Xilai’s recent Chongqing campaign and the CPC anniversary just around the corner? A Guest Post by Zhang Yajun. 
When lunatic Mao worshipers collide with history, wacky hilarity ensues. Another classic attempt to “explain and understand” China from the CIA/NSC archives, this one is like some sort of unholy mash-up of John King Fairbank, Max Weber, Henry Luce, Edward Said, and the KMT propaganda department…but there is some useful archival footage as well as interviews with seminal American “China watchers” such as Theodore White and Pearl Buck. Huge h/t to my fellow historian G.T. I want to come clean: I am a Red Sox fenqing. Mao may have had his Red Guards but I’m a card-carrying armband-wearing brainless slogan-chanting member of the 红袜兵.* Hey, we’ve got our catchy songs and marching anthem too. You have a problem with that? Didn’t think so, because there’s a bleacher full of guys behind me who will find your ass, pull you out of your seat and get all Dropkick Murphys on you… You can hold me down, prop open my eyelids with rusty nails and make me watch video of David Ortiz plunging needles into his body like he’s filming the last 15 seconds of Kurt Cobain: The Movie and I still won’t believe that Papi was juiced on steroids even though he went from hitting 20 home runs a year with Twins to bashing 50 home runs only after joining the Red Sox and making the acquaintance of one Manuel Ramirez. The cover of Sports Illustrated with Nomar Garciaparra that caused every red blooded New England male to question their sexuality for .000001 seconds? Yeah, nothing going on there. Oh sure…right AFTER steroids became a big deal Nomar started breaking down like a decade-old Xiali, but In class two weeks ago we were watching the documentary series China From the Inside when one of my students asked, with some reason, that if there was so much hardship and discontent why does the CCP enjoy such broad support? It was a good question, and like all good questions it depends on whom you ask and how you phrase the question. A middle-class manager in a multi-national company in Beijing is likely to have a more favorable view of current policies than, say, a farmer living next door to a factory that blatantly ignores environmental regulations while making the products sold by the middle-class manager in Beijing. This stands to reason. But I think on a more fundamental level there is something which brings the farmer and the yuppie together: the question of what do you fear the most? In Western Europe and North American our dystopian nightmares, those of science fiction and political thrillers, as well as in our history books, involve tyrants who acquired too much power and used that power to brutalize people. Hitler. Stalin. Darth Vader. (Even) Mao. The United States was founded on a profound paranoia over anything that has a whiff of “tyranny” about it. And in the past few |
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Copyright © 2012 Jottings from the Granite Studio - All Rights Reserved
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