ABOUT CONTEMPORARY CHINA

Mao, wake up!

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese people, is popular today - souvenirs with the Great Pilot are sold in different parts of the Middle Kingdom, his portrait hangs in the main square of Beijing - Tiananmen. Modern Chinese authorities do not particularly encourage discussion of Mao's activities, preferring to follow the traditional formula for assessing the results of his reign: 70 percent of merit, 30 percent of errors. Meanwhile, there are people in the country who enthusiastically recall Mao and his times- the times of the class struggle.

"The old son of a bitch Mao forced us to suffer," - pronouncing these words at a well-covered table, the popular TV presenter Bee Fujian did not suspect that Mao might cause him to suffer even after death. In social networks and the newspaper Global Times there was a noise, which led to the removal of this presenter from the air. A year and a half later, under the criticism of the Maoists, 62-year-old professor of Shandong University of Construction, Deng Xiangchao, was wounded. On January 4, 2017, more than a hundred people came out with a protest to the university building, demanding to punish Dan for insulting the great leader. Protesters loudly shouted "traitor", raised the posters "Who is against Mao – is an enemy of the people" and fought with the defenders of the professor. The matter ended with the fact that the next day the party committee demanded that Deng Xiangchao resign from the post of deputy head of the art school of the university.

In the twentieth century, in China and Russia, there have been major transformations associated with the revolutionary restructuring of society, transformations that are often very painful for those who are among the "enemies of the people." Every Revolution is a hard struggle of someone against someone and sacrifices are inevitable here. For example, the future leader Deng Xiaoping and his family, who were at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in disgrace, were the goal of the Red Guards, the revolutionary fighters. The most severely affected son was Dan Pufang, whom the "red guards" threw from the third floor, making him wheelchair bound.

Although there is no special romanticization of the era of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC, among economists and historians, a revision of that time has already occurred. They proved that from the beginning of the 1970s the Chinese economy grew at a high pace, at the same time the foundation for subsequent reforms was laid, many railways, highways and dams were built. According to reports of the beginning of 2010, in the village of Nanjie in the north of China, the past has been preserved. People literally stayed in Maoist China, despite the reforms of the 80s carried out in the country. The commune with the old economic order - an equal distribution of things and products, the absence of rich people, daily listening to revolutionary songs. True, the true purpose of preserving such a village may not be so beautiful – as there is tourist stream from all over the country has been drawn to it.

If you sit in a taxi in a Chinese city and do not know the language, you risk not only to go for a long ride coasting you a lot of money and not to where you expect, but also to be left without pleasure listening to the opinions of drivers about tough guy Putin and your salary. Less often, but still there is also a chance to hear exclamations about the current and not the most equitable structure of society and impersonal politicians of our time. In contrast to the social problems of today's day (including the catastrophic gap between rich and poor and the number of billionaires in a formally socialist state), the Mao era for many people is an era of social justice and order.

In modern China, Mao Zedong is seen as a great leader, whose unquestionable merit is the creation of the People's Republic of China. "Revolutionary leaders are not gods, they are people. And we can not worship them as gods, or deny people the right to point out mistakes and correct them only because they are big, just as we can not completely reject them and cross out their historical exploits just because they made mistakes. We can not judge our predecessors on the basis of current conditions of the level of development, "- perhaps, this is the most characteristic quote of the current chairman of 2013.

The father of the current head of China, Xi Jinping, Xi Zhongxun was a member of the first generation of leaders of the PRC, at one time he held the post of deputy chairman of the State Council. In his speeches, he stressed how much he is grateful to Mao, and that one can only win by following the path chosen in the revolution. However, in 1962, Si fell into disgrace, was imprisoned. This, in turn, was reflected in the fate of his son - the persecution and life in the village - through all this had to pass the current leader of China. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family was rehabilitated. Xi Jinping himself from the moment he became chairman, resorted to quoting Mao, visits the mausoleum and appeals to the party with the call "to raise the banners of the teachings of Mao Zedong."

However, he uses this rhetoric for a reason: he needs to discipline and deploy a large-scale anti-corruption campaign in the party ranks. If Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin did not overextend the population with the theme of building communism, then Si constantly reminds that one who does not believe in communism can not be a good member of the party. It will be built, albeit in the distant future.

However, Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong share not only slogans about building communism, but also efforts to combat corruption. Si intercepted the old slogans of the left - the struggle to exclude from the ranks of the party people who derive personal benefits. Si is like saying: the party is true to the spirit with which it was created in 1921. Since 2013, law enforcement agencies and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, according to official data, have punished more than 1.3 million officials. Interestingly, the first major target of this struggle was the head of the Chongqing regional committee and member of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee, Bo Xilai. In 2014, for the first time in 40 years, a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee, Bo Xilai Zhou Yongkang, an associate member, was also brought to trial. Recognizing the blame for bribery, he went to jail for the rest of his life. Xi Jinping states that it is impossible to erase the first 30 years from the history of the PRC, honoring only the second 30 years, exactly the same as vice versa.

If even over the past decade, Mao's supporters sought to create more traditional political groups (for example, the Maoist Communist Party), today the development of Maoism goes online. To estimate the exact number of Mao adherents in modern China is not possible, but the indirect facts speak for themselves.

The same opinion is held, for example, by one of the leaders of the moderately left Zhang Hongliang: "The authorities really stopped pressuring the left. But this does not mean supporting their ideas in everything. " Such a maneuver is not new, but it is necessary today for Xi Jinping for successful long-term rule, consolidation of society, while maintaining positions in the economy. The National People's Congress (NPC) approved the most important amendments to the country's constitution: now the PRC president is not obliged to limit himself to two terms of succession. Everything goes to the fact that Xi Jinping will stay in high places for at least a third term - which means that new rules of the game are expected for social groups, political informals and intellectuals of different ideological trends. The future of the PRC in many ways is not clear.
Revolutionary history of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic. How much in them and similar and fundamentally different features! In China, "took place" and his "collective" Beria - the "gang of four" and his analogue of 1937 - 1937 - the Great Cultural Revolution, with the deaths of the first great leaders - Stalin (1956) and Mao Zedong (1976) began a gradual ( in the USSR) and a sharp (in the PRC) departure from the construction of communism. But, economic results are fundamentally different. Here is the transformation of the USSR into an economically "bored" secondary power and a powerful economic growth of the PRC. Perhaps the fact is that the new economic elites in these two countries had fundamentally different development goals? We, the modern Bolsheviks, should carefully and objectively study the history of our countries, compare, draw conclusions and, of course, fight pro-American (in fact) forces that are trying to drive a wedge between our two nuclear powers in their natural consolidation in confronting American imperialism.
The material was prepared by SV Khristenko using separate fragments published in https://lenta.ru/articles/2018/04/02/chinese_radicals/