The vice president of the old Xinhua News Agency (equivalent to the current deputy director of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government) told me two true stories.
During the Cultural Revolution, China Customs was seized by the Red Guards. According to the story, a carpenter in Hong Kong returned to his hometown and was asked by a Red Guard officer what he did in Hong Kong when he passed through Customs.
The Xinhua News Agency did a lot of united front work, and in 1970 mobilized the vice chairman of the New Territories Heung Yee Kuk, Zhang Renlong, to visit the mainland, and the Xinhua News Agency sent a united front commissioner to accompany him. When he went through customs, the customs officer asked him what he was doing in Hong Kong, and he said he was the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk. The customs officer immediately reprimanded loudly: How can you be the chairman? Our country has only one chairman, that is, Chairman Mao, to restore the state chairmanship is a conspiracy. Zhang did not know what to do, and the Xinhua attaché on the side was extremely embarrassed.
How can a person who is a secret agent directly tell the customs officer that he is a secret agent? How is it possible for a place outside of China to be like the mainland during the Cultural Revolution, where the title of President can only be held exclusively by Mao? These words and actions, which violated common sense, were commonplace during the Cultural Revolution, and under the dictatorship, no one dared to say a word of common sense.
During the Cultural Revolution, everyone knew the big truth, but common sense was lost. The big truth was that China would lead the world to realize the ideal of communism, and the common sense was that people had the basic needs of Food and sleep. At that Time, literature and art works could not talk about love between men and women, saying that it was “bourgeois thinking” (now it is said that there are also restrictions on the expression of love in Film and Television in the Mao era). At that time, my wife was teaching in Shenzhen, and because of her love for students, she was criticized by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for “educating students about bourgeois motherhood”, and even “motherhood”, which is found in the animal world, became a criticized “bourgeois ideology”. The “mother’s love”, which is found in the animal world, was also criticized as a “bourgeois idea”.
During the Cultural Revolution, everyone had a big morality, but they lost their ordinary morality. Great morality was to sacrifice one’s Life to protect a small public object, and ordinary morality was not to spit, to observe public hygiene, to stand in line on the bus, etc. After the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, most of the Western countries had lost their morality.
After the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, most Western intellectuals praised the Soviet Union for realizing the ideal of equality. Chinese scholars, writers, and cultural figures were no exception. Socialism could be said to be the craze of the times. The Kuomintang, led by Sun Yat-sen, also adopted the “United Russia and Communist Party” policy, inviting Soviet experts to China to reform the Kuomintang. In the midst of this socialist fervor, in 1924, the master of Chinese studies, Wang Guowei, wrote in an article entitled “On Political Science”: “So there is socialism and communism. However, will this equalization of production be shared by all the people of the country? After the equalization, will it be managed by the people of the whole country together, or will it be delegated to a few people as agents? From the former saying, there is no such reason, but from the latter saying, the unevenness will be seen in a short time.”
The equalization of production and management can only be managed by a few people, so that the uneven things, will not immediately appear? This passage is simply common sense. But at that time, no one paid much attention to and discussed these words. Both Chinese and foreign intellectuals were blinded and clogged by the utopian ideal of “achieving equality” and no longer considered the horror of unchecked power, but blindly believed in the revolutionary zeal and good intentions of the Soviet leaders. It was not until 1945 that the observation of the British Writer Orwell that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” appeared in the West.
Those whose minds were clogged with utopian ideals were usually not common people, but mostly scholars, experts and intellectuals. For example, the myth of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, which yielded 10,000 jins per mu, was boasted in an article written by Qian Xuesen, the number one scientist in China at that time. The peasants knew from common sense that it was impossible to produce 10,000 jins per mu. But Qian Xuesen, in order to cater to Mao Zedong, said that it was possible to produce millions of jins per mu with unpracticed so-called scientific proof. And other intellectuals also follow the same. The result was a national catastrophe in which more than 40 million people died of starvation.
The leftist ideology of equality has been frustrated for a century, but the utopia in its different forms still affects the world. The Equality Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in February, further legislates the primacy of ideology over common sense.
Recent Comments