Tsinghua University has released its 2020 library lending list, with “Selected Works of Mao Zedong” at the top, followed by “The Complete Works of Marx and Engels”, and the third place goes to Liu Cixin’s novel “Three Bodies”. Foreign books such as 1Q84, China in the Countryside and One Hundred Years of Solitude are also on the list. Is it true that young people in China have started to turn left across the board and turn into red tinkers?
Last year, the most popular book, Selected Mao, was only borrowed 179 times by students at Tsinghua University. Since 2017, however, the book has been at the top of the list, and in 2019 it also ranked first.
Liu, who attends Chongqing Normal University and does not want to reveal his real name, told the station that this may be due to the need to prepare for exams, and although multiple videos of the Zhongzhi dance and pictures of people reading Mao’s Selected Works in the subway circulate on Twitter, he rarely sees people who genuinely revere Mao in his life.
“There are very few people who are really interested in Mao Zedong’s thought, I think. More than 90 percent are there for credits.” Liu said.
Zhang Ming, a retired professor from the Department of Political Science at Renmin University of China, also questioned the authenticity of Tsinghua’s official data and the intention behind it, “Within my field of vision, there doesn’t seem to be such a (Maoist) fever. I have been teaching for so many years, is a reference book list, forced to read he did not read. To take a step back, if it is true, it may not necessarily be good for the authorities. The Marxist-Leninist group at Peking University incited workers to strike at the time, making the authorities cry and laugh.”
Former member of the Democracy Wall: Be wary of the little Mao Zedong in every Chinese heart
Pei Yiran, an associate researcher at Columbia University’s East Asia Institute and author of “Historical Evidence of the Red Death – Causes of the Great Famine,” told this station that Germany would not have collectively remembered Hitler, so why is China’s post-1990s still paying for Mao’s red mistakes? It has to do with the information blockade and the fact that Xi Jinping is currently eager to find the legitimacy of the Communist regime from Mao’s first three decades.
“Public its right and wrong in schools, this is a famous saying of Huang Zongxi. Marxism and communism, after 100 years of practice, have caused the unnatural death of at least 100 million people and the unnatural survival of 2 billion people, and have been abandoned by all countries, contrary to human nature and the law of productivity. The disease is in the children, the root in the parents! Or because of the closed information, the post-80s do not even know who Lin Biao is. The post-90s as individuals have the right to look at history freely, but as a value orientation, this is completely wrong.”
Yang Jing, a pro-democracy activist during the 1979 Democracy Wall and one of the “troika” of the April Fifth Forum, still lives in Beijing and is wary of the left-leaning trend represented by Wu You Xiang in recent years.
“Mao’s ideology is based on class struggle, and the spirit of action, heroism, still has influence on young people, but it goes against universal values, globalization and pluralism.” Yang Jing warned.
“We are positioned as the children of Mao Zedong, the successors of the communist cause. Every Chinese has a little Mao in him and Mao in his heart – fighting the landlords, dividing the land and depriving the ‘dispossessed’. He started out as a gangster movement. The Soviet Union evaluated him as a Trotskyist (Trotskyist).”
Yang Jing, born in 1946, was also a fervent pro-Maoist youth at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but this fervor was completely disillusioned after witnessing the brutal struggles between people. In the late seventies, Milovan Đilas’s “The New Class” and other Western books helped him to complete his ideological transformation, and he was later imprisoned for eight years for his participation in the Xidan Democracy Wall.
Under the increasingly rigid centralization and ideology, Yang Jing watched the next generation of Chinese college students evolve into refined egoists, their generation of rebels struggling in what Lu Xun called the iron room, suffering from loneliness and desolation. He refused to go abroad and was baptized a Christian in 2001, determined to be with those in bondage and persecution, “fueled by positivist bureaucrats, beginning with Deng Xiaoping. Political slogans are now everywhere in the streets, creating at least a kind of environmental pollution. I am also inevitably oppressed by the state of existence, very depressed and desperate, but the ideas I formed when I was young, will not change.”
Yang Jing can understand young people being hurt by capital and falling headlong into the arms of Mao, “but this is not the way to progress in the world, it is still necessary to be democratic and rational, and human development should have a new wisdom by now. I want to say to them to have a free spirit, to have independent thinking. To study real problems and to maintain world peace and justice in the international community.”
Red education is coming on strong How to get into the brain and heart?
This year, Moody Kim’s Guangdong Province, which has always been open-minded, is under tighter control, with poetry recitations, study of ideas and competitions on Party history, all in an increasingly atomized and utilitarian society. In an increasingly atomized and utilitarian society, this is like a large absurd performance art.
In Hunan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, the contest has brought together teams from more than 100 colleges and universities, with more than 300,000 participants since late March.
Moody Kim: “I’ve learned that their feeling is to just deal with it. They don’t believe in this stuff, but they have to play along. It’s like graffiti on the wall, if it has artistic value, it gets into people’s hearts, but it’s like street advertising, it doesn’t get into my heart at all, and it’s the same with a lot of Chinese students. People are becoming less and less concerned about other people’s, society’s and country’s affairs. The Chinese Communist Party is in charge and has the say, what else do people want to be involved in? What the CCP wants to achieve now is: not only do I have the say, but you have to embrace me. This demand goes too far.”
On May 16, Xi Jinping published an article in the party magazine “Seeking Truth”, re-emphasizing that “an inch of mountain and river is an inch of blood, a shovelful of hot soil is a shovelful of soul”, promoting revolutionary tradition, patriotism and moral education for youth, passing on the red gene to ensure that the red mountains will never change color.
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