During this year’s Qingming Festival, Cai Xia, a former professor at the CPC Central Party School who now lives in the United States, tweeted that the authorities had banned private citizens from paying tribute to Zhao Ziyang, but opened Jiang Qing’s tomb to the public, “It is clear who the CCP authorities fear and promote. Cai Xia retweeted a video of a friend from China visiting the tomb of former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang on Qingming Day, only to be intercepted by plainclothes police.
Writer Gao Valin also revealed in a tweet on Qingming Day that he “received a post – Qingming today. Strange thing in the capital: lots of people paying respects to Jiang Qing, and the officials let it go; going to Zhao Ziyang’s tomb, but heavily barricaded, strictly forbidding anyone to approach.”
In an interview with Radio Free Asia this Wednesday, Zhang Jianping, a rights activist from Yixing, Jiangsu province, who lived through the Mao era of the Communist Party, said, “This Qingming Festival, at the Futian Cemetery in Beijing, there are still many leftists going to pay their respects at Li Yunhe’s (Jiang Qing’s) tomb. This is the stereotype of thinking created by the divided environment, which is not a truly open and pluralistic society. Fountain Cemetery now has two well-known figures, one is Yang Jia and the other is Li Yunhe (Jiang Qing)”
Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing, formerly known as Li Yunhe, was sentenced by the Supreme Court to a suspended death sentence in 1983 and died in Qincheng Prison in 1991. But Zhao Ziyang was always referred to as a “comrade” within the Communist Party. According to public opinion, the above two incidents reflect the political attitude of the top echelon of the CCP. In response, some netizens have posted images online of a boycott of the Cultural Revolution, reminding people to be wary of its return. In the image, six young people dressed as students stand in the street holding a copy of Chairman Mao’s Quotations, with a lamp post beside them reading “Long live the great leader Chairman Mao.
Most people in China would not want to go back to the Mao era
In an interview with Radio Free Asia, Beijing-based dissident Cha Jianguo said that the Chinese mainland population would not accept the Mao years: “Most people in the civil society resist going back to the Mao era. Private capitalists, individual households, peasants who contracted to households, most intellectuals, including cadres, cadres back to the Mao era to defeat the capitalist faction in the party, but also to liquidate the Deng faction to engage in capitalist issues. So the majority of people in mainland China will not want to return to the Mao era.”
Cha analyzed the political forces in mainland China over the past forty years of “reform and opening up”. He said, “The Chinese Communist Party is now mainly composed of three factions, the Maoists, the Dengists and the liberals, all of which oppose each other. The Deng faction opposes both the Maoists and the liberals, but the Deng faction is more tolerant of the Maoists because they share the same basic point of party leadership. And Zhao Ziyang’s late performance classified him in the liberal faction. The upper echelons are now slightly more tolerant of the Maoists, and there is no room for tolerance of the liberals.”
The Communist Party’s National Film Bureau recently issued a Notice ordering cinemas to show at least two officially designated films per week, such as The Red Army of the Maiden, Little Soldier Zhang Ga, and Children of Heroes, red films reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution years.
Zhang Jianping, the first generation of Chinese migrant workers, told reporters, “You can’t mobilize a country to use administrative resources to propagate, which will easily cause people to lose their minds and some extreme ideas will come out of the cage. China has come to today, the economic development has been good, at this time should increase the efforts of reform and opening up, so that the people are exposed to a pluralistic society. Then there will be less social conflicts and less hate education.”
Zhang calls on the government to reform the political system and keep opening up, rather than imprisoning people’s minds.
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