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 list, forced to read he did not even 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.”
B station young people: the Mao instructor’s gun should be well maintained the future of the global red
However, in recent years, the voice of Mao Zedong has been increasingly pushed on the wall network. Zhihu on “in terms of China, who is the greatest person in recent times to the present?” This question received more than 16,000 answers, most of them pointing to Mao Zedong, citing his own poem “Recently, I hailed Sun Da Sheng, only because the demonic fog has come back again”.
The microblogging platform “Mao’s Selected Works” and “Rereading Mao’s Selected Works” have already received more than two million views, and many people have posted articles such as “Why China’s Red Regime Exists”, “Farewell, Stanton”, “Throw Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle”, “Review of Many people have posted their reading experience of articles such as “Why China’s Red Regime Can Exist”, “Farewell, Stanton”, “Throw Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle” and “Review of War Criminals’ Quest for Peace.
Why are young people starting to reread Mao’s Selected Works? On the bilibili video site, where Chinese secondary users gather, the video of the reading of Mao’s Selected Works has received more than 700,000 views, and the comments are unanimously invoking the soul of Mao Zedong, affectionately calling him a “teacher”: entrepreneurs and American imperialism are the objects of struggle, and Mao Zedong’s thought is the dusty art of dragon slaying. We contacted the people concerned for comment but no reply.
Netizen Mingming’s Mingming name: “The post-90s generation is really miserable, the spiritual world has no guiding direction, coupled with globalization, the impact of the Internet, lost. The oppression of capital, the escalation of national conflicts, alas. The instructor’s gun should be taken out properly to maintain maintenance ah.”
Jiangnan Aker: “Communists have never bothered to hide their views on the elimination of exploitation, the elimination of capital that enslaves people, common prosperity, spiritual exaltation and incomparable freedom for all, on the road to communism, the color of the red flag will not change, and if it does, it will be dyed red with blood again. Look at the world of the future, it will be a world of red!”
Director of the Museum of the Future: “If every worker and peasant in the world, is completely armed with Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, the end of those 996 capitalists will come soon.”
Yidanovsky: “No need to miss him, we can all be him.”
Rusty on the Clothes of Little Marble: “He made a country more than double its population in less than 30 years, while raising the life expectancy of that country from 35 to 65 years. He made the illiteracy rate in the world’s most populous country shrink from over 80 percent to less than 20 percent in more than 20 years. He wiped out pornography, gambling and drugs overnight, and made a country where people are diligent and thrifty, scavenging for money, staying up at night and striving to be unsung heroes. He basically solved the problem of feeding nearly 700 million people, with neither domestic nor foreign debts. He made a country step into industrialization in only 20 years or so, and by the end of the 1970s, China was the sixth industrial power in the world …… Chairman Mao’s banner is the sword hanging over the heads of capitalists, bureaucratic groups, and bought-and-paid-for elements.”
Shengshi Gryphon Learns Success from Mao’s Selected Works
Moody Kim, who has studied in China for four years as an undergraduate and is currently studying at Purdue University, told the station that about 30% of his classmates are reading Mao’s Selected Works, mainly because they are tempted by Mao’s success theory of being poor but good at power struggle and playing everyone in the palm of his hand, rather than having a grand mission of changing the world and revolutionary rebellion, just as they are equally enthusiastic about Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Kampf” and “The Thick of It”.
“China lacks a Christian civilization of fraternity, a civilization without God. (Mao Xuan) This book can teach them to model human relationships: how to get people to support you and embrace you; how to get up after losing power. The power of this country has nothing to do with me, I will live well like a mole and not die. If you want me, a mole, to take the responsibility of reforming the status quo, I am not willing to do so. As a mole, if I can run away to America, I am happy to do so; if I cannot run away, then I will be a diligent ant.”
He sees the contemporary young people as a group of “mole crickets in the heyday of the former wolf and the latter tiger,” struggling in the cracks of the U.S.-China confrontation, wielding Chairman Mao’s gun from time to time to pierce Ma’s myth, but never daring to confront the ultimate evil behind Ma, or pretending not to understand it. To some extent, the Mao fever also reveals the repressed political passion of young Chinese people, but they are strictly forbidden to talk about politics in the Western context of democracy and constitutionalism, and can only find a gap in the history of Mao’s rebellion and in the context set by the CCP.
Moody Kim: “Mao was more correct and less dangerous in the Chinese political context. They demonized capital exploitation and glorified communism as heaven on earth. Why bring out fundamentalist communism again? China is now moving towards internal volume, foreigners can not earn money, internal distribution in the ability of less people will get less, so 996 young people and take out the barrel of the gun to comfort the inner …… They are not stupid, just do not dare to say, capitalists are not also the white gloves of the Chinese Communist Party?”
Liu, a journalism student born after the 1990s, chose to be an indifferent ant, never reading “Mao’s Selected Works” and powerless to spit on Mao’s fans. He says he maintains a political apathy, watching public power turn into water mist and air, stuffing every crevice of daily life.
Tang Yun, a teacher at Chongqing Normal University, was dismissed after a student reported him for saying that the President’s words “insulted the beauty of Chinese characters”.
Liu, who had been inspired by the afterglow of Southern Weekend, was full of impulse, but was prevented by bureaucratic walls from getting close enough to interview the whistle-blowing student, who was close at hand.
“These four or five years, every once in a while, you see something like this. That’s probably what it’s like to have expanded Party history education, Red education.” He lamented.
For four years, everyone taught him to be a good mouthpiece of the Party, and after experiencing many social investigations that hit a wall, Liu now plans to become a financial journalist or switch to an Internet technology company like most of his classmates and stop running social news.
“Mao was a founding father, but at certain moments he also suffered from the backlash of power and made some bad decisions. I didn’t know him very well.” He also approached his history teacher after class to inquire about the details of the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, and couldn’t be bothered to pursue them after receiving a perfunctory stream of official language, just a glimpse of Mao from public sources.
He is not worried about the resurgence of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution, “The core of my world is: I can freely eat, watch movies, have fun, live with the girls I like, and talk about some art and literature that interests me. As for the political, economic and social events of a country, I don’t pay any attention to them. The New York Times’ judgment on the country a few years ago still applies: pan-entertainment and officially sanctioned political content are the daily routine of our public life, and anything else is not allowed and selectively eliminated. What kind of social activity and what kind of thinking people can we give birth to? Even if there were, it would not have a group basis.”
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 1970s, Milovan Đilas’s “The New Class” and other Western books helped him to complete his ideological transformation. Later, he was imprisoned for eight years for his participation in the Xidan Democracy Wall, and was unable to work for the rest of his life, repeatedly put under house arrest and reformed through labor, forced to move six times a month, and “physically annihilated in disguise, worse than death.
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 Mao’s arms, “but this is not the way to progress in the world, it’s still about democracy and rationality, 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 coming on strong How to get into the brain and heart?
This year, Moody Kim’s Guangdong Province, which has always been open-minded, has been 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 never change color.
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