Am I a Co-conspirator in the Anti-Mao Movement?

I had a rather disquieting, though brief, conversation last evening about Mao Zedong, Though presenting no concrete evidence to justify the claim, one of my students from China made the argument that Mao was personally responsible for all the deaths that occurred during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, including the deaths of four generals in the People's Liberation Army. Now I don't pretend to know what Mao did or did not do, but I have for some time suspected, based on actual evidence, that Mao was responsible for far less of what happened in the 1949-1976 China than he is given credit for, although I would be more willing accept that he had indirect responsibility for the deaths of the GPCR. It seems quite clear that he started it and, to a significant extent, directed it. It's just that I've noticed the anti-Mao drive has taken on a certain fervor, both in the West and in China. I understand that tainting the image of Mao is an important element in the battle between the pro-capitalist leadership and those who benefit from their policies and the remaining Maoists and other radicals within and without the Communist Party of China (CPC). Mao serves as a symbol for both sides in that struggle. However, it's a bit of a red herring, if you'll pardon the obvious pun. For most of the history of the People's Republic, Mao was little more than a proxy emperor, with mostly ceremonial duties, and the ability to give overall direction to policy, sometimes that meant just naming things -- like using the name "communes" for the feudal domains in the countryside after 1958. The actual executive power in government mostly rested with the prime minister, the state council, and the bureaucracy, not with Mao. Mao didn't know what was going on most of the time. In fact, the effort to create the proper image for Mao to see was so intense (such as prettying up the villages and towns before Mao visited, fudging the statistics Mao was presented with, etc.) that it is dubious that Mao ever really understood the China he "governed." In that context, it would make no more sense to blame Mao directly for deaths that occurred in the GPCR (or the Great Leap Forward, where famine took a large number of lives) than to blame G. W. Bush for the killings of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan or those who died in New Orleans after Katrina. On the other hand, it's probably better to blame the emperor (or the imperial president) than to just let the atrocities slide, as if no one was to blame.

Ironically, I've been attacked by a number of people on the Left for the argument I make in Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision that the CPC implemented feudal social relations during the period from 1958 until the reform process began the transition to capitalism in the 1980s. A lot of these people, like Bob Pollen at UMass, seem to view me as a co-conspirator in the anti-Mao movement and don't even listen to my argument. Such is life, I guess.

Bush Admin Playing Chicken with China's Leadership

For most of the past six years that the Bush administration has had an iron grip on executive (and to some extent legislative and judicial) authority in the U.S., they have acted clearly in the interest of the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). In fact, at times it has appeared that the Bush administration couldn't have been more pro-China in its actions if Beijing had personally selected the U.S. president. This has been good for Chinese economic growth, and related strengthening of the Chinese military and geopolitical influence. Bush policies have also been central in the extraordinary build-up of China's foreign exchange reserves and holdings of U.S. treasury securities. China now has over a trillion dollars (U.S.) in foreign exchange reserves. This gives China a great deal of clout in the global political-economy. (This clout is reinforced by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which has damaged the global reputation of the United States and which China is indirectly funding, without taking any of the blame, through its heavy role in the U.S. debt market.)

But now that the Democrats have taken control (I use this word gingerly) of Congress, the chorus of complaints about the U.S. trade deficit with China and of Chinese policies viewed as contributing to this deficit has grown stronger and noisier by the day. The Bush administration has decided to call Congress' bluff (so maybe they're really playing chicken with Congress, rather than with the Chinese leadership). The Bush administration has now filed a formal complaint with the WTO against China, claiming that the Chinese leadership has failed to protect U.S. intellectual property rights. If these complaints are found to be valid, it gives the administration the power to slap tariffs on imports from China, driving up the cost of these goods and potentially doing some (likely limited) degree of harm to China's steady stream of U.S. dollars. Of course, China could retaliate by reducing its holdings of U.S. treasuries, putting downward pressure on U.S. bond prices and upward pressure on U.S. interest rates. A lot of people find this unlikely because they point out that China needs the U.S. economy to be healthy so the Americans can keep buying all those "Made in China" goodies. After all, that's how China accumulates the dollars with which to buy the bonds. And maybe they're right. But it is a gamble.

What a lot of people fail to remember is that the Chinese leadership remains solidly within the CPC and their strategies, both economic and political, are shaped by Marxian theory (a particular version of Marxian theory, which I've labeled elsewhere -- see my text Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision -- modernist Marxism. This theoretical framework has as a central tenet the drive to acquire and innovate new technologies in every sphere of society and the U.S. is helping to pay for this transformation. On the other hand, the theoretical framework also recognizes that the Chinese social formation must remain solidly in the control of the CPC as "vanguard party." If WTO is ever viewed as genuinely threatening Chinese sovereignty (and WTO threatens every nation's sovereignty, in some form or fashion), then it would become necessary for the CPC leadership to reassert authority. This might mean accepting negative economic consequences in order to reinforce their control over future events. The CPC leadership could dump U.S. bonds, if it was seen as necessary to not only reassert domestic authority but to teach the American politicians (who are probably more vulnerable to economic downturns) a lesson. The Bush administration has little to lose at this point, or so they seem to think, since they're now in the last two lame-duck years of authority and increasingly irritable, as the Democrats start making their previously easy lives a bit more difficult.