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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (26381)	11/29/1998 7:39:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

X, Based on my reading of those books I have formed the conclusion that while life was uncertain for the Chinese in the anarchy before Mao A wee bit worse than uncertain. 20 million dead of famine, China's worst in several centuries. Areas under Japanese occupation scorched to the bedrock, massacres, systematic looting and rape. Armies marching through villages press-ganging every male in the place into service to replace soldiers that dropped from famine, stealing every scrap of food. The horror of the years of occupation and invasion was very deeply ingrained on the Chinese psyche, and was later stretched to justify many unjustifiable actions. I've talked to Chinese who argue quite persuasively that assuring security and individual survival were more important at that time than freedom and prosperity, and that those goals could not have been achieved without enforced conformity. Many of those same individuals also believe that this is no longer necessary, that security and survival are now reasonably sure, and that the time for liberalization is very much at hand. This argument is viscerally very distasteful to me, as it would be to most westerners, but I have a hard time rejecting it altogether. What happened to China's educated class is in part due to their own detachment from public life. If educated Chinese had rallied together to present some viable alternative to stand between the swinish thuggery of Chiang Kai-shek and the swinish thuggery of Mao, things might have gone differently. Certainly the Chinese peasants were ignorant and boorish. Many still are - God knows there is no shortage of ignorance and boorishness in America, and politicians pander to it everywhere. But the wealth, education, and culture of the aristocracy were based on the labor of the peasants, and when the aristocrats ignored their obligation (very clearly stated in Confucian codes) to keep the conditions of the peasantry liveable, they sealed their own fates. Aristocrats often make this mistake, and not only in China. I have been to China, but not for nearly long enough to draw any conclusions based on observation. Opinions are based more on reading and conversation with people who know more than I do. Steve