Counter-revolution
Zona Libre/Bong Z. Lacson
Counter-revolution
TO GUANGZHOU I came, and wept for Mao Zedong.
The Great Leap Forward did indeed happen in the capital of Guangdong province. But in a fashion that is thoroughly inconceivable at the time of the Chairman: its realization, the very antithesis of Mao’s ideological dogma.
Okay, for those out of the Red axis of Marx-Lenin-Mao mindset, the Great Leap Forward was the People’s Republic of China’s Second Five-Year Plan covering the period 1958-1963. Its principal aim was to modernize the Chinese economy by 1988 to the level of good old US of A, with industry as priority target.
The Great Leap Forward is forever etched in memory by the 600,000 backyard furnaces in communes all around the country producing steel, from melted ore as well as just about any finished iron material the people could lay their hands on. Initially, the plan was successful, with the annual steel production reaching 11 million tons.
Low technology – the slow rise from the backyard stage, coupled with high ideology – the requisite of discerning the thoughts and precepts of Mao in communal teach-ins at certain periods of the day, spelled doom for the Great Leap Forward. At the same time, the over-emphasis on technology at the expense of agricultural production resulted to famine. Hence, the derisive Great Leap Backward.
Leaped forward, nay, soared skyward Guangzhou has, being the industrial capital of the PROC. (No thanks to Mao, all thanks to Deng Xiaoping who instituted a market economy in China, one Chinese storekeeper told me.)
At the 106th Session of the China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, the massive exhibition hall – think of two parallel SM City Pampanga doubled in width, a few hundred meters longer, and three storeys high here – was a maze of large and small machineries in all aspects of endeavor, from construction to production; lighting and electronics, transportation and communications. And that was only for the first phase of the three-phased fair held for three weekends.
A Maoist dream of China drawing in peoples from all the world to learn from its praxis of socialism found manifest in the Canton Fair drawing in all nationalities to its exhibition halls: Africans preferring the heavy equipment displays; Middle Easterners, the pumps and water processors; Italians, the lighting fixtures; Germans and Americans, the automobiles; Indians, the electronics.
All came though not in search of the socialist ideal but in response to the call of the produce of a liberal market economy, the socialist’s very nightmare. How Mao’s heart must have been broken by this blasphemy to his faith!
And how warped has been my socialist brain, thinking of Guangzhou – of the whole of China – in terms of the baggy drab grey or green uniform of the population, of bicycles clogging all the streets!
Yeah, another initiative of the Chairman – the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – finding realization today. Again, in the very contradiction of its Maoist thesis.
The proletariat as both subject and object of the Chinese cultural renaissance cleansed of all liberal bourgeois elements was the expressed aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966.
All art, all cultural expressions that did not serve the proletariat was deemed decadent and had to be destroyed. With Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, at the cultural revolution’s vanguard, the worst excesses were committed including the proclamation of The Red Detachment of Women as the very acme of Chinese theater, and the burning of Chinese classics, sparing not even Confucius in the process. It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution effectively ended.
A revolution of culture I saw in Guangzhou as well as in Shenzhen – of Western values and lifestyles liberating the people from their socialist past, with compulsive consumption fanning the revolutionary fervor.
The very symbols of liberal bourgeois ideals – Benzes of all classes, BMWs and Porsches, Audis and Volvos, Rovers and Alfa Romeos, yes, even the iconic American Cadillac make the most ubiquitous presence on Guangzhou and Shenzhen’s wide avenues, any time of the day and night.
Ah, how Jiang Qing would have shrieked to death – not hers but theirs – at the sight of ladies in micro-mini skirts and abbreviated cut-offs, as well as exposed navels and posterior dimples, ramping along the walking streets of Shang Xia Jiu and Beijing!
There now is the counter-revolution: decadence its natural outcome. Just as damnation is the wage of disbelief.
Ah, other than that one in Utrecht, I may just be the only remaining communist in the world.
Counter-revolution
TO GUANGZHOU I came, and wept for Mao Zedong.
The Great Leap Forward did indeed happen in the capital of Guangdong province. But in a fashion that is thoroughly inconceivable at the time of the Chairman: its realization, the very antithesis of Mao’s ideological dogma.
Okay, for those out of the Red axis of Marx-Lenin-Mao mindset, the Great Leap Forward was the People’s Republic of China’s Second Five-Year Plan covering the period 1958-1963. Its principal aim was to modernize the Chinese economy by 1988 to the level of good old US of A, with industry as priority target.
The Great Leap Forward is forever etched in memory by the 600,000 backyard furnaces in communes all around the country producing steel, from melted ore as well as just about any finished iron material the people could lay their hands on. Initially, the plan was successful, with the annual steel production reaching 11 million tons.
Low technology – the slow rise from the backyard stage, coupled with high ideology – the requisite of discerning the thoughts and precepts of Mao in communal teach-ins at certain periods of the day, spelled doom for the Great Leap Forward. At the same time, the over-emphasis on technology at the expense of agricultural production resulted to famine. Hence, the derisive Great Leap Backward.
Leaped forward, nay, soared skyward Guangzhou has, being the industrial capital of the PROC. (No thanks to Mao, all thanks to Deng Xiaoping who instituted a market economy in China, one Chinese storekeeper told me.)
At the 106th Session of the China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, the massive exhibition hall – think of two parallel SM City Pampanga doubled in width, a few hundred meters longer, and three storeys high here – was a maze of large and small machineries in all aspects of endeavor, from construction to production; lighting and electronics, transportation and communications. And that was only for the first phase of the three-phased fair held for three weekends.
A Maoist dream of China drawing in peoples from all the world to learn from its praxis of socialism found manifest in the Canton Fair drawing in all nationalities to its exhibition halls: Africans preferring the heavy equipment displays; Middle Easterners, the pumps and water processors; Italians, the lighting fixtures; Germans and Americans, the automobiles; Indians, the electronics.
All came though not in search of the socialist ideal but in response to the call of the produce of a liberal market economy, the socialist’s very nightmare. How Mao’s heart must have been broken by this blasphemy to his faith!
And how warped has been my socialist brain, thinking of Guangzhou – of the whole of China – in terms of the baggy drab grey or green uniform of the population, of bicycles clogging all the streets!
Yeah, another initiative of the Chairman – the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – finding realization today. Again, in the very contradiction of its Maoist thesis.
The proletariat as both subject and object of the Chinese cultural renaissance cleansed of all liberal bourgeois elements was the expressed aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966.
All art, all cultural expressions that did not serve the proletariat was deemed decadent and had to be destroyed. With Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, at the cultural revolution’s vanguard, the worst excesses were committed including the proclamation of The Red Detachment of Women as the very acme of Chinese theater, and the burning of Chinese classics, sparing not even Confucius in the process. It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution effectively ended.
A revolution of culture I saw in Guangzhou as well as in Shenzhen – of Western values and lifestyles liberating the people from their socialist past, with compulsive consumption fanning the revolutionary fervor.
The very symbols of liberal bourgeois ideals – Benzes of all classes, BMWs and Porsches, Audis and Volvos, Rovers and Alfa Romeos, yes, even the iconic American Cadillac make the most ubiquitous presence on Guangzhou and Shenzhen’s wide avenues, any time of the day and night.
Ah, how Jiang Qing would have shrieked to death – not hers but theirs – at the sight of ladies in micro-mini skirts and abbreviated cut-offs, as well as exposed navels and posterior dimples, ramping along the walking streets of Shang Xia Jiu and Beijing!
There now is the counter-revolution: decadence its natural outcome. Just as damnation is the wage of disbelief.
Ah, other than that one in Utrecht, I may just be the only remaining communist in the world.
posted by A.Caesar Z. Lacson at 3:58 PM
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