It was one of the first phrases I learnt in China, when I first went there to study, in 1976. “
One divides into two”. In Chinese
Yi Fen Wei Er, (一分为二).
Why that? I hear you ask. Good question. I was being shown around the
Peking Languages Institute on the outskirts of Beijing, by a Ms Li, a sweet and keen young thing, whose job it was to introduce me to the campus. It was the fall of ’76. Just getting chilly.
The campus was, then, way outside the heart of the city. About an hour’s drive. I asked Ms Li: “why is the Institute so far out?”. And she said: “Because, as our dear leader, Chairman Mao said, ‘one divides into two’, and so we are here”.
None the wiser, I shrugged and moved on with Ms Li to other parts of the campus.
Later, I learned the the PLI used to be an Oil Industry Institute, but following another of Mao’s profundities, to “dig caves deep, store grain everywhere and combat hegemony” (深挖洞,广积粮,不称霸
Shen wa dong, Guang ji liang, Bu cheng ba) it had moved out west, freeing up the facilities for a rather less strategic Languages Institute.
I still don’t see the connection with
Yi Fen Wei Er, and don’t to this day. Mao fancied himself a bit of a philosopher and we know he studied Hegel, who was the first to light on this truth. And so he said it. And so his acolytes recited it. The point of obedience being precisely that, to mirror whatever the emperor says.
Anyway, it stuck in my mind over the decades since. It’s everywhere you look, from sexual dimorphism to the two-party system.
It even affected the way we face the
coronavirus. At the beginning I naively thought that it would be something we faced as humans. But remarkably quickly
Yi Fen Wei Er kicked in. People lined up into camps of Lockdown Zealots vs
Lockdown Sceptics, predictably enough (mostly) along party lines.
But what I wanted to touch in was a broader case of
Yi Fen Wei Er. Or perhaps it’s the opposite: a case of where something is conflated which
ought be
Yi Fen Wei Er.
I’m talking about the conflation of people with ideologies. Or people with policies.
Four examples:
1. China and (Maoist) communism
2. Russians and (Stalinist) communism
3. Muslims and Islam
4. Black Lives and the BLM Movement
1. When I first arrived in
China in 1976 I was a bit of a squishy leftie, like most of my cohort. We’d been anti the Vietnam war. We’d celebrated Gough Whitlam's Labour Parry triumphs in Australia. We were soft core lefties. What NSW Premier came to call “Chardonnay socialists”. Then I went to China and lived in a
bona fide socialist economy. And I saw how it worked. Or rather how it didn’t work. After thirty years of socialism, countless mass movements and a still ongoing Cultural Revolution there was little to eat and little to clothe. We had ration coupons for our rice, our cotton, our meat, our lodging, our very thoughts. The fact that this was due to socialism and not some exogenous factor is made clear in the forty years to now, after Deng Xiaoping changed things, said that “to get rich is glorious” and “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. This unleashed capitalism (aka “socialism with Chinese characteristics”) and the great Chinese entrepreneurial spirit. The rest is history. A panoply of plenty.
And or struck me at the time, or if not forcefully at the time at least since then, that it was the Chinese people who suffered most under the yolk of socialism.
So it was easy for me to make the distinction between the Chinese as people and China as a communist system, as a Leninist dictatorship. In short:
Chinese people = fine, good. Chinese socialism = bad.
2. The same for
Soviet Russia. I went there in 1989 when it was still the Soviet Union. I found the Russians warm, friendly and fun. Pretty much like people everywhere. They lived then at the fag end of Stalinist sovietism. The now famous
Gum Department store in Moscow, today a Harrods of Russia, was then bare. The window displays were cans of beets. Inside, rubber plimsolls, in odd sizes. And vodka, plenty of vodka in coke sized bottles.
So, again:
Russians = fine, good. Soviet socialism = bad
3.
Muslims and Islam seems to cause the most difficulty. It’s pretty much a given that any criticism of Islam will be labelled “Islamophobic”, where a it ought to be clear that Muslims are people and Islam is an ideology. And no ideology ought to be immune from criticism. Indeed just as Maoism/Leninism/Marxism most oppressed the Chinese people and Stalinism most oppressed the Russians, Islam most oppresses Muslims, and especially
moderate Muslims. I’m going to take the risk here and say:
Muslims = fine, good. Islam = bad. (I feel pretty much the same about all other religions so I’m an equal opportunity hater of faiths).
Which brings me to our latest example:
4.
Black Lives and BLM: No one denies the statement: “Black Lives Matter”. Of course they do. And I’ve seen no one saying the opposite. But there’s a
movement called Black Lives Matter, with a
website and a platform. The main one is to “Defund the police”. They have other views, some of them outright anti-Semitic or racist. It ought to be fine to believe both that Black lives matter and that the movement “Black Lives Matter” (
BLM) has some policies that are “problematic”. But they’ve done such a good job of branding that if one does challenge the policies, one is accused of not believing that Black lives matter.
So this is another case of where it outbreak to be
Yi Fen Wei Er, but where People and policies and ideologies are conflated. I guess it’s a kind of
cognitive dissonance.
I don’t know what we do about that. Something needs doing for the sanity of our world. But what?
The
Weinstein brothers -- a couple of super brainiacs -- don’t know either:
