The Zombie Apocalypse: Communism Redux (or.. What Paul Krugman DIDN'T say)

I recall an Oxford Union talk, in 2020, with the guest American Nobel laureate in Economics, professor Paul Krugman. He of a weekly New York Times column. He, a beloved man of the liberal-progressive Left. Oft-quoted in the uber-liberal academic blog "Crooked Timber".  

Krugman talks of "Zombie ideas". Which, he claims, are very severe on the Right, in the Republican party. But not in the Democratic Party: "...all important Zombies are on the Right because that's where the money is."

The Zombie idea on the Right that most got on his goat is "the trickle down theory", described in his talk as "cutting taxes for the wealthy". Which Krugman claimed had been debunked over and over, yet kept reappearing, he said, like a shambling Zombie. 

The trickle down theory, aka "tax cuts for the rich", and whether or not it's a "Zombie idea" is for another time. But no "important" Zombie ideas on the Left?

Well, I thought. Paul K may not recognise any "Zombie ideas" on the Left, but I sure do. What about the idea of Socialism for a start? 

Socialism, no matter what form ("nice" Democratic-Socialism, or not-so-nice Authoritarian-Communism), has been tried again and again. Again and again it's failed. Yet again and again it rises. How it this not seen as the monster "Zombie idea" of the Left? The OG of Zombie ideas. Answer: because it's actually believed. The Left genuinely believes -- at least I believe they believe --  that Socialism holds the promise of equality and justice for all. 

And for that reason will do "Whatever it takes" to bring it about. 

The fact that it's not succeeded a anywhere it's been tried? The Left's answer: it's never been tried properly. (!)

The Soviet Union, China, East Germany, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, Cuba, dozens of African countries... all these don't count as "trying properly"?? Well, I'd call BS on that. But if you still don't accept that, and you still say "it's not been tried properly" there's no falsifying your view. It is inarguable. 

In which case, the Zombies have won. At least on the Left. The Zombie idea of Socialism has won. 

What then of an idea that's a bad idea, that's been killed off but rises from the dead, like the Zombies, yet still captures the attention of all of academia and swathes of the political Left? What of that? 

Well... we might have to admit that the Zombies have won! 

And what is it when the Zombies have won?  I asked AI and the answer is: Zombie Apocalypse. That's what the Zombies winning is called. 

We've now a Zombie Apocalypse in the west. 

An old idea. A horrid idea. An idea that impoverishes humankind. Has nonetheless won. 

Well done, Left! You've won. 

The saddest thing, for me is: I've no longer any hope that in winning "the Left will find out". That the Left will see failure and impoverishment. That they will learn from that. No. The Left has learned nothing of the many previous failures. There's no reason to believe that they'll learn from yet another failure. 

Yet now, this Zombie idea, this Zombie Apocalypse, infects not a poor, agrarian post-Tsarist Russia, not a poor agrerian post-imperial China, but the United States. The Anglosphere. The West. The inheritors of the Enlightenment. The vanguard of modernity.

If I'm right that socialism is a very bad idea, that it impoverishes countries it infects, then this Zombie Apocalypse is very bad news indeed. 

Yet Paul Krugman, guest at Oxford University, did not talk about this major Zombie idea of the Left. Nor did Oxford Union ask him. 

Gloom.

ADDED: re-watching the Krugman talk at Oxford U, I notice in particular that what he does, well enough to fool his audience, is to create one Straw Man after another. And then to rebut the Straw Men. I'll leave that here for now, just to note: see if you can spot the Straw Men!

Below is an article by Brivael Le Pogam, from the French, describing how Marxism was re-purposed by the French and German Schools, and injected into western academia, for ingestion by society. Which is where we are today. It's a good article. Spot on, as far as I know the facts. 

Which are handily summarised in Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution". 

“The Long March through the institutions”

One of the most successful and insidious political strategies of the 20th century was summed up in a single phrase: “the long march through the institutions”. Aka “Cultural Marxism”. 

The slogan was coined by German socialist student leader Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. It deliberately referenced Mao Tse-tung’s Long March of 1934–35 and called on the radical left to abandon immediate revolution; instead, they should infiltrate and subvert the key institutions of Western society from within - government, media, schools, universities, courts and corporations - while outwardly working inside them.

Herbert Marcuse, the left’s intellectual superstar of the mid-20th century, enthusiastically endorsed this approach. He described it as “the only effective way” to bring about radical social change in advanced capitalist societies.

Indeed, the strategy worked with remarkable success – and nowhere was it more effective than in the universities. The social sciences and humanities were gradually captured by radical academics who replaced the pursuit of truth with ideological activism. Over decades, this long march transformed those institutions into ideological training grounds for successive generations of activists, journalists, teachers and civil servants.

Today the result is obvious: many of our most important cultural and educational institutions no longer serve the public; they serve a political project. The “long march” quietly replaced liberal education with ideological indoctrination and open inquiry with enforced orthodoxy. The consequences of that conquest are still unfolding today.

Creative Deduction 

A book to read on all of this: Christopher Rufo “America’s Cultural Revolution”. Aka “Cultural Marxism”. It’s been going on for decades. Hugely accounts for today’s anti-Israel hysteria. Which goes as far as anti-America. Anti the west. 

America Maoism redux

 

I was in Beijing on 9 September 1976, the day Mao died, as was Xi Van Fleet. Fifty years ago this September. Yikes!

So I know exactly what she's talking about. China of that Cultural Revolutionary time. The poverty. The corruption. The oppression. The main food that winter was Chinese cabbage piled high on street corners. All other food was rationed. I needed ration tickets for rice. Ration tickets for cotton. Ration tickets for shoes. Bread didn't exist. You needed permission to travel anywhere. The average urban wage was $25 per month. Farmers much less. 

I was a language student. My attempts at essays in my learner's Chinese were graded not just for grammar and character strokes, but for political content. There was correct view and a wrong one. (It’s from Mao that the term “political correctness” comes).

It was in the socialist China of those days that I learned I didn't much like socialism. Let alone communism. Though I tend to treat "socialism" and "communism" pretty much interchangeably. Socialism: bad. Communism: badder.

Socialism in practice, as in China of the 70s, destroyed my lazy-hazy undergraduate chardonna-socialism that I shared with my class mates. 

Sadly, though, it's starting again in America. Socialism. Communism. Maoism redux. We see it everywhere. 

I've followed Xi Van Fleet for years on X. She's a vocal critic of the CCP. Her grandparents were the Chinese equivalent of Kulaks, small landowners, who had their land confiscated (ie, stolen) by the CCP.  Her grandparents were named "Black Faction" members, Hei Pai. And therefore so were her parents, and therefore so was Xi herself. One person in the family is a Black Faction, all the family members are Black Faction. The only escape from the branding was to escape the country. 

Talking in the vid above to Adam Carolla, Xi warns of the dangers of resurgent Maoism in America. The only difference from China's of the 60s and 70s being that the divisions between "good" and "bad" -- which in China of the Mao era were class-based, rich or poor, Hei Pai or Hong Pai, Black faction or Red faction -- in America are based on race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or all three. The operatives are the same. The M.O. is the same. Define and name the parties, label one "good", the other "bad", and have at it -- divide the country; go to war. (Joe Biden was pretty good at this. Remember his speech in Philadelphia in October 2024? Where he labelled half the country, Republicans, “near Nazis”?). 

With the "good" side, of course, pre-ordained to come out on top of the evil "Black faction". Or so they believe.

When you look at what's going on in America today, in big chunks of the Democrat party, moving ever Left (the communist hammer & sickle red flag of communism at the "No Kings" protests!), often paid by wealthy donors in America and overseas, can you really say her warnings are not relevant? Are some kind of crazy conspiracy theory? 

Meantime, China's Communist Party perseveres, even as China's economy is less socialist and more a kind of crony-capitalism. But, The Party stays in power -- 75 years and counting. 

The Party Abides, dude.

ADDED: Some background to the Chinese influencer who's popped up all over the internet recently, Jiang Xueqin.

Keep the Status Quo on Taiwan. The path to peace

I knew this (below) from decades ago -- because I'd read Edgar Snow's "Red Star over China" in 1976, the year I arrived in China. Everyone said: "you've got to read this book". So I did. 

It was not a great read, TBF. Even in those early days I recognised hero worship. Edgar Snow idolised Mao. That didn't seem to me a sound base for a biography. More like hagiography. 

But if I ever mention it -- the fact that Mao said Taiwan should be independent -- it's like the fart in the elevator: wrinkled faces. People don't want to know. But it's true. Mao said what Snow said he said and it made sense. It makes sense. 

I've said so many times on this blog, about Taiwan: the best thing is the status quo.

Just leave things as they are. Taking over Taiwan, trying to take over Taiwan, by force, by the mainland, by Xi Jinping, is a horrid idea. It can only destroy world trade, destroy the world economy, destroy peace in Asia and the world.

Just leave it like it is. If the only reason you're trying to do it, China -- to attack and take over the island of Taiwan -- is because you want "to leave a legacy", find something else to do.

"In 1928, Mao Zedong explicitly advocated that Taiwan should be independent and establish a “Taiwan Republic.”

In 1936, Mao told American journalist Edgar Snow in Yan’an that if the Korean people wished to break free of Japanese imperialism, “we enthusiastically support their struggle for independence,” and that “the same applies to Taiwan.”

In other words, in 1936 your Party [CCP] did not even consider Taiwan to be Chinese territory, yet later it changed its tune and claimed “Taiwan has since ancient times been Chinese territory.” This shows the Party’s habit of rewriting history to suit political needs."

Robert Tsao

Happy China National Day! 国庆节

Jing, 1 October 2010, Zacs, Discovery Bay 
Waterfront. Hong Kong

On this day in 1949, Mao Tse-tung stood on the steps of Tian'an Men gate in Peking and declared the establishment of the "People's Republic of China". 

Leftists -- never able to leave well enough alone, never knowing a person they disagreed with that they didn't want to kill or imprison -- launched, under Mao, the "Anti Rightist Campaign", 1957-59.

Overlapping this, and just to ensure complete, not just partial, chaos, the party, under Mao, launched the ludicrous "Great Leap Forward", 1958-62.

Still not enough, for there remained a few voices calling for Common Sense, Mao instigated the most rigorous, the most fearsome, the egregious, the longest-lasting of them all: "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", 1966-76.

That's when I arrived in China. At the very end of that Cultural Revolution, on 5 September 1976. Three days before Mao died on 9 September. 

I saw with mine own eyes, experienced with mine own body and mind, the worst of socialism. I saw and well noticed what happened when the shift came to capitalism, to an economy run by the market, not by communist apparatchiks. 

That's what made China rich -- to the extent that it is rich -- the market economy, not the Communist Party. China's economy succeeds to the exact extent that the Communist Party stays out of the way. It fails, gets weaker, to the exact extent that the Communist Party intervenes. 

Net victims out of all those campaigns? Deaths from all those political movements, all that getting rid of people who don't agree with you: 32 million to 50 million. 

Add these to the hundreds of millions killed by Lenin and Stalin, by Pol Pot, by Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and every tinpot socialist crackpot dictatorship in the history of the last century, and you've got such a pile-up of skeletons, such a mountain of maimed lives, all down to far Leftism. 

Which the Democratic party in the US is moving toward. (vide: Zohran Mamdani, mayor-in-waiting of New York City, a self-declared, bizarrely proud of being... "Democratic Socialist"). 

Looking at the Left in the United States, it's hard not to compare them with what happened in China. Specially with the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Those barely pubescent indoctrinees. Brainwashed in schools teaching the neo-version of a "nice" socialism, a neo-Marxism, a "democratic" socialism, no less! 

How are the youth of today, in today's academy in the US, how are they different from those Red Guards, who brandished their Little Red Books, and persecuted those who thought differently, just as today's Green and Red Guards, brandish their keffiyehs and AK-47s?

Me? I'm not buying it. The lesson of China and its ructions of "movements" is too much, too clear, of a lesson. Instead of half-digetsted European Marxism, how about we steer the middle course? The Great Way, the 大学, the Da Xue. The "Way of the Mean". 中庸之道 Zhōngyōng zhī dào. 

Now that's something China could teach us! The Middle Way, from the teachings of Confucius. For goodness sake let's not follow China's mangled marxism, recycled for the n-the time, in the half-formed minds of mini-Maos or student-Stalins.

I mean it! I Mean it! The Way of the Mean. We could learn from Confucius. The Middle Way! 

中庸之道

ADDED: And... 1 October yesterday, at Miru Japanese atop St Regis Hotel, Chicago, also celebrating a birthday: 

Lookin' good in Black & White
Miru restaurant, Chicago

"What the Left’s Eulogies for Assata Shakur Reveal" | Noah Rothman

The Left choose so many weird heros. 

Even the likes of the most popular, Che Guevara, for example, don't really pass the sniff test. He was a mass murderer and a tyrant. You did things his way, or it's lined up against a wall and shot, for you, capitalist pig!

Mao Tse-tung the same, only immeasurably worse. Responsible for the death of 100 million of his fellow citizens. And the untold miseries of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Yeah, right. 

Stalin, anyone? Lenin? Mass murderers both, each worse than Hitler. 

Lately the Left have taken to every type of common criminal. George Floyd's 2020 death was deemed murder by cop. Every Republican I know decried it. But not enough for the Left. Floyd had to be sacralised. This, a serial felon, engaged, at the time of his arrest, in yet another felony and high on a toxic mix of heroin and fentanyl. 

Their latest favourite of the Left is anyone that the Trump administration is after. And anyone who kills a someone they deem to be a fascist or a nazi. Which is pretty much anyone who disagrees with them. 

Kilmar Albrego Garcia? Illegal immigrant. MS-13 member. Wife-beater with 3 restraining orders against him, human trafficker, drug dealer. Overstayer. Sentenced, by due process, to be deported, twice, upheld on Appeal. But he too had to be lionised and protected by the Left. 

That's gotten wider now, that net of the Left's Heros: To include anyone that the Trump administration deems to be subject to deportation. And murderers. They love me some murderers! Like Luigi Mangioni, who murdered a Healthcare executive in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan.  Lionised because he killed a horrid highly-paid executive. (Who had no history of any convictions at all. No matter. He's a nasty capitalist, oppressing the working classes. And Luigi didn't like him).

The latest? A eulogy for a known terrorist:

Cuban authorities have not said what caused the late Joanne Chesimard’s death. They say only that the 78-year-old passed away from health complications arising from old age, and we have no reason to disbelieve them. Chesimard spent the last 40 years residing comfortably in Havana as a guest of the communist state: a teacher, a writer, a lecturer, and, most important — indeed, her foremost value to the Cuban regime — a fugitive from American justice.

The nom de guerre by which Chesimard is known to most Americans, Assata Olugbala Shakur, is more likely to trigger dim recollections of the crimes that made her into a figure of veneration among those who promote the notion that the United States of America is an illegitimate regime. In his book, Days of Rage, the author Bryan Burrough described her as “the purest expression of revolutionary ardor” — “a ferocious, machine-gun-toting, grenade-tossing, spitting-mad Bonnie Parker for the 1970s, an archetype for a series of badass heroines heralded in Foxy Brown, Get Christie Love!, and other blacksploitation films of the day.”

A City College student before falling in with elements that would later compose the Black Liberation Army, Shakur was an instrumental element of many of the outfit’s plots, most of which were designed to foment revolution in America by first killing cops. Shakur evaded justice until 1973 when she and her BLA associates were pulled over on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Read on... 

Nate Friedman's heartfelt tribute to Charlie Kirk

 

These are the GOOD people. Those that Nate Friedman shows, above, in his tribute to Charlie Kirk, which he did at the Tribute to Charlie, apparently the biggest such ever in the United States, watched by over 100 million and attended, in person, by over 200,000. 

The Tik Tokkers dancing on Charlie's grave, horrid horrid views. Those that want to kill, to murder, to assassinate a good man, and now we know, any good person, to stop their thoughts and speech. These are the BAD people. 

Very Manichaean of me, I admit. But there we are. There are good people and there are bad people. Maybe it's in you. Or maybe it's your society that made you that way. A measure for me is: Whether or not you celebrate the death of a person whose views you know nothing of (as most of the grave dancers don't). That's one of those dividing lines for me. 

As Mao Tse-tung used to say: "One divides into two". Or, as I used to say: "There are two types of people in the world; those that divide the world into two and those that don't". 

If you can't tell good from bad. Or if you prevaricate about it -- "Charlie Kirk should not have been killed, BUT... " -- aka Salman Rushdie's "But Brigade" redux, if there's some doubt and wondering, then I can't help you. 

You can think as badly as you want of me. I feel comfortable being on the side of Free Speech, on the side of the free interchange of ideas, on the side of NOT killing people you disagree with, of engaging with young minds in the academy. 

That's the side I stand on. That's the side most of the Left used to stand on. But no longer does. 

======================

Salman Rushdie's speech (a clip), from January 2015 on Free Speech and the "But Brigade":

“So anyway, the thing that I come to—I used this phrase on TV the other day— the rise of the ‘but-brigade.’ I got so sick of the goddamn but-brigade.  And now the moment somebody says ‘Yes I believe in free speech, but,’ I stop listening. ‘I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves.’ ‘I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody.’ ‘I believe in free speech, but let’s not go too far.’

“The point about it is, the moment you limit free speech, it’s not free speech. The point about it is that it’s free. Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela, in important speeches, used the same three-word phrase which to my mind says it all: “Freedom is indivisible.” You can’t slice it up. Otherwise it ceases to be freedom.

Reposting “Can Banna the Younger right the wrongs of Banna the Elder?”

As I learn the other day that the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in the United States, and about time too, I wondered when I had first mentioned the Brotherhood on this blog. Turns out it was 1 September 2009, an amazing 16 years ago. I wrote the piece below, which still reads pretty well, me reckons. 

Read below, or also here’s the link to the 2009 post.

Since that post, I did a car trip from Cape Town to Cairo, across the whole of Africa. Blog here.

In Cairo I did a tour of the city with a taxi driver who was the spitting image of Sayyid Qutb, the legendary promoter of Hassan al-Banna’s new organisation, in the 1920s, which he called the Muslim Brotherhood. I said that to the taxi driver. He was none too pleased. The Brotherhood was then already banned in Egypt. As it is in all the Gulf Countries. It's just not banned in the ever-trusting, ever-naive West. Till now, at least in the U.S....

For quick reference, the Muslim Brotherhood is the Big Daddy, the OG, of all the worst, all the most brutal, all the most efficient terrorist outfits in the world today. Hamas, to Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PLO, Al-Qaeda and ISIS; the Brotherhood is the progenitor of them all. 

It’s also spawned more benign-on-the-surface outfits to fool western intelligentsia, like CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, and the MCB, the  Muslim Council of Britain. Which do fine jobs of fooling the intelligentsia, because the intelligentsia want to be fooled, to have plausible deniability, so they don’t have to face the reality of what the Islamist influx to their countries means for their populations. The threats, the dangers.

But enough of that. 

The article is re-posted below where be a pic of said Sayyid Qutb. 

================

1st September 2009 Post begins: 

What do an 88-year old Egyptian writer living in Cairo and a teenage American girl living in Florida have in common?

Answer: the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad and “honour killings”.

Here are the dots….

Gamal al-Banna is the 88-year old Egyptian writer, the younger brother of the late Hassan al-Banna.

Banna the Elder established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.  

The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence was greatly expanded by Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s (that's Qutb pictured here).

Qutb was mentor to Osama bin Laden and to Ayman Zawahiri, a “theoretician” of al-Qaeda.  Much of the terror rhetoric of al-Qaeda draws directly from the Muslim Brotherhood.  In the US, the Muslim Brotherhood has said that it is engaged, in its own words: 

"... in a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

The Muslim Brotherhood motto: 

"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

The Muslim Brotherhood platform demands strict implementation of Sharia law, which calls for death for apostasy, including killing one’s children:

“When a person … apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”  (Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence, Reliance of the Traveller,  o.8.1).  And:

“The following are not subject to retaliation: …  a father or mother for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring” (o.1.2)

This is not just Islamic legal theory.  It is also fact. People are killed, tortured, raped or threatened with death all the time for apostasy from Islam [Ref 4].

“You get the picture?  Oh yes, we see…. 

Hassan and Sayyid, 

the leaders of the pack…”

Banna the Younger [Gamal] writes for a more moderate Islam: he’s against the wearing of the veil, against female genital mutilation, in favour of women leading prayer.

The teenage American girl is Rifqa Bary, the 17-year old from Ohio who converted from Islam to Christianity in 2005, and about whom I wrote here .   When her father found out she had become an apostate from Islam, she says he beat her and threatened to kill her.  She fled to Florida in July, in fear for her life. 

The Muslim Brotherhood connection?  The lawyers for Ms Bary have issued to the media an “Investigation and Intelligence Memorandum” [3] which provides evidence from the US Justice Department of connections between the Noor Mosque in Ohio attended by the Bary family and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas, and Jihadi terrorism.

Since (a) the Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organisation calling for for strict adherence to Sharia, which mandates death for apostates, since (b) the Noor Mosque has clear connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and since (c) Mr. Bary was a devoted attendee at the Noor Mosque, there is at least clear a priori evidence to keep Ms Bary away from her father.

You would think that the “moderate Muslims” we hear so much about would tackle this issue: try to get the death penalty for apostasy provisions changed.  But the problem is, they can’t.  There can be no change in Islam and Islamic law: Ijtihad (Koranic and Hadithian exegesis) closed its door centuries ago.

So all they can do is try to deny that death provisions exist (in which they are plain wrong), and try to shift the focus from the threat on the young girl’s life, by instead raising fears for their own safety!  Robert Spencer: 

“This is, of course, how Islamic groups in the U.S. have reacted to every act of violence and every threat that any Muslim has issued in recent years: they've raised fears of a non-existent "backlash" and claimed they're being persecuted, rather than address the root causes of the violence and brutality within their own community. And the bemused, befuddled multiculturalists in the mainstream media go along with it happily, every time.” (ref)

In his latest article in favour of some flexibility [2] in Islam Banna the Younger [Gamal] has said that belly dancers ought not to be criticized.  

Would it not be nice if this old Lion of Moderation were able to address the Rifqa Bary case direct? A nice kind of squaring of the circle.  To denounce honour killings, flat out, no if’s no buts.  And denounce, while he’s about it, the poisonous legacy of his brother’s most famous creation the Muslim Brotherhood.

BTW: I’ve read Sayyid Qutb: his Milestones and Social Justice in Islam.  They’re pretty dreary, illogical, circular in argumentation, frequently self-contradictory, and otherwise a farrago of sophistry.  I thought them rather like reading Mao Tse-tung in the seventies, when I had to do it at the Peking Language Institute: writing that was like fairy floss, fluffy and insubstantial, superficially pretty, but squashing down to nothing, sickly sweet glob.   Both writers, Qutb and Mao, have caused rather a lot of trouble,  though, thereby proving Orwell right: that we have to watch out for bad writing, as it can have baleful effects.  In particular we need to watch Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood; unlike Mao, they continue to pursue their aims for a worse world.

References:

   1.   A voice for 'new understanding' of Islam -  Michael Slackman discusses Gamal al-Banna, IHT 20 Oct 2006, 

   2.   Hints of Pluralism in Egyptian Religious Debates, Michael Slackman on Gamal al-Banna, IHT, 1 September 2009

   3.    Investigation and Intelligence Memorandum,  Issued in Rifqa Bary case, 30^th August 2009

   4.   Murders, torture, rape or death threats for apostasy from Islam in: Australia, Bangladesh,  Britain, Britain again, Egypt, Egypt again, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia

China’s population fell in 2022 | First time since 1961

Births in China dropped 10% in 2022, to 9.56 million

Surely major news. The fall in 1961 was because of widespread famine, caused by Mao Tse-tung’s disastrous Great Leap Forward policy. Today the fall is structural. And long-term. A historic year that marks the beginning of a long decline in population, maybe irreversible. With China about to get old before it gets rich. 

Observers like Peter Zeihan have been predicting this for some time, and indeed claim that the fall is much greater. China, he says, has been reporting a population 100 million higher than it actually is. Though how he knows this is not clear to me. Due to this decline, says Zeihan, China now has an inverted population pyramid, so not enough young to produce what’s needed by the older nor enough to support the eldest. He gives the Chinese regime ten years or less. This may be analysis by wishful thinking, as China has consistently confounded cynics. As a certain man would say “we’ll see”.

New info on the Lab Leak hypothesis of Covid’s origin

As Mao Tse-tung said, often: “One Divides into Two”. In Chinese: 一分为二, Yi Fen Wei Er. Mao's cutesy bit of Hegelian dialectic, which he picked up somewhere along the way, studying Marx. One divides into two: everything: man/woman, black/white, Lib/Lab, Dog/Cat. 

So we have the two theories of the origin of SarsCoV-2, the Lab Leak hypothesis (LL) and the Zoonotic Origin hypothesis (ZO). LL says it came from an accidental leak of the pathogen from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The ZO says it was passed to humans via an animal (as yet not identified) at the Wuhan Huanan wet market. 

A Senate minority report has just been published and reported in ProPublica. ProPublica is a non-profit, non-partisan online news source and winner to date of six Pulitzer Prizes. 

It’s a long read, but kind of like a detective story. Sit down and enjoy this whodunit! 

Then make up your own mind if you think the origin of Covid were more likely from an unknown animal in the Wuhan wet market, or from an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Me, I remain on the fence, though I lean to LL. If there were some solid actual evidence on the ZO side, like an actual animal with the actual disease, found around the Wuhan wet markets, then I’d change my mind. Till then, the balance of probabilities is with the LL hypothesis. In my view. 

[ADDED: A curious thing happened to some scientists who began LL then flipped to ZO. Like Kristian Andersen. Who initially said, to paraphrase: “the virus looks like it could not have arisen in the wild, so presumably it was engineered”. Then, a while later (not very long at all in Andersen’s case) said “well, I can now see how it might have arisen in the wild”. But then — and this is the curious bit — go further and say, “…and it couldn’t have been engineered”. This is a weird extra step. I’m no virologist, but many virologists most assuredly do believe that CoV-2 could have been engineered. Indeed that the evidence, admittedly circumstantial, is that it was.]

China has played a horrible part in all this. It’s kept secret. Punished any whistle blowers. Failed to cooperate with international investigations. In short, it’s made things worse for the rest of the world. While it goes its own merry way on the Zero Covid policy path, which is infuriating even its own population, docile as it usually is. 

Shame on China. And shame on the WHO for not putting more pressure on China, especially early on, when the knowledge would have been even more useful: eg, an earlier vaccine could have been developed.

We need to know the origins of Covid so we can know what best to do to avoid the next pandemic. If it’s ZO, then the wet markets need to be closed down. Across Asia. Or something. Something done with them. If it’s LL, then any gain-of-function research needs to be banned forthwith. As it had been by the US, but not by China. 

The article:

COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab. ProPublica.

Wayback Internet Archive version

PS: there’s mention in the article of “Party Speak”. This is the same as I’ve called elsewhere “Commie Speak”. The turgid, turdy, tat that Chinese apparatchiks are obliged to use. It was everywhere when I first went to China in 1976, and I even learnt how to write it, in Chinese. Then it waned over the decades, as Deng Xiaoping’s sanity took over. It’s back in major vogue since Xi Jinping, and his mania for keeping CCP party control, at whatever cost. Even linguistic sanity. 

Hong Kong’s “leap forward”. Okay. As long as it’s not “Great”

Hong Kong from the Peak, looking NE

Let’s hope it’s not a Mao-style Great Leap Forward....

Cheap shot aside, I’m posting this for the propaganda and for reference, a place-marker as it were, to see how reality matches to our new Chief John Lee’s projection. 

Hong Kong will take “another leap forward” in the next five years 

Xi was praising Mao Tse-tung yesterday

Brilliant thinking: Mao hated sparrows and instituted
a campaign to kill them all. Result: locust plagues
that led to famine and millions dead

To the Youth League of the Chinese Communist Party. And I was disgusted. Disgusted that this horrid, murderous, mendacious, slovenly tyrant should be praised. Just as I’m always disgusted when I’m in China and a cabbie has a swinging doll of Mao, hanging from the rear view mirror.

I get it why Xi does this.  He gains legitimacy from being linked to Mao. At least in China where Mao is still revered. 

Mao killed more human beings, intentionally and as side effects of his disastrous policies, than anyone ever. Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Stalin 20 million Kulaks. Mao? Around 100 million, in the Anti-Rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And he didn’t care. A complete psychopath. 

But China has never been able to come to terms with the man. He’s revered for establishing the “Peoples Republic” in 1949. Had he not it would have been Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Kuomintang. More corrupt (arguably) but would have been better for China in the long term. We’d now be dealing with a Democratic China. Not a buffoon of a Winnie the Pooh, who blunders around the region causing mayhem 

“One Divides into Two” redux

Zuby: a British rapper and heterodox thinker.
Click above to go to tweet thread

Some non-binaries of mine: 

• I’m fully pro-vaccine; I’m against vaccine mandates. [ADDED: doesn’t make me “anti-vaxxer”]
• I wear a mask when mandated; the science shows they are of limited use. 
• I have accepted lockdowns; though lockdowns are of limited effect. 
• I believe in the coronavirus; but Zero Covid policy is not the best way to stop it.
• White Supremacy is horrid; Kyle Rittenhouse is not a white supremacist. 
• "Black lives matter” (lower case); Black Lives Matter (upper case) doesn’t help improve their lives. 
• Social justice is important; woke-ism makes it worse.

Another thing. Which is in the “things I don’t get” category. The MSM, which is almost all on the Left (in the 2016 election, 93% of print media who endorsed chose Hillary Clinton), often calls for Fox News -- the only MSM outlet on the Right -- to be shut down. That’s despite the fact that they denounce countries where there is only one source of media, places like China or Russia. 

But what then? What if they succeeded, got rid of Fox and there were only voices on the Left? They would probably coalesce between more Left and less Left, and the ones to the right of the Left would likely drift further right, and the ones to the Left further left. 

Because "One Divides into Two”, a favourite saying of Mao Tse-tung and which I first heard in 1976. 一分为二，Yi Fen Wei Er. Which we ought resist, despite its pull. Most things are not binary. And thus resist moves to limit the range of views. 

We celebrate China's National Day. Right?

1 Oct 1949: Mao announces the “People's Republic of China”
At left Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, far right Zhou Enlai. 

Today is  the 1st of October, China's National Day. In Chinese: 国庆, which means "Celebrate the Country" Guo Qing! Here in Hong Kong, it's a holiday. 

So, what's to celebrate?  For one, in 1949, the defeat of the communists' arch-enemies. No, not the Japanese. But their fellow Chinese. People who didn't think the same as them, the Nationalist Party (国民党). The KMT were defeated and scurried off to Taiwan, where they remain to this day.

There was such a euphoria back then, 70 years ago, in the leftist world, that many thousands, foreigners and overseas-Chinese alike, came back to China to help "build New Socialism".

All was well. For about five years. Then the paranoia of Mao gave China the "Anti-Rightist Movement". Then came the "Great Leap Forward" and the stinker of them all the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". These socialist movements — all inspired by Mao — killed up to 100 million by starvation, persecution or straight out murder. Yet, in China today, taxi drivers have a hanging mobile of Mao, "The Great Helmsman" on the rear-view mirror. He's a hero. I find it revolting. I usually query them. They find it odd that I don't think he's a great man. Happens I know more than they do about what that evil tyrant got up to in between bedding nymphettes.

Here's what Mao said on that day, 72 years ago (or around that day...):

From the Guardian, 23 September 1949

Sound familiar? Could be Xi Jinping today. Considering the US as the dangerous tiger that you have to attack, no matter what its intentions might appear. That "the right of reactionaries to voice their opinions must be deprived" (come to think of it, also a Woke idea).

What Mao didn't say on that day 72 years ago (at least according to some people): "The Chinese people have stood up". Even if he didn't say it exactly like that, it's what he ought have said. And history has said it for him. A bit like "play it again, Sam". Becall never said it, nor Bogie. But it's our favourite quote from "Casablanca". So on this Maoist quote, I'm on Malcolm's side. Mao meant the Chinese people have stood up; and he, Malcolm, meant we -- Australians -- have stood up -- or we are standing up -- to you, China, 70 years later, in your neo-Maoist garb.Sound familiar? Could be Xi Jinping today. While our C-E Carrie Lam attends a ceremony to Celebrate the Country, and tells us that all is hunky dory and the "One Country Two Systems" formula is just fine after the National Security Law, and as the top-left editorial in the SCMP (the space given over to what Beijing thinks) tells us that we're to have an Article 23, anti secession law, that will restrict even more the public sphere. 

"How Antonio Gramsci’s Ideas Went Global"

A crazy. A cool Italian crazy. But a crazy nonetheless

I think I first heard of Antonio Gramsci when I was in Italy in the early 1970s. 

That was a time that the Italians were in yet another version of a love affair with communism. Just up the road from me in Torino, was the communist-run town of Bologna. Think of it: not “democratic socialist” or Left Wing. But Communist ! And then there was the Red Brigades, still around at the time, sowing murder and mayhem. 

So, Gramsci was sometimes on the lips of lefties of the time. He was, after all, as some claim, “Italy’s greatest twentieth-century intellectual”. Crikey!

But then I started hearing more about him after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism. I’d assumed that communism had been so roundly trounced by the West, so patently a failure, that it was done for.  Dead and buried. I wasn’t the only one to think that. There’s “Francis-the-end-of-history-Fukuyama" for just one. 

But then there was the resurgence. This time in the cultural sphere. The rise of Cultural Marxism. Via the so-called Frankfurt School, Derida, Foucault, the Frenchies, always and of course, and then, right up there, the louring presence of Antonin Gramsci. Which gave us the “Long March through the institutions” we have today. (The “Long March” is a Maoist term). 

The Jacobin, a very leftie magazine, has a whole encomium, by Marzia MacCaferri: "How Antonio Gramsci’s Ideas Went Global”. They love it all, this Long March. If only it could be longer, and harder, and deeper and tougher and more thorough. And more... well, violent, is where we’re at today. 

There’s an Oxford Union debate with the New York Times’ know-it-all-in-chief, Paul Krugman, in which he talks of “Zombie ideas”, referring to the idea of “trickle down” economics of the Right. Now, forgive me here, but is there not the Zombie idea of Zombie ideas in the case of Socialism? Of Marxism? Of Communism? All malign versions of each other. There is no bigger, crazier, more malign idea out there that will simply not die. No matter how often it’s been tried and failed. 

When you think about that, it’s pretty bizarre. And I’d have to give it the label: “Things I don’t get”.  (Though I kind of do: which is the end goal is a utopian wonderland. Just one more try! Pleeeease!)

That’s what we’re living with today. The malign influence of “Italy’s greatest intellectual”, infecting young minds at college, who go on to be middle-aged minds in academia and old-minds in the media and leftist governments. 

Oh, how I wish that Gramsci’s ideas had not “gone global”!

Be done with the Zombies!

Manufactured Amnesia: “The World Turned Upside Down” by Yang Jisheng

A “struggle session” against rival factions, Beijing, 1965

I’ve seen amnesia created, with my own eyes. No one in China under age 40 knows what happened In Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. No one over forty who was in Beijing will choose to remember it. No one of any age outside of Beijing will even know about it.  Pretty much the same with the Gang of Four, who I actually studied, in Chinese, back in 1976, just after they’d been arrested. Nowadays nothing, because to remember them, even as the villains they were, raises uncomfortable questions account the complicity of the communist party. 

So, a manufactured national amnesia. Including the big one, the Great Leap Forward, instigated by Mao Tse-tung, which killed fifty million. Forgotten. Even as we, outside, might recall that that’s ten times the number of Jews Hitler killed. 

Xi Jinping is no fan of the Cultural Revolution. His father Xi Zhongxun, was purged by Mao and Jinping exiled to the countryside as a teenager. But he styles himself after Mao, nonetheless, as dictators emulate dictators. It’s the thing. And Xi, son, keeps on ramming those uncomfortable historical happenings down the Great Memory Hole of China.

Brave historians like Yang Jisheng, keep up the struggle to remember. The Atlantic’s latest edition has a book review of some of these, “China’s Rebel Historians”.

The article has links to photos of Tiananmen Square, then and now. Each year it’s been remembered here in Hong Kong. But I wonder if it will be so this year.* Or will it be classified as subversion under the new NSL, and banned? I fear the latter. And the process of forgetting the past will go in here as well, part of the sinicisation of Hong Kong. 

Snip:

In china, history long occupied a quasi-religious status. During imperial times, dating back thousands of years and enduring until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, historians’ dedication to recording the truth was viewed as a check against wrongdoing by the emperor. Rulers, though forbidden from interfering, of course tried.

So have their successors. Among the most intent on harnessing history for political gain are the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. They routinely scrub Chinese-language scholarly books, journals, and textbooks of anything that might undermine their own legitimacy—including anything that tarnishes Mao Zedong, the founding father of the party. The effort, no small task, has not gone unchallenged. A web of amateur historians has been collecting documents and eyewitness testimony from the seven decades that have elapsed since the establishment of modern China in 1949. Guo Jian, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who has translated some of their findings, describes the tenacious researchers as “the inheritors of China’s great legacy,” dedicated to “preserving memory against repression and amnesia.’’. [Read on…]

========================= 

*ADDED (17/6/24): June 4th was was not Remembered, here in Hong Kong, in 2021 and has not been since. It’s being Memory Holed.  

China: ‘The influence game'

I know how it works, the United Front. 

And it's true, this piece by Juliet Samuel. on China's United Front Work Department - which reports directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party — is a scary and scarily efficient outfit. We ignore it only if we're naive, or if we are wilfully ignorant. Those first class tickets to a thorough China duchessing, are mighty appealing…. The UFWD knows just how to flatter and cajole. They've been at it almost 100 years. They're very good at it. 

Juliet Samuel has some simple suggestions at the end, of what Britain should do. Any country which cares for its security and dignity ought do no less — demand accountability and transparency. 

She speaks well of Australia's policies in this area. But there are plenty of uber-sinophiles in Oz, who speak out against standing up to China. "It'll impact our economic relations" don't you know.

The influence game

Why do we still struggle to see Xi's China as a threat?

For years Westminster has been obsessing over Russian interference in Britain. Yet while we fret over oligarchs and social-media bots, the most dangerous assault on our democracy and security goes not just unchallenged, but largely unnoticed. Beijing is richer and more sophisticated than Moscow on every level, and its influence more prevalent across British society. But even as we witness events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we still struggle to see China as a threat to our way of life.

This blind spot means China has been able quietly to amass huge amounts of influence with little pushback. Just look at how Huawei settled itself in our communications infrastructure and then expanded into our establishment.

The company started spending in a big way in the early 2010s, handing out grants and courting scientists at Whitehall champagne parties, according to a former academic. Last year, it gave £155,000 to Jesus College, Cambridge and it has at least a dozen universities on its payroll, including the LSE, Edinburgh, Imperial and Manchester.

Naturally, where cash goes, influence follows. Huawei's UK board has been stuffed with grandees, from ex-BP man Lord Browne, who just quit, to ex-BT man Sir Mike Rake, who just joined. It has hired at least seven PR firms (Finsbury, BCW, MHP, Ogilvy, FleishmanHillard, Hawthorne and Flint Global). It can draw on advice from some of Britain's most senior ex-officials — such as Sir Simon Fraser, former head of the Foreign Office, and Sir Andrew Cahn, former head of UK Trade & Investment. Tories debating 5G can count on hearing from an old colleague, Kris Hopkins, an MP till 2017 but now a Huawei 'senior public relations manager'. And Huawei hasn't forgotten the wonks: Chatham House and the Centre for Policy Studies have both received money.

The wonder, then, isn't really that Britain has relied on this officially 'untrusted' company to keep our phones pinging, but that the government can bring itself to ban Huawei at all. Yet while backbenchers in Westminster celebrate their 'victory' after the government's U-turn last month, onlookers scratch their heads. They wonder not just how a seven-year, post-election phase-out amounts to a ban, but, more importantly, how Britain's elites have been so comprehensively bought — and what on earth can be done about it.

The influence-buying in the Huawei case is replicated throughout the country in academia, business and politics. It is the result of a highly successful Chinese government programme called 'the United Front', which began as a branch of Chinese Communist party activity intended to subvert counter-revolutionary forces. According to Mao Zedong, it was a 'magic weapon' that would help communists to victory, a phrase repeated by Xi Jinping as he has expanded its activities since 2015. Now, the term 'the United Front' applies to an array of Chinese government interests, from suppressing minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang to transferring technology from abroad and recruiting supporters for the CCP's strategic aims through cash, persuasion or blackmail, both at home and among elites the world over.

In recent years, some democratic countries have been waking up to the fact that large chunks of their societies have fallen under the sway of a foreign force with truly malicious intentions. In New Zealand, a sitting member of the House of Representatives, Jian Yang, recently announced his coming retirement over a row about his links to Chinese military intelligence. In Australia, police raided the political office of sitting Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane, an outspoken supporter of Beijing, in a counter-espionage investigation. The US government is leading an assault on CCP influence over American society. Investigators have discovered that dozens of US scientists had not been declaring funding received from the Chinese government. Meanwhile, intensive lobbying by tech companies has created loopholes in legislation meant to stop sensitive, early-stage US technology being bought by China.

But as our allies take action, the UK remains detached. Huawei and Hong Kong might make headlines, but below the radar the CCP and its allies promote soft, soporific voices in the British establishment who insist we reject 'protectionism', embrace 'global cooperation' and 'engage' with Beijing, no matter how many international agreements it violates, how vile its policies are and how little we gain from this so-called 'engagement'. The pro-China business group the China-Britain Business Council is lobbying the UK government to do more business with Beijing after Brexit. The CBBC's chair, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, another former diplomat, is now head of public affairs at HSBC, which recently expressed support for China's new security law in Hong Kong.

These 'global cooperation' arguments find purchase not because of their inherent value, but because of the people that voice them. Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg's new book Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World describes just one of the vehicles for this influence operation: an organisation called the 48 Group Club founded by old UK allies of the CCP. The club organises free trips to China and promotes close links between senior communists and British elites, with a membership list that, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, includes Tony Blair, John Prescott, Michael Heseltine, Alex Salmond, Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson, the Duke of Westminster, five former UK ambassadors to Beijing and an array of business people and academics.

Matthew Henderson, an old Foreign Office hand now at the Henry Jackson Society think tank, puts it well: 'They've identified vanity, greed, a cosiness in the British establishment that they are now replicating — people who like funny academic caps and robes, people who like medals, slightly odd handshakes, guilds.' Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee, says: 'The currency for MPs isn't cash. It's ego… You get flown over first class, treated like a king, interviewed for CGTN [China Global Television Network], picked up in a limousine, put through make-up. The waiting room has got lobsters in it.'

It isn't just politicians, however. Academics are just as susceptible. British and Chinese academics regularly collaborate not just on commercially valuable technology like 5G — itself risky enough — but on research with clear military and security applications, like image recognition, drone communications, supercomputing and nuclear physics. Beijing's 'Thousand Talents Plan', a scheme for recruiting foreign scientists, draws our underfunded researchers into Beijing's orbit with prizes, junkets and grants, disguising its political or military intentions with empty rhetoric about free and open inquiry.

These projects frequently link UK universities with Chinese institutions that are intimately tied to Beijing's defence programme. Sometimes they even use British taxpayers' money to do it. Yet when I revealed these links in a Telegraph investigation with colleagues, it caused barely a ripple in academic circles. It is so widespread and so lucrative that our universities just accept it.

The sheer depth and breadth of the problem makes it seem overwhelming. Again, though, other countries have shown us where to start. In 2018, the US passed FIRRMA, a law that expanded national security grounds for blocking foreign takeovers and joint ventures involving technology transfer. And having let things slide for years, the FBI is now enforcing rules on academic funding transparency.

More broadly, the US debate is changing to reflect the fact that security and commerce cannot be separated any more. 'They're intertwined now in a way they weren't during the Cold War,' says James Lewis, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. In Beijing, this is a deliberate policy that has a name: 'military-civil fusion'.

Despite these developments, however, UK authorities still preside over shockingly lax disclosure rules for academics and have utterly failed to advise universities on suitable research partnerships with Chinese institutions. Nor is the government doing anything to protect our campuses from Chinese censorship and spying on its students.

We could also learn a lot from Australia. In 2018, Canberra passed laws defining foreign interference and criminalising covert or coercive activities. Those engaged in foreign influence must now disclose what they are up to. The legislation is a well-targeted attempt to take on the United Front. Even so, Canberra is struggling to devote enough resources to the problem.

In Britain, there is talk of similar laws. No. 10 Sinosceptics such as Munira Mirza, head of the policy unit, are pushing for action, but despite Covid and Hong Kong, Boris Johnson still struggles to believe in the extent of the threat. If he won't engage, his MPs may begin to force the matter. Bob Seely, a Tory member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has started work on a foreign lobbying act, which could take elements from US and Australian legislation. The aim is not just to take on spies, but to force the CCP's covert influence activities out of the shadows. Foreign companies or states that meet particular criteria could be made to declare who and what they are funding. Likewise, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, the toothless system for vetting business jobs for ex-officials and politicians, needs a major overhaul.

The UK must pass laws and launch investigations. But even more than that, it must recognise that the CCP does not want to co-operate or be persuaded to adopt our values. It wants to subvert and supplant. On his blog, Dominic Cummings is fond of quoting Sun Tzu, so perhaps he will recognise this wisdom: 'If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.' Britain is already losing the war. Indeed, we have barely realised we are fighting it.

spectator.co.uk/chinesewhispers - The Spectator's fortnightly podcast on everything you need to know about China.

Downfall of the Gang of Four, Beijing October 1976

BBC Radio runs a program called "Witness", in which listeners are asked to give an account of an historic event they witnessed.  This week, of course, many about the downfall of the Berlin wall, 30th anniversary being today, or hereabouts.  I sent the Beebs something about our witnessing of a huge demonstration in Beijing in October 1976, which accompanied the downfall of the Gang of Four (remember them?).  I sent the note below, and they've responded by saying they are "very interested" in the story and want to ring me later this week.  Standing by....

My parents and I were witnesses to the huge demonstration along Chang-an Boulevard and Tiananmen Square in Peking in mid October 1976. Demonstrations that welcomed the downfall of the “Gang of Four”.  And the downfall of the "G4" led to the opening up of China and the remarkable transformation of its society and place in the world.

You may recall that Mao Tse-tung (“Mao Zedong” in Pinyin) died on September 9th 1976. Immediately after his death there was a fierce battle for control of China.  The leftists wanted to keep China along the socialist path set by Mao, centrally controlled and “self-reliant” – ie, to keep it the closed society it had been till then.  These leftists were led by a group who came to be known as the Gang of Four: Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen.  Leading those against the leftists was Deng Xiaoping, who had been “purged” in April that year (the second or third of his career “purgings”).

The Gang of Four were arrested on 6th October 1976 and shortly thereafter there were national celebrations to welcome the arrest.  In Peking the major demonstration was in mid October (I can’t remember the exact date and can’t find it online).   That’s what we witnessed and took part in. 

I was new in Peking, sent there in early September 1976 by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs (Australia’s FCO), for the first of two years’ full-time study of Mandarin at the Peking Languages Institute and Peking University.  My parents were visiting us (my then wife and me).

We were staying at the Peking Hotel, which is still there and still called the “Peking” Hotel, right on Tiananmen Square.  We had rooms overlooking Chang-an Boulevard and the square to our right (immediately south-west of the hotel).

We awoke to hear sounds outside.  Opening the window, we saw crowds as far as the eye could see to east and west and filling the huge square: millions of people, by later estimates.  There were happy people waving flags, letting off firecrackers, crashing cymbals, pounding drums on flatbed trucks and tricycles.

We went outside to get a closer look.  We were warmly welcomed by the crowds, who seemed genuinely happy, even deliriously so.  We were given little paper flags to wave.  They had hand-written Chinese characters on them.  I had only just started my study, so I didn’t know what the flags said, but later we had them translated for us and they were variations on the theme of “down with the Gang of Four”, and “down with the Jiang, Zhang, Yao, Wen clique”, some with crudely drawn pictures of the “gang”, and crosses through them.

A word on “Gang of Four”, the phrase: at the time, the translation into English “Gang of four” was not immediate.  The Chinese phrase is  四人帮, (Si Ren Bang in Pinyin; “Sir wren bung” phonetically), which is literally “four person gang”, or “four person clique”, or similar.  It was some time, some days, if I recall, before the western press settled on “Gang of Four” as the preferred term, and it has, of course, now become part of English lexicon. [check out Google images for "gang of four" to see just how much there is, including a number of bands with the name].

Deng Xiaoping was officially brought back to power some two years later, though he was certainly behind the scenes in all that led up to the arrest of the G4 and the aftermath. It was Deng who set China on a new path, to lead it to its present status as a major world power and major player in the international economic scene.  There are concerns about what China terms its “peaceful rise”, but there can hardly be any argument that we’re better off with a China we have now than the one we may have had under the G4 – witness North Korea as to what happens under that type of leftist extreme isolationism.

It was Deng who settled the course of China onto a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, ie, a pragmatic China: he coined some memorable phrases: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice” (to move China away from rigid socialist ideology), “Seek truth from facts” (ditto), “To get rich is glorious” (Adam Smith would've loved him!).

For the place where I now live, Hong Kong, he came up with the famous formulation of “One country, two systems”, which paved the way for the agreement on Hong Kong with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and which has worked rather well for us since the handover in 1997.

There may be some “retrospective determinists”, who might claim that China would have gone this way in any case (ie: “this is the way China is, so this is the way it must have become”). I don’t think so.  If the G4 had prevailed, China could have proceeded along the same path it had to that time, just as North Korea has continued along its own ruinous path.  That would have been to the great cost of many hundreds of millions of people. In China alone, the World Bank has estimated that China’s economic rise has brought over 500 million people out of poverty.  It has, on any fair balance, been a stabilizing force in the recent financial crises: the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the current GFC.

What we have seen in China in the last 30+ years is unprecedented in world history.  It all started with the arrest of the Gang of Four, which was welcomed by the crowds in the streets of Peking we witnessed from our hotel window and then walked down to join, waving our flags to celebrate the downfall of the Gang, thirty three years ago.

P F Hong Kong

PS: my wife I met some 14 years ago in China. Turns out she was there at the demo too. She was a high-school student in Peking.  She remembers the day well.  They were driven to Tiananmen to take part in the demos, and though not given much info about it, knew enough of the basics to know that it was good news for China, the beginning of opening up.  Had we met that day, however, we would not have been able to talk as she knew no English then and I had only just started my Chinese.  My mother (88) is currently visiting us in Hong Kong and also remembers the day well.