Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's an uprising there that Chiang Kai-shek's people, the nationalists repress. And it starts being from the late 1940s on, this long period of martial law on Taiwan.
And there becomes then this period where the mainland's under the control of a Leninist party, believes in one-party rule, and believes that it was a very bad period in Chinese history when China was unable to stand up to imperialists.
Taiwan's controlled by a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule, limits on participation, believes that it was a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists. What distinguishes Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Kai-shek has a personality cult, Mao has a personality cult.
They have a lot in common, but one clear thing that makes them different is Chiang Kai-shek says that what's wrong with the Communist Party is they've abandoned Chinese traditional values of Confucianism. And Mao says that the Nationalists What's really bad is they are still wedded to these traditional Chinese values of Confucianism.
So cycling back to where we began with Mao and Xi, you could actually say Xi Jinping in some ways is like living out the dream that Chiang Kai-shek had of one party rule. And also kind of celebrating Confucianism. Yeah, there's elements.
Yes. And both of them, right, they had high profile wives who were sort of celebrity figures and made a good impression globally and were more like kind of first ladies. But both Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping oversaw a period of emphasizing more traditional patriarchal values in China.
And one of the things I didn't mention before, Xi Jinping has been very, in this idea of trying to do away with difference within PRC, he's been pushing against feminists of any kinds of feminist movements.
Yeah. Yeah. In some ways. I mean, there are people who will argue for a less patriarchal Confucius, but it fits with that mode.
Then the story after 1949 with Mao is there were divisions within Mao Within the Communist Party over sort of Mao was impatient. He wanted to transform the country quickly. He had a utopian streak. He thought just as the peasantry could sort of you didn't have to stick to the traditional pattern of moving slowly to socialism and then to communism. He tried to the great leap forward was this.
disastrous policy of his that imagined China outdoing the West in a kind of quick industrialization and move like this. And it just didn't work and all kinds of things were wrong. And we'd need a whole other session to do the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But one of the simple ways to think about it is
Mao made these kind of disastrous moves and then was partially sidelined and then wanted to get back to power. And there was this struggle between people who were more gradualists, more let's try to work more kind of rationally, and the more utopian side with Mao. And both the Great Leap Forward and then later the Cultural Revolution were Mao's efforts to...
to do things dramatically, even at the risk of chaos, even at the risk of undoing a lot of the kind of slow building of state building going on. And then there were other figures who were more concerned with kind of incremental moves. And then after Mao's death, one of those figures, Deng Xiaoping, ends up being the next long-term figure
So with the Great Leap Forward, it's caused this incredible famine, just incredible devastation. One of the One of the things that happened was getting very bad information. There was a sense that there was people, officials were afraid that if they gave bad news, if they admitted that they were failing to meet these giant targets that were being set, that would be seen as a political mistake.
So it got to be a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports on what was going. So some of it was A culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. So that was one part of the dynamic. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of things that were unmoored.
When early in the Chinese Communist Party history and power, there was the connection to the Soviet Union and Mao, and Stalin had a connection. After Stalin's death, Mao was haunted by the move toward de-Stalinization and the moves by Khrushchev, and thus laid the groundwork for the Sino-Soviet split. But there was also this kind of
obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. And you have factional struggles. You have all kinds of things that are happening simultaneously.
So before Xi Jinping, there was this kind of... assessment of Mao as having been early in the early 80s of being 70% right, 30% wrong.
Yeah. But Xi Jinping has had a different way of talking about this. And he's talked about the first 30 years of the People's Republic of China and the second 30 years and says that we should not use the successes of one to criticize the other, that we need to see where we are today as...
benefiting from both those first 30 years and those second 30 years, which implicitly, or he sometimes talks about a new era, suggests that in many ways, he sees China as now in a post-reform era. We can think about a third stage, and there are people who write about it in that way. And so he clearly, there's always been a way of trying to
separate out a kind of Mao of the periods when things were not going horribly. And I think Xi Jinping would think that Mao, having managed to fight the Korean War to a standstill, which is how... how the history of that period is described in the PRC.
Showing 341–360 of 385 · page 18 of 20
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