Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New
York Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
, A
New Yorker at Sea,, Tales
of a Hamptons Sailor and his most recent book,
Scribble
from the Apple. For Nick's reviews, visit his
website: www.nickcatalano.n
Despite
total Western dismissal of Mao Zedong’s Revolution in
1949, objective analysis reveals several noteworthy achievements
his Marxist ideas spawned during the last half of the 20th
century. To begin with, although accompanied by tragic social
sacrifices during the period, the new regime managed to start
feeding millions of starving peasants. “Finish eating
your food,” American parents would instruct their kids
in the 1950s, “the people are starving in China.”
Not only did Marxism manage to feed 1.4 billion people but
it moved the country to the forefront of the world’s
economic successes in less than 50 years. It also eliminated
centuries old horrific autocracy (last bastion that of Chiang
Kai-shek) that buried the population with unending poverty,
and did so without using the territorial imperialism practiced
by most western countries during the 19th century. Mao preached
egalitarianism of a sort and in 1954, shortly after he came
into power; the government officially recognized 55 cultural
minorities living in the country. And just in the last decade,
leadership rekindled appreciation of ancient Confucianism
and its brilliant philosophy of moderation, justice, equanimity
and rationalism.
Visitors to China
in the modern day would marvel at the support the government
gives to hordes of artists who can live rent free in decent
housing. They would gaze in awe at the beauty of Chinese sculpture,
iconography and painting observable in hundreds of state supported
museums everywhere in the urban centers. And despite the Tiananmen
Square protests in 1989, visitors practically anywhere in
the scads of densely populated cities will constantly witness
smiling well-dressed folk contentedly strolling on prosperous
avenues occasionally revealing unarmed policemen.
Surprised? Go
there on a visit and see for yourself.
Thus, unlike the
autocratic bullying that occurred in Russia after the corrupt
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 which also promised citizens
freedom and equality, the Chinese regime begun in 1949 fulfilled
many of Marx’s ideals and aspirations.
Until now.
The
reign of Xi Jinping begun a dozen years ago is presently conducting
persecution of 11 million Uighurs ( largely Moslem adherents)
in the western province of Xinjaing that rivals any cultural
genocide since Hitler’s Holocaust. But unlike the infamous
concentration camps of WW II, Xi and his cronies have utilized
a high tech computer method of terror that baffles the imagination.
Instead of the camps run by the Nazis, Xi’s government
has erected “re-education camps” that employ horror
more subtlety. All over Xinjiang there are millions of cameras
on homes recording every movement of the Uighurs, utilizing
vast computer technology that actually monitors people growing
beards, fasting, or applying for a passport: all reasons for
classifying them as ‘suspicious.’ The government
then sends them to the camps. Even though these folk have
broken no laws, the government is holding them hostage ‘extrajudicially.’
Why is this horror
taking place? Xi’s government is focused on cultural
censure of Uighur ethnicity because they maintain there now
can be no other culture that rivals the principal Han population.
The old acceptance of 55 cultural minorities is being thrown
out. The Marxist ideals of Maoists is now being replaced by
hackneyed authoritarianism by yet another in the long line
of world dictators. Once again, as throughout human history,
the oppressed revolt against oppressors and after they gain
power become oppressors themselves. Marxist idealism has become
a sham in China -- the same ugly autocratic totalitarianism
that Mao opposed is back again.
Very little coverage
of this insidious computer Holocaust is available here in
the west. Last summer HBO’s John Oliver devoted a program
exposing some of the terror. In his videos we see a tearful
factory worker describing the policy of a maximum 2-minute
bathroom break and being given an electric shock because she
took more than the allotted time in the toilet. We see an
interview with the CEO of Volkswagen who when told that his
products from China were made by forced labour in Xinjiang
denied that he knew anything about this. Oliver names other
companies including Nike who obtain products also made by
Uighur forced labour. Thus, western capitalism is complicit
in this injustice in a way similar to the deals Krupp Steel
made with Hitler. We see reports of forced sterilizations,
and abortions forced on Uighur women as Xi’s Strike
Hard campaign of 2014 intensified government persecutions
with more ghastly methods.
A few weeks ago
New Yorker writer Raffi Khachadourian reported the story of
a young woman - - Anar Sabit -- who had immigrated from Xinjiang
to Canada in 2014. When she went back home to visit her family
she underwent delays, forced inhuman captivity, bureaucratic
skullduggery, and myriad technologically engineered surveillances
preventing her return to the West. After almost two years
of criminal government torment she finally escaped. During
this time China developed a surveillance facial recognition
camera system called Sharp Eyes with some half a billion units
recording every conceivable human activity including the amount
of toilet paper used by patrons in public places that could
exceed no more than seventy centimeters . . . or else. In
the same period that Sabit had been confined some 16 thousand
mosques and minarets were destroyed as efforts to totally
eliminate the Uighur culture heightened.
In this writing
I have not scratched the surface of the repugnant terrors
of the Chinese noted by both Oliver and Khachadourian in their
reporting.
What is most insidious
about this terror in Xinjiang is that it goes beyond Hitler’s
‘industrial genocide’ employing new technological
methods of torture. And the most cynical irony is inherent
in the new implementation of ‘colonialism’-- the
very institution that Mao Zedong’s revolution sought
to extinguish.
