As China tries to exorcise the ghosts of its traumatic past, some of the shadows just refuse to disappear. The 40th anniversary of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution hasn’t spurred the Asian giant into paroxysms of patriotic fervor. Today’s Chinese communist leaders consider the Great Helmsman 70 percent correct. As one of the darkest decades of its past, the Cultural Revolution falls in the 30 percent of Mao’s transgressions.
Stripped of its ideological sheen, the Cultural Revolution was essentially Mao’s effort to strengthen his grip on the party and the country. Amid the omnipresence of Mao’s multi-sized portraits, and the teeming millions swearing fealty each day, state atheism only masked another fervid religiosity.
Some supporters – dwindling in numbers but less so in conviction – still insist that the Cultural Revolution played a crucial role in unifying the vast and largely ungovernable country that Long Marchers took over. They are right. But at what price?
Mao unleashed an orgy of madness to eliminate political rivals and perpetuate cult following. The more insidious effects continue to be experienced in the murders of hundreds of thousands of innocent and ordinary people and the maiming, torture and displacement of countless millions others.
It must be truly difficult for post-Mao Chinese from Shenzen to Shanghai to believe that the state actually equated education with counterrevolution. The wave of ideological purification didn’t spare Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s spectacular economic miracle, whom Mao branded a capitalist-roader and purged twice. Writers, artists, teachers, journalists and freethinkers were germs society needed to immunize itself against at all costs.
Even the fiercest critics of the Chinese communist leadership concede that the country’s economic transformation would inevitably bring political change. Deng’s Four Modernizations stand as a tacit repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, although the Tiananmen Square massacre under his watch raised the specter of regression. An official Chinese repudiation is perhaps too much to expect from a leadership that still cherishes 70 percent of what Mao represented.
But the Great Helmsman continues to cast a long and troubling shadow on China from next door. The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, sandwiched between Tibet and India, has all but fallen to Maoist insurgents. By tactically allying themselves with the mainstream political parties – most of them communist – the Maoists led street protests that forced King Gyanendra last month to relinquish political powers he had seized 15 months ago.
The Maoists and the mainstream parties, now in power, are preparing for a constitutional assembly that they hope would, among other things, abolish the 238-year monarchy. With the king out of the way, the Maoists are almost certain to turn their guns on the democratic parties.
What inspires the Nepalese rebels is not China, but Nepal’s southern neighbor India, where Maoist groups are active in at least 13 of 28 states. A Maoist victory in Nepal would be a seminal event in the creation of what extreme left-wing groups in South Asia call a compact revolutionary zone. From the Philippines to Peru, Maoist groups impatient to unleash the next wave of revolution.
The growing vulnerability of India -- China’s principal Asian rival -- to Maoism should have been the least of Beijing’s worries. But the Chinese leadership is alarmed. Beijing refuses to call the Nepalese rebels Maoists, saying their violent methods gives a bad name to their departed leader. The Chinese prefer the term anti-government guerrillas – and all the disapproval it connotes. The Nepalese Maoists, for their part, denounce the Chinese communists as deviants.
The Chinese leadership recognizes the growing rural-urban economic and social divide in their own country could breed some nostalgia for the days when everyone was poor but equally so. If Maoism could still be relevant in the neighborhood, why shouldn’t it be so at home?
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