安土重遷

 安土重遷

兔死狗烹

一抔黃土

蒸蒸日上

人間蒸發

真槍實彈

放聲大哭

乃 (迺 廼)

 1. a fi

此乃中国特产。

產

失敗乃成功之母。

2. asadar

因山勢高峻，乃在山腰休息片時。

o clipa

3. doar atunci

今乃知之。

4. al dumneavoastra

乃父

Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution

 

Beginning in the 1920s thousands of Chinese revolutionaries set out for Soviet Russia. Once there, they studied Russian language and experienced Soviet communism, but many also fell in love, got married, or had children. In this they were similar to other people from all over the world who were enchanted by the Russian Revolution and lured to Moscow by it.
The Chinese who traveled to live and study in Moscow in a steady stream over the course of decades were a key human interface between the two revolutions, and their stories show the emotional investment backing ideological, economic, and political change. They embodied an attraction strong enough to be felt by young people in their provincial hometowns, strong enough to pull them across Siberia to a place that had previously held no interest at all. After the Revolution, the Chinese went home, fought a war, and then, in the 1950s, carried out a revolution that was and still is the Soviet Union's most geopolitically significant legacy. They also sent their children to study in Moscow and passed on their affinities to millions of Chinese, who read Russia's novels, watched its movies, and learned its songs. Russian culture was woven into the memories of an entire generation that came of age in the 1950s--a connection that has outlasted not just the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the subsequent erosion of socialist values and practices. This multi-generational personal experience has given China's relationship with Russia an emotional complexity and cultural depth that were lacking before the advent of twentieth century communism--and have survived its demise. If the Chinese eventually helped to lead a revolution that resembled Russia's in remarkable ways, it was not only because class struggle intensified in China due to international imperialism as Lenin had predicted it would, or because Bolsheviks arrived in China to ensure that it did. It was also because as young people, they had been captivated by the potential of the Russian Revolution to help them to become new people and to create a new China.
This richly crafted and narrated book uses the metaphor of a life-long romance to tell a new story about the relationship between Russia and China. These lives were marked by an emotional engagement that often took the form of a romance: love affairs, marriages, divorces, and "love children," but also inspiring revolutionary passion. Elizabeth McGuire offers an alternative to the metaphors of brotherhood or friendship more commonly used to describe international socialism. She presents an alternate narrative on the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s by looking back to before the split to show how these two giant nations got together. And she does so on a very personal level by examining biographies of the people who experienced Sino-Soviet affairs most intimately: Chinese revolutionaries whose emotional worlds were profoundly affected by journeys to Russia and connections to its people and culture.

Sidney Rittenberg: Chairman Mao's favourite American

 As China's Communist Party marks its 90th birthday, one man has a unique perspective - an 89-year-old American ex-communist who spent 35 years in China and rubbed shoulders with Chairman Mao.

Sidney Rittenberg has lived a life usually seen only in Hollywood movies.

As a young man, he turned his back on the country of his birth, the United States, and threw in his lot with China's fledgling Communist Party.

He personally knew the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, spent time in solitary confinement after being accused of spying and, disillusioned, finally returned to America following a second stint in prison.

But the 89-year-old has never lost his love for China and its people, and now returns regularly for work and to see old friends.

As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 90th anniversary, there can be few people still living who have seen its ups and downs from such close quarters.

Born in South Carolina into a prominent family, Sidney Rittenberg came to China with US forces in 1945, at the end of World War II.

His left-wing beliefs - and China's pitiful state at that time - naturally drew him towards Mao's communist party, based in the minor inland city of Yan'an.

"The normal state of existence for way over half of the people was hunger and the communists were the only group trying to get China out of that kind of poverty," he told the BBC while visiting the home he still keeps in Beijing.

At the time China was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party. The victory of the communists was, for many, still an unlikely outcome.

In Yan'an, Mr Rittenberg worked for Xinhua, the news agency that still exists today, and regularly rubbed shoulders with the party's leaders.

He became a party member.

"If you were walking down a road and ran into Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai or whoever, it was no big deal - it was normal," he said.

"You might stop and chat - anyone might stop and chat. You didn't feel a gulf."

Hysteria

But a gulf eventually did open up between him, a foreigner, and the Chinese revolutionaries he supported.

They blamed overseas powers, such as Britain and France, for many of China's problems and so a foreigner was always likely to be viewed with suspicion.

And so it turned out. Shortly after the communists took power in 1949, Mr Rittenberg was accused of being a spy and sent to prison. He spent time in solitary confinement, and was only released in 1955.

"I felt this terrible hurt. It's like you have a sweetheart that you've been in love with for years and it's been a wonderful relationship. All of a sudden, she appears in court and accuses you of rape," he said.

But Mr Rittenberg did not lose his faith in the Chinese communists and, when Chairman Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966, the American was caught up in the hysteria of the times.

In the chaos, many were accused of political crimes at denunciation sessions that lasted for hours. The accused were often forced to wear dunce's caps and stand in painful positions.

Mr Rittenberg took part in these sessions. He said his participation was "inevitable".

"I was very enthusiastic about the prospect of building a world without classes, without war, without poverty - and it looked to me like this was what Mao was trying to do."

His verdict on Mao now? "He was a great historical leader and a great historical criminal - very few have reached this status in both of those aspects."

Renewal

Eventually the Cultural Revolution turned on many of its fiercest advocates and, like many others, Mr Rittenberg was sent to prison again - as an "enemy" of the party.

Disenchanted with communism, on his release he decided to leave China for good with his Chinese wife and four children.

It was 1980 and he was about to start a new life as a consultant advising companies that wanted to do business in China, from a base across the Pacific Ocean, in Washington state.

At about the same time, China's Communist Party was also starting again. Under Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, it ditched many of the former chairman's ideas and principles.

In Mr Rittenberg's view, the new top leader saved the party, but changed it in such a way as to make it unrecognisable.

He said it might have to change again if it is to survive.

"We'll get to certain point where people will no longer be willing to have an advanced market economy and a backward political system," he said.

Sidney Rittenberg was born just a few weeks after the Chinese Communist Party held its first congress in Shanghai in 1921 and so, like the party, he will soon celebrate his 90th birthday.

And like the party, he is not thinking of retiring just yet - he is still too passionate about the country he adopted more than six decades ago.

Mao Zedong remembered: China's multi-faceted deep-thinking leader?

 

US citizen Sidney Rittenberg spent 35 years in China at a time of momentous upheaval, personally befriending Mao Zedong and other veteran Chinese revolutionary leaders as they seized power from the Kuomintang from 1945 onwards. Here he reveals his unique perspective on the civil war, the early days of Communism and Mao's philosophy.

Like everything else in China, Mao's role today is a study in paradox. He is both more and less than the ginormous portrait that dominates the centre of Beijing's Tiananmen Square - and which will not be coming down anytime soon.

More, because Mao is the George Washington figure, the founder of the People's Republic of China, the great unifier of his ancient, far-flung and multifarious people.

Less, because Chinese youth today, including young Party members, typically know nothing about his writings, his doctrine, his great successes and monstrous errors.

Xi Jinping and his new leading team have warned that Soviet-style de-Maoification could lead to great confusion and weakening of the present regime - a regime whose stability they consider essential for leading China down the thorny path of reform.

At the same time, they make no bones about the catastrophic latter-day Maoist adventures like the "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s and the (anti-) Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Those megalomaniacal social experiments cost tens of millions of innocent lives.

Unlike Stalin, Mao sentenced no-one and certainly did not intend to create a terrible famine.

But he did know full well that he was engaged in huge social experiments, which disrupted the lives of multitudes - and that he himself was not sure what the outcome would be.

He confessed as much to the left-wing American writer Anna Louise Strong in 1958, when she was about to write a book acclaiming Mao's Great Leap Forward.

"Wait another five years before you write it," he told her, explaining that he was not sure yet what the outcome would be.

So is Xi reviving Maoism? Or, was disgraced former party boss in Chongqing, Bo Xilai?

The answer is "No", in both cases.

Bo was simply using demagogic egalitarian slogans to catch the fancy of the poor.

As for Xi, his reform policies run directly counter to Maoist economics, but he makes adroit use of Maoist dialectic logic to analyse China's problems and their putative solutions, and he argues for acknowledging the positive achievements of Mao's leadership.

Which leads us to the really interesting point - almost universally overlooked by Western scholars, with a few honourable exceptions, like Cambridge's Peter Nolan: Mao's analytic/synthetic philosophy is China's genuine secret weapon, although much neglected even in China today.

Take the scene when I arrived in China, September 1945.

Two rival parties, Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalists and Chinese Communists, were drawing up their armed forces, preparing to contend for power in a bloody civil war.

On the Nationalist side were well-fed, well-trained troops with air support, tank divisions, heavy artillery, motorised transportation - and out-numbering the Communists manyfold.

They controlled all major lines of communication, all major cities outside of Manchuria. They enjoyed enormous support in arms and money from the USA. Their superiority seemed absolute.

On the Communist side? In November 1946 I hiked 40km (miles) out from Yanan to meet the Communists' crack 359th Brigade, whose commander, Wang Zhen, was a friend.

The 359th had been on the legendary Long March and had forged a path all the way to southern Guangdong Province to support the building of an American airbase there in World War Two.

Meeting them as they marched towards Yanan, I was appalled by what I saw.

They were a rag-tag and bob-tailed crowd. Most of them looked like teenagers.

A few in each squad wore baste shoes, most tramped along in self-woven grass sandals. Of the 10 men in a squad, five or six would have captured Japanese rifles; the rest carried knotty clubs or red-tasseled spears.

My heart sank at the sight: How could they possibly win?

et, they did win, and quite handily at that. Why? Because of a superior, more scientific way of thinking, which led to ingenious and highly popular policies (like land reform) and to versatile tactics that clobbered the stodgy KMT officer corps.

Mao always described himself to visitors as a "primary school teacher". He was, in fact, probably the largest-scale teacher of philosophy in human history. Among his main tenets were:

• Seek truth from facts. Investigate and study the facts on your specific task or locality, and base your policy and actions on that. Do not start from preconceived "truth" and amass the facts to prove yourself right, neglecting facts that cast doubt on your conclusions. In 1947 I translated a set of 40 Articles on how to carry out the land reform. Article 40 was written personally by Mao, with his big wolf-hair writing brush. It said, if any land reform workers disagree with the 40 Articles, and want to sabotage them, the most effective means of sabotage is to carry them out in your village exactly as they are written here. Do not study your local circumstances, do not adapt the decisions to local needs, do not change a thing - and they will surely fail. "No investigation, no right to speak," said Mao.

• "One divides into two." Everything is many-sided, everything is in flux, nothing is pure and simple. Not analysing, not probing, assuming that "what you see is what you get" is a recipe for over-simplification and disaster. A KMT commander may be bitterly anti-Communist, but his co-ed daughter may be in the student movement and able to influence him, he may be seriously disgruntled with Chiang Kai-Shek, his secretary may be a secret Communist, He is a complex, many-sided man. Find his buttons, and push them.

• The enemy far out-numbers and out-guns you? Then, only fight him in small increments, in local situations where you out-number and out-advantage him - never fight when victory is not certain. Your overall strategic position at the beginning is defensive, but each individual battle must be offensive, in order to change the balance of forces and win the war.

• The Mass Line "From the masses and to the masses". The leading team should be a processing plant, gathering data on the needs and demands of people at the grass roots, formulating policies to meet those needs, returning to the grassroots to monitor the implementation of the decisions, and making the appropriate revisions. This should be a continuous "down-up-down" process of leadership. Restoring attention to this process has been a major effort of the Xi Jinping team.

Historians in China and abroad will continue to study Mao's role for centuries, but this multi-talented figure with the great good and great bad he gave rise to, is not likely to be cast aside by the Chinese people.

Political slogans of Chinese Communism

Let 100 flowers bloom (百花齐放) 1956

Dare to think, dare to act (敢想敢干) 1958

Smash the four olds (破四旧) 1966

4. Smash the gang of four (打倒四人帮) 1976

Reform and opening up (改革开放) 1978

Seek truth from facts (实事求是) 1978

"Seek truth from facts" is a good example. The phrase was deployed by Mao, possibly in the 1930s, so the new leadership could reuse it and claim legitimacy.

"Only if we emancipate our minds, seek truth from facts, proceed from reality in everything and integrate theory with practice, can we carry out our socialist modernisation programme smoothly," Deng said in a 1978 speech.

Dr Altehenger says it is a broad concept and presumes that there is an objective truth. In reality, whoever is running the show can dictate its meaning.

Have fewer children, raise more pigs (少生孩子多养猪) 1979

More graphic slogans have included: "Induce labour! Abortion! Anything but an excess baby", "If one family has an excess baby, the whole village will be sterilised" and "One more baby means one more tomb".

Three supremes (三个至上) 2007

It might sound like a Motown group, but in Hu Jintao's mind it was a way of controlling an increasingly reform-minded judiciary.

"In their work, the grand judges and grand procurators shall always regard as supreme the party's cause, the people's interest, and the constitution and law," he said.

Mr Hu effectively shut down the discussion of legal reforms by appointing as Supreme Court president Wang Shengjun, an apparatchik with no legal training.

Mr Wang set about making sure the courts obeyed the three supremes doctrine. Since then, the interests of the party have reigned supreme over the other two supremes.