Why China Needs Mao Today

China needs Mao.   They need the Father of Modern China.  

The Communist appeal in the 30’s had a lot to do with not just the staggering disparity of wealth but by a country run not by Beijing, but by local, brutal, ruthless chieftains whose main concern was the consolidation of their power and wealth, at the expense of the people they ruled.    These leaders were uneducated, peasants.   China from the 20’s through to the 40’s was nothing but an array of banana republics stitched together to call itself one nation.   China was a farce and weak, and given only paper respect. No one feared China.

China is not “weak” today.  It is not a farce.  It has nuclear weapons.    Countries may not “fear” China, but they are certainly “leary” of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Yet Chinese society today is very much like China in the 30’s.  Weak, in disarray, and without purpose.  Mistrust, and suspicion.   Everyone is a thief, or purported to be.  There is no unity when everyone is out for himself.  

So China needs a unifying presence.  Someone with the moral authority to kick ass and get away with it.   The only person that could do this on force of will and personality alone is Mao.

Please don’t mention Zhou En Lai.  He was too cultivated..

Deng Xiaoping….?  Nope.  In the end he depended upon his military friends just to come out of hiding in the 70’s.   He was merely first among equals.

China needs a MAN that stands above everyone else.  Uncouth, unkempt, coarse and vulgar. 

Unless China finds such a person today, it will continue down the slope of mass greed, and eternal suspicion where everyone is out for himself, and takes what he can before the implosion.

Even if China found such a MAN, what than?  The distrust of government is so steep, the population so desensitized to talk, and gestures, would he even be able to make a difference?

NO! of course not.  Such a contemporary man today would himself be too tainted to clean things up.   I honestly believe he would be removed from power before any progress was to actually happen.   Such a person would maybe last 2 years in power.

So China needs to go to one of it’s ubiquitous soothsayers, and see if any of them can bring the old man back.   Let’s assume for the fun of it they would be able to do just that. 

Than what?

First of all, the Great Helmsman would be astounded by what he sees.   They say if George Washington came back today and saw an airplane he’d promptly have a heart attack.

Mao would at first be utterly impressed with the undeniable progress of China, amongst the world’s nations.   He would marvel at the glass and steel, the traffic jams and the large airports.  In his time, China was a bicycle nation, and nobody ever rode an airplane, much less saw one flying.

It goes without saying he wouldn’t like the quality of the air.

The Great One would be amazed at the condition of the roads, and the quality of housing, even in the countryside.    He wouldn’t be fazed by the poverty in the countryside either.   Far more people have a bowl of rice today than in his time, and famines are unheard of today. 

If Mao were to come back from the land of Marx, and just walk around for a few days,  his joy and pride in the progress of the motherland would surely turn to anger, disillusionment and than rage.

In Mao’s day there really never was a vacuum of morality.  Everyone believed in the Party.  The Party was Big Brother, and joining the Party a priviledge.   It was not a means to an end, ie a better apartment, or a means to more easily moving money abroad.  It was a serious responsibility to be a Party member than.   To many people, you were the ombudsman of your village.   People actually came to you to settle disputes.  The authority of Mao was a halo above your head. 

Today Mao would see the opposite.    He would see people becoming party members as a conspiratorial way to enrich themselves.   Using their status as leverage to send their children abroad.  Using their party card as a way to ensure they received a cut of every investment deal that went down.

Than he would see the KTV’s, this form of prostitution with Chinese characteristics.   He would wonder how these came about. 

He would stroll through Macau, and wonder why so many mainland officials are there, and oh my, how they have so much money!

He wouldn’t be upset at the quality of the food.  The food quality was bad than, too.  Nor the supposed shoddiness of the consumer products being produced.   He would even be impressed with the health system.  

No, what would set Mao off would be the utter wealth of the CCP elite.   Once upon a time obscene wealth, legally gotten or not, was seen as a scourge of the West, and something China could live without.  It was better to keep China down you see, and poor, than allow the reemergence of a “landowner” class.  

It’s ironic that until the 80’s the CCP leadership did more to keep China down and underachieving than any country ever did.   But they were on to something.   Unleashing the natural instincts and business acumen of the Chinese people would bring rise to a prosperous class of the population that would someday challenge the power of the CCP within China.  Hadn’t the Chinese migrated to neighboring countries and in no time promptly dominated those economies(see Malay, Indonesia, and the Philippines)?  Better to simply bar people from becoming rich!

The outside world likes to say we need a “strong prosperous, China!”.   Or…

”Only a wealthy China can feel content to join the club of nations”.

But what people don’t understand is that minus the controls and checks and balances a properly capitalist and free economy places on a growing society, that country will only grow in a wild and unpredictable nature.   Corruption will go unchecked. ( A Frankenstein economy will ensue, where a promising experiment goes wrong).  Abuses will permeate the system, as it does now.

However what the white guys in the suits meant was that we need a “strong, prosperous, China, where everyone shares in the prosperity and wealth”. 

Only than can China be “normal”, and successfully join the club of nations.   And that is not what we have now.    And that is why China is more a risk to itself, and to others rich, than it may have been poor.

And that’s why a wealthy China is scary.   Wealthy does not strong, and viable a country make, if only a few share in the spoils.

No…wealth was a bad thing.  It may be great for the individual Chinese, but for the survival of the country as a whole it can be terrible if not properly managed, and kept in check.   And while the country today is infinitely better off today than it was in the time of Mao, as a whole, the country than was far more unified, and less of a threat to the community.   There was never a real threat of implosion, as there increasingly seems to be today, even when compared to the Cultural Revolution. 

So if Mao were alive today he would start another cultural revolution, a class war, and it would be wildly supported by the masses.   In China people think “if I can’t have what my neighbor has, than I want him to be as poor as me”.   Problem is the wildly, corrupt wealthy would simply be too numerous to count.   The ill begotten gains of the Party Elite too numerous to account for.  There would be an exodus unlike anything we’ve seen.   Both the corrupt and wealthy would flee en masse, with their new found green cards and passports.  They’ve prepared for this you see, for a long time.  Their money is already overseas.   Their children are gone.  These are the same people that prop up real estate values in half of the subdivisions in America today.  

That mysterious family that suddenly arrives from Canada and says “we’re in business” when asked their story. Speaking of which, housing prices in China would go off a cliff, wiping out the paper wealth of tens of millions of Chinese. 

No matter.  This would only make housing more affordable, for all.   Yet the gap between rich and poor would disappear overnight.    Only the poor and middle class would remain.   As for the party membership, purges and executions would have a violent pace.   Dunce caps would come out of the closet, and property developers and those few industrialists remaining would wear them.

China would be a nation of one again.   Only those without money enough or connections would remain.   Everyone would look around and see how everyone is like them, and China would again become a nation content with itself.