I was switching from television station to television station when I came upon a show (on “Sky 3”) called Riverdance In China.
OK, I thought, a group of athletic Irish people dancing in China – I will see what the show is like.
And then an Irish women’s voice said something close to the following:
“The Chinese Emperors tyrannically isolated the country from the outside world, but in the first years of the 20th century the Communists under Chairman Mao overthrow the Emperors and the lives of hundreds of millions of people gradually improved…”
Perhaps it got better after this, but I do not know because I turned it off.
Well once the Emperors of China may indeed have isolated China from the outside world, but that certainly was not true in the “early years of the 20th century”, when one could, for example, buy Chinese railway bonds on all the major exchanges of the world.
The Chinese Communists did not overthrow the Emperors – the Chinese Communist Party did not even exist in 1911 when Sun Yat-Sen (and his protégé, Chiang Kai Shek) overthrew the Qing Dynasty.
And as for the life of the Chinese people gradually improving under the Communists, in reality tens of millions of them starved to death during the collectivist ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the rest of it. About 60 million people were murdered under Mao, so perhaps ‘gradually improved’ might not have been the most appropriate choice of words.
Also even the most statist Emperor never demanded that people make steel in their back yards (you can guess what this steel was like) or launched a campaign to exterminate birds in the demented hope that it would improve the harvest (surprise, surprise, there was a plague of insects).
Perhaps the show introduction was, unintentionally, amusing for people who have read books like Mao: The Untold Story, but remember – a lot of young people (and not so young people) get what knowledge of the world they have from sources like the introduction to this show, which is a great pity.
It did get a little better after that bit (it was politely critical of Mao, calling him a ‘dictator’ (rather than one of the greatest mass murders in history)) but you are right that the statement you fairly accurately paraphrased is a gross historical clanger.
I’m reading “Mao, The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang right now. It makes for a, shall we say, somewhat different story than what the Chinese government claims.
It’s actually quite a good documentary but yeah, that remark was like a large steaming turd in the middle of their dance floor. But damn, that lead female dancer has great legs.
Feckin Irish eejits – still got bees in their bonnets about the 800 years of oppression under the English etc etc.
The key thing to remember is penetration – more folk will likely watch Riverdance on TV and hear what they have to say about Chinese history than watch a docu-drama dedicated to that subject.
The Chinese government is very alert to how others are allowed to see it. You can bet that script-approval was part of the conditions for filming, officially or unofficially. “Step out of line and your very expensive stage-show will have to close early ‘for lack of public interest’,” is liable to be quite a persuasive line.
Expect much more of this sort of thing in the run-up to the Bejing Olympics.
Perry,
I’m not sure that “dictator” is regarded as a pejorative term in the PRC, or for that matter in most parts of the world.
‘Strong leaders’ are widely approved of, even in nominally liberal countries. Many people prefer the secure feeling that they know to whom they are subordinated. Personal autonomy and negotiable lives do not figure. There’s anxiety associated with uncertainty about who is in charge.
Which is why in even in established democracies a ‘disunited’ party loses popularity, and the most common criticism of politics is that politicians are always arguing and should get together to agree what is good for the country.
Paul,
You’ve left me with little to say. I was going to mention the tale of how China became the world’s largest producer of (useless) iron or the war on spuggies but you’d already included it. For homicidal idiocy on the grand-scale you need a Mao. Alas for Mugarbage, he only has little Zimbabwe…
But maybe the lives of the Chinese have improved “gradually” under Communism. Mao slaughtered folk by the truck-load, now they merely do it by the van-load. That’s progress!
I would like all of you to do what you can to support Falun Gong. Oh, the beliefs are daft as a brush but they are by no means harmful and they are viciously oppressed by the ChiComs just for being different. How can an empire tolerate a new religion it doesn’t understand?
1. I didn’t find it amusing at all, quite the contrary.
2. It is a problem that a lot of young people don’t know anything about these things, but I guess that’s just the way it is and always will be. Incentives and all that.
If it’s any consolation to Paul Marks, some young people like myself do try to get most of their knowledge from more reliable sources than television-shows.
3. When talking about China’s history in the 20th century, I have to mention Jung Chang’s other great achievement in passing as well: Wild Swans.
“Feckin Irish eejits – still got bees in their bonnets about the 800 years of oppression under the English etc etc.”
Closer to 900 actually. And no, no bees in the bonnets regarding such, we’re more concerned now about German attempts to higher out corporate tax rates and thus lower our citizens spending power, which aren’t all that bad considering we never had a huge empire to feed off.
There was once a time when Media people studied real subjects at university. Subjects like English and history and philosophy. These people might still have been raving lefties, but at least they were not ignorant across all those topics which civilised individuals learn. These days though? The best course of entry is dross like Media studies, a worthless course which eliminates all worthwhile content while teaching how to edit a film in order to mislead the viewer.
What do you expect from these people? Informed opinion?
Give me a break.
Chris,
I don’t think you understand “media studies” if you think it imparts the technical skills to edit anything. Britain, last I heard (it was a few years back) now produces 4 times more media studies graduates than physics graduates.
Now who would you rather be stranded on a desert island with? Someone who had a fightin’ chance of getting the radio to work or someone who could deconstruct whatever came over it.
I thought the rot set into the academy with sociology. Let’s face it people. Of the “social” sciences there’s the reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits and there is wank. Pure, unadulterated, knuckle-shuffling, chucking your load into a crisp packet, toss-pottery.
Ever noticed the fall-off in uptake for the subjects like the sciences (and no, “science” is not a subject any more than…), languages (are). Why d’ya think this is the case? Is it because they is hard?
Paul,
I am mildly ashamed to have missed the rubbish you mention in the introduction. Perhaps, in my own defence, I filter out this sort of stuff without noticing.
What I did notice was the impact of Riverdance on the Chinese audience. It was exactly the same as Riverdance on that first Eurovision audience. To me Riverdance audiences are experiencing an example of the glory that people in the right circumstances can achieve.
What impression did that Chinese audience take away from the show that night in Peking? Perhaps I am just a Riverdance groupie, but I think they were being inoculated against repression.
Two comments:
1) Q:Why do universities like mathematicians?
A:Because they’re cheap. They only need pencils, paper and a waste paper basket.
Q:Why do they like sociologists even more?
A: Because they don’t need the waste paper basket.
2)This (the Riverdance intro) is to how to do indoctrination well. To succeed, indoctrination happens while the subject is paying attention to something else. Hence the success of indoctrination in British schools.
I’m pretty sue there were emperors who were almost as daft as Mao(Qin Shi Huang and his mass purges of scholars and books comes to mind), but Mao certainly ranks up there in the genocide listings.
Strangely enough, the chinese themselves are pretty aware of what Mao did, but most of those I’ve met have never summoned up enough hatred to spit on his name.
TWG
Of course it was not just Mao (although he added his own demented touches) it was Marxism in general.
Perry is clearly more tolerant than I am (which, I admit, is not a difficult thing to be) – I could not keep watching after the bit I heard (and therefore missed a good show – my loss).
WalterBoswell – well I could please you by saying that my Mother’s family were Catholic Irish (the Powers), but then you might ask whose side my grandfather was on (and that might annoy you).
As you know Irish history is a lot more complicated that most people think and has been ever since Strongbow came over in the 1160’s, and then Henry II came in to impose the Roman Catholic faith (with clerical celibacy and so on).
I have a fantasy that one 12th of July the “Blue Guard” will come over from Holland (oddly enough where my father’s mother came from – he had relatives who were unlucky enough to be caught in Holland in 1940). They are one of the best known historical reenactor groups in Europe.
As you may know the historical Blue Guard were the bodyguard of William III – but were mostly Catholic (no problem, the Pope being a great enemy of Louis XIV – and James II was acting as Louis’ man).
If the Blue Guard came over just about everyone in the “island of Ireland” (north and south, Unionist and Nationalist) would be utterly confused.
This is not to deny all the evil statutes that were passed after 1690 (mostly under Queen Anne), although most of them were finally got rid of by Edmund Burke.
By the way about the only time the Empire provided more money for the U.K. government than it cost was in the late 1940’s under the Atlee government (a lot of financial tricks went on then). The idea that the Empire was a money making concern is one of those great myths that refuses to die when one hits it over the head with facts.
Good luck with keeping control of your own taxes. You would be better off out of the E.U. of course – who knows the North might join up with the South then (as it is the United Kingdom is going out of existance anyway). By the way, if your country stopped being “the Republic” (i.e. if it had the same head of state as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and so on) I think the North might join up tomorrow (Ulster Protestants do not tend to love the English – and things have changed a lot since they refused to join the “Free State” in the 1920’s).
US:
Glad to hear there is another person who does not regard lies as amusing.
A word of warning about serious sources though.
College textbooks (and college folk) can lie just as much as T.V. shows.
By the way – I agree about “Wild Swans”.
Guy Herbert:
I fear that you may well be correct about the games (and other things).
Thank you, Paul, your remarks are right on the money.
A few points—
There is a relentless and, I’m afraid I believe, intentional misrepresentation of leftist tyrannies in the history and current practice of western intelligentsia.
While it may very well be the case that this commentary was the result of simple ignorance, any presentation like this is supposed to be edited and supervised by people who have some knowledge of the facts.
Just as so often happens in the day to day media, that knowledge seems to fade away when it comes to accurately describing the malefactions of the various and deadly leftist/collectivist totalitarianisms that plagued the last century. (And, having just watched a very good documentary about the years of the Black Plague, I use that term intentionally)
Also, I would like to give a little plug to a very good book about the lesser known Asian theater of WW2, Barbara Tuchman’s “Stilwell and the American Experience in China”. (I also recommend her book about the 14th century and the plague in Europe)
It is a commentary on the true nature of devotion and attention to duty—Stilwell I mean— as it traces the career of the field commander who was considered the best general officer in the US army leading up to the war. He was the only officer Marshall called by his first name, and was allowed to reciprocate.
He was sent to China because it was the toughest assignment, and his efforts were noted by those who understood the situation, but didn’t often make the newsreels.
There is a very revealing moment near the end of the story, when the planning for the invasion of Japan and China was being done without regard for the still unknown atom bomb, and Stilwell sent a message to MacArthur volunteering to be reduced to a division commander if he would just be allowed to command US troops in combat. He was assigned an army, but the invasion never happened.
He died shortly after the war from heart problems, part of the many health issues that service in the jungles of Burma and India brought about. Marshall reportedly wept.
Nick,
Actually, the social sciences can be fine. There are some honest people doing sound work in most of them. They are seen as a soft option, because they don’t require high level mathematics, and often the answers are more sophisticated than yes/no. The problem is, this lack of hard answer is sometimes used to disguise ignorance, stubbornness and political agendas which wouldn’t last a split nanosecond if they had to be demonstrated in hard engineering; then these people are allowed to influence public policy.
Lets face it, how long would an aeronautical engineer last if his/her planes kept making like a tunneling mole? But sociologists and educationalists who design social security and education policies which are blazing disasters are allowed to keep at it for decades.
The scientists need to revolt, and take back these subjects from the politicised wackos.
More to the point, trust to the wisdom of crowds and stop making policy in these areas at all.
Chris,
From my experience it is almost invariably used as a trojan horse for a political agenda. My alma mater did a degree course in “social policy” and that was nothing but pure indoctrination. The social sciences are utter toss. The problem is that these folk have built a giant dung-heap from which they pontificate. Because they are “experts” on “society”.
My experience is that arts and science students get on fine. Yeah, the Eng Lit guy might not be much cop at complex-variables but hell’s teeth he knows old English and can tell ya about Beowulf – and there’s some very fit birds on his course. But I’m buggered if I know where in this mix the social sciences fit in. Talk to them and it’s like hearing the 6 o’clock news delivered by a raving Marxist at grotesque length. And unlike Eng Lit the birds are squat and shouty.
@Paul:
“College textbooks (and college folk) can lie just as much as T.V. shows.”
Oh, I know that very well, even if I am just a naive student. It’s only a couple of weeks ago that a Danish scholar, the historian Kristian Hvidt, was defending Lenin in public, after having published a new book. According to Hvidt, Lenin was “a great organizer” – and this he did write in the book – and he criticized the “moralizing right-wingers” for nagging him about the fact that he did not tell anyone in his book, not even in a sentence, that Lenin, well, did kill a lot of people. After having been criticized for that, he responded that he “didn’t know anything about that”.
Either he’s intentionally lying, or he is writing about things which he knows clearly nothing about. I think he’s lying, but either way…
As far as I’m concerned the validity of an argument depends neither on who nor how many people adhere to it. It’s a healthy principle.
Paul Marks: [b]ut then you might ask whose side my grandfather was on (and that might annoy you).”
So long as he was not affiliated with Riverdance then I doubt it.
veryretired: “While it may very well be the case that this commentary was the result of simple ignorance, any presentation like this is supposed to be edited and supervised by people who have some knowledge of the facts.
Just as so often happens in the day to day media, that knowledge seems to fade away when it comes to accurately describing the malefactions of the various and deadly leftist/collectivist totalitarianisms that plagued the last century.”
Below is a post from a forum I often use, it was posted by another forum user, I am sure he would not mind me pasting it in here.
——————————————–
“Propaganda is what gets left out.”–George Orwell
Anne Applebaum sees little distinction between what happened to Jews in German concentration camps and what happened to Russians or entire ethnic populations in the gulag. The thing I cryptically referred to in previous posts is the revisionist movement headed by campus Marxists, many of them Jews, that is attempting to whitewash communist atrocities in the old Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, until wikipedia took off, was the most referenced source for students in the Western Hemisphere, even ahead of Britannica. Do you have the 2004 or 2005 Encarta CD/DVD? Pull up “gulag”. There you will find the most blatant example of criminal revisionism ever to see light of day in a major encyclopedic reference source. There you will read that “about 900,000 people died in the gulag”. Adding to the sinister nature of such an entry, is the fact that Microsoft no longer publishes the names of their academic contributors; Marxist professors can print garbage like that in Encarta and remain anonymous. Meanwhile, the 2004/2005 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica CD/DVD state that “best estimates by Western academics” put the gulag’s death toll at 15-30 million.
I hounded the Encarta editorial board for six months, and finally got an admission from them that yes, the article on the modern world’s most prolific death factory needed some revising. Yet it was only after I asked Jamie Glazov, assistant editor of frontpagemagazine.com to print Microsoft’s e-mail exchange that Encarta finally broke down and agreed to change the death toll. They “revisioned” it alright. The gulag death toll in the 2006/2007 Encarta CD/DVD now stands at “about 4 million”. I guess something is better than nothing. Maybe if I keep hounding Encarta for another ten years, a future generation of kids might be able to pull up “gulag” and actually see something approaching the truth.
———————————————–
I find this to be an accurate example of what you refer to when you write “[f]ade away when it comes to accurately describing the malefactions of the various and deadly leftist/collectivist totalitarianisms that plagued the last century.”
To be fair, they do say “put an end to the Dynastic system”. Well, in a way that is true, as the Soongs took over from the Qing. As for foot-binding and other aspects, the Republicans/Nationalists did move forward in that area, but I agree that the words are subtle and disingenuous.
I’m with Nick M on this one. We share the same alma mater, albeit 20 years apart.
If you met someone in my day and they said they were doing Sociology, you’d give them a knowing smile and think to yourself “Just here for three years of sex drugs and rock n roll then mate!”
As for Media Studies, there may be a lot of courses and graduates but they sure as hell arn’t getting jobs in the media.Tesco’s perhaps. The Times no.
The Nationalists got rid of the Imperial system (after 1911) at a time when the Communist party did not even exist.
However, the Japanese did use the last Emperor as a puppet in Manchuria for awhile – so that line of defence could be used for the show (on this point).
US:
Quite so.
Keep safe “young student” – I would not like to think that your life is going to be messed up by leftist academics marking you down on political grounds.
For example, I doubt the pro Lenin gang would be happy if you mention how “War Communism” made such a mess of everything (with millions starving to death) that Lenin accepted aid organized for the people of Russia by a man called Herbert Hoover.
Not because Lenin cared about the starving of course (he had no time for petty bourgeois humanitarianism), but because his regime was weak and he wanted to save it. That was the reason that Lenin went for the New Economic Policy as well (but you may well know all of this).
Hard science people:
You know I love you all – but (you knew the “but” was comming) there have been plenty of hard science people who have talked a lot of nonsense about political economy.
I suppose the point is that when someone claims that he is an economist or an historian or what Americans call a “political science” person (and has lots of qualifications in these areas) one might expect them to know something about the subjects they claim to be experts on – too often (as you know) this is not the case (too often comming out with total nonsense is a way to get hired or promoted in the parts of universities devoted to humanities or “social sciences”).
If someone has qualifications in mathematics or some other “hard” areas, one can at least be fairly sure that they know something about their subject.
RAB,
Well, the drugs and rock and roll certainly. I somehow think the sex eluded them. Short, fat mouthy look-like-a-dyke-but aren’t birds and deeply inadequate “men” who are clearly hung like Chinese mice. The real action was when the lads of science met the lasses from arts. We’d even pretend to have read some stuff (or in my case, pretend to pretend because I actually had read it).
I once got tops and fingers on the basis of claiming to have read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. That’s a real safe one to go for with philosophy students because nobody has ever read beyond the introduction so you can busk it on the basis of a chapter from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.
Of course law and medical students get up to antics too but they tend to keep it in faculty.
The faculty of (t)arts. Why do you think I turned down Imperial?
Hey! I read beyond the introduction. But can I remember it now? Can I hell. But then, reading Kant is to modern philosophy what reading Darwin is to modern biology.
Of all the pre C20th philosophers, only Plato really struck me as being worth reading in the original. The ideas of others are far better served by secondary sources.
feed off=trade with.
Feckin’ Irish eedjet
That’s good spin right there, we should sign you up for new labour.
Before the First World War the most important export market for the United Kingdom (which then included all of Ireland) was, in spite of its import taxes, Germany.
The idea of the Empire as an outlet for exports was made popular by Edward Gibbon Wakefield in the 1830’s (his wrong headed concepts about saturated developed makets were taken up by Karl Marx). The idea was taken up in the early 20th century by the radical liberal Hobson (he even blamed the Boer War on wicked Jewish financial capital – which shows that liberal-left antisemitism goes back far before the existance of Israel) and (a few years later) by Lenin.
It is all bullshit.
“Underveloped markets” are not needed because “developed markets become saturated”. Nor are places one politically controls better markets than places that one does not politically control. As long as a local government does not steal the company or its money, it is actually better for a country to be independent (that way one does not have to pay taxes back home to support the defence of the place).
Of course after the First World War with the rise of economic nationalism in areas like Latin America (with threats of nationalization and exchange controls and so on), the Empire did start to look like a safer option for investment (but there is no evidence that companies that decided to invest in or export to Empire areas made more money that companies that invested in or exported to non Empire areas – if anything it was the other way round).
Ok, feed off was a tad unfair. How about dine with?
Yes “dine with” seems O.K. to me.
Of course some empires in history have tried to prevent their colonies trading with other nations – the Spanish tried this into the 19th century (one reason that Latin America broke away).
But this was not the British way in the modern period – perhaps because a few half hearted trade taxes had set off an explosion in the American colonies in 1776.
Indeed the British went too far the other way.
For example the Australian colonies (tiny populations) were allowed (almost encouraged) to put import taxes on British goods from the mid 19th century.
So the British Empire (even at its height) was not even a free trade zone.
Joseph Chamberlain wanted to make it a free trade zone – but he also wanted import taxes on the goods of non Empire nations (and that was not going to be accepted in the pre First World War world) and he also wanted an Imperial Parliament – and that had no more chance of being accepted than the idea of some of the friends of Pitt the Elder to give the American colonies seats in the House of Commons back in the 18th century. Parliament was never going to share power with any other body (in those pre E.U. days) and Parliament was never going to accept representation from any place outside the British Isles.
As odd as it may seem, the economic and poltiical policies of the British indicate that the people who had the biggest empire the world had ever seen did not want a great empire at all.
The question should be not “why did the British Empire fall” but “why did come into existance, and why did it last as long as it did”.
None of them would have been one of my wife’s uncles.
Born of immigrant parents in Los Angeles, he left for China in 1950 after getting his M.D., to help China rebuild after the war.
And returned here nearly 35 years later, having seen things like the Red Guards (yes, there were cases of forced cannibalism), Great Leaps Forward, the campaign against the birds, and all the rest.
Spent quite a bit of time in the contryside as a doctor of the people, playing down his training in western medicine all the while.
After his actively-Maoist wife died, their three kids grown and on their own, he came back here. Met a widowed medical school classmate from before his departure to China, and settled down for a peaceful couple of decades.
He wrote a couple of books about his experience (and they’re somewhere around here), and we talked about his time over there once in a while. He loved China, and the people there, but had nothing good whatsoever to say about the government.
The greatest mass murder of all times might actually go to Queen Victoria, for her role in causing the Opium Wars, Taiping Rebellion, and vast other numbers of rebellions worldwide, that went on for more than a century.
I know, history is written by the victors, that is why we don’t count her!