MCLC: stirring essay by Murong Xuecun (3,4,5,6)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: stirring essay by Murong Xuecun (3)
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To answer Bill Goldman's question, I quote from Wikipedia,
Totalitarianism/Difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism>:

<<a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the
social life including economy, education, art, science, private life and
morals of citizens. "The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into
the deepest reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian government
seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens ."[9]

Compared to totalitarian systems, authoritarian systems may also leave a
larger sphere for private life, lack a guiding ideology, tolerate some
pluralism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_pluralism> in social
organization, lack the power to mobilize the whole population in pursuit
of national goals, and exercise their power within relatively predictable
limits.

The difference could be summarised like this:

Authoritarian state: "Mind your own business, or we'll shoot you
"Totalitarian state: "Do what we say, or we'll shoot you">>

I roughly agree with the above and I think that the PRC was a totalitarian
state until the Reform and Opening Up, i.e. until the slogan "Enrich
yourselves!", and since then it has been turning into a one-party
capitalistic country where the communist elite tries to turn itself into
the new ruling bourgeois class without losing control of political power
as in the 1989-1991 USSR and keeping it (and the material benefits
thereof) as long as possible.

A regime whose repressive apparatus agents invite people "for tea" and
tell them "you shouldn't care about politics, just mind your own business
and try to get rich" is not totalitarian, because by saying this it admits
that it has relinquished totalitarianism's supreme cause: to own peoples'
minds. I find Murong Xuecun's reference to Orwell and his 1984 very
exaggerated for present-day China.

Costas

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From: A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
Subject: stirring essay by Murong Xuecun (4)

When the response of Costas Kouremenos begins, "With all due respect . .
.", one knows what's coming!

I read Murong's essay not as "China-bashing" but as an attempt to diagnose
an illness.  I called it 'striking' not because he enumerates the
hastening ills to which Chinese society is prey, but because he offers a
powerful hypothesis (one with illustrious antecedents) that many of those
ills stem from unaccountable power and the rapacity of a ruling class.

I especially admire the way he debunks the propaganda with which that
class justifies itself. Murong's not-quite-threefold "Go find your mother"
is a gem of which Mencken would have been proud (though the irony of
turning Kong Qingdong's obscenities against the hyper-nationalists, which
would have been especially gratifying to a Hong Kong audience, is hard to
capture in translation).  Is this what Mr. Kouremenos deplores as
"over-rhetorical"?  Aristotle said rhetoric is about "observing in any
given case the available means of persuasion."  The means chosen might be
ineffective, or the argument in whose service they are employed could be
fallacious; but rhetoric cannot be judged on a scale of more or less.

Mr. Kouremenos wishes Murong, once he decided to mention the Famine, had
rebutted the Famine-deniers with evidence instead of dismissing them as
laughable.  But, as Mr. Kouremenos acknowledges, Murong's theme is the
impact of autocracy on national psychology, and such an argument would
have been a digression.  I would point out further

a) that he has reduced the need for such argument by citing some
objections which truly are laughable ("If they didn't have rice, why
didn't they eat meat?").

b) that most of his readers will be aware that Yang Jisheng's work is
banned on the mainland.  For many Chinese, no further argument is needed.
As Damo says in Hu Fayun's _Such Is This World_,

"The fact they wouldn’t let you speak proves that what you were saying
is true. This is practically a law of the Universe."

Mr. Kouremenos makes the distinction between a totalitarian society and a
police state.  Mr. Murong used both terms in his essay (极权 and 专制),
either 
because he is gauging the cumulative impact of a history that includes
both, or because the distinction is not important for his purposes.  (It
is important for economic development, but that does not seem to be his
concern here.)  I would suggest that as a measure of political progress,
this distinction can be misleading.  For most who would earn their living
quietly, the change brought by Reform & Opening has been like night and
day; but for those with political ideas, especially doubts about the
policies of the regime or even the local administration, the distinction
is not so apparent.  Recall the experience of Yao Lifa, as reported in May
by Charles Hutzler of the AP:

"Usually there are eight people with me at school, and those eight people
have a duty: to speak and lecture me without interruption," said Yao. "One
goal is to keep me from resting. A second is to see my reaction. One
person is tasked with taking notes."

These individuals experience the police state in a totalitarian way.
Totalitarianism remains an instrument by which the regime maintains itself
in power. It is just a lot more focused than it was under Mao.

Next, _pace_ Mr. Kouremenos, there is not necessarily a contradiction
between decrying apathy and predicting a continuation of protests.  Murong
might be contrasting the behavior of the many with the behavior of the
few; or it could be that individuals feel keenly the injustices that
affect themselves and are disposed to protest them, while indifferent to
the injustices suffered by others.

Finally, I am impressed that Mr. Kouremenos manages to bring up the Aurora
shooting.  Of course, many Americans _have_ published "negative" articles
about developments in this country.  None have been suppressed.  Nor would
I dismiss them as "exaggerated" (even if, in some cases, they are).  They
are contributions to the reflection and debate by which a free society
guides itself and occasionally (and laboriously) changes direction.  It is
not a neat mechanism, but it is a valuable one.
  
The Chinese people will work out their destiny in their own way, in their
own time.  Noteworthy in this process are the contributions of those who
envision a freer society and are not afraid to point out the costs of
authoritarianism.  Some of us outside China listen to them with
fascination and great respect.

A. E. Clark

=============================================

From: Mia <mia.feng at gmail.com>
Subject: stirring essay by Murong Xuecun (5)

It is so interesting to see how Murong Xuecun conflates the current
chinese state with the state form of the socialist period and suggests a
revolt against it. His way of totalizing the past and rejecting it as a
monolithic whole is strikingly similar to what the New Cultural-May Fourth
intellectuals did.

Mia

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From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: stirring essay by Murong Xuecun (6)

If you define a totalitarian state as one that retains strict control of
_all_ aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation, or
exercises _absolute_ and centralized control over _all_ aspects of life,
China in the post-Mao era is no longer totalitarian. Maybe that's why
"In a spring 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes
Project, 87% of Chinese said they were satisfied with the way things were
going in their country."

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1945/chinese-may-not-be-ready-for-revolution

(For my part, I still find this level of satisfaction hard to believe.
Maybe the Chinese government censors so much bad news, the lǎobǎixìng
actually think things are OK.)

Han Meng