Teaching Comparative

CCP and KMT convergence

Jeremiah Jenne is a PhD candidate, who is in Beijing teaching history, doing archival research, and working on his dissertation. He blogs at Jottings from the Granite Studio as often as the Great Firewall of China permits.

I finally got around to reading his June 4th entry in which he offered an interesting historical speculation.

Mao and Chiang Kai-shek are walking down the street, and Mao says…

"Today a Google user followed this query to the Granite Studio: 'How do Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong continue to influence Taiwan and China today?'

"It’s obviously a complicated question, but it does recall a comment made by a Beijing acquaintance of mine the first time we went to the old South Bar Street and took in the spectacle of a Sanlitun Saturday night: 'This is what all of China would like if Chiang Kai-shek had won the war.'...

"If the ghosts of Mao and Chiang somehow reconciled over shots of baijiu in the afterlife and then wandered around Beijing on a rainy afternoon... what would they be thinking? What would they talk about?

"Some scholars have made the argument that post-Opening and Reform China is very much in keeping with the KMT vision of a strong one-party state administering a relatively open economy, going so far as to suggest that today’s China shares much more in common with the Nanking Decade of 1927-1937 than with the Mao years (1949-1976).

"For example, both today’s CCP and the KMT of the 1930s emphasized modernization, a strong military, and urban development at the expense of rural areas. Like the 1930s, today there is a fair amount of personal freedom and autonomy… so long as individuals don’t challenge the political leadership or threaten ’social stability,’ and as is the case today. The secret police under Chiang’s government were always ready to squash dissent in the name of ‘national unity.’

"Even the CCP’s recent ‘Harmonious Society’ campaign bears a passing resemblance to Chiang’s 'New Life Movement' in that both advocate a kind of Confucian traditionalism in the service of social stability/political loyalty along with campaigns against 'uncivilized/backwards' habits of hygiene and personal deportment.

"Moreover, a case could be made that Chinese society today is exactly what Mao was afraid would happen when he decided to ice the economic recovery plans launched by the likes of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. (Plans that Deng would revive 15 years–and one Cultural Revolution–later.)

"I can’t help but wonder if today’s China would be Mao’s nightmare come to life: A capitalist society riven with economic inequalities, foreign influence, and corruption run by a class of elitist technocrats far more concerned with what works than with ideology?"

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Labels: China, leadership, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:06 AM