An Interesting Interpretation of China

Here is a bit from an interesting American blogger who is a historian of China: Jeremiah Jenne if a PhD student currently in China where he runs the Chinese history site Jottings from the Granite Studio, has written for the China Beat and the online edition of the Atlantic Monthly. In this posting he compares the Chinese Communist party to the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising sitcom Mad Men:

Two things happened this summer. The CCP celebrated its 90th anniversary and Mad Men decided to take the year off. The truth is, the world’s longest running Communist government has a lot in common with an American show celebrating naked capitalism and martinis. Mad Men is about that moment in US history when the American dream was being invented and promoted by Madison Avenue. They convinced us that if we just bought the right car and had the house with the yard and drank the right soda then “everything was going to be okay.”[1] The CCP uses basically the same message. Stick with us and you’ll get what you want…the house, the car, kids in college. Forget about what happened before, it’s irrelevant. The story is anything we want it to be. Think about the present, the future, and the fear that you have over losing everything you worked for by dredging up unpleasant truths from the past.

You have to figure too that Mao and Don Draper are both chain-smoking misogynistic misanthropes with shady pasts who rose to prominence by being good ideas men and not a little bit ruthless. Politics aside, I bet they could have hung a bit.

So with that, and out of withdrawal for my usual summer guilty television pleasure, I present the Mad Men guide to 90 years of the CCP.[2]

...

If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.

There’s little difference between the advertising industry and the Communist propaganda machine. They’re just selling different products. For 90 years the CCP has survived by training a steady fire hose of bullshit at its supporters and convincing those same supporters that it’s all just chocolate pudding with Chinese characteristics. And they’ve gotten better at it over time. Sure there are stumbles still, but the propaganda department in 2011 is, generally speaking, a pretty slick operation. Why block the New York Times or CNN when you can simply convince people that it’s all just the jealous rantings of bitter anti-China white people? The CCP and its apologists are masters at the strategy of “Hey, look over there…don’t look here.” Human rights in China? Hey, buddy, where’s our apology for the Opium War? Even the 90th anniversary is an exercise in misdirection. 90 is a decent round number, and the CCP never misses a chance to flaunt themselves in public such that even Eric Weiner is embarrassed for them, but I also firmly believe that part of the motivation is to reclaim this anniversary year for the Party and its origin mythology rather than turn it over to the more historically ambiguous and politically tricky centenary of the 1911 Wuhan Uprising.

...

I have ideas. I’m sure you do. Sterling Cooper has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.

Ideas matter, but not all ideas are created equal especially when the CCP has a say in the matter. During the 1930s and 1940s, the CCP managed to convince a whole generation of left-leaning patriotic Chinese that the the Party had their interests at heart. Of course, it turned out that it was this same group of intellectuals – people who like to, you know, ask questions and stuff – who ended up taking the fall after the Communists took over and especially during the 100 Flowers/Anti-Rightist era of the late 1950s. Frankly, I’ve always wondered if the CCP leadership – many of whom had aspirations as philosophers/writers/poets/thinkers – just weren’t pissed off that other people had actual talent. Jiang Qing was particularly notorious for taking out her frustrations on the artistic community by making them sing her shitty operas, but I’m guessing she wasn’t the only bitter failed artist in the bunch willing to take revenge on the more talented.

But that’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.

Liu Shaoqi was a good communist. He wrote a famous essay called “How to be a Good Communist.” He, along with Zhou Enlai, functioned as the Party’s designated grown-ups, even taking the keys away from Mao for a brief period in the early 1960s. Too bad Mao was a vindictive son of a bitch. Within three years, Liu went from being the President of China to dying of cancer, naked and alone, in an unheated prison tool shed.

...

It wasn’t a lie, it was ineptitude with insufficient cover.

Which brings me back to history. The key to the Party’s hold on power is to keep control of its own story. I’ve used this quotation before, but on a day when my television is an endless loop of self-congratulatory propagandistic bullshit, it is worth repeating George Orwell’s famous dictum that ‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’ The party is afraid of many things, but most of all it is afraid of losing control of its own past. The recent multi-volume History of the CPC reads like an inoculation: rather than ignore dark moments in the Party’s history, traumatic events are papered over with passive grammar and a banal platitudes. Mistakes were made. Enemies were among us. Shit happened.[8]

It’s getting harder and harder for the Party to lie, to simply make things up and hope to get away with it. But at the same time, they are getting smarter about how they go about massaging the past, augmenting the mythology with modern media, and working overtime to avoid any counter-programming or competing messages. But that’s what it has to do if it wants to stay in power for another 90 years.

Go read the whole post. You have to go to the original post to get the embedded links.

I get a chuckle out of this posting. I'm puzzled why Jeremiah Jenne doesn't see Mao as a monster. If you read Mao: The Unknown Story you get an excellent inside view of Mao and the horrors he brought upon the Chinese people. From Wikipedia:

Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) written by the husband and wife team of writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, and depicts Mao as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

In conducting their research for the book over the course of a decade, the authors interviewed hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life, used recently published memoirs from Chinese political figures, and explored newly opened archives in China and Russia. Chang herself lived through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, which she described in her earlier book, Wild Swans.

The book quickly became a best-seller in Europe and North America and received overwhelming praise from reviews in national newspapers. Academic reviews from China specialists were, on the whole, far more critical.

Wow... hard to believe that the Chinese "specialists" didn't find this book to be definitive. I guess they were afraid of getting the Ai Weiwei treatment (and this).