Happy birthday Grandpa Mao

[DoomYoshi]

In 1937, John F. Kennedy traveled Germany and wrote

Fascism? The right thing for Germany. .  .  . What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?

His fellow Harvard grad wrote (to his aunt):

Hitler, is as perfect an idealist as he could be. His intentions for Germany are even finer than I had imagined. Surely with his leadership Germany may recover from the terrible wrongs done by avaricious powers at Versailles. .  .  . And the Nazis are not violent to the Jews. What we read in our papers was all exaggeration and tabloid falsification of the worst sort. Violence was done only to Communists, no-goods of the worst sort.

If Hitler had stuck to killing the CCP, he would probably be an American hero.

[DaGip]

http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=5285

Looks more like an obesity map (which would naturally correlate with breast size, but not in any desirable way).

What was the Honorable Chairman's breast size?

[Dukasaur]

Do you consider the people who died during the Great Leap Forward to have been 'murdered by Mao'?

Yes, we've discussed this before.

I don't think we need to rehash the whole conversation. Basically, during the GLF, food was pillaged from regions where Mao wasn't very popular, like the Upper Yangtze, and shipped off to the major coastal cities where communist support was strong.

You tried to dismiss this as bureaucratic mistakes, but your position is absurd. Even someone as stupid as a communist party bureaucrat can't fail to notice that there is a causative relationship between pillaging all the food in a province and mass starvation. Essentially, it was a premeditated act of murder against 30 million people in provinces where support for the communist party was weak.

It was the collectivist ethics of communism in the purest form. "Amputate" any "limbs" (provinces) that aren't "part of the body" (completely subservient to the dictator) and let them die.

There were plenty of absurdities like taking agricultural land out of production and forcing farmers to try to cook pig iron in home-made kilns. I don't honestly know to what degree those were bureaucratic stupidity, and to what degree they were deliberate and cynical attempts to destroy the rural economy. Most likely a blend of both. Still, even if it was 90% stupidity and only 10% deliberate, it's still mass murder.

[_sabotage_]

During the civil war, the Gung Ho company lead by a Jewish Kiwi Rewi Alley.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_ ... operatives

Their small scale mobile production capabilities greatly enabled the communist party. It was this concept which lead to the belief in small scale localized industrialization.

[AndyDufresne]

This thread is now about Japan:

Inside One of Japan's Oldest Restaurants

Honke Owariya was established in 1465. The restaurant started out making confectionery, but its noodles proved more popular. According to Deep Kyoto, Honke Owariya has been making soba for "only" the past three or four hundred years. Those with a sweet tooth will be happy to know that it still makes desserts.

"Soba" noodles are made with buckwheat flour and wheat flour. They can be eaten hot or cold, depending on the season. Japan Travel reports that the restaurant uses the "freshest" Kyoto spring well water to make its delicious soup broth.

This is the noodle restaurant that the Japanese imperial family eats at when it returns to Kyoto from Tokyo. Bowls of hot soba start at 756 yen. You can see the restaurant's menu in English right here.

--Andy

[mrswdk]

Do you consider the people who died during the Great Leap Forward to have been 'murdered by Mao'?

Yes, we've discussed this before.

I don't think we need to rehash the whole conversation. Basically, during the GLF, food was pillaged from regions where Mao wasn't very popular, like the Upper Yangtze, and shipped off to the major coastal cities where communist support was strong.

You tried to dismiss this as bureaucratic mistakes, but your position is absurd. Even someone as stupid as a communist party bureaucrat can't fail to notice that there is a causative relationship between pillaging all the food in a province and mass starvation. Essentially, it was a premeditated act of murder against 30 million people in provinces where support for the communist party was weak.

It was the collectivist ethics of communism in the purest form. "Amputate" any "limbs" (provinces) that aren't "part of the body" (completely subservient to the dictator) and let them die.

There were plenty of absurdities like taking agricultural land out of production and forcing farmers to try to cook pig iron in home-made kilns. I don't honestly know to what degree those were bureaucratic stupidity, and to what degree they were deliberate and cynical attempts to destroy the rural economy. Most likely a blend of both. Still, even if it was 90% stupidity and only 10% deliberate, it's still mass murder.

1 - you are completely confusing correlation with causation. Perhaps those regions had weaker support for Mao due to the food shortages they experienced during the GLF. Does that not seem more likely than Mao deliberately starving his agricultural workforce?

2 - you assume that the leadership was aware of the food shortages, which is dumb given that I have already pointed out to you in the past that local officials deliberately covered up shortages to give the impression that their regions were performing well. The main reason the GLF was abandoned after 3 years was that the central government had by that point become aware of how badly the rural population was being blitzed in some areas and therefore realized that the GLF wasn't working out.

[betiko]

Japanese have great taste. everything is with pure lines, sober and efficient. Evverything about their culture is like that,even their food. Everything is meant to be simple but is at the same time very hard to do and to master because nothing is as simple as it looks.
Chinese have tastes pretty much as horrible as middle eastern. While middle easterns put gold everywhere, chinese put red and plastic everywhere; but they love all that is tacky just as much. Chinese people have no class, while japanese are probably the classiest people on earth.
It just sucks to be chinese dude.

[mrswdk]

Japanese have great taste. everything is with pure lines, sober and efficient. Evverything about their culture is like that,even their food. Everything is meant to be simple but is at the same time very hard to do and to master because nothing is as simple as it looks.
Chinese have tastes pretty much as horrible as middle eastern. While middle easterns put gold everywhere, chinese put red and plastic everywhere; but they love all that is tacky just as much. Chinese people have no class, while japanese are probably the classiest people on earth.
It just sucks to be chinese dude.

Which parts of China have you visited?

[betiko]

Japanese have great taste. everything is with pure lines, sober and efficient. Evverything about their culture is like that,even their food. Everything is meant to be simple but is at the same time very hard to do and to master because nothing is as simple as it looks.
Chinese have tastes pretty much as horrible as middle eastern. While middle easterns put gold everywhere, chinese put red and plastic everywhere; but they love all that is tacky just as much. Chinese people have no class, while japanese are probably the classiest people on earth.
It just sucks to be chinese dude.

Which parts of China have you visited?

Just the back door while I was pulling her hair and slapping her face. I think it was just her stage name, not sure she was even asian.

[mrswdk]

Which parts of China have you visited?

Just the back door while I was pulling her hair and slapping her face. I think it was just her stage name, not sure she was even asian.

lol, the people of China and the Middle East will surely be queuing up to learn all about class from you.

[Dukasaur]

Do you consider the people who died during the Great Leap Forward to have been 'murdered by Mao'?

Yes, we've discussed this before.

I don't think we need to rehash the whole conversation. Basically, during the GLF, food was pillaged from regions where Mao wasn't very popular, like the Upper Yangtze, and shipped off to the major coastal cities where communist support was strong.

You tried to dismiss this as bureaucratic mistakes, but your position is absurd. Even someone as stupid as a communist party bureaucrat can't fail to notice that there is a causative relationship between pillaging all the food in a province and mass starvation. Essentially, it was a premeditated act of murder against 30 million people in provinces where support for the communist party was weak.

It was the collectivist ethics of communism in the purest form. "Amputate" any "limbs" (provinces) that aren't "part of the body" (completely subservient to the dictator) and let them die.

There were plenty of absurdities like taking agricultural land out of production and forcing farmers to try to cook pig iron in home-made kilns. I don't honestly know to what degree those were bureaucratic stupidity, and to what degree they were deliberate and cynical attempts to destroy the rural economy. Most likely a blend of both. Still, even if it was 90% stupidity and only 10% deliberate, it's still mass murder.

1 - you are completely confusing correlation with causation. Perhaps those regions had weaker support for Mao due to the food shortages they experienced during the GLF. Does that not seem more likely than Mao deliberately starving his agricultural workforce?

2 - you assume that the leadership was aware of the food shortages, which is dumb given that I have already pointed out to you in the past that local officials deliberately covered up shortages to give the impression that their regions were performing well. The main reason the GLF was abandoned after 3 years was that the central government had by that point become aware of how badly the rural population was being blitzed in some areas and therefore realized that the GLF wasn't working out.

Okay, do a little slicing and dicing with Occam's Razor. What do you think is more plausible:

1. That a tyrant wicked and unscrupulous enough to subjugate one of the greatest nations on earth, a man with a proven track record of ordering mass executions, would stop short of very conveniently letting his political opponents starve to death, or
2. That this same tyrant was clever enough to outwit the Japanese, Americans, Russians, and British, and yet suddenly turned into a bumbling idiot overnight and allowed some minor officials under his command to murder 30 million people without him noticing.

I'll assume you're spouting this propaganda because you're under observation by the secret police and you're trying to prove your loyalty to the regime. I grew up in a nation under Soviet occupation, so I understand, which is why I forgive you.

[betiko]

Which parts of China have you visited?

Just the back door while I was pulling her hair and slapping her face. I think it was just her stage name, not sure she was even asian.

lol, the people of China and the Middle East will surely be queuing up to learn all about class from you.

Not sure what you mean. What isn t classy about all this? You chinese spit all day.

[DaGip]

Japanese have great taste. everything is with pure lines, sober and efficient. Evverything about their culture is like that,even their food. Everything is meant to be simple but is at the same time very hard to do and to master because nothing is as simple as it looks.
Chinese have tastes pretty much as horrible as middle eastern. While middle easterns put gold everywhere, chinese put red and plastic everywhere; but they love all that is tacky just as much. Chinese people have no class, while japanese are probably the classiest people on earth.
It just sucks to be chinese dude.

Which parts of China have you visited?

Just the back door while I was pulling her hair and slapping her face. I think it was just her stage name, not sure she was even asian.

Yep...the Japanese have great tastes:

















And if that isn't enough great taste for you, you should check out their new and improved "tastes":

Click image to enlarge.

Your insinuation that the Chinese are somehow "tasteless" compared to the Japanese is grotesquely absurd; however during World War 2 you would have been singing a different tune. The Japanese have never changed their tune...you are just accepting your forced slaves because of the atomic bombs your government dropped on their heads.

[mrswdk]

1 - you are completely confusing correlation with causation. Perhaps those regions had weaker support for Mao due to the food shortages they experienced during the GLF. Does that not seem more likely than Mao deliberately starving his agricultural workforce?

2 - you assume that the leadership was aware of the food shortages, which is dumb given that I have already pointed out to you in the past that local officials deliberately covered up shortages to give the impression that their regions were performing well. The main reason the GLF was abandoned after 3 years was that the central government had by that point become aware of how badly the rural population was being blitzed in some areas and therefore realized that the GLF wasn't working out.

Okay, do a little slicing and dicing with Occam's Razor. What do you think is more plausible:

1. That a tyrant wicked and unscrupulous enough to subjugate one of the greatest nations on earth, a man with a proven track record of ordering mass executions, would stop short of very conveniently letting his political opponents starve to death, or
2. That this same tyrant was clever enough to outwit the Japanese, Americans, Russians, and British, and yet suddenly turned into a bumbling idiot overnight and allowed some minor officials under his command to murder 30 million people without him noticing.

I'll assume you're spouting this propaganda because you're under observation by the secret police and you're trying to prove your loyalty to the regime. I grew up in a nation under Soviet occupation, so I understand, which is why I forgive you.

Political opponents? Mao's whole ideology and support base was agricultural peasants. That was the main reason for the Sino-Soviet split - he thought the Soviets had become too urban and thus ceased to be proper communists. Explain to me how someone like this could come to power and within his first few years start annihilating the countryside due to lack of political support from the rural population.

Do you even know anything about the GLF other than the starvation? The reason Mao was taking large amounts of food to the cities is because that is where the factories were, and the whole point of the GLF was to kick-start an industrial revolution in China. Rural areas were reporting healthy surpluses in food production, and so extra food was taken from the countryside to feed an industrial boom.

Why must a failure to immediately notice the problems being caused be the result of stupidity? China is an enormous country. A president cannot micro-manage everything - he needs the help and information of subordinates. If local officials are feeding false information to Beijing (out of a desire to avoid looking like failures and keep being regarded as good, productive socialists) then it is only natural Beijing would be unaware of problems in remote regions. The GLF only lasted a couple of years - that seems a reasonable amount of time for Beijing to uncover deceptions in the countryside and start backtracking.

I studied all this under a professor who was heavily anti-Party and anti-Mao. I assure you that none of this is some sort of apologist Party line. The GLF is a textbook example of the failures of central planning and socialist economics, not of political tyranny.

[mrswdk]

Maybe you grew up in a country occupied by the Soviets but China was historically a rival of the Soviet Union. That rivalry was so heated that at one point Mao built a labyrinth of bomb shelters under Beijing because he feared a Soviet nuclear attack on China was a real possibility. Try not to confuse the USSR with Maoist China - they were two very different places.

[nietzsche]

War crimes: we are deeply shocked by the atrocities yet we don't do anything to stop our governments from going to war.

[DaGip]

War crimes: we are deeply shocked by the atrocities yet we don't do anything to stop our governments from going to war.

Never a truer statement was ever spoken.

[Serbia]

Bollocks.

[BigBallinStalin]

1 - you are completely confusing correlation with causation. Perhaps those regions had weaker support for Mao due to the food shortages they experienced during the GLF. Does that not seem more likely than Mao deliberately starving his agricultural workforce?

2 - you assume that the leadership was aware of the food shortages, which is dumb given that I have already pointed out to you in the past that local officials deliberately covered up shortages to give the impression that their regions were performing well. The main reason the GLF was abandoned after 3 years was that the central government had by that point become aware of how badly the rural population was being blitzed in some areas and therefore realized that the GLF wasn't working out.

Okay, do a little slicing and dicing with Occam's Razor. What do you think is more plausible:

1. That a tyrant wicked and unscrupulous enough to subjugate one of the greatest nations on earth, a man with a proven track record of ordering mass executions, would stop short of very conveniently letting his political opponents starve to death, or
2. That this same tyrant was clever enough to outwit the Japanese, Americans, Russians, and British, and yet suddenly turned into a bumbling idiot overnight and allowed some minor officials under his command to murder 30 million people without him noticing.

I'll assume you're spouting this propaganda because you're under observation by the secret police and you're trying to prove your loyalty to the regime. I grew up in a nation under Soviet occupation, so I understand, which is why I forgive you.

Political opponents? Mao's whole ideology and support base was agricultural peasants. That was the main reason for the Sino-Soviet split - he thought the Soviets had become too urban and thus ceased to be proper communists.

That's an ad hoc excuse. Really, China was hardly industrialized, so it's not like their "communist" movement could follow the Soviet/Marxist model (i.e. the entire European model: start with workers in factories and so on).

In the early days of the civil war (early 1930s, when GMD were fighting Mao and Friends in the south), you had various pro-Marxist groups in the major cities, organizing the factory workers, starting protests, and so on in order to start up the 'revolution.'

It wasn't until later (during the Long March, especially), that Mao understood the importance of siding with peasants instead of urban laborers. (Of course, gaining support from that group does not mean that he and his friends would never go around implementing policies that kill millions).

[mrswdk]

If Mao had wanted to pour workers into the cities then that would have been easily done. Post-Mao China has urbanized far faster than any Western country ever did. However, he instead implemented a household registration system specifically designed to prevent migration to the cities. He wanted people to be in the countryside.

And I feel that the bulk of my post which you deleted gives a perfectly reasonable explanation for the starvation experienced during the GLF, an explanation more reasonable than Duk's blood-curdling cries of Holocaust.

[AndyDufresne]

All I know, is that in EU4, dealing with the Ming and/or Zhou dynasties is tough.


--Andy

[betiko]

Bollocks.

Chinamen don t have such talents!

[BigBallinStalin]

If Mao had wanted to pour workers into the cities then that would have been easily done. Post-Mao China has urbanized far faster than any Western country ever did. However, he instead implemented a household registration system specifically designed to prevent migration to the cities. He wanted people to be in the countryside.

And I feel that the bulk of my post which you deleted gives a perfectly reasonable explanation for the starvation experienced during the GLF, an explanation more reasonable than Duk's blood-curdling cries of Holocaust.

I'm talking about the Sino-Soviet split--not the means and outcomes of Mao and Friends' policies during the 1950s.

[mrswdk]

If Mao had wanted to pour workers into the cities then that would have been easily done. Post-Mao China has urbanized far faster than any Western country ever did. However, he instead implemented a household registration system specifically designed to prevent migration to the cities. He wanted people to be in the countryside.

And I feel that the bulk of my post which you deleted gives a perfectly reasonable explanation for the starvation experienced during the GLF, an explanation more reasonable than Duk's blood-curdling cries of Holocaust.

I'm talking about the Sino-Soviet split--not the means and outcomes of Mao and Friends' policies during the 1950s.

Oh right. Well yeah, a case could be made for the split being a mere power struggle

That said, agrarianism was still a genuine focus of Mao's ideology. His idea of communism was one in which urbanization was to be rejected in favor of industrializing both the cities and the countryside.

[AndyDufresne]

This thread is now about Japan:

--Andy