by Leonard P. Liggio
Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, former EU commissioner and former last Governor-General of Hong Kong, presented a book review of Henry Kissinger’s new book, On China in the Financial Times article “Fateful Embrace.” (May 28/May 29, 2011). Chris Patten criticizes Kissinger for being too indulgent of Mao’s crimes. This issue emerges in the Washington Post (May 26, 2011) article by Andrew Higgins: “In China, a long path of writing the Communist Party’s history.”
It has taken 16 years and four extensive re-writes with strong involvement of the leaders of China. “It gets particularly hard when it includes not only two of the past century’s most lethal man-made catastrophes – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – but also a modest yet now ticklish upset back in 1962 – the disgrace of Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping, China’s current vice president and leader-in-waiting.” The article quotes the noted Harvard scholar, Roderick Macfarquhar: “It’s an old communist joke that Marxists can predict the future, but the past is more difficult.”
Future Communist Party Chairman Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was purged in 1962 by Mao for “seeking to restore capitalism.” The new history does not blame Mao, but rather Kang Sheng, the ruthless security chief. It was one of the many consequences of the Great Leap Forward seeking deeper collectivization leading to mass famine and deaths.
The article quotes the Dutch scholar, Frank Dikotter’s book, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958 – 1962 (2010) that 45 million people died (a figure quoted by Chris Patten). Dikotter recorded a 1959 statement by Mao: “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
The new history praises Mao’s schemes as seeking to make China rich and strong. (A review from The New York Review of Books (February 2010) titled “Kissinger and China,” by Yale historian Jonathan Spence mentions in a footnote Roderick MacFarquhar’s review of Frank Dikotter’s book Mao’s Great Famine. Spence is the author of the renowned The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.)
Valuable studies are not coming from the party’s history bureau, but from other sources. Liu Yuan, a military officer, writes in the preface to a new book that “the Party has been repeatedly betrayed by general secretaries, both in and outside the country, recently and in the past.”(Outside the country could refer to Josef Stalin’s famines.) Liu’s father, Liu Shaoqui, was president of the People’s Republic. He died in 1969 as a major victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is interesting that the comment comes from a military officer (although again well-connected) since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army wheels increasing power in the government and party.
This post was originally published here