How Do You Solve A Problem Like Mao?

Cheng Shi-Zheng grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, when elites were ruthlessly persecuted by Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. Cheng is directing a new Paris production of the opera "Nixon in China." If Nixon is controversial in the U.S., imagine Mao in China, where victims of the Cultural Revolution are highly influential in politics and culture. The Bangkok Post:

The stage is dominated by a statue of Mao "because he is very much a part today of Chinese life," Cheng said.

But "I don't think any Chinese composer would have written an opera in such a way about Mao ... this is a very sensitive issue. I am not sure this is something that the country is ready to talk about," said Cheng who was banned for five years from returning to his home country because of his work.

Soft America, Hard China

Eugene Robinson urges the U.S. to take China and its leaders seriously, especially heir apparent Xi Jinping, because they are men (mostly) who have been tested by considerable hardship. Robinson is implying that our elites are soft and dilettantish by comparison:

Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, once one of Mao Zedong’s lieutenants, fell out of favor and was persecuted during much of that era. Xi Jinping is part of a remarkable generation that survived the apocalypse of the Cultural Revolution; as a teenager, he spent long, hard years living in a cave in the poor, remote Shaanxi province.

Xi fared better than the man considered his chief rival for power and influence in China — Bo Xilai, the Communist Party chief for the Chongqing metropolitan area, which is home to nearly 30 million people. Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, was one of Mao’s most trusted associates before being purged in the Cultural Revolution. The whole family was sent to a prison for five years, then to a labor camp for another five. Bo Xilai’s mother either committed suicide or was beaten to death.

I recount this history because it helps me understand why the men — and a few women — now running China are the way they are: impatient to make up for lost time, pathologically wary of the slightest instability, tough, resourceful, adaptable, coldly unsentimental and, as [Henry] Kissinger generalized in his introduction, convinced “that every solution is the beginning of a new set of problems.”

Photo: Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong

You Don't Get To Decide, Unless You Must

Some excerpts from Hugh Hewitt's radio interview with George W. Bush about his memoir, Decision Points:

On faith and leadership: I think the first thing...is to understand you’re not God, and that you don’t get to decide. Secondly, I believe a faithful person is someone who fully understands his or her own inadequacies, and therefore relies upon a loving, redemptive Savior. And so it was, in one way, it was easy not to be judgmental when I’m trying to strengthen my own faith. And in the other way, though, it was easy to be judgmental when it came time to the practicalities of protecting the country. And I was very judgmental. I said these people are evil, and we will bring them to justice, because the most important job of the president is to protect the homeland.

On faith and power: [I]f you allow power to become your god, then it is corrupting. If you allow fame to become your god, it is corrupting. If you allow money to become your god, it is corrupting. And what religion helped me was to understand that that was those truths. And so power can be used effectively to help people, or it can be intoxicating, in which case it is difficult to have a proper relationship, if you’re a Christian, with Christ....

[For] American presidents...it’s hard to become so totally intoxicated with power when you’re responsive to the people. But the people that became intoxicated by power that affected me were like those idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one, whether it be the folks who led the French revolution, or those who bought into Mao, or those who corrupted the Leninist movement in Russia. These are people that became so intoxicated with power that they ended up being murderers.

On meeting with grieving families: What was interesting...because we have a volunteer army, and because many of the folks who lost their life signed up after 9/11 and knew exactly what they were getting into, the parents really wanted to tell me how much that the sacrifice, how much their child really wanted to do what they were doing. And frankly, in many instances, they were there to determine whether or not I was going to make decisions based upon my own personal standing, or whether or not I was going to make decisions so that sacrifice would not go in vain. And it’s hard for people to understand this, but often times, or most of the time I met with families of the fallen, I became the comforted one. I was supposed to comfort them, and they comforted me.

On politically motivated CIA leaks in 2004: I was convinced there were some, and very few, I’m talking about a handful versus the thousands that are dedicated patriots, but they were leaking information that kept getting into the New York Times, for example, that seemed to me, and was trying to make it difficult for me to be reelected. It’s like the same thing about the leaks on some of our security programs that emanated, perhaps, out of that agency. And to me, that’s unacceptable behavior. When people get into the CIA, they have sworn to secrecy, and that their job is to provide the president with the information necessary to make tough decisions, not to try to undermine the process.

But If They Want To Buy School Bonds...

I didn't quite understand Kai Chen's campaign against Mao Zedong's statue at the Nixon library. His apparently successful effort to keep a southern California school district from taking money from the Beijing regime for classroom projects makes considerably more sense.

As Peace Slips Away, She Still Needs A Future

Steven A. Cook writes that the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank may again resort to violence, in the form of a third Intifada, to shore up its political fortunes, drained by its internecine struggle with Hamas in the Gaza Strip as well as the Palestinian Authority's own poor choices (and, Cook argues, the Obama administration's missteps). It's the harshest of realities, Cook says, that "[t]hroughout contemporary Palestinian history, spilling Israeli blood has often been the best way for competing political factions to burnish their nationalist credentials."

Palestinians aren't the first to grasp for political legitimacy by stigmatizing or attacking an enemy, and they won't be last. All that makes the Middle East unique is the close quarters of the potential combatants as well as each side's arguable theological, historic, and moral claims on the territory.

The tension between Beijing and Taipei, equally fraught with potential violence, is far simpler to understand, since the dispute only goes back to Chiang Kai-shek vs. Mao Zedong in 1948 instead of Abraham and the Canaanites in 2000 B.C. Yet in the Taiwan Strait just as in the Middle East, both sides have a responsibility to keep in mind the other side's psychological and political situation when making their moves. Responsible Taiwan leaders, no matter what their deepest hopes may be, always think about the perils of sounding too militant about independence and provoking the mainland. By the same token, Israel knew that by stiffing the U.S. and the Palestinians on West Bank settlements, they would empower extremists. Palestinians and their supporters in Arab capitals knew that when they demanded progress on settlements as a condition for restarting talks or offering the confidence-building measures Israel demanded, they were making it easier for Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to be intransigent.

By making Middle East peace a top, early priority, the Obama administration, no matter how inept some of its moves may have been, offered those who wanted peace the opportunity to make historic progress. If we have a third Intifada, both sides bear responsibility for the failure. Violence against Israel is never justifiable. But Israel could forestall it if it really wanted to. Cook writes persuasively about how violence serves craven political interests on the Palestinian side. What about those Israeli politicians who also seem to prefer confrontation to peace?

Good Mao, Bad Mao

You need a degree in semiotics to figure out what Kai Chen's problem is with the images of Mao Zedong in the Nixon Library. Reporting about a demonstration by 12 people outside the Library today, the Orange County Register writes:

A needlepoint still-life, donated by the Chinese government, is in a nearby exhibit. Protest organizer...Chen of Los Angeles said he doesn't object to the other items, because they were presented by other people, whereas the statue was chosen by Nixon and seems to be an endorsement of Mao by the U.S. government – exactly what [Library director Tim] Neftali [sic] said he wants to avoid.

Let's be absolutely clear about this. The Chinese communist regime donated the framed needlepoint (showing President Nixon's 1972 meeting with Mao) in 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. But that depiction of Mao is okay, whereas the statue is not because it was approved by the former President who formulated the opening to China considered by virtually every expert as a progressive hallmark of the Cold War (and who went back to China in the fall of 1989 to denounce the hardliners who ordered the Tiananmen tanks to roll). If I were Chen and his fellow protesters, who were actually wearing shirts commemorating Tiananmen Square, I'd be more offended by the gift from the butchers of Beijing.

UnHomaginized

Facebook friends weigh in on the controversy over Mao Zeodong's statue in the museum of the Nixon Library:

The Rev. Karen Ann Wojahn. I'm puzzled. Why does recognizing an individual's impact (for good or for evil) on the world -- especially an individual as powerful as Mao -- make him or her the the moral equivalent of similarly powerful people? I've marveled at that lovely exhibit many times, and never saw it as an homage to any of the figures. Instead, I saw it as a way to "see" in one place a sample of flawed (some more than others) but powerful figures whose lives impacted every living person in one way or another during the twentieth century.

Ed Cimler: I agree, Karen. A museum is not only a repository of stuff. It also serves to remind and educate us. It may be somewhat unfortunate that the bad guys seem, at times, to get more press than the good guys. If asked to name a bad emperor of the Roman empire, many would come to mind, but I would have to think hard to come up with a good one.

Stephen Bruce: It's like saying (forgive the analogy) that watching "Birth of a Nation" makes me a racist.

Red Zone

Just this once, OC Weekly isn't sure whom to make fun of: The Nixon Library or the single-minded critic of its Mao Zedong statue.

Mao Tied

An LA real estate investor has single-handedly made a federal case out of the presence of a statue of Mao Zedong at the Nixon Library. Previously confined to Kai Chen's website, the issue rose to the attention of the LA Times today:

"Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history," Chen said, his volume set to high. "His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It's a perversion of American freedom. You don't put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum."

While generally sympathetic to the criticism, the Library's federal director, Cold War scholar Tim Naftali (shown here), doesn't promise to remove the statue anytime soon nor indeed those of Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, neither of whom was a day at the beach. Naftali does say:

"I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect," he said. "I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they're all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

"It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum," Naftali added. "I don't think it's the best way to teach history."

Why that's true, I'm not precisely sure. As I wrote in August on learning of Kai Chen's campaign:

As the Nixon aide (later, private Nixon Library director) who supervised the design of the display in which the statues appear, I can say with absolute confidence that they weren't intended to honor anyone. We asked President Nixon to pick the ten leaders he'd met who'd had the most decisive impact on the postwar world. Four of his choices were leaders of communist regimes -- the two Chinese plus Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. The idea was to give visitors an idea of what they looked like and illustrate RN's proposition that the U.S. could be a force for stability and constructive change by finding ways to be in dialog even with leaders of unfriendly or unsavory powers.

Nixon would have been the first to say that the Chinese regime was odious....And yet there's considerable evidence that his overtures and policies were good for the Chinese and Soviet peoples, in the same way that the North Koreans and Iranians might end up being better off if relations with the U.S. improved.

No one from the private Nixon Foundation was quoted in the Times article, though two of the Library's docents spoke up on behalf of the volunteers' nearly two decades of service as expert and unfailingly professional interpreters of President Nixon's life and times.

Overall the article seemed designed to leave the impression that sticking up for keeping Mao's statue would amount to a vote for the formerly private Nixon Library's pro-Nixon spin. Memo to the younger generation of reporters: Richard Nixon was an anti-communist. His counter-intuitive opening to Beijing was the essence of his genius as a statesman. I doubt if Naftali or indeed Kai Chen would argue that the Chinese people, no matter how they were abused by their communist leaders, would be better off if Richard Nixon hadn't sat down with Mao and tipped mao tai glasses with Zhou. If the policy was worth pursuing then, it makes abundant sense to depict the Chinese leaders now in a museum gallery designed both to capture a unique moment in the annals of geopolitics and to demonstrate the advisability of being willing to shake hands with friends and foes alike in the pursuit of peace.

Besides, Remember Lot's Wife

Commentators on the Youpai Forum complain on moral grounds about the statues of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on display at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. (More commentary here.) These Chinese communist leaders, they write, were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The writers don't say why they think bad people shouldn't be depicted three-dimensionally as opposed to in photographs and text, since I assume the bloggers don't want all references to Mao and Zhou in the museum expunged.

It may be that the critics, who are asking federal Library director Tim Naftali to remove the statues, are mistaking an exhibit for a memorial. As the Nixon aide (later, private Nixon Library director) who supervised the design of the display in which the statues appear, I can say with absolute confidence that they weren't intended to honor anyone. We asked President Nixon to pick the ten leaders he'd met who'd had the most decisive impact on the postwar world. Four of his choices were leaders of communist regimes -- the two Chinese plus Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. The idea was to give visitors an idea of what they looked like and illustrate RN's proposition that the U.S. could be a force for stability and constructive change by finding ways to be in dialog even with leaders of unfriendly or unsavory powers.

Nixon would have been the first to say that the Chinese regime was odious. He dedicated much of his career to opposing communism. And yet there's considerable evidence that his overtures and policies were good for the Chinese and Soviet peoples, in the same way that the North Koreans and Iranians might end up being better off if relations with the U.S. improved. While Library officials may well decide to replace the whole exhibit one day, Soviet- and PRC-style airbrushing of the politically incorrect or even morally repugnant is a terrible and an anti-historical idea.

Well, One Bought $1 Trillion In U.S. Treasuries

Hat tip to Padre Mickey's Dance Party via Greg Larkin

Mao Tie

Bill O'Reilly is being subjected to severe interrogation techniques (it's up to him to say if it's actually torture) for saying that Richard Nixon never met with Mao Zedong, which, of course, he did, in February 1972. Here's the lashing by the "Economist."

What If Iran Really Means What It Says?

Making a Nixon-to-China analogy, Nathan Gonzalez says Iran's coolness in response to President Obama's video valentine shouldn't be taken as proof that his policy is either reckless or ineffectual. Though useful for domestic consumption in Iran (and sometimes in China even these days), anti-U.S. rhetoric doesn't always reveal what leaders are really thinking:

During President Richard Nixon's historic visit to the China in 1972, Mao Zedung apparently couldn't believe that U.S. policymakers had taken his "anti-imperialist" propaganda to heart. Henry Kissinger writes: "[Mao] laughed uproariously at the implication that anyone might be taking seriously a slogan which had been scrawled for decades on placards and on the walls of public buildings all over China." In Iran, the cult of anti-Americanism has inspired government-sanctioned murals that depict the United States as a wretched country, and the phrase "death to America" ("marg bar emrika") is still something of a national political slogan.

Interesting. Unless, of course, Iran really means it.