One CHINA: Hold the Mao!

China brings in current account the practical wisdom of millennia to it’s operating paradigm, while the United States, can only focus on short term profit in a failed Neo-con capitalist system that is rapidly destroying its functional base---it’s citizens, democratic culture, civil order and military security. The great question is: will China’s corruption by predatory American capitalism follow suit?

The destruction of the American Empire will be China’s greatest historical goal and, ironically, is being accomplished without a single shot being fired by applying the tenets of Sun Tzu’s eternal applications, using to advantage the greed and human folly of its enemy‘s hubris. At the same time, it is the unfettered worm of predatory capitalism that will in turn ruin China’s neo-empire as it elevates an elite economic professional class over it’s one billion poverty stricken peoples. The ’collective’ current techno-dynasty of China is betraying the Confucian ‘Mandate of Heaven,’ Mao’s socialist people’s revolution and will fall like all the others, but not before it determines to reduce the great America to an economic vassal and second world economic status.

Not even the Roman Empire can compare with China’s collective brilliance over time in every disciplined human endeavor. China is certainly far more than the sum of its parts and no easy analysis of its phoenix renewal in the twentieth-first century can be easily generalized. Government, science, education, engineering, architecture, the arts , military, urban development and economy are only beginnings of the wonder that is the new China . In that collective rises the world’s newest super power and also the West’s greatest future enemy---- a phoneme not seen since the mighty T’ang Dynasty.

China’s ancient gifts to the world at large are the very staples of advanced culture: paper, computers, rocket science, gun powder, astronomy, the world’s first super navy, hydraulic engineering, advanced metallurgy, ceramic technology, super construction, exceptionally beautiful architecture, the world’s first writing system, meritorious government bureaucracy and legions of other fundamentally advanced achievements that were commonplace while the West was running about in animal furs and tribal chaos.

My first enchantment with China came by virtue of its extraordinary art history, particularly poetry and painting in the formation of what is often referred to as literati painting. It has often been said, and I find it true, that calligraphy is the truest expression of an individual’s soul and is the greatest of art’s expression.

The other realm of extraordinary individual self expression in the arts came from the Zen schools, particularly during the Song Dynasty. It is through these pathways one can sense the richness of mind informing the undercurrents of culture in the rather rigid superstructure of formal Chinese governance.

Throughout the millenniums of Chinese culture, there exists a particularly vibrant and engaging history of what happens beneath the layers of totalitarian government. Perhaps for some, such study is merely the indulgence of elitist academia. But, to this student it has revealed the lotus beneath the iron heel of a seemingly endless progression of tyranny that for eons subjugated the Chinese populace while creating an elite of breathing taking accomplishment and genius:

Du Fu

The stupendous contradictions of power and cultural life in China are moral dilemmas of the greatest consequence. Herein lies the brilliance of art in adversity. To the degree that Confucius was right, we may judge kindly or harshly the long rule of internal China:

“To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order, to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.”

The modern world often considers contemporary China in the same thought with the legendary Mao Tse-T’ung, arguably the single greatest historical figure in Chinese governance since Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China. We are accustomed to thinking of Mao as a Communist and a kind-of cartoon revolutionary with life‘s riddles solved by a little red book of re-hashed Confucian aphorisms. While it is true that he reordered the face of China, in actually, Mao vitally refreshed the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ in the Confucian sense by reversing the order of privilege from elite to peasant in an ideological purity compatible with Marxist communism:

"Chinese political theory allowed for a change of dynasty as ruling houses could be replaced. This was based on the concept of the Confucian "Mandate of Heaven". The theory behind this was that the Chinese emperor acted as the "Son of Heaven." As the only legitimate ruler, his authority extended to "all under heaven" and had neighbors only in a geographical sense. He held a mandate to which he had a valid claim to rule over everyone else in the world--as long as he served the people well. If the ruler became immoral, or other natural disasters such as repeated flood or famine showed that the mandate of heaven may have expired, then rebellion was justified and heaven would take away that mandate and give it to another. This important concept legitimized the dynastic cycle or the change of dynasties."

At first, Mao was essentially a Confucian/Marxist War Lord who supplanted the old order of dynastic tyranny with a new one, centered like that of the emperors on a cult of personality, which ultimately evolved into a ‘divine‘ status in keeping with China‘s long tradition. The cost to the ‘Middle Kingdom‘ was a hundred million lives.  Still, in spite of the enormous cost, China's entry into the modern world is a stunning accomplishment and admirable by the great standards of historical perspective.

While Mao came upon the landscape of China as the greatest hero of ordinary people in all of its history, he left as a mythical figure imbued with his own delusions of cultist divinity and murderously corrupted by power. His poisonous attempt to regain the virtue of his righteous revolution resulted in the famous ‘Cultural Revolution’ a violent upheaval of social order that destroyed two generations of citizens and bankrupted the country leaving it a ruined, antiquated industrial backwater.

Mao’s Stalinist creation was ultimately a failed Marxist philosophy tied to its inadequate and  antiquated economic paradigms. Once Mao was out of the picture China’s brilliant, gray eminences, hidden from public view for the most part, but directing the ship of state, turned to predatory capitalism as the key in a new world order determined by corporate hierarchy---- so like the old feudal imperial systems. In the broader scheme of things China’s new order is a refutation of Mao’s peasant nation and a return to elitist class paradigms. The closest contemporary example would be based on the city-nation model of Singapore, a prosperous, totalitarian police state reminiscent of that described by Orwell in ’1984.’

Six months ago, I would have encouraged anyone able to make the journey to visit China, see its wonders, and marvel at its stunning advances in the post-Mao years. But that opinion has changed dramatically with China’s renewal of Tibetan genocide and its arrogant, belligerent chauvinism.

It is a disgrace that the Olympic Committee chose China in the first place: a showcase of Stalinist oppression. Offensive is Olympic Committee Chairman Peter Ueberroth , whose irritable dismissal of human rights abuses and pandering to its host nation seems more in keeping with Hitler’s Olympic games of 1936:

No objective individual in their right mind can postulate that the Olympic Games aren’t political. It has been so since Athens and Sparta. The Olympic Committee has soiled the reputation of the Olympic spirit holding its democratic games in an oppressive environment like China. No glorious, shining new cities and gleaming display can hide the true horror that passes for progress now in China. It is completely unacceptable that the Games should be held in totalitarian states.

CNN’s Jack Cafferty, probably ignorant of Sun Tzu, was, never-the-less, presciently informed in his populist view that:

In China, the outrage about Cafferty’s remarks, anger about worldwide demonstrations against China’s human rights violations  and outrageous slurs against the Dali Lama crudely demonstrate that China is still diplomatically immature  and out-of touch with the power of opinion in Western nations, for whom genocide is at least open for discussion and religious toleration a given.

The New York Times recently ran an article about student, Zhu Xiaomeng, who,  armed with a laptop in her dorm room,  unleashed a massive backlash against western support for Tibet that has unnerved foreign investors and western diplomats. China’s anger is understandable, if hardly forgivable, considering the truth of the criticisms aimed at her dignity. From China’s perspective, it’s a bit like an honored guest at a spectacular dinner party accusing its host of being a pedophile. However true the accusation, the breach of etiquette is the greater harm in its opinion.

Zhu Xiomeng is among that privileged  group of communist bourgeois elitists, which thrive as parasites in economic luxury denied to the other billion or so of China’s left-behind population. Quite aside from betraying Mao’s revolutionary egalitarianism little Zhu is reminiscent of those self-centered, pampered brats in the West that mistake shopping for patriotism. She has spearheaded the boycott of French companies blamed for their country’s support of pro Tibetan agitators. Zhu Zhu wants other brats to boycott Carrefore and Louis Vuitton.

The danger in all this is that these zealous young busybodies and their misplaced patriotism are capable of raising thousands of demonstrators on a moment’s notice and pose a grave physical threat to western business , investment and tourists in China. Further, a wave of verbal assaults, violent insults and death threats on foreign media have raised concerns about the safety and viability of media control in China during the Olympic Games.

Who’d a ‘thunk’ that the ‘Great Leap Forward” and “The Cultural Revolution” would have been reduced to boycotting Louis Vuitton by a bunch of privileged brats totally out of touch with the realities of their own suffering countrymen? The Chinese government and it’s outrageous, indulgent chauvinism in this matter is no greater an indication that the ‘Middle Kingdom’ is not yet ready for participation on the world stage outside it’s insidious capitalist machinations, Stalinist oppression and Potemkin cities.

Who would have thought China would so quickly become confused with the capitalist understanding that consumerism is the same as patriotism? Poor old Mao. The Zhu’s of China don’t have a clue and don’t begin to understand how elitist and offensive they really are. China has gone from the slaughter of nascent freedom in Tiananmen Square to ‘attitude’ at the mall in less than one generation.

Particularly offensive and galling are the complaints of Chinese Americans against demonstrators petitioning for human and religious rights in China and its occupied territories. Perhaps they might be reminded that their prosperity comes from the advantages of a democracy. But, come to think of it, maybe they are Bush Republicans in synch with torture and the relative commercial value of human life.

For those who love the real China, its people and the ancient culture that endures beyond time and the conceits of power we remember the poet T’ang poet Li Po:

My friend is lodging high in the Eastern Range,

We take solace in the greater vision of Cold Mountain’s Han Shan:

And, by-the-way:

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