[BBC] Comparing Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong is "inane", scoffs Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese History at New York University.
"If you're going to compare two people, it has to reveal something. It's like comparing Putin to Stalin or Liz Truss to Margaret Thatcher."
At first glance, the parallels are striking. Chairman Mao, as he was known, was the defining political figure of 20th Century China. He ran the Communist Party - and the country - from the republic's founding in 1949 until the day he died in 1976. No other Chinese leader has since come close. Until now.
On Sunday Xi Jinping became the first leader since Mao to be chosen as party chief for a third term. In his decade at the top, he has centralised power in his own hands, ruthlessly eliminated rivals, promoted a cult of personality, shut down criticism, and had his ideology - Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era - enshrined in the constitution. He is known, only half-jokingly, as the Chairman of Everything.
But it's still a mistake to draw a straight line from Mao to Xi, Prof Karl argues, because it dismisses all that came in between - and the Chinese who dreamed or fought for a different country.
"It suggests autocracy is in their blood, it's in their water or it's in their culture," she says.
The truth is Xi's path to power was far from inevitable. And it's defined as much by his ambition as it is by the party's failure to prevent what they did not want - a repeat of Mao's disastrous one-man rule.
"My first introduction to China was in the 1980s, when the debates about China's future were huge, significant, and consequential," Prof Karl says. "The party itself was involved in those debates. But 1989 shut that down."
In 1989 - as the Soviet Union was breaking up - China's hopes for change were crushed by tanks and automatic gunfire.
#1
"It suggests autocracy is in their blood, it's in their water or it's in their culture," she says.
Note that this came from her own brain. Nobody else said it; but she hears a little voice speaking and now she's arguing against it.
This happens all the time with the left. Usually it's with racism (because they're racist as fuck themselves and know it) but here we've got a variant. Once you know how to spot it, you see it all the time.
[War On The Rocks] Europe is facing a hard winter, but support for Ukraine remains strong. Russia’s war has highlighted many of the challenges the continent already confronted, from internal divisions within the European Union to a deep dependence on Russian energy. It has added newfound urgency to the search for solutions, even as these new solutions create trade-offs of their own. To date, European leaders have moved quickly to blunt the worst of the energy crisis, but have yet to fully allay their citizens’ concerns. They have also been forced to rapidly rethink their military posture, creating new opportunities for America to help strengthen the continent’s defense.
This, at least, was the consensus of the experts who joined our members-only Winter in Europe Warcast series. With many in Washington wondering how European solidarity will fare over the coming months, we brought together a number of observers on the continent to evaluate the recent political and economic developments, and tell us what they mean for the future of the war in Ukraine. In these conversations, they conveyed their belief that Europe’s political solidarity would survive the winter even if individual governments struggled to master rising energy prices. Moreover, they described a growing convergence in security thinking between Eastern and Western Europe, as well as between Europe and America. The result, they suggested, is that enhanced E.U. defense and stronger trans-Atlantic cooperation are now more compatible than ever.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
