Tuesday, January 17, 2006
I have a coffee date on Thursday with a guy who lives in Newtown. He hasn't seen my photo yet and my father said he must be desperate if he's meeting me without seeing my photo first. Well if he's expecting someone who is hideously ugly he's going to be pleasantly surprised, that's all I can say! So this RSVP thing is moving along quite fast. Meeting duds will force me to abort the mission but I'm sticking my feelers out for the time being. Oh my god. Again. In my profile I said I enjoy devising plots for future best-sellers and he's keen to hear all about it. I've only got one - the supernatural spy thriller I devised while I was in the Observation Unit!
Done 1284 words for my essay. It's not that bad really. It's a bit brief with few references but as long as it shows an understanding then I'll survive. It won't be a Distinction though. I always get Credits. A credit will be fine, as long as I get it over with. Yeah baby. And that's Lizwa, signing out of Sydney University, not that I was there for more than two years. I feel like I used to the degree as an excuse to travel and live overseas. It's like I tried to learn Chinese for four years and now I'm getting a degree for it.
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Here's the first half of my stupid essay:
The Chinese Communist Party has assessed the late leader of China from 1947 to 1976 Mao Zedong as 70% good, 30% bad. This assessment could mean many things and many interpretations may be made as to how these proportions were decided. A greater weight has been given to his achievements and general contribution to China while the large mistakes and failures such as the Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution have not gone unacknowledged. In this essay I would like to argue that due to the seriousness of the mistakes that were made and to the human suffering to which Mao is to be held responsible, this assessment is rather generous. My own assessment would be a reversal of this ratio. Maurice Meisner argues that despite these ���blots on the Maoist record��� the Maoist era was one of the great modernising epochs of world history.��� I would argue that despite the Maoist era being such an epoch, these events had a massive human toll that is too significant to assign a mere 30%. So, Mao Zedong was 30% good and 70% bad.
As one should not be judged by their intentions but rather the results of their leadership I hesitantly choose to allow 10% of the 30% assigned to Mao���s utopian intentions which I believe deserve attention despite the disastrous effects his policies had on China. Mao was determined to bring about economic success hand in hand with an ideal socialist state. He was similarly driven to minimise bureaucracy and put into force his concept of the Mass Line which would merge the state and the masses together as one so that the masses were to rule themselves. Another 10% is for his success in leading the Communist Party to victory in 1949; the final 10% for the improvements made to Chinese society and the setting up of the foundations of China today whose economy is now booming. The degree to which movements such as The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution affected people���s lives was quite severe. The failure of the Great Leap Forward led to mass food shortages and skepticism among the population. The Cultural Revolution as a period in history unparalleled by any other event saw the persecution, humiliation, torture, and sometimes death of many Chinese aswell as the general state of instability, fear, and chaos endured by all. To compound the severe nature of these events, the reasons behind them were related to Mao���s personal career. From the mid 1950���s, Mao wanted to split with the Soviet Union in ideology and as he progressively did so, formed himself and his follwers into a minority, becoming more and more separated from the Party majority. Gasping for air in the early 60���s he allowed a personality cult to grow around him based on the prestige he gained through leading China to liberation in 1949 and the loyalty of the army. When it came to the Cultural Revolution, he was still concerned with the way the Party operated, in Soviet style, and his attempts to ���reform��� the party are what led to the abovementioned chaos and destruction.
Firstly, one must look at the featured ideas of Maoist ideology to appreciate Mao Zedong���s intentions for China. Known as Mao Zedong Thought, his philosophy involved a deviation from orthodox Marxist-Leninism, which was the path followed by the Soviet Russia. According to this idea, industrialisation was a prerequisite to communism. In pre-industrial countries such as Russia and China at the time of revolution, industrialisation being incomplete had to be a task undertaken by the state. Only after this stage in development could communism be brought about. The First Five Year plan had proved unsatisfactory to Mao. He thought that communism and industrial development could happen simultaneously. This was the intention behind the Great Leap Forward: to create communist socioeconomic structures while pushing industrial development forward as fast as possible. One of the main goals of the Great Leap Forward policies was to catch up to and overtake Great Britain economically in 15 years . The similarly utopian means to such an end was the theory that human consciousness and morale could overpower material obstacles in development and that by human will Chinese society could essentially be moulded whatever it wanted to be, namely that which Mao wanted it to be like. It shows great faith in the ability to consciously create a new society while dismissing material factors as secondary to human ones. Mao���s daring to experiment in this way to bring about what he thought was best for China deserves some acknowledgement and is therefore assessed as ���good���.
His ongoing problems with the growth of the bureaucracy and the Soviet-modelled structure of the Party apparatus in China led him to begin a ���reform��� movement of the Party which among other aims manifested itself as the Cultural Revolution. Mao was vexed at what he saw as a growing gulf between the Party and the people and this went against the grass roots ideals of the Mass Line concept. To Mao, the original revolutionary aims of the Party were being neglected somewhat as the Party became more concerned with maintaining it���s position of power in China. His intention was to cleanse the party of it���s increasingly conservative morale and reinvigorate it spiritually rather than let it stagnate and become a new ruling class when it���s own reason for existence was to introduce China to an egalitarian society. In fact it has been argued that Mao succeeded in achieving some of his aims especially where the size of the bureaucracy is concerned: he reduced it to one-sixth its former size, causing better growth of industry and making it impossible to reestablish a Soviet-style economy after his death. Mao���s intentions were honourable in the context of the progression of socialism in China and although the results of his intentions were bad, they still deserve 10% of the 30% allocated to what was ���good��� about the leader.
The next 10% goes to Mao���s leadership of the Chinese Communist Party to victory against the Guomindang in 1949, soon after bringing in policies to cleanse the country of its more ���impure��� occurrences such as family clan organisations, prostitution and foot-binding, and redistributing land (although many times in violent ways) to the peasants. The Communist Party was founded in 1921. Mao was Chairman from 1945 and during the time they were based in Yenan played a dominant role in creating their basic principles of ascetics and frugality which later became known and remembered as the Yenan spirit as its influence became more apparent. Mao and his military right-hand man Zhu De employed radical guerilla tactics to fight both the Guomindang and the Japanese during World War II and made policies that gained mass support of China���s peasant population where the Guomindang failed to do so. As a better alternative to the GMD and its allegedly rampant corruption and inflation problems, Mao���s soliders treated the peasants with respect and made promises of a better life. One of the major features of Mao���s leadership of the party was his deviation from conventional Marxist ideology: the peasants, rather than the urban proletariat, were to be the basis of the revolution. Mao stuck by his own ideas despite early criticism from the Russians and it was his philosphies exactly which brought power to the Party. It was Mao who was responsible for doing so and has been accordingly referred to as the ���Great Helmsan���. We are able to question whether similar successes could have been achieved if the Party had led a different path under a different leader.
The final 10% of ���good��� goes to improvements in health care and education, and economic successes. TO BE CONTI... FINISHED EVENTUALLY ¶ 17:16
Done 1284 words for my essay. It's not that bad really. It's a bit brief with few references but as long as it shows an understanding then I'll survive. It won't be a Distinction though. I always get Credits. A credit will be fine, as long as I get it over with. Yeah baby. And that's Lizwa, signing out of Sydney University, not that I was there for more than two years. I feel like I used to the degree as an excuse to travel and live overseas. It's like I tried to learn Chinese for four years and now I'm getting a degree for it.
****************************************
Here's the first half of my stupid essay:
The Chinese Communist Party has assessed the late leader of China from 1947 to 1976 Mao Zedong as 70% good, 30% bad. This assessment could mean many things and many interpretations may be made as to how these proportions were decided. A greater weight has been given to his achievements and general contribution to China while the large mistakes and failures such as the Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution have not gone unacknowledged. In this essay I would like to argue that due to the seriousness of the mistakes that were made and to the human suffering to which Mao is to be held responsible, this assessment is rather generous. My own assessment would be a reversal of this ratio. Maurice Meisner argues that despite these ���blots on the Maoist record��� the Maoist era was one of the great modernising epochs of world history.��� I would argue that despite the Maoist era being such an epoch, these events had a massive human toll that is too significant to assign a mere 30%. So, Mao Zedong was 30% good and 70% bad.
As one should not be judged by their intentions but rather the results of their leadership I hesitantly choose to allow 10% of the 30% assigned to Mao���s utopian intentions which I believe deserve attention despite the disastrous effects his policies had on China. Mao was determined to bring about economic success hand in hand with an ideal socialist state. He was similarly driven to minimise bureaucracy and put into force his concept of the Mass Line which would merge the state and the masses together as one so that the masses were to rule themselves. Another 10% is for his success in leading the Communist Party to victory in 1949; the final 10% for the improvements made to Chinese society and the setting up of the foundations of China today whose economy is now booming. The degree to which movements such as The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution affected people���s lives was quite severe. The failure of the Great Leap Forward led to mass food shortages and skepticism among the population. The Cultural Revolution as a period in history unparalleled by any other event saw the persecution, humiliation, torture, and sometimes death of many Chinese aswell as the general state of instability, fear, and chaos endured by all. To compound the severe nature of these events, the reasons behind them were related to Mao���s personal career. From the mid 1950���s, Mao wanted to split with the Soviet Union in ideology and as he progressively did so, formed himself and his follwers into a minority, becoming more and more separated from the Party majority. Gasping for air in the early 60���s he allowed a personality cult to grow around him based on the prestige he gained through leading China to liberation in 1949 and the loyalty of the army. When it came to the Cultural Revolution, he was still concerned with the way the Party operated, in Soviet style, and his attempts to ���reform��� the party are what led to the abovementioned chaos and destruction.
Firstly, one must look at the featured ideas of Maoist ideology to appreciate Mao Zedong���s intentions for China. Known as Mao Zedong Thought, his philosophy involved a deviation from orthodox Marxist-Leninism, which was the path followed by the Soviet Russia. According to this idea, industrialisation was a prerequisite to communism. In pre-industrial countries such as Russia and China at the time of revolution, industrialisation being incomplete had to be a task undertaken by the state. Only after this stage in development could communism be brought about. The First Five Year plan had proved unsatisfactory to Mao. He thought that communism and industrial development could happen simultaneously. This was the intention behind the Great Leap Forward: to create communist socioeconomic structures while pushing industrial development forward as fast as possible. One of the main goals of the Great Leap Forward policies was to catch up to and overtake Great Britain economically in 15 years . The similarly utopian means to such an end was the theory that human consciousness and morale could overpower material obstacles in development and that by human will Chinese society could essentially be moulded whatever it wanted to be, namely that which Mao wanted it to be like. It shows great faith in the ability to consciously create a new society while dismissing material factors as secondary to human ones. Mao���s daring to experiment in this way to bring about what he thought was best for China deserves some acknowledgement and is therefore assessed as ���good���.
His ongoing problems with the growth of the bureaucracy and the Soviet-modelled structure of the Party apparatus in China led him to begin a ���reform��� movement of the Party which among other aims manifested itself as the Cultural Revolution. Mao was vexed at what he saw as a growing gulf between the Party and the people and this went against the grass roots ideals of the Mass Line concept. To Mao, the original revolutionary aims of the Party were being neglected somewhat as the Party became more concerned with maintaining it���s position of power in China. His intention was to cleanse the party of it���s increasingly conservative morale and reinvigorate it spiritually rather than let it stagnate and become a new ruling class when it���s own reason for existence was to introduce China to an egalitarian society. In fact it has been argued that Mao succeeded in achieving some of his aims especially where the size of the bureaucracy is concerned: he reduced it to one-sixth its former size, causing better growth of industry and making it impossible to reestablish a Soviet-style economy after his death. Mao���s intentions were honourable in the context of the progression of socialism in China and although the results of his intentions were bad, they still deserve 10% of the 30% allocated to what was ���good��� about the leader.
The next 10% goes to Mao���s leadership of the Chinese Communist Party to victory against the Guomindang in 1949, soon after bringing in policies to cleanse the country of its more ���impure��� occurrences such as family clan organisations, prostitution and foot-binding, and redistributing land (although many times in violent ways) to the peasants. The Communist Party was founded in 1921. Mao was Chairman from 1945 and during the time they were based in Yenan played a dominant role in creating their basic principles of ascetics and frugality which later became known and remembered as the Yenan spirit as its influence became more apparent. Mao and his military right-hand man Zhu De employed radical guerilla tactics to fight both the Guomindang and the Japanese during World War II and made policies that gained mass support of China���s peasant population where the Guomindang failed to do so. As a better alternative to the GMD and its allegedly rampant corruption and inflation problems, Mao���s soliders treated the peasants with respect and made promises of a better life. One of the major features of Mao���s leadership of the party was his deviation from conventional Marxist ideology: the peasants, rather than the urban proletariat, were to be the basis of the revolution. Mao stuck by his own ideas despite early criticism from the Russians and it was his philosphies exactly which brought power to the Party. It was Mao who was responsible for doing so and has been accordingly referred to as the ���Great Helmsan���. We are able to question whether similar successes could have been achieved if the Party had led a different path under a different leader.
The final 10% of ���good��� goes to improvements in health care and education, and economic successes. TO BE CONTI... FINISHED EVENTUALLY ¶ 17:16
