Word: mao
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Beware Impetuosity. It was a fantastic undertaking. One measure of how far Mao is from success is the state of the 17 million-member Chinese Communist Party, which marked its 50th anniversary last week. Mao demolished the party during the Cultural Revolution in his effort to wipe out the "capitalist readers" and others who did not share his own mystical concept of the revolution. He hoped to replace them with freshly radicalized, totally Maoized youth who would be prepared to spend their lives in permanent struggle. But they have yet to appear...
...party before the Cultural Revolution. Of the provincial bosses, 18 are old-line generals, five vintage bureaucrats, two veterans of service in the state security apparatus. Rural, poorly educated, untraveled and just plain old-their average age is 62-they are hardly the sort of men to heed Mao's call to "take in the fresh." In fact, a dominant theme of the 25,000-word anniversary editorial that appeared in the Peking press last week was a warning against the evils of "impetuosity...
Speaking Bitterness. The condition of the party aside. Westerners who have been admitted to China since Peking launched its venture in Ping Pong diplomacy report that in other respects, Mao has made remarkable strides toward his goal. Their dispatches tell of orderly cities where threadbare but smiling millions echo Maoist slogans, of shopkeepers who leave their goods out all night without fear of their being stolen, of a military establishment whose $150-a-month generals uncomplainingly accepted a sizable pay cut in 1969. Maoist thought, some of the travelers reported, has done away with corruption, enabled the deaf to regain...
Maoism was always grounded more in a naive spiritualism than in psychological or even political theory. Though the Communist rule of China proceeded conventionally enough in the beginning, by the mid-1950s Mao decided that the great necessity was not to institutionalize socialism but to institutionalize revolution. To prod the country's historically passive masses into a ceaseless struggle for the new world, writes University of Michigan Political Scientist Richard Solomon, Mao made virtues of hostility and aggression, the two human characteristics most deeply suppressed by the Confucian ethic. "The more one hates the old society," Mao reasoned...
Party cadres still regularly instruct groups of peasants in the cathartic pleasures of "speaking bitterness" about the bad old pre-Mao days. Provincial newspapers and radio stations (about half of China's towns and villages receive broadcasts) blare endless polemics against U.S. imperialists, Soviet revisionists and home-grown "class enemies...