Thank you, Howard Fu, and all sharing their opinions here!
I have cited both positive and negative points of view about Stalin and Mao, as each person and situation has the same. So what we can do now is learn from history for the future, learn to tell good from bad. And I recall a phrase from one Russian recent movie about Brezhnev regarding him “He is a good man but being a good man isn’t an occupation yet”. In Russia nowadays politics is often considered being dirty thing in ordinary people's mind. We have easily admitted our socialistic past was a mistake, but this is a part of phenomenon of times or generations gap, existing in Russia and inappropriate in China where people worship their historical past. I also hope Russia will become stronger but now our people's attitude to improvement leaves much to be desired…And despite there are mostly overseas Chinese participating in discussion I trust their opinion because they are thinking and accomplished people and they use facts to explain their points of view.
I will clarify here as to what background I have. I was from mainland China, not someone who was raised overseas as Howard claimed. The reason I had come to possess different view from Howard's was that since about 1983-4 around, I came to contact with English language books that were not abridged versions that were allowed in China. One teacher of mine, who was teaching English around the world all her life, set up a library in my university, and brought in cases of books whenever she came to China. Through those books, I acquired some knowledge into true history. I first found out how the Korean War was started, what Mao's AB League Purge was about, etc etc.
My family history had some impact. However, my father was not the kind of person who dared to say a negative word about the communist regime. He told me about how his teacher was killed in early 1950s, how he went to Ussuri for farming, and how he lived and worked with KMT prisoners, Korea War returnees, and leftists, ... As to the inhuman nature of communism, I had personal observations of the mass parade, of course. However, when I was in junior high, I was still touting the communist revolution by enumerating the victories of PLA in Huaihai, Yangtze, and etc. One middle school teacher personally went over my essay on the Huangqiao Battle, which was a communist elimination campaign against the government troops in 1940, the direct fuse that preceded the New Fourth Army incident of 1941. At that time, I could not make a judgment as to the cause and effect, not to mention linking up the flow of events like 1940 vs 1941. I was curious about Taiwan - because of some young man being paraded as a reactionary for listening to enemy radio stations. I tuned in to Voice of Free CHina, and heard quite a bit about Miss Deng Lijun's visiting the Taiwan Army, Navy and Air Force for singing songs. Taiwan radio was touting how many agents they had on mainland China. Like agent No. this, your task was this; agent No. that, your task was that, etc. That's my memory about the enemy radio. My father told me about his uncle in Taiwan, as well as the story about my grandfather who fought the guerrilla war against Japan in the Yangtze Delta. I was interested in finding out more, but my information was limited. I could only acquire this info after I came to the US.
Now about the interpretations of the Chinese communist revolution. The problem I have with the official version of history is that they tried to make up the cause and effect by fabricating the theme of popular support and people's support. This was also the theme of Fairbanks and his students. I figure that it is real easy to talk about how the Chinese Communists ascended to power. History is a good mirror. You have Waterloo which determined Napoleon's fate. You have Napoleon's campaign against Moscow versus Hitler's campaign against Leningrad/Stalingrad. Now, it was easy to say the cases of Hitler and Napoleon were the same. However, there was a fundamental difference. Napoleon was exhausted by the winter in Moscow, but Hitler was exhausted by the tilting balance of power that was the United States lend-lease aid to Stalin. Stalin would not have allowed the Russian people to know that it was the massive US aid that secured the fate of the Soviet Union, though. For China, the loss of the ROC regime was no less an event than that of a battle at Waterloo or Hitler's debacle in Moscow, which were the equivalemnts of the campaigns of Liao-shen; Huai-hai and Ping-jin. As long as you have a correct understanding of the events surrounding the three campaigns, the myth of the Chinese communist revolution is debunked.
Some correction: I thought Stalin was a non-Jew. The following link showed that Stalin's original name in the Georgian language "shvili" means son of, and "Djuga" means Jew. Stalin's name "Kochba" was the leader of the "Jews during one of the anti-Roman uprisings of the Jews."
http://www.jewwatch....ers-stalin.html
I have to admit that I needed to catch up with the continuous dig.
Edited by ahxiang, 11 July 2009 - 09:18 PM.
