Spotted via the Horse’s Mouth, Nathan makes some statements to which I take exception.:
So as bad as the Communists have been, the 20 years under an oppressive Nationalist Party (our friends in Democracy!) were even worse.
Not to mention what the Japanese (our friends in Democracy!) did to the Chinese people in their seven years of occupation on the Mainland.
For some reason, we are not supposed to ever forget what the Communist Government did, but we aren’t supposed to ever mention what Our Friends in Democracy! did only a few years before. Why is that? …
Feel free to pile on me on this; that’s what blogging’s all about.
I’ve obliged, below the fold.
It takes quite a bit of gall to suggest that Imperial Japan was "our friend in democracy." It’s also wrong to suggest that the KMT is not openly criticized in Taiwan for its past.
Hideki Tojo was executed and and it would be nuts to hold the
crimes of imperial Japan over Junichiro Koizumi. The Kuomintang, as well,
is a reformed democratic opposition party and there’s no reason to hold
the errors of Chiang Kaishek over the administrations of Chen
Shui-bian’s immediate predecessors.
History is openly discussed in both Taiwan and Japan - and neither Chiang nor Tojo escapes scrutiny. China is different. It has not domestically addressed its past.
The personality cults that surrounded Tojo and Chiang have long since
crumbled. Mao is still revered and there is very limited space for
seriously questioning his legacy within China. His face in on the
currency and his massive portrait still looks over Tiananmen Square.
That said, I wouldn’t hold Hu Jintao or current CPC leadership
responsible for the either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural
Revolution. I wouldn’t hold Pope Benedict XVI or the Catholic
leadership responsible for the excesses of the crusades either.
But the Communist Party should still be called on to allow a full discussion of history, to take
responsibility what it does now and to reconsider its version of more recent events.
June 11th, 2005 at 11:57 am
I can go with most of what you said.
I’m not trying to excuse Mao. He was a power-mad jerk who pretty much ruined the education/life of an entire generation just because he wanted to come back from retirement.
I dunno. Maybe history is discussed in Taiwan. But I had to research to find out about the 2-28 incident. If you ask someone in the US about the evils of Communist China, most can answer “mass starvation, secret police”. Few people know that Taiwan was under martial law through the 80s, that the KMT came in and oppressed the locals and didn’t even allow them any voice in politics until the 90s, and didn’t have an open election until 1996.
Japan open about their history? HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA.
You haven’t been paying attention to news lately. They just put out a textbook that absolutely ignores the excesses of their military adventurism in the first half of the last century, and their Prime Minister can’t understand why anyone should be bothered when he goes to pay respect to Class A war criminals.
Do you think Europe would be sanguine if the German President went to a shrine dedicated to Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, et al?
And I don’t know…I do also think that the people who are/were the victims should set the tone. The Chinese people don’t seem to be all that upset about the starvation that happened more than 40 years ago. They even seem to be over the massacre that happened 16 years ago. Why should people who were never threatened be so upset about it?
I assure, the establishment of the People’s Armed Police will have more to do with the prevention of another Tiananmen Massacre than anything anyone in the West says/does.
But like I said, I’m not really finding fault with what you said; I’m just trying to point out a slightly different way of looking at it.
June 11th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
The textbook you mention is used by a tiny fraction of Japan’s schools. Past books were picked up by 0.3% of schools. Most of Japan’s population, according to recent polls, opposes the shrine visits. The People’s Armed Police was formed in 1983, they didn’t stop the killing six years later. I see no reason to believe they would do so should a similar situation arise today. And people here do remember June 4.
http://www.andresgentry.com/thoughts/2005/04/03_and_the_free.html
June 11th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
CCP in China killed 80 million. Can the Japanese top that?
June 11th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Nathan: KMT may have not been the most democratic of parties in Taiwan’s history, but comparing it with the Communist Party seems rather odd. KMT wasn’t democratic, but it wasn’t to the extent of having a totalitarian police state as it is in China. Much of KMT’s rule over Taiwan, except between KMT first took over Taiwan and towards the end of the Chinese civil war, has been more like Singapore and Malaysia than like Mainland China or North Korea.
June 13th, 2005 at 11:47 am
80 million? Are you kidding? Where the heck did you make up that number from?
Heck, why don’t we just blame every death that’s happened in the world since, say, 1937 on the Chinese Communists?
…that’s about the same logic as “80 million”. Sheesh.
KMT did have a totalitarian state over China. Taiwan was under martial law for approximately 50 years, and the people who actually lived there before the KMT moved in (without invitation or permission) were not allowed to vote freely until 1996.
Please research a little before making ridiculous comments.
If the shrine visits are so opposed, why does Koizumi still make them despite the distress it causes throughout Asia? If the textbooks are so unimportant, why publish them?
If Japan doesn’t have to face up to its past in international matters, it is foolish to expect China to do so on a purely internal matter when the Chinese people themselves seem to have gotten over it pretty well.
Still, China shouldn’t get a past. But you can’t look at it out of context. China is not the USSR, and I find attempts to make them the next “evil empire” to be strained, at best.