Earlier this evening, I watched Mao's Last Dancer, a film based on the autobiography of the Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin. The movie includes a sequence in which the dancer performs for Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife and leader of the Gang of Four during China's Cultural Revolution. In a few minutes, the movie successfully recalls how oppressive, dangerous, and deluded China's leadership was during that dark period.When I taught English in New York's Chinatown many years ago, I met students who had experienced the Cultural Revolution. It is difficult for us to grasp the swirl of revolutionary hysteria that gripped China at that time. The historical episode touched every Chinese. I don't take such incidents lightly, and occasionally reflect on how something similar could happen elsewhere.
One of my Chinese students showed me her stamp collection featuring pristine stamps from the Cultural Revolution. Heroic farmers, dedicated leaders, strident slogans graced those
functional objects, transforming them into aggressive political icons. The student knew the stamps were more than simply collector's items. They reflected history, one that directly,negatively impacted her family.
To this day, I recall the stamps' lurid power, and hoped I would never have to encounter such collective insanity as the student's family did over four decades ago.
Finally, the Nobel committee's award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo is an unintended, yet entirely suitable coda to this post. The Chinese government's reaction to the honor, which it characterized as an "obscenity," baldly demonstrates why people of thought are persistently troubled the country's current, rigid political direction and have profound intellectual and moral doubts about its future.
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