Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

But that is precisely the issue: should the state waste money on the
uneducated low-quality people? On a social occasion in June 2007 I
met a professor from the prestigious Beijing Normal University, Huang
Zuoyue, a highly educated member of the Chinese intelligentsia, who
looked smooth and urbane. When Huang told me that Chinese government
at all levels had so much money these days that officials did not
how to spend it, I asked why they did not spend the money on education
and healthcare for the poor. Professor Huang’s response was
something classic: There are too many people in China and if you spent
one dollar on each person it would be too costly. This is a professor
who, during our conversation, not only thought it acceptable to build
en suite bathrooms in professors’ offices at some leading Chinese
universities but even expressed pride in the plan.
Pointing out that the Chinese elite all jump onto the wagon of
condemning the Great Leap Forward famine as if it was Mao who had
murdered millions of people, Yi then asks: Why don’t they condemn the
population control policy for murdering so many millions? What about
the 1.7 millions girls that are missing according to the normal gender
ratio? Shui Han (2007), another e-media participant, argues that the
missing girls actually number as many as 40 million. Shui Han presents
detailed historical evidence, elaborate charts, figures and statistics to
show that Mao was right (and Ma was wrong) in not advocating a coercive
population control policy because the very strength of China lies in
its population. In order to combat a population control policy that is
considered to be disastrous Shui Han has created a population policy
website (http://www.shengyu.org/) to encourage debates.
The credibility of Li Rui
CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY I
One influential argument constructed by memoir, autobiographic and
biographic writings about Mao is that after 1956 he did nothing positive
for China. This is the so-called later Mao thesis (wan nian Mao
Zedong). One person who is very influential in promoting the later Mao
thesis is Li Rui. Following the veteran tradition of constructing China
as an Oriental despotism, Li Rui thinks China under the late Mao was
ruled by autocracy. His utterances attract a serious audience and one
high-profile US academic with a mainland China’s background credits
Li for first applying the term ‘autocracy’ to the Chinese regime and
uses it a key word in the title of his recent book (Pei 2006). In a list of
the 50 most influential people in China produced by Kerry Brown
(2007) for Chatham House and Open Democracy, Li Rui is included
ahead of Jiang Zeming, the General Secretary of the CCP for eight
years, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Li used to be the Deputy
Minister of Irrigation and wrote more than a dozen of anti-Mao works,
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