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

argument that is widely circulated in the e-media is that there is a difference
between xi panzi (washing dishes) and jiao xuefei (paying tuition fees
to study). The author of this argument starts with a well-known
phenomenon that many PRC Chinese students, when in an affluent
Western country, would rather wash dishes in a restaurant than study
because the immediate cash income is too tempting, especially when
compared with wages they could earn in China. Those who wash dishes
can earn and save enough money to buy a car (a luxury item in China)
and even eventually a house. This is consumer culture. However the
other approach is to save and borrow to pay tuition fees to pursue a
course of study. This would mean many years of hard work and of little
consumption. The end result is totally different: those who study will
eventually end up with a higher social status. This metaphorical comparison
is used to argue that during the Mao era the Chinese had to work
hard but to consume little (like someone paying tuition fees) so that
eventually China could manage to build up an industrial and economic
base to become the equal of the great global powers. The post-Mao strategy
is like washing dishes to earn money to consume: China is now an
assembly line of the world, or a gigantic low-technology migrant worker.
The four modern inventions
CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY II
Participants in the e-media debate constantly remind their readers that
post-Mao China has hardly made any technological advance, and that all
of China’s important industries that were built up during the Mao era
have either declined or been taken over by foreign companies (for more
on this, see Chapter 9). Along these lines, La (2007) presents a ‘four new
inventions’ argument to show that the Mao era performed better technologically.
According to one poll survey of more than 50,000 respondents,
the four winning entries of modern Chinese inventions, as opposed to
the four old inventions of paper, compass, mobile printing and gun
powder, are the hybrid rice crop (zajiao shuidao 杂交水稻), the laser typesetting
and electronic publishing system of Chinese characters (hanzi
jiguang zhaopai 汉字激光照排), artificial synthetic crystalline insulin
(rengong hecheng yidaosu 人工合成胰岛素) and the compound Artemether
(fufang gaojiami 复方篙甲醚), the last being the malaria cure discovered at
Mawangdui as discussed in Chapter 1. These technological inventions
that have won the title of Modern China’s Four Most Important
Inventions were all developed during the Mao era (Tian Fu 2007).
In connection with this, the abandonment of the Chinese development
of civil aircraft Yun Shi (Transport 10) by the post-Mao authorities
has been widely publicized in the e-media. One e-media participant
even suggested that Shen Tu, the head of the Chinese Civil Aviation at
the time, who later defected to the West, was either a CIA spy or was
[ 143 ]