Why do East Asians still hold grudges against Japan?

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Chinese hypocrisy knows no bounds...

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/as...pan/index.html

What hypocrisy. The Chinese government is criticising the Japanese decision to increase Japanese military's power. Meanwhile, China is cutting its military by 200,000 toops, in addition to the previously announced 500,000 troop reduction.

[Drake Tungsten]

Meanwhile, China is cutting its military by 200,000 toops, in addition to the previously announced 500,000 troop reduction.

Which is all part of a massive modernization project that is aiming to make China the most powerful military in the region. The hypocrisy is pretty obvious.

[st_swithin]

China has 4 billion people who can't use a hoe to plant rice to save their own assets.

That's pretty bent on destruction, I'd say.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by mindseye

Meanwhile Mao let people starve to death because of personal pride, but that's OK?

According to Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's doctor, Mao really was kept unaware of the true scale of the situation for a quite a while. Apparently most of those who reported to him feared the repercussions of explaining to him how disastrous his agricultural (and other) policies were.

According to Li's biography (he spent twenty-two years as Mao's trusted personal medical advisor before immigrating to the west after Mao's death), at some point the charade became impossible to support. At that time even Mao's personal bodyguards (usually drawn from the countryside) were receiving letters from relatives back home, describing the mass starvation taking place in the rural parts of the nation.

Li says that when Mao finally started to understand the real situation, he went into a kind of denial, becoming very depressed and reclusive. At this point, the Party bureaucracy seized the opportunity to take control, and began taking measures to address the crisis (e.g. ordering emergency distributions of the grain which was being withheld in support of wildly unrealistic production quotas).

Mao was politically marginalized for years after the Great Leap. He eventually unleashed the Cultural Revolution as a bid to regain his pre-Leap staus.

It seems to me that the most villianous of those responsible for the mass starvation were the lowest level officials in the villages. These local officials, under pressure from above, reported imaginary harvests of great abundance, even in areas where the harvests were down due to Mao's crazy agricultural schemes. When Beijing made requests for food shipments to the cities based on these inflated reports, officials had to oblige or risk exposure of their fraudulent accounting. Jasper Becker (in "Hungry Ghosts") recounts witnesses' descriptions of villagers dropping dead while local graineries stood loaded with food. Besides the local officials, others higher up became aware of the scale of the crisis, yet failed to take any action out of fear of losing their position or suffering Mao's wrath.

The famine which resulted from the Great Leap was a product of several factors, including a flawed political system which rewarded fantasy statistics while punishing bringers of bad news. It was (and remains) a political system in which unaccountable local officials (especially in rural areas) may wield enormous power, often operating outside of the knowledge (and to some degree control) of Beijing.

Even though he did not intentionally design a policy to starve millions, Mao bears ultimate reponsibility for creating such a system and the deaths that resulted.

Very informative, thank you.

[mindseye]

Originally posted by Sikander
Very informative, thank you.

Simply returning a favor (re: bilingual education thread).