<p>…well, for me, at least. all of you all who are off already…suck :P</p>
<p>no. just kidding. have a great holiday everyone!</p>
<p>thanxgivin is never a great holiday</p>
<p>i never kno which is the best shop to go buy ***** so i get up early and end up w/ not much</p>
<p>otherwise, i expect a nice afternoon of bombings and headshots and knife humiliations</p>
<p>as i was saying</p>
<p>i never kno which is the best shop to go buy ■■■ so i get up early and end up w/ not much (cant believe they block the ! in sh**)</p>
<p>[random rant]</p>
<p>and news of the day on ksci18 (socal thing) was how to cook a chinese turkey and cranberry sauce… tmd first thing they say is… ok this stuff normal tastes bad so we gonna make it xiang and taste good… does anybody think thats tmd youbing? if sb gonna eat dirt b/c its some tradition… just eat the dirt, if they want sth to taste good… eat sth simple and good tasting…isnt the turkey all about understanding sth about how hard the pilgrims had it and the natives saved them and then the descendents of the pilgrims killed off the descendents of the natives? making turkey into chinese style is tmd wuliao…[/rant]</p>
<p>cant believe there isnt enough news b/w the two most important nations to fill ~40min of air time everyweekday</p>
<p>HAHA…tmd youbing.i like that.i see that u like saying tmd.u have no idea how much swearing i do in my dialect.it gets scary.
anyways,happy thanksgiving everyone!and yy,please,don’t be such a turd.i mean,ppl are only getting off one day earlier than u do and you’re already ranting.GEEZ.
hehe,jk,u know i love u.</p>
<p>haha. sorry. yea. i don’t know what’s wrong with me. i have this chem test in an hour that i really don’t feel like studying for any more. we have a drop grade in that class, and technically i can afford to fail this last one. somehow i just feel like my brain’s dying on me but feel bad about not even trying. i’m just utterly exhausted. and it’s not even halfway through the year yet…
o well, after today…i’m FREE</p>
<p>are u serious,i still have wednesday to go through.oh well,it’s not that bad.i can just go through my classes in a fog or something.</p>
<p>same here, i still have 2 classes tomorrow. but then i’ll be in Boston by tomorrow evening :)</p>
<p>just had my second comp sci mid-term today…can you believe it…but it turned out to be all right so i’m in a pretty happy mood right now.</p>
<p>i cant wait for nyc… right now im watching “yuan wei de xia tian” “summer” its soooooooo cheesy… eww… but ahwell who cares</p>
<p>Hi, everybody, sorry for butting in. Not Chinese, though am Asian.</p>
<p>I’m in the middle of writing a paper about Mao Tse-tung/Mao Zedong and his Great Leap Forward and its resulting Famine from 1958 to 1962. There’s information on it on the Internet, yep, but they’re either rather disjointed, repetitive or locked behind money-subscriptions I have no money, interest or time for. </p>
<p>I was wondering if any of your parents/grandparents talk about Mao and his Famine, or if it’s an avoided topic or, as I find some historians state, something still denied in Chinese culture/family.</p>
<p>If they do talk about it, do you think you could reply, either here (though I’m not sure how other thread-posters would feel about me hogging more space than needed :embarrassed:) or PM me on CC?</p>
<p>Thanks, everybody!</p>
<p>My parents think Mao is the greatest. He was the chairman of the greatest party on earth. He was a poet, a revoluntionary, and a national hero</p>
<p>/end sarcasm</p>
<p>Well, any information you would find in reserach would originate from chinese expatriates in the US. Nobody ever talks about it in China. It’s a risky political taboo topic in China. Chinese citizens at that time probably sympathized with the students mostly. But under the suffocating political environment and in-fighting and backstabbing going on, most people are too afraid to say anything. Too afraid of authority. What exactly do you want to know?</p>
<p>I’m reading a book “Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine” where the author (Jasper Becker) travels in China and interviews the Chinese people about what life was like under Mao’s Great Leap and the Famine. </p>
<p>I’m curious about the commune system and experiences with that. My paper is slanted more on the comparison of Soviet and Chinese Five Year Plans, and Soviet’s collectivization vs. Mao’s Great Leap Forward and how/whether the Soviet “aid/advice/relations” with China influenced/directed Mao’s plans or exacerbate his already-thought-of plans or the fact that the USSR was the only country China could receive aid from just made it inevitable their plans coincided. Sino-Soviet relationship…</p>
<p>It’s amazing, rather. As I grew up, I thought of Hitler as the one responsible for the most deaths by deliberate acts, then Stalin and now it’s turning to Mao. I wonder if there are other totalitarian leaders who have “hidden crimes” under their belt. And I wonder who the future dictators will be…</p>
<p>I’m not quite quick on data on current Chinese politics. I wonder if China will go through a de-Mao-ist phase like the USSR did with Stalin.</p>
<p>1989? Nothing happened in 1989 … LIES … LIES… BLATENT LIES … There were no protest… no crackdowns… Blame the Americans …</p>
<p>When you ask the older chinese people, they generally have a mixed feel to Mao. Sure he did the whole revolution thing but then general consensus is that he kinda went crazy and did crazy things. I still remember watching a video of some people trying to work with the metal from the door-handle in a cooking pot during the great leap forward. I don’t quite think hardened steel melts at 100 degree’s celcius …</p>
<p>It seems China doesn’t really need to de-mao-ist because he kinda did it to himself. Who doesn’t know about the cultural revolution … Hitler died quick but achieved alot. Like James Dean he’s imortalised for what he did towards the end of his life. Stalin aged and sorta tried to drag everyone down with him. It was one tough legacy and they needed to de-stalinise. With China though, Mao was great… until he lost it. Cultural Revolution, Greap Leap Forward, Self Reliance … Non of those managed any level of success you saw in Germany and Russia. Of course most of our parents were part of the Cultural Rev so they would always tell us stories of where they went in teh countryside and all the other crazy stuff they did. You don’t have that sort of idol culture and devotion when it comes to Mao nowadays so I doubt they would need to do any de-mao-ising.</p>
<p>that’s a strange turn to our conversation…</p>
<p>Interesting thread lol.</p>
<p>Issyj, it really depends on who you talk to or who you read. There are some that believe the good Mao did far outweighs the bad. You have to take all the oppinions with a grain of salt since I doubt there is a “truth”. Everything is too shrouded in mystery somewhere in the Communist bearaucracy. </p>
<p>I did something similar for a world history project and it was just a total pain. I thought it would be easy since my grandparents lived through those eras. However I didnt expect them to hold vastly different oppinions. The family on my mother’s side were commerical landlords before the Revolution and her grandfather was a police chief under the Nationalists in Nanjing (where family is from). So obvious they are not too in love with Mao. Father’s side is more intellectual and they believe Mao was a great person who severed China from its pagan, backward past. </p>
<p>Anyway get all the oppinions you can and try to form your own.</p>
<p>wats not in wikipedia? well i’ll go check it out and see if theres anything i’ll add, but for real, i highly doubt any of us r studying chinese history</p>
<p>k so since this turned into personal opinion: Mao was 10 times the man Deng was and 10000000000 = 10^10 times the man Jiang was, he was master of everything, except economics, which ofc, is very important… and stuff like poetry and writing, is by comparison, useless</p>
<p>the communist revolution and great leap foward ended some incredibly backwards, unfair, and unpredictable political problems of the empires, but “leaping” so far left also created tons of problems, and further volality</p>
<p>chinese is now moving back right (historically “all under heaven” always very right, even when the “outside” was complete fuedal/theocratic/dicatoral) and some very old problems r seeping back, some less old problems r dissolving, and some new problems from industrialization and corporatization (the very problems the CCP founders use supposed to avoid) r trying to be resolved</p>
<p>Mao legacy will be the same as Caesar, Napolean, and Gorbachav</p>
<p>there is a radical opinon that believes that Mao actually ended up killing more Chinese than the Japanese durng his regime. I am very skeptical about such a claim and I believe that the Japs masercred far more Chinese . But I do think that the people holding such an opinion have a point. Hundreds of thousdands of people died during Mao’s era.</p>
<p>During Mao’s revolutionary era, there was a veil of internal surveilance in some regions. Coworkers would tell on each other if they said anything anti-mao. Then the ‘traitors’ lives would be made miserable.</p>