Autobio – Originally From Canada – education and deconstruction.com

Red China Blues

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The Book of the Week is “Red China Blues, My Long March From Mao to Now” by Jan Wong, published in 1996.

Born in 1952, Wong grew up in Montreal. Since her parents were originally from China, she went to search for her roots there, beginning when she was in college. She spent her three-month 1972 summer vacation in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked temples and burned books, painted walls red, and posted Mao’s quotations. Chinese natives had severe shortages of consumer goods, which were exported for hard currency.

The author was assigned a minder (supervisor / spy) and a driver. The unwashed masses were squashed into noisy trams while top government officials rode around in red-flagged limousines whose windows were covered in gauze.

Wong was taken somewhere different every day, such as the Canton zoo, or the countryside. The latter was ninety miles away from Beijing. To get there, she had to take an overcrowded bus with live chickens, plus a six-hour ride on three ferries.

Fresh-faced, earnest, brainwashed cultists (Chinese youths) put on a show for Wong (a special foreign visitor). She had arrived fresh-faced and earnest, and became a brainwashed cultist herself. The most prominently featured book at the bookstore was Selected Works of Mao Zedong in various languages.

Wong became a lucky beneficiary of Mao’s campaign to open up China economically and culturally. As is well known, American president Nixon opened the door for economic benefits. The author got permission to study the Mandarin language at Beijing University. She and her dorm-mate, another foreigner, were treated like princesses rather than common Chinese peasants.

Even so, the author acquired the martyr complex of true Mao worshippers– she was eager to go to the countryside to do hard manual labor. She did, but she saw that her fellow workers had gotten tired of the leaders’ hypocrisy, and the deprivation suffered by, and oppression of ordinary Chinese people.

Mao’s latest nationwide political program was winding down. His anti-education mandate was changing. His minions began to encourage school attendance, but there was rote learning, which still put the kibosh on independent thinking. The goal of the Communists was to produce blindly obedient robots who could recite Marx, Engels , Lenin, Stalin and of course Mao, verbatim.

In the early 1980’s with a new leader, China caught the capitalism bug. But there was still loads of corruption. The government still oppressed ordinary Chinese people. Even though the author was a Canadian expatriate, she looked Chinese, so this actually gave her a distinct advantage as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. She was able to gain the trust of the people she questioned.

Nevertheless, even the author suffered an outrageous incident: “The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our car another month… on June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone, and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks littered the interior.”

The author acquired direct experience in two economically and politically diverse environments over the course of decades– Canada and China. By the end of the 1970’s, she had become disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, but didn’t regret the education she got.

Wong saw how, into the 1990’s, Beijing’s roads became clogged with luxury vehicles, as the new rich sought to keep up with the Joneses. At the book’s writing, she could identify dogma and hated it. She believed in dignity and building resilience through experiencing hardship. She contended that rational thought should be sufficiently simple to explain to a five-year old.

Read the book to learn of many other experiences in the author’s life, and of the major late-1980’s historical event the author witnessed, that showed that China was still not ready to join the modern nations of the world that practiced democracy and rule of law.

A Life In Our Times

The Book of the Week is “A Life in Our Times, Memoirs” by John Kenneth Galbraith, published in 1981.

Born in 1908 in southern Ontario, Canada, the author grew up on a farm and ranch. One of four children, he was of Scottish extraction. In spring 1934, he got a high-paying job as an economist with the U.S. government’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, having completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote, “I was not a citizen, but it is not certain that one was even asked about such details in those civilized days.” However, he did have to verify with the Postmaster General that he was a Democrat.

Also in 1934, when the author became a professor at Harvard, he was appointed an admissions officer. He was told that all (very nearly all white male, at that time) applicants to the college who had attended the nation’s elite private boarding schools (Groton, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Middlesex, Exeter and Andover) were automatically accepted. Students from other private schools were possibilities; public schools, less so, and Jews were subjected to a quota, regardless of their pedigree. Radcliffe College– Harvard’s female counterpart, had inferior offerings in all ways (housing, food, academics, etc.).

John Maynard Keynes helped originate a prominent school of thought in economics in the Depression era. He believed the country could deficit-spend its way out of a financial hole, and of course, military spending soared at the start of WWII. Government officials have one chance (there are no do-overs) in any given administration to try to foster or maintain a good economy and claim credit for doing so. The extremely complex United States economy is a topic area that is very propaganda-dependent.

However, human nature plays the biggest role in the wealth of a nation. The author propagandized that Americans who survived the Great Depression feared there would be another, so during and after WWII, they saved their money for a rainy day. Thus, one factor driving the economy might have been the behavioral economics of citizens, regardless of government policy.

In 1940, the author was a lobbyist for the Farm Bureau in Chicago, setting minimum prices for corn, cotton, wheat and other crops. He also had a hand in shaping policy at the National Defense Advisory Commission in Washington, D.C. “No one worried about the environmental effects; industry and jobs in those uncomplicated days [1930’s and 1940’s] were an absolute good.” In 1942, amid much governmental infighting over price controls on agricultural products, the Senate lied with statistics to minimize financial harm to farmers. There was also mandatory rationing of everyday consumer products.

The author eventually became an American citizen and a high government official, so he was able to gain access to a large amount of horse’s mouth archive-documentation, which he meticulously sifted through in writing this book.

In spring 1945, the author, fluent in German, interrogated Albert Speer– one of the first Nazis to shrewdly get legal immunity from punishment for snitching on his countrymen in naming names of war criminals. United States government officials were also trying to find out how much harm the Air Force did to the German economy and its war capabilities.

The answer was– not very much. The overall reason was that the Germans didn’t make war as well as they should’ve, so they lost the war more as a function of their weaknesses, not as a function of the Allies’ strengths. The author listed the major factors:

America and England competently executed talent recruitment and deployment of both men and women in their very productive war mobilization efforts;

The overconfident Germans allowed only men to help;

The Germans put more effort into mobilizing their propaganda machine than their war machine after they initially stockpiled weaponry to kick off the war– they didn’t want their economy to slow down;

The emotional impacts of the incidents at Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor spurred the Allies to action;

The Germans again accelerated the making of war weaponry in 1944– too late; and

The United States’ fighter bombers did disable some German oil and railroad installations, but not many ball-bearing and aircraft factories.

In spring 1961, the author was nominated as U.S. ambassador to India. A whopping 106 security-clearance informants gossiped about the author to the U.S. secret service to help him get the job. President JFK had just suffered the embarrassing Bay of Pigs fiasco.

When the author learned that the CIA had secret plans to send money and publish propaganda in newspapers and magazines in order to get voters to favor non-Communist candidates in India’s upcoming elections, he shared his concerns with the president and other top American officials. They listened, as they couldn’t afford to fail at any more adolescent-boy spy games, at least for the near future.

In the author’s day, aside from his having cozy contacts in high places, his friendliness and honesty with the press, and his writing well-argued, readable memos went a long way toward getting the government to act pursuant to his recommendations.

In 1967, the author published a book in which he wrote– inexplicably– that the motivations of captains of industry did not (!) include the pursuit of money but only “… the desire for peer approval, the identification with the goals of the organization, and the desire to adjust these toward one’s own.” He asserted that these motivations were common to socialist organizations, too. It must be remembered that the author was originally from Canada; he gave lectures on his ideas in Britain, and the book was sold in the USSR, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Germany.

Read the book to learn about the author’s additional dealings with India in connection with Pakistan and China; his prescient and depressing prognostications on Laos and Vietnam, to which the government failed to listen; his views on LBJ’s War on Poverty; and much more about how times have changed, and how they have stayed the same.