#this applies to urban chinese too btw. we know someone who says they have 'intergenerational trauma' from their parents not being able to

[eusuchia]

one of many things that bothers me about the average understanding of 20th century china is that people seem to find it impossible to conceive of the idea that the revolution happened for any real reason. this romantic idea of ~traditional china~ as a land of riches and scholarship and high culture only existed for a handful of people (not a phenomenon unique to china though, obviously). the vast majority of people in china were rural peasants (even now, rural pop is ~45%) living in absolutely intolerable poverty in a cruel, misogynistic, exploitative society and most being bled to death by extortionist landlords, some literally selling family to get by.

the idea that tens of millions of people living in, at the time, some of the worst poverty in the world would a) represent an actual society-changing force, if organized, and b) get on board with a complete overhaul of society just doesn't seem to register. funny how that happens!

I think more often than not stuff like the cultural revolution and great leap forward are talked about as though it was all cruelty for cruelty's sake and not as though it was the continuation of a long project through which people felt that they had a lot to gain. and they DID. when do you think the huge public infrastructure projects in china started being built? do you know how many people starved to death every year BEFORE land reform and collectivization (and how normalized it was)? how many peasants were able to access the bare bones of a childhood education, let alone go on to become university graduates and scholars, like mobo gao or dongping han?

before the midcentury, rural towns were trapped in impoverishment and underproduction not just because they were literally being worked and starved to death, but because the capital to, for e.g. make basic improvements to local wells and irrigation or any kind of public project simply didnt exist. even the richest town officials were living in what their contemporaries in europe would consider pathetic squalor. E.P. thompson in his work on 18th C england mentions how the abject poverty of the chinese peasant was widely known and used as rhetorical fodder even by english peasants toiling at the same time.

no matter what you think of china's trajectory now or then (and if you read this as blanket support for china, lmao), it wasn't all for nothing, or god forbid some kind of ego stoking project because you can only conceive of politics occuring at the level of heads of state. it was millions of the poorest people in asia remaking society and seeing their country become one of the world's top economies. that is just a fact. if you don't understand that, then you can't understand the first fucking thing about modern china or its historical relationship with other (especially the impoverished) countries of the world.

#I'm putting reblog lock on and not citing bc this isnt an essay I'm just fucking exhausted #this applies to urban chinese too btw. we know someone who says they have 'intergenerational trauma' from their parents not being able to #go to university during the cultural rev. #they've never said this part out loud bc nobody here knows better but its bc they were letting in all those yucky poors instead :(