Tag Archives: maoism

even maoist spaces crumble and fade…

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Only eleven houses remain occupied in Baishizhou’s Tangtou row houses.

Nanshan District tacitly condemned these houses several years ago, but did not become serious about evictions until the Universidade (Summer 2011). As inhabitants were evicted, the District padlocked the doors, so that the buildings could not be reoccupied. However, as the saying goes, “Those on top have policies, those on the bottom have countermeasures (上有政策,下有对策)”. When houses weren’t immediately padlocked, another family or worker or group of friends moved in. The owners continued to collect rent. When enforcers from the Urban Management Bureau (城管) came by either the inhabitants moved, or made friends with them and stayed, waiting for the final eviction.

This wait and see attitude has been much more successful for inhabitants of houses where the landlord is either in Hong Kong or further abroad. As a 4-year resident said, “Property managers don’t care what we do because the absent landlords are legally responsible. All they have to do is collect rents and their paychecks. I’m polite to urban management and they leave me alone. We’re all human, and when it’s time to move, they’ll tell me.”

Nanshan District has decided to close down the area completely because the summer rains further weakened the structures. These buildings from rural collectivism are no longer simply considered an eyesore, but also dangerously unsound. The vanishing of Maoist economic legacies was, of course, one of Shenzhen’s raison d’etre. However, Maoism lingered in the nooks and crannies of previously built spaces, such as Tangtou. Indeed, the Tangtou row houses are one of the few remaining examples of Maoist architecture in Shenzhen’s inner districts and once they have been razed, Maoism will become more of a spectre than it already is.

Thought du jour: in Shenzhen, even crumbling, Maoist dormitories can no longer safely shelter the city’s poorest workers and their families. Wither the left, indeed.

Impressions of Tangtou wet and sunny, and still occupied interior.

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Zhao Shaoruo’s work, or, does solipsistic representation parody Mao’s cult of personality?

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Visited the Wutongshan Culture Highland with friends, Jonathan and Gigi; resident artist director, Ryan Mitchell showed us the site. Of note, Zhao Shaoruo’s (赵少若) solipsistic exhibition in which he appears as every character in every painting and image. In addition to pieces in which he has substituted his face for Mao’s, Zhao has also produced work in the name of a variety of others, ranging traditional Chinese through Jews to insects. Telling, the only time that others appear in Zhao’s work, they do so as an extreme end of a continuum in which Zhao’s features are blended with his other.

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Solipsists argue that the idea that only one’s own mind exists, that knowledge outside one’s own mind is unsure, or that only one’s own mind exists. Zhao’s relentless substituting his own face for those of others reminds us that extreme forms of solipsism are brutally pathological; I exist therefore you cannot. Continue reading →

the way we were

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Going through old speeches of Deng Xiaoping, I came across his 1974 address to a Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, using Third World theory that Zhou Enlai had presented at Bandung 1955. Those were the days, when socialist utopianism inspired the oppressed Peoples of the Third World to roar their anger and retake what had been taken. Of course, two years after Deng’s New York gig, Zhou Enlai and then Mao Zedong would pass, the Gang of Four would be vanquished in a bloodless transition of power (if we don’t take the PLAs one-year foray into Vietnam as a concession to hardliners), and Deng Xiaoping would emerge as the new leader of the People’s Republic of China, employing cats of various colors to jumpstart the economy first in Shekou (1978) and then in Shenzhen (1979), with the SEZ established in 1980.

And yet. As events in the Middle East force us to reflect on the resentments that inequality and oppression foster, Maoist language resonates. And yes, Socialism with Chinese characteristics would qualify for condemnation as “that country which styles itself socialist” if only because the USSR, the other country that styled itself socialist disbanded as Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng renegotiated the post Cold War order. Memory snippets from the Marxist Internet Archive.

[…] In this situation of “great disorder under heaven,” all the political forces in the world have undergone drastic division and realignment through prolonged trials of strength and struggle. A large number of Asian, African and Latin American countries have achieved independence one after another and they are playing an ever greater role in international affairs. As a result of the emergence of social-imperialism, the socialist camp which existed for a time after World War II is no longer in existence. Owing to the law of the uneven development of capitalism, the Western imperialist bloc, too, is disintegrating. Judging from the changes in international relations, the world today actually consists of three parts, or three worlds, that are both interconnected and in contradiction to one another. The United States and the Soviet Union make up the First World. The developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions make up the Third World. The developed countries between the two make up the Second World… Continue reading →