Great Leap Leftward?

The article Hu's Campaign for Ideological Purity Against the West by Willy Lam

Call it the Great Leap Leftward. President and Commander-in-Chief Hu Jintao is presiding over a leftward turn in politics that has come as a surprise to Hu admirers who were once impressed with the Fourth-Generation leader's reformist inclinations. In Chinese terminology, "left" has the connotation of being conservative, doctrinaire, and in tune with Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

In internal sessions devoted to the Ukraine phenomenon, Hu's aides in the LGFA pointed out that, in the words of one America specialist, Yushchenko's election triumph was due to the fact that "the West, led by the U.S., has been successful in infiltrating former Communist countries, thus resulting in their tilt toward America." Hu advisers have raised the specter of a domino effect, meaning that after Ukraine, similar pro-West, pro-U.S. administrations may emerge in other former Soviet-bloc countries, including member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, which have close ties with Beijing. Moreover, the Hu leadership has inherited late patriarch Deng Xiaoping's suspicions that Washington is dead-set on effectuating China's transformation into a capitalist state via a process of "peaceful evolution"...


Most disturbing for China's intellectuals is the fact that the CCP leadership's fears about "subversion" allegedly spearheaded by the U.S. have translated into tough tactics against the nation's liberal academics, writers and journalists.

Yet another reason behind President Hu's crackdown on intellectuals was the declining health of former party chief Zhao Ziyang, who died at the age of 85 on Jan 17...

Apart from cracking the whip on recalcitrant "rightists" and "all-out Westernizers," Hu and his colleagues are masterminding an old-style ideological campaign to promote Marxist rectitude and "ideological purity" among cadres and ordinary party members...

...Perhaps almost as much as for Mao, it's the party's - and its reigning supremo's - monopoly on power that matters most for Hu at the end of the day.

Great Leap Leftward? No, like most everything else, it's about keeping the Communist Party dictatorship in power. Still, the Chinese Communists blaming U.S. infiltration of the Ukraine for Yushchenko's election reminds me of those who blame the Korean War for shifting Mao's policies to the left. If the Korean war was wrong, I suppose we should have let l'il Kim take over the whole peninsula. And if we can't even support democracy in Eastern Europe, I guess we should just let Russia dominate the countries there. Otherwise, they might get upset or something.