Chinese Minority Cultures Literature Review Purpose Students Will: Fill & Download for Free

On 2 February 2021, The New York Times published a profile piece written by Rachel Poser titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The subject of the article is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Afro-Latino associate professor of classics at Princeton University who argues that the field of classics as it is currently constructed is deeply embedded with systemic racism and serves to reinforce white supremacist hegemony. Padilla wants to radically reshape the field by rooting out aspects that reinforce white supremacy and rebuilding the field in a new way.This profile piece triggered an unceasing deluge of op-eds published on various platforms purporting to “defend” the discipline of classics from Padilla’s supposed attacks. These op-eds almost invariably display complete ignorance of the conversation that has been taking place within the discipline of classics over the past few years and ignorance of what Padilla is actually proposing. They reduce the conversation to a ridiculous caricature according to which evil, radical leftist scholars are trying to bring an end to the study of ancient texts altogether.Many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the controversy solely from these op-eds and coming away with the egregious misimpression that this is really what is happening. In this essay, I want to explain for my general readership what is really going on within the field and what sorts of changes people are really advocating. (I would write an op-ed, but no one would publish it, since I’m just a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate.)The op-eds are everywhere!Rachel Poser’s profile piece about Dan-el Padilla Peralta in The New York Times has many good qualities and it goes good work to raise public awareness of a conversation that has been happening for several years now within the discipline of classics. Unfortunately, the piece also has some weaknesses. One major weakness is that it portrays Dan-el Padilla Peralta as a radical iconoclast, but yet it does not clearly lay out in any systematic fashion the actual changes that Padilla is seeking to promote.Consequently, it seems that the authors of the recent op-eds—who seem to only know about Padilla’s work from the profile piece itself—do not understand what Padilla is actually advocating. The result is a seemingly never-ending deluge of uninformed and half-informed think pieces.I couldn’t possibly list every opinion piece that has been written in response to Poser’s piece in The New York Times, but here are a few that should give a general impression:On 3 February 2021, The American Conservative published an op-ed by Rod Dreher titled “Suicide of the Humanities.”On 4 February 2021, The Washington Post published an op-ed by the scholar and translator Shadi Bartsch titled “Why I Won’t Surrender the Classics to the Far Right.” (As it happens, that particular article contains a link to my blog post about the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January.)On 5 February 2021, The Weekly Dish published an op-ed by the blogger and political commenter Andrew Sullivan titled “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics.”On 9 February 2021, The National Review, a far-right magazine, published an op-ed by the magazine’s own editor Rich Lowry titled “Are the Classics Racist?”On 18 February 2021, The National Review published another op-ed by the scholar and translator Sarah Ruden titled “In Defense of the Classics.”Some of these op-eds are written by people who are actually involved in the field of classics (such as Shadi Bartsch and Sarah Ruden), but most of them are written by people with no involvement in or engagement with the field (such as Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, and Rich Lowry). All of them share an overall reactionary stance and all of them reduce the arguments that Padilla and others have put forward regarding the field of classics to a simplistic straw man.ABOVE: A few of the op-eds that have been published over the past few weeks in reaction to the profile piece about Dan-el Padilla Peralta in The New York TimesHow many people outside the field of classics are receiving this controversyUnfortunately, many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the conversation that is currently taking place solely from The New York Times profile piece and the op-eds written in response to it. They are therefore coming away with a very inaccurate perception of the conversation—one that is informed by the very popular (but false) stereotype of the humanities as a stagnant collection of useless disciplines full of leftist ideologues who only care about ideology and not about facts.This is evident in some of the reactions to the ongoing conversation from people with STEM backgrounds. For instance, Jerry Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and a prominent popular science author. He has a blog titled Why Evolution Is True, which has a very large audience. He frequently complains on this blog about how radical leftists are supposedly trashing the humanities and putting ideology ahead of science.For instance, here is a post he published on 3 October 2018 decrying what he describes as “the abysmal academic standards in the humanities.” On 29 January 2019, he published another post complaining about how he thinks that the humanities have become hopelessly anti-science and “stagnant” as a result of embracing “Postmodernism.” The opening paragraph of his post reads as follows:“There’s never an end to science-dissing these days, and it comes largely from humanities scholars who are distressed by comparing the palpable progress in science with the stagnation and marginalization of their discipline—largely through its adoption of the methods of Postmodernism. (Curiously, the decline in humanities, which I believe coincides with university programs that promote a given ideology rather than encourage independent thought, is in opposition to the PoMo doctrine that there are different ‘truths’ that emanate from different viewpoints.)”Coyne himself is far, far from the only person in STEM who has this impression of the humanities; the things he says on his blog are similar to things I have read and heard more times than I can possibly count—in op-eds on the internet, in comments on my blog, in answers on Quora, and from the mouths of fellow students and relatives with backgrounds in STEM.The New York Times profile piece on Dan-el Padilla Peralta and the op-eds written in response to it have only reinforced Coyne and his followers’ assumptions and prejudices about the humanities. Coyne published a blog post on the subject on 6 February, in which he comes away with the very inaccurate impression that Padilla is one of many delusional radical leftists in the humanities who want to end the teaching of ancient texts altogether because they think they are racist and there is no value in teaching them. Coyne is definitely not alone here; his post already has dozens of comments from his various followers, nearly all of whom share opinions similar to his own.ABOVE: Photograph of Jerry Coyne, a very prominent evolutionary biologist and science popularizerWhat Padilla (and lots of other people) are actually arguingAll of this is very unfortunate, since it is extremely easy for anyone with an internet connection to look up Padilla’s actual work. Even if you don’t have access to or don’t know how to find any of the articles Padilla has published, there are literally free videos of him explaining his ideas in depth on YouTube that come up if you simply type his name into Google. For instance, here is a YouTube video of a brief talk he gave in October 2020, in which he lays out very succinctly some of the changes that he thinks need to happen in the field of classics. Here is another YouTube video of a longer talk he gave about the future of classics.Padilla is not saying that everyone needs to stop reading ancient Greek and Roman texts altogether. Instead, he is arguing that the field of classics as it is currently constructed in the twenty-first century, especially in the English-speaking world, needs to change. There is a very important distinction between the ancient subject matters that classicists study and the academic discipline of classics as it exists today.Everyone in the field of classics that I know of agrees that there is value to studying ancient texts. Even people who absolutely despise, say, Aristotle from the depths of their hearts—and, believe me, there are legitimately good reasons to hate Aristotle—recognize that it is worthwhile for there to be people who study his works, even if only for the sake of understanding how they have influenced modern prejudices. Unfortunately, most of the authors of the op-eds that have been published lately don’t seem to grasp this.Below, I discuss a few of the changes that people in the field of classics—including Padilla—are actually advocating. Rebecca Futo Kennedy (a professor of the classics at Denison University) and Maximus Planudes (a classics scholar who uses the name of a thirteenth-century Greek anthologist as a pseudonym) have already published a post of their own on this subject, which is very thorough. I highly recommend reading it if you have the time once you finish reading this article.In this post, I will be covering a few of the same topics that Padilla covers in the videos linked above and that Kennedy and Planudes cover in their post. My article here, however, is written from my own perspective as an undergraduate student and is meant primarily for people who are not personally involved in the discipline of classics who are curious about what is going on. With that out of the way, let’s get started on some of the things that people are advocating.ABOVE: Photograph of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, from the Princeton websiteChanging the name of the fieldOne thing that many people, including Padilla, are advocating is changing the name of the discipline. The name classics has some seriously problematic implications and it is outright confusing to many people. It is derived from the Latin word classicus, which referred to the highest and most prestigious class of the Roman citizenry. The word classics in English still bears the connotation of superiority and erudition.The name classics therefore implies that the things classicists study are inherently superior to things that other people in other fields of the humanities study. Since (as I will discuss in a moment) classicists currently almost exclusively study ancient Greece and Rome, the name of the discipline therefore implies that the ancient Greeks and Romans are somehow superior to essentially all other cultures that have ever existed. This is a very inaccurate and unsavory implication.The name “classics” is also highly confusing to most people who do not have any background in the subject. Most of the time, when I tell people that I am a “classics” major, their first assumption is that I study so-called “classical music”—as in the works of composers like Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I therefore find myself constantly having to explain to people that I actually study ancient Greece and Rome. (There’s nothing wrong with studying Beethoven and Mozart, but they have nothing to do with my area of study!)Many classics departments are therefore quite reasonably ditching the name “classics” and adopting other names that are more accurate and more specific, such as “Ancient Greek and Roman Studies” or “Ancient Mediterranean Studies.”ABOVE: Photograph from the website AncientRome of the Togatus Barberini, a Roman marble statue dating to around the first century CE or thereabouts, depicting a Roman patrician wearing a toga and holding images of his deceased ancestorsEngaging with cultures other than ancient Greece and RomePresently, at most institutions, the field of classics is intensely hyper-focused on the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. There is nothing inherently wrong with studying ancient Greece and Rome, but, unfortunately, classicists often tend to ignore all other cultures in ancient world, including even cultures with which the Greeks and Romans frequently interacted. Although classicists certainly realize on an intellectual level that Greece and Rome did not exist in a vacuum, they often functionally tend to treat them as though they did.Sarah E. Bond, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, has advocated that we should radically reorganize humanities department structures to combine all the scholars who work on fields related to the ancient world into one big “Global Antiquity” department. On 22 January 2021, she issued the following tweet, which triggered a great deal of online controversy:She followed this up the next morning with another tweet clarifying what she meant:These are radical suggestions, but they are ones that I partly agree with. I strongly agree that scholars who study ancient Greece and Rome should pay more attention to other cultures aside from Greece and Rome. This should especially include the cultures of the ancient Middle East and North Africa—which, as I will discuss in greater depth in a moment, are now widely recognized to have had tremendous influence on both Greek and Roman history, culture, literature, and politics.It should also, however, include other cultures in places like India, East Asia, and parts of Africa south of the Sahara Desert that were somewhat more remote, but were still connected to the ancient Mediterranean in sometimes surprising ways. For instance, as I discuss in this article from May 2020, many of the earliest surviving depictions of the Gautama Buddha display noticeable influences from the Greek artistic tradition. Similarly, as I discuss in this article from June 2020, the Aksumite Empire in Ethiopia minted coins with Greek inscriptions and, as I discuss in this article from December 2019, there were diplomatic relations between the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China.These are just a few of the very interesting and significant connections that Greece and Rome had with seemingly far-flung ancient cultures that classicists generally don’t tend to talk about much.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greco-Buddhist statue of Siddhārtha Gautama from Gandhāra, Pakistan, most likely dating to the first or second century CEClassics doesn’t just need to break out of its geographic isolationism; it also needs to break out of its temporal isolationism. It is truly unfortunate in my view that many classicists have little knowledge of and little interest in engaging with material from late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Byzantine Roman Empire in particular has generally been unfairly marginalized and ignored by most classicists for a long time, even though it is in many ways profoundly and immediately relevant to what classicists—especially Hellenists—study.As I previously summarized in this article I published in January 2020, Anthony Kaldellis provides an extremely compelling argument in his excellent book Byzantium Unbound for why classicists—especially Hellenists—should care about the Byzantine Empire. He points out that nearly the entire canon of ancient Greek literature as we know it has been shaped by which texts the Byzantines chose to read and copy and which ones they chose not to copy. Understanding Byzantine culture and the literary interests of Byzantine elites is therefore extremely important for understanding why the particular works that have survived from ancient Greece have survived.ABOVE: Byzantine manuscript illustration from the mid-tenth century CE depicting Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipmentAt the same time, though, I am not totally on board with Bond’s idea of combining everyone who studies every part of the ancient world together into one big department. I am only an undergraduate, so I am certainly not an expert on university departments and administration, so anyone reading this should take my opinion with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, as I see it, having people who study different parts of the ancient world in separate departments is useful for ensuring that the departments in question are able to adequately address the specific needs of their area of specialization.I am currently double-majoring in classics and history and, for my history major, I’ve taken a lot of classes about ancient cultures outside the Mediterranean world. I’ve taken enough of these classes to know that the people who study these cultures are, in many cases, dealing primarily with different concerns from the ones classicists are dealing with and that they generally have very little interest in combining their departments with classics.Indeed, even the political concerns that these disciplines have to deal with are, in many cases, different. For instance, I’ve taken a couple classes in pre-modern Chinese history and I’ve noticed that, when my Chinese history professors have brought up contemporary politics, they haven’t talked about white supremacy and appropriation of ancient history by the American far right; instead, they talk about how the current government of the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping is using Chinese history and archaeology to justify authoritarianism and the persecution of minorities such as the Uyghurs.It seems to me that combining separate areas of study that all have their own problems and concerns together into a single department in an attempt to solve some of the problems that one of those areas of study is facing would be counterproductive to the majority of the areas of study involved. Indeed, many people who study other parts of the ancient world would probably interpret it as an attempt by classics to essentially annex or colonize their areas of study.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Xi Jinping, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, whose regime has been using ancient Chinese history and archaeology for political purposesGetting rid of the implicit notion that ancient Greece and Rome were homogenous “white civilizations”Moving on, it is unfortunately still frequently assumed, even among people who study the ancient Mediterranean world, that the people who lived in ancient Greece and Rome were uniformly what most twenty-first-century Americans would call “white.” This is an assumption that has never really been grounded in evidence and that scholars nowadays are increasingly coming to recognize as false.Sarah E. Bond has done extensive public scholarship to promote recognition of the fact that ancient Greek and Roman statues, which appear white in color today, were originally brightly painted and that the Greek and Roman world was, in fact, what we would consider quite racially diverse. She’s talked extensively about how the misconception that ancient sculptures were originally white has been used to buttress white supremacy. For instance, here is an excellent article she wrote for Hyperallergic in June 2017 titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.”For more information on this subject, I highly recommend this article I published in September 2020, in which I attempt to debunk the general notion that ancient Greece and Rome were “white civilizations.” In that article, I do admit that the majority of people who lived in Greece and Italy in ancient times would probably pass as white if they were alive today. Nonetheless, I make several points that I think are important for members of the general public (and classicists, for that matter) to realize.First I note that, contrary to what the vast majority of people in the United States still believe, race is a social construct based on arbitrary and extremely superficial physical features, not an objective reflection of any deep or inherent biological reality. This is something that has been almost universally accepted among anthropologists and academics for a very long time. Unfortunately, I am constantly getting comments from people trying to argue against this, insisting that race is “objective science” and that people of different races are inherently biologically “different” from each other.Furthermore, as I discuss in the article, many of the concepts that most Americans have about race today didn’t exist in antiquity. No one in ancient Greece or Rome ever thought of themself as racially a “white person.” They had a concept of white as a color, but they had absolutely no concept of a “white race.” If you asked a random person on the streets of Athens in the fifth century BCE whether they were “white,” it would make about as much sense to them as it would if you asked them whether they were “olive.”It is also important to recognize that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many white Anglo-Americans in the United States regarded Greek and Italian immigrants as questionably white at best and often referred to them by hateful ethnic slurs. White supremacists even sometimes targeted them with acts of violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in United States history was the murder of eleven Italian men by a mob in New Orleans on 14 March 1891. A few decades later, on 21 February 1909, participants in bloody anti-Greek pogrom known as the “Greek Town riot” in South Omaha, Nebraska, destroyed homes and businesses owned by Greek immigrants and murdered at least one person.ABOVE: Photograph of a Greek-owned hotel in South Omaha that was destroyed by a white supremacist mob during the Greek Town riot on 21 February 1909I spend the bulk of the article, however, talking about evidence that many people in ancient Greece and Rome—including famous ancient philosophers, orators, novelists, Church Fathers, and even Roman emperors—were probably not what most Americans in the twenty-first-century would consider “white.” For instance:The philosopher Zenon of Kition (lived c. 334 – c. 262 BCE), who is known as the founder of the Hellenistic philosophical school of Stoicism, is described in biographical sources as having been a dark-skinned man of Phoenician ancestry.The playwright Publius Terentius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BCE), one of the earliest authors in the Latin language from whom any complete works have survived, was a member of the Afri, an Amazigh tribe that lived in the region around the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia.The emperor Septimius Severus, the founder of the Severan Dynasty, was born in the city of Leptis Magna in what is now Libya. His mother was Italian, but his father was of Punic and possibly Amazigh ancestry. His wife Julia Domna was Syrian. Every single member of the Severan Dynasty was of non-European ancestry.The author Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who is the author of The Golden Ass, the only novel written in the Latin language in ancient times that has survived to the present day complete, was an Amazigh from the city of Madauros in what is now Algeria.The satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) was a Syrian who was born into a working-class family in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates River on the far eastern fringe of the Roman Empire. His native language was probably Syriac, but he learned the Greek language and became a prolific writer of satire in Greek. Over eighty works attributed to him have survived, including his satirical novel A True Story, which contains elements that foreshadow science fiction.Many influential early Christian theologians and writers were Africans. Tertullianus of Carthage (lived c. 155 – c. 240 CE) was probably an Amazigh and Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE) was an Egyptian.The most influential early Christian writer of all, Augustine of Hippo (lived (lived 354 – 430 CE) was born in the city of Thagaste in Algeria and was almost certainly of Amazigh ancestry. His works Confessions and The City of God are some of the most widely studied and read works of early Christian literature.People whom most Americans would consider Black were present throughout the Roman Empire, including in Europe. In many cases, they held Roman citizenship and they freely intermarried with other people in the empire. For instance, the wealthy Athenian philosopher Herodes Attikos (lived 101 – 177 CE) had an adoptive son named Memnon who was of “Aithiopian” ancestry and was named after a mythical “Aithiopian” king. The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) mentions a Greek woman whose great-grandfather was an “Aithiopian” in his De Sera Numinis Vindicta 21.These are just a few of the examples I talk about in the article.ABOVE: Portrait dating to the first or second century CE depicting a young man from Lower Egypt who evidently served in the Roman military, as evidenced by the sword belt over his left shoulderGetting rid of the notions of “western civilization” and “western heritage”For over a century, one of the main arguments that the field of classics has used to justify its existence is the claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans were founders of a wonderful, concrete thing called “western civilization.” I wrote an article in February 2020 in which I attempt to debunk this whole notion.The first thing I note in the article is that the whole notion of “western civilization” is a spurious one that wasn’t even invented until around the nineteenth century or thereabouts. The ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of “the west”; they thought of themselves as Greeks and Romans, not “westerners.” Meanwhile, for them, Europe was simply a landmass; they had no sense of “European” identity and they felt no sense of kinship whatsoever with Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic peoples, whom they considered “barbarians.”Moreover, the Greeks and Romans had very close cultural connections to previous and contemporary cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. The Greeks especially were far more closely connected with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean than with the peoples in western Europe.The ancient Phoenicians, a people from the area of what is now Lebanon who spoke a Semitic language, developed the first abjad—a writing system with letters to represent individual consonant sounds, without letters representing vowels. In around the eighth century BCE, the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician abjad and modified it to create letters representing individual vowel sounds. This became the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet is, in turn, derived from the Greek alphabet. This means that both the Greek and Latin alphabets can ultimately be traced back to the Phoenician abjad.It is also widely recognized that ancient Greek artwork, especially artwork from the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BCE), is heavily influenced by earlier Egyptian art. One of the most common types of Greek sculpture from the Archaic Period is the kouros, a statue of a naked man standing with very stiff posture and one foot placed forward. This type of statue is clearly based on earlier Egyptian statues, which frequently depict men in this exact same posture using very similar styles. The main difference is that, in Egyptian statues, the man is always wearing a loincloth, while, in Greek statues, he is usually completely naked.ABOVE: Ancient Egyptian colossal statue of Ramesses II dated to the thirteenth century BCE in the Grand Egyptian Museum (left) and the New York Kouros, a Greek statue dated to between c. 590 and c. 580 BCE (right). Notice the identical poses and the similar artistic styles.Ancient Greek religion, mythology, and literature also manifestly display influences from the Near East. Many scholars, including Walter Burkert, M. L. West, Charles Penglase, and Tim Whitmarsh have all written about this. The Greek goddess Aphrodite is widely recognized as being derived from or at least heavily influenced by the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who was herself closely related to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.The Iliad and the Odyssey display parallels with the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, the standard Akkadian version of which was composed during Middle Babylonian Period (lasted c. 1600 – c. 1155 BCE) and is attributed to a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni. Among many other notable parallels that could be pointed out, all three epics contain a scene in which the main hero of the epic, a living person, meets a ghost of one of his fallen comrades, who tells him about the Underworld.Meanwhile, the Theogonia, a Greek poem about the origins of the deities and the cosmos that was composed in around the eighth century BCE by the poet Hesiodos of Askre, is certainly related to an earlier Hittite poem titled Kingship in Heaven or The Song of Kumarbi, which was composed sometime in around the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE and is known from fragmentary clay tablets discovered in the archive at the Hittite capital city of Ḫattuša.If you closely examine pretty much any aspect of ancient Greek civilization, you will find some kind of connection to the Near East.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that probably indirectly influenced the Iliad and the OdysseyThis influence did not just go one way; ancient Greece and Rome have, in turn, exerted and continue to exert a profound influence on cultures throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This influence is evident not just in the literally countless monuments built in Greek and Roman-influenced architectural styles all across the Middle East and North Africa, but also in intellectual traditions that have continued to the present day.Unfortunately, people who promote the narrative of “western civilization” nearly always ignore these influences, because they want to pretend that the Greek and Roman influence has primarily only affected western Europe. Indeed, even the Byzantine Empire—the predominantly culturally Greek political continuation of the Roman Empire—is normally seen as “eastern” and is therefore normally excluded from the story of “western civilization.”It is very telling that, at my university, the people who study the Byzantine Empire are in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC) department, rather than the classics department or medieval studies department. Evidently, Byzantium is too “eastern” for the classics or medieval studies departments to even be affiliated with it.ABOVE: Mosaic from the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople depicting the Virgin Mary seated with the infant Jesus on her lap. The emperor Constantine I stands on her left holding the city of Constantinople and the emperor Justinian I on her right holding the Hagia Sophia itself.The more extreme forms of this “western civilization” narrative go so far as to flat-out deny that modern Greek people have any place in the classical tradition. It is no surprise that one early influential proponent of the narrative of “western civilization” was none other than the German scholar Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (lived 1790 – 1861)—who, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, is primarily known today for his stubborn insistence that modern Greeks are somehow not “real” Greeks, but rather degenerate half-breeds born of Slavic, Turkish, and Albanian miscegenation. He famously declares in volume one of his 1830 book Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (in my own translation):“The race of Hellenes has been totally exterminated in Europe. [Their] beauty of the body, brilliance of the spirit, harmony and simplicity of custom, art, competition, city, village, majestic columns and temples, yes even their name is vanished from the face of the Greek continent… Not even a drop of true and unmixed Hellenic blood flows through the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.”The American white supremacist author Madison Grant (lived 1865 – 1937) went even further than Fallmerayer. As I discuss in this article from January 2021 about the so-called “Dorian invasion,” Grant notoriously tries to claim in his book The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History, which was originally published in 1916, that modern Greeks are not “real” Greeks and that the modern people who are racially closest to the ancient Greeks are, in fact, the English. Grant writes:“It is not possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands, and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.”There are also less explicitly racist versions of this narrative. For instance, as I discuss in this article from January 2020, the popular series of mythology-based children’s books Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, originally published from 2005 to 2009, portrays the Greek gods as living in the United States because the United States is supposedly the place where the flame of “western civilization” burns “brightest.”Riordan eventually emends this narrative in his sequel series The Heroes of Olympus by having his heroes actually travel to Greece, but the consistent message within the first series is that the “flame of the west” has passed from Greece to the United States and that the Greek deities have therefore abandoned modern Greece.It should come as no surprise that a Greek person once commented on an answer I wrote on Quora with a phrase that his father once told him: “Westerners have always loved Greeks—but only the dead ones.”ABOVE: Photograph taken in around 1860 of the German author Jakob Philipp FallmerayerGetting rid of the pervasive unwillingness to criticize the ancient Greeks and RomansCurrently, many classicists are still unwilling to seriously criticize the ancient Greeks and Romans. Notably, as I discuss in this article from August 2020, there is a widespread unwillingness to recognize the sheer extent to which ancient slavery was a horrible, dehumanizing, and brutal institution.It is a disappointing fact that some older classicists especially are still openly acting as apologists for slavery. Most notably, in August 2020, The Great Courses Plus released a lecture on ancient Greek slavery by Robert Garland, a highly respected emeritus professor of the classics from Colgate University, with the following description:“Slavery was an ideal condition for some people in ancient Greece. Poverty and disease were so prevalent in those days that people preferred to be slaves so that they could survive those hardships. This gave them a level of economic security in that poverty-stricken world.”As I discuss in the article—and as I think any reasonably informed person will agree—this is all complete nonsense. Slavery has never been an “ideal condition” for anyone. Nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that some older scholars are still pushing.ABOVE: Screenshot of the description for Robert Garland’s lecture on ancient Greek slavery for The Great Courses DailyThere is also a frequent tendency for classicists (and people who are interested in the ancient world in general) to idealize Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, portraying them as models for modern states to emulate. As I discuss in this article about Athenian democracy that I published in January 2021, however, this approach is misguided, because it fails to take into account the glaring flaws of these ancient states.Classicists generally intellectually realize that Athenian democracy was highly exclusive, but there is a common tendency to merely make mention of this and shrug it off without making a real point of what it means. As I discuss in much greater depth in the article I have linked, at the very best, fully enfranchised adult male citizens only made up about one sixth of the population of Athens and anyone who was not an adult male citizen was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. At any given time, there were almost certainly more people in Athens who were enslaved than people who could vote.Athens was also an aggressively imperialist state that treated its “allies” as subjects. Whenever one of its “allies” tried to leave the “alliance,” Athens used violence to force them to rejoin. The Athenians even committed flat-out genocide on a few occasions—most famously in around January 415 BCE, when the Athenians slaughtered all the men of the island of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery.The Roman Republic, which people also tend to glorify, was even less democratic than ancient Athens, since not even adult male citizens had much of a say in government the vast majority of the time. Likewise, the Roman Republic was arguably even more imperialistic than ancient Athens. The number of slaughters and atrocities committed in the name of the Roman Republic are indeed too numerous to even count.There are, of course, important lessons that we can learn from studying ancient Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, but the idea that these ancient states are good models on which we should directly base our own government is deeply misguided.ABOVE: Painting by the German history painter Philipp Foltz (lived 1805 – 1877) showing the famous Athenian statesman Perikles addressing the Athenian Assembly on the PnyxIncreasing recognition of the racist history of the field of classicsThe way the discipline of classics is currently organized enables classicists to be ignorant of the racist history of their own discipline. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. Last year, I happened to mention to one of my Latin professors here at Indiana University Bloomington that the eminent German classicist Eduard Norden (lived 1868 – 1941) was a racist who dismissed Loukianos of Samosata’s literary output on the basis of his identity as an ethnic Syrian, describing him in his Die antike Kunstsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (which was first published in 1898) as “an Oriental without depth or character... who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language.”What’s really interesting is that the professor in question responded by telling me that he consults Norden’s commentary on Book VI of the Aeneid all the time and that he had no idea that Norden was racist. He said that, after what I had told him, consulting Norden’s commentary would never feel the same.I don’t blame that professor personally in the slightest for not knowing that Norden had written some really racist stuff; after all, I only knew about that quote from reading it quoted in Daniel S. Richter’s article about Loukianos in The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic. Nonetheless, the fact that it is possible for a classics professor to regularly consult a work written by a scholar from a hundred years ago without having any idea that the scholar in question was really racist speaks to a serious systemic problem in the discipline of classical studies.One of the Delphic Maxims that are said to have been inscribed at the Temple of Apollon at Delphoi is “γνῶθι σεαυτόν,” which means “Know yourself.” This is a maxim that every classicist knows quite well. Unfortunately, it seems that classics as a discipline does not, in fact, know itself after all. There needs to be more support for scholars looking into the history of the discipline and much greater recognition of the racism and sexism that have been embedded in the discipline throughout its modern history.ABOVE: Photograph of the classicist Eduard Norden, taken in 1888 when he was a student in BerlinDe-emphasizing Greek and Latin philologyThe field of classics is intensely focused on Greek and Latin philology. This is partly justified; after all, a very large chunk of the surviving texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are written in these languages and knowing these languages is important for most scholars in the field. Unfortunately, the way that almost the entire field is structured around Greek and Latin philology has the effect of making it nearly impossible for people who are not already extremely socially privileged to enter the field.For those who are not already aware, a student applying to a classics PhD program is generally expected to have had at least four years of formal instruction in Latin or Greek (usually Latin) and at least three years of the other. They are also generally expected to have received an A in every Latin and Greek class they have taken. This is a philological standard that is nearly impossible for most students to achieve and even many students who meet these rigorous expectations are rejected. Meanwhile, students applying to classics MA programs are generally expected to have had at least three years of Latin or Greek and at least one year of the other.One difficulty many students face in meeting the philological expectations stems from the fact that the vast majority of high schools in the United States do not offer Latin. According to the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey from June 2017, in that year, only thirty high schools in my entire home state of Indiana offered Latin. That’s in sharp contrast to the total of 174 high schools in the state that offered Spanish, the eighty-four high schools in the state that offered French, and the sixty-two high schools in the state that offered German.I know from personal experience that not having taken any Latin in high school can make it significantly more challenging to pursue a degree in classics. I personally went to a very small, rural high school that was located several miles outside the small town of Kokomo, Indiana. Like the house I lived in, the school was surrounded by vast cornfields. My entire graduating class was composed of only 117 students. Naturally, the only foreign language classes my high school offered while I was there were Spanish and German. (It had previously offered French, but stopped offering French to new students the year I entered high school.)When I first came to Indiana University Bloomington, I knew immediately that I wanted to major in the classics. (I added a second major in history before the end of my first year.) Nonetheless, I had virtually no experience whatsoever with Latin and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was at a significant disadvantage compared to all the other classics majors at the university. They had all taken Latin in high school, so most of them started out taking 300 and 400-level classes in Latin their freshman year. I, on the other hand, had to start out in CLAS-L100, the very first course in the introductory sequence.I went through the entire four-semester Latin introductory sequence and I did well in it. In fall 2020, I finally started taking 300 and 400-level Latin courses. I found that fellow undergraduates who had started at IU the same year as me were well ahead of where I was because they simply had more years of experience with Latin. I was still in the phase where I was forgetting vocabulary, while others who had taken Latin in high school were able to sight-read complicated sentences that took me ten minutes to figure out. My Latin has continued to improve since then. I am currently taking two upper-level Latin courses at once in order to keep from being too far behind my peers.ABOVE: Beginning of a chart from the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey from June 2017 showing the number of high school programs in various foreign languages in each state, with my home state of Indiana highlightedAcquiring formal instruction in Ancient Greek is even more difficult than acquiring formal instruction in Latin. There are only a handful of high schools in the United States that offer any Greek courses whatsoever and, as far as I am aware, there is not a single high school in the United States that offers Ancient Greek at anything more than the most basic introductory level.Even most colleges and universities in the United States do not offer upper-level classes in Ancient Greek, since only those schools with large, healthy classics departments can afford to teach such classes. These naturally tend to be more elite schools that are more expensive and harder to get into. Moreover, as I have discovered from first-hand experience, those universities that do offer upper-level Greek courses don’t necessarily offer them consistently.I’ve always been more interested in Greek than Latin. My high school obviously never offered any form of Greek classes. Nonetheless, while I was still in high school, I was able to teach myself a little bit of Greek using a copy of Donald J. Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek and a website on the internet that had free written lessons and exercises in Koine Greek. Part of the reason why I decided to go to Indiana University Bloomington was because I knew that it was one of the few universities in the state that taught upper-level Ancient Greek.I went through the entire four-semester Greek introductory sequence. I was expecting to start taking upper-level Greek courses in fall 2020. Midway through the spring 2020 semester, however, it was announced that two of the Hellenists in our classics department were moving to the University of Michigan. As a result of the reduced faculty, the department has not offered any Greek courses that are open to undergraduates this whole year other than the courses in the introductory sequence (which I have already taken), meaning I am missing out on a whole year of Greek classes right now that I would have taken otherwise and there’s not much I can do about it other than try to keep up with Greek on my own.Next year, the only Greek classes that my university will be offering are the classes in the introductory sequence, an upper-level class on Xenophon in the fall, and an upper-level class on Homer in the spring. I had a conversation over email with the head of the classics department, who is also going to be the one teaching the Xenophon class in the fall. He strongly advised me not to try to sign up for either of the Greek courses that will be offered next year because they are “fast-paced” and, although they are nominally open to undergraduates, they are intended mainly for graduate students who already have extensive study of Greek. He told me that he thinks that the Greek will be way over my head.Nonetheless, I am going to be graduating at the end of next school year and I really want to get at least a little bit of Greek beyond the introductory sequence in before I graduate. These are the only Greek classes that are going to be open to undergraduates that I haven’t already taken. There are no intermediate classes being offered. Therefore, as I see it, I don’t have any choice but to study Greek as intently as I can over the summer and take the classes on Xenophon and Homer that are being offered next year.ABOVE: Portrait of Xenophon (left) and portrait of Homer (right)I am personally extremely lucky, both that Indiana University Bloomington offers more Greek and Latin courses than most colleges and that I discovered my interest in ancient Greece and Rome before I came here, meaning I was able to start taking language classes right away. Many other people either go to universities that offer hardly any upper-level Latin or Greek courses or don’t discover their interest in the classics until after they are already at university.I think it is fair that getting into a classics PhD program should be difficult. After all, the economic demand for people with classics PhDs is extremely tiny, so it is logical that programs should be extremely selective about who gets in. The problem with using experience in Greek and Latin philology as such an important factor in determining who gets in and who doesn’t isn’t that it restricts who can get in, but rather that it specifically restricts who can get in to the few students who are privileged enough to have had the opportunity to have already acquired extensive experience with the languages.The high schools that offer Latin tend to be either elite, mostly-white private schools or well-funded public schools serving affluent, mostly-white neighborhoods in cities and suburbs. Most students of color trying to make it in classics would not only have to face the problem that I did of having never had Latin in high school, but also a plurality of other, far greater challenges, including the problem of systemic racism, which I have never had to face.There are other areas of the study of the ancient Mediterranean world where the advantage that the most privileged students have over everyone else is much smaller. Notably, in the areas of ancient history and material culture, students generally tend to come in with similar levels of formal experience. Universities are also more likely to offer upper-level classes in ancient history and material culture than Greek and Latin.It is therefore interesting how the one area of classical studies where the most privileged students have the greatest advantage over everyone else also happens to be the one area that graduate programs seem to care the most about.The rhetoric of “burning it all down”The ideas I have listed here are a few of the real changes that people are currently suggesting. None of these suggestions involve abandoning the study of the ancient world altogether; they are simply about changing how we study the ancient world.It is true that some of the people advocating for change in how we study ancient Greece and Rome have used the rhetorical phrase “burning it all down.” For instance, Nadhira Hill, a PhD candidate in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan, defended the use of the term “burning it all down” in a blog post titled “Yes, Classics Is Toxic, or In Defense of Burning It All Down” published on 21 December 2020. Sarah E. Bond used the same phrase in her now-infamous tweet on 22 January 2021.What most people writing op-eds right now do not seem to understand is that, when twenty-first-century classicists use the rhetoric of “burning it all down,” they are not literally suggesting that we should round up every last copy of the Odyssey and Plato’s Republic, toss them all on a gigantic bonfire, and dance around the bonfire of burning books singing the Soviet anthem. The phrase “burning it all down” is a metaphor used to express the idea that the old order needs to be consumed in fire like the phoenix in order for a new order to be born from the ashes.I personally agree with most of the things that the people who talk about “burning classics down” are actually advocating. Nonetheless, I am not personally going to use this rhetoric, because it is so easy for people to misinterpret—especially for people outside the field who are only paying half attention to what classicists are saying. It is extremely easy to spin this rhetoric into the hackneyed, stereotypical narrative of “Woke leftists want to destroy the humanities.”Obviously, conservatives will try to tar us with this narrative no matter what we say or do, but I think that the least we can do is not make it easy for them.ABOVE: Thaïs Leading the Destruction of Persepolis, painted in 1781 by the English painter Joshua ReynoldsThe inevitability of changeI furthermore want to emphasize that many of the changes that Padilla and others are pushing for are already starting to happen. Some departments that were formerly called “classics” have already changed their names. Young scholars in the field increasingly roll our eyes at the notion that ancient Greek and Roman texts should be taught in line with the idea of “western heritage” and we are generally more willing to be critical of ancient practices such as slavery.Greek and Latin philology is still dominant in large classics departments at elite institutions, but, as Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Maximus Planudes discuss in this blog post from 15 February 2021, at many smaller departments and less elite institutions, philology is already being knocked off its pedestal. These departments are increasingly finding that, as a result of systemic changes in society, the economy, and the university, they can’t realistically offer the in-depth philological training that graduate programs in classics expect.The inevitable fact is that the status quo of the discipline that Padilla is critiquing simply can’t survive; its demise is inevitable. The study of the ancient Mediterranean world will inevitably look very different in thirty years than it does today. That’s just a fact. It is up to classicists right now to decide whether we want the new status quo to be a better one.The real threat to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world: capitalismThere is, of course, a real threat to the survival of the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Contrary to what the recent op-eds have led so many people to believe, however, the real threat is not “radical leftist” professors seeking to destroy the discipline from within, but rather the capitalist economic pressures that are currently eviscerating the humanities in general.Incoming college students are increasingly told that they shouldn’t major in the humanities because they will supposedly never find jobs. This is manifestly untrue; studies have consistently found that the overwhelming majority of all people who majored in the humanities are happily and gainfully employed. It’s true that humanities majors do tend to make less money on average than people who majored in some disciplines of STEM, but the average pay for a humanities major is comparable to the average pay for a psychology or biology major—and yet, for some reason, I’ve never heard anyone warn students not to get a degree in biology.Nonetheless, as a direct result of so many incoming students being fed the false narrative that majoring in the humanities is a sure path to unemployment, students are increasingly reticent about majoring in the humanities, or even taking humanities classes at all. The result is that there are fewer students in the humanities overall than there were a couple decades ago.Meanwhile, as a result of the simultaneous process of the corporatization of higher education, universities are increasingly less interested in offering valuable education and more interested in churning a profit. As a result, they are less concerned with which skills are valuable to society and more concerned with which departments are attracting the most students. As a result, many universities are downsizing, defunding, or flat-out dissolving many of their humanities departments.For instance, just recently, in December 2020, word got out that the University of Vermont (UVM) would be abolishing all Greek, Latin, and classical civilization majors for undergraduates, along with its classics MA program, and dissolving its classics department entirely, citing supposed low enrollment in these programs as an excuse. In addition to dissolving its classics department, UVM is planning to dissolve a large number of other programs, amounting a total of twelve majors and eleven minors in the College of Arts and Sciences that are all slated for dissolution.ABOVE: Seal of the University of Vermont, which recently announced that it will be dissolving its classics department entirely due to supposed low enrollmentIf any of the conservative op-ed writers really gave the slightest care in the world about the study of ancient Greece and Rome, they would be rallying to classics’ defense, criticizing the capitalist economic pressures that are destroying the humanities, and doing everything in their power to stop these departments from being dissolved and defunded.But they aren’t doing that. They aren’t doing it because they don’t really care about the study of ancient Greece and Rome in the slightest. All they care about is effete pearl-clutching about how Black people and young scholars are trying to make the field less racist.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “The Debate about Classics Isn’t What You Probably Think It Is.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

My highschool has a grading system that was suppose to help students, and lessen the effects of getting some low grades on your final grade during the year. This was abused by a group in my batch, and it got really extreme during our last year. Not to mention they shared it to the lower batches, and after we graduated, the whole grading system was changed.The basic idea is, in one year, you have 4 quarters, and the succeeding quarter’s final grade is 30% previous quarter, 70% current average = quarter grade.Also, 75 is the lowest passing grade one can get. 74.99 below is failing. But the lowest mark that is placed in the final report card is 70. So 71 is 71, 70 is 70, but 67 is still 70.Can you think of an abuse of this system?This is what some of the delinquents did to cheat the system.70 is the lowest mark, so those who get 67 can still make up for it. What if you get 1, 6, 11, 40 as a final grade? Ridiculous right? No one is THAT BAD. Hence it wasn’t considered in the system.Then these guys started to not even bother answering. Our tests are often 100 items, 1 point each, or some have 10 items for 2 points each. When they receive the paper, they go to multiple choice, go a b c d a b c d a b, go to true and false, go T F T F T F T F then sleep during the whole exam period. Final grade? 6. 3. One manage to get 0. The teacher just make a huge X mark on the blank pages.At the end of their quarter, all their grades in all their subjects have a big red 70.for the next 2 quarters, we have 30% of 70 + 70% of 70 which is still 70For 4th quarter, they TRY to do good. Aiming for something 78+30% of 70 (3rd quarter) and 70% of 78 (4th quarter) = 75not a high grade, but you didn’t fail, so you do not need to repeat the year.4th quarter is also the months with a lot of school presentation and sports events, that can give + points or exemption from a few exams.Some of them join the “singing contest” and they can sing quite good. They may not win but joining gives you an instant 100 in 1 test.Edit for Daniele IavaroneSCHOOL SYSTEM• At what age do you start going to school? Until what age?3yo at Kinder 1 (at a different school), 5yo at Preschool one (my school until Highschool. I will be talking about this school in my answers), graduated Highschool 4th year at 17yo• Can you leave before? Is it common?Not very common. In my batch, no one left during preschool, I think 4 during elementary and 7 during high school. We are around 300 in a batch. Students may transfer OUT to other schools. Since the school opened, no transferees are accepted.• Are schools divided by age? (elementary, middle, etc...) How?Preschool 1 – 3, Elementary 1 – 6, High School 1 – 4. Everyone is about the same age. Applicants from Preschool 1 have around the same age bracket (5-6). The only times we have an older kid in the batch is a repeat student from the higher batch.• Can students jump forward, if they are talented? Can they do it if they lost a schoolyear?No, you stay in your year level. If you are talented, then you are the top student of the batch (honor student, etc). I do not know the process if one missed a whole year. I don't recall any experience in my time at school. I think the person had to transfer.• Is education free or you have to pay some fees?We have a yearly tuition fee. We have no financial or academic scholarships for students, although excellence in school may give you scholarships for college. But all students in school paid the tuition full.• Do you have to pay for the books?Almost all books are bought. There is a book adoption program especially for books that are reused but sometimes, the reading material requires the updated editions• What is free in your school? What isn’t?We have a library. There are empty floors in one building, the multi-purpose building. Student can practice and have study groups there. Free use of the basketball court (playground for the younger students). The registrar office has a free landline phone you can use to make calls.You need to pay in the canteen and for the school bus service. Emergency meds and stuff in the clinic are charged to you at the end of the quarter.• What happens if someone can’t afford it?If you can't pay the tuition, you can't get into the school. Students who can afford the tuition find most of the other stuff affordable. Some don't get the school bus service since they have their own car/driver, for example. The ones who avail of them are often those less rich among the student community.• Are schools opened both for boys and girls?We are a co-ed school from Preschool to Highschool• Is there a “student card” that gives students privileges? (discounts on publictransport, for example)We have a student ID. But most of the students actually don't use public transport or commute. We can use the ID for other promos, such as student rates in theme parks etc.• Who pays for the bus/train fare? What happens if the student can’t afford it?In the start of the year there is a registration for the school bus service. Usually those who DON'T have a driver to fetch them, or live too far to make fetching a hassle, avail of the school bus service.• Is there a school library? Can you borrow books from there? Is it free?Yes. We have a library card as well. You can borrow for free, but as usual, there are fines for returning late or damage.SCHOOL DAY• How long does a school day last?Class start 7:20 and end at 4:10. We are comparatively longer to most other schools here because we learn 3 major languages, compared to others who learn only 2.• Can students sleep at school? If yes, do they have to pay for it?You can take a nap in your desk at recess and lunch after eating. In Preschool there is a mandatory Nap Time class and you need to cross your arms and lie down. The teacher will scold you if you are awake and playing around.• Do you have breaks in between the school day? How many and how long?2 20 minute recess, morning and afternoon, and lunch break. For gradeschool it is 1 hour long. For highschool it is only 40 mins. The reason is that the lunch area can only hold limited students, so the first 20 mins, HS still have class while the GS go eat. Everyone ends lunch time the same time. Preschool only have half day so morning class go home before lunch and afternoon come after eating• How does a school day start/end in your country?Morning = Flag ceremony (during monday), morning prayer then class inspection (teacher will check uniform, haircut, fingernails, etc)Afternoon = summarizing homework, evening prayer• How many days per week do you attend school?5 days, Monday – Wed then Friday Saturday. Our area has a church, who's special day is Thusrday, and a lot of people come, so there are crowds and traffic. Hence we don't follow the M-F schedule. Imagine the culture shock when we go to college.• Do you have holidays? When?Public Holidays in Philippines in 2016Holidays in our country. There are special occassions as well that give us no classes, like the Director (Dean) birthday, or the feast of our Saint. We are also next door to Malacanang, which is our “White House”, (We are so close we can actually throw rocks from some windows and be able to hit the wall of the building.) so when there are big presidential events or rallies, we have no school.• What do you usually do at school?During breaktime I usually get some food in the canteen and hang out with friends in our classroom's corrider. Sometimes I get some homework done at school.• Can you eat at school?Eating is forbidden in the classroom. You can eat in the canteen or the lunch area.• Is there a canteen where you can buy/get food? Is it free?Yes we do. It is not free, though everything is quite affordable to the general school population.• If you can eat at school, what kind of food can students find?Junkfoods, juices, sandwiches, local delicacy treats, candies.• Do schools organize school trips? Who has to pay for it?Every year there is a batch field trip. It changes every year, and each year level has their own. There is often jealousy when the Grade 6s get to go to a local theme park (for Physics learning trip) when we just went to the old dilapidated Observatory back then. There is a fieldtrip fee that is collected from each student a few weeks before.• Where do students usually travel to? Where do they stay? (hotel, host families etc)Usually some place with educational experience, like zoos or the local volcanology facility, etc. The trip is a one day thing, so we go their via the school buses, and get back before the day ends.• Do schools organize school exchanges? If yes, also with foreign schools?We do not have this program.• What school facilities do you usually have? (science lab, gym, swimming pool,soccer field etc...)We have a lab with we use during chemistry and biology classes. There are 2 gyms, both with a full basketball court and one that can be a volleyball court. There are 3 badminton courts. For the swimming varsity, they hold practices in a nearby sports club. We do not play soccer. (just our school). The auditorium is where we have our school programs.SUBJECTS, GRADES, TESTS & EXAMS• Are schools in your country divided on subjects? (language school, technicalschool, music school etc)There are some specialized schools but most are like mine, who teach general education, from language, to science to music.• What subjects do students study at school?Some year levels have more classes as you go higher. I don't remember well that much anymore but these are mostly the 4th year classes.English Reading, English Literature, Filipino (local language), History, Science, Religion, Home Economics, PE, Chinese History, Chinese Literature,• Can you choose what subjects to study and what to avoid?Nope. There is a fixed curriculum for each year level.• How many teachers do you have for each subject?For each batch, 2 teachers teaches a subject. There are 6 sections and they handle 3 each. Some teachers teach all 6 sections of a year. Some teach 3 for 2 different year levels. The 3 PE teachers handle all PE classes.• Do you change class when you have to study another subject? (English room,Math room etc)We have 1 room the whole year. Teachers are the ones who come and go. Most of the time, the current teacher is reminded to wrap up when we see the next teacher waiting outside the room.• Do schools in your country give students mark/grades? If yes, how do they work?Passing is 75-100. Failing is below 75. (I have explained this most in my Quora answer Rachel Subijano's answer to How does your school system work and how do students feel about it?)• What happens when you get a bad mark/grade?Fail the subject in the 4th quarter and you will have to take the class in summer (basically the whole year cramped again into 2 months)Fail a lot at the end of the year and you repeat the year. My batch lost 2 students to repeat, and received 1 from the higher batch. Being a repeater is one of the most shameful moments in school. You are generally looked down upon by most especially in your first year. Often, the repeater gets to become friendly with his new batch in the next years.• Do students have to repeat years of school if they fail?Only if you fail a lot. I am not sure exactly of the details. I don't usually interact with the “failing students”• Do you have tests in your school? If yes, how are they structured? (open answer/multiple choice etc)Short quizzes are usually 10/10. Depends on what the teacher wants to test. Last 10-15 mins. Big exams (mid quarter and final quarter exams) are usually 2-3 page exams with 100/100 item. The whole batch moves to the lunch area to take it there. Usually 1-1.5hours. We have almost all kinds of tests, multiple choice, matching type, true or false, fill in the blanks, etc. The exception is Math, where we usually get 10 or 20 big problems, worth 5-10 points each. There are the scary big Math exams with only 5 questions. Miss one totally and you risk failing if you don't perfect the other 4.• If you have tests, how frequently do you have them?Class quizzes are often announced and unannounced. Usually after a major topic in class, or if the teacher feels no one was listening.• Do you also have exams? When do you have to take them?Major (mid quarter) and Final Exams are usually announce beforehand, and we are given the topics that will be covered for review. They each happen once a quarter for each subject.• What are the most important exams in a student’s life?All! You are taught to balance everything. You may be the top Math achiever but if you fail History, you will get a low total grade in the end.• Is religion taught in your schools? How does it work?It is a minor subject for Grade school and Highschool. It is pretty much about trivia and stuff. The easiest of exams but you can still fail if you don't study. Religion pretty much helps pull up your total year grade.• Is “Food and Nutrition” taught in your schools?We have a year's science class devoted to biology. Home Economics teaches this as well, but is only taught in highschool• Is sex education taught in your schools? If yes, what do you learn?Pretty much basic stuff in science, when we tackle the human reproductive system.• Is “Art” taught in your schools?Homeroom is usually for art. Each class's adviser is also a teacher of a main subject. So Class A gets a few minutes less Math for the art project because adviser is a math teacher. Class B gets less history because adviser is the batch's history teacher.• Is “Music” taught in your schools?Art and musics alternate for homeroom. Same system applies for short music lessons. Students interested in instruments and singing can join the school organizations devoted to those.• Is Physical Education taught in your schools?For Grade school, PE is included with Art and Musics. A few minutes of basic exercise once a week. For highschool, students are required to come to school on Thursday for PE. Varsity players are exempted from PE and receive a perfect grade all the time, but require to attend practice (depending on the sport, Thursdays or Sundays) and must not have failing marks.• Do you learn languages at school? Which ones? How many languages can astudent speak when he’s 14?We learn 3, English, Filipino and Chinese. During Preschool, students learn English and Chinese only. We are introduced to Filipino at elementary (8yo)RELATIONSHIP STUDENTS & SCHOOL STAFF & TEACHER• Do you call your teachers with “Mr”,“Mrs” or can you use their real names? (John,Anna etc)Mr. Santos. Ms. Baet. Mrs. Santiago. Most of us don't even know our teachers first names, or forget. The only times we usually hear it, is day 1, when introductions are made, and Teacher recognition events.• Are teachers generally strict? Do you think they are open-minded?There are the nice lovable teachers you won't forget. There are the terror teachers you won't forget.• What about the school staff?We know some of the staff such as the clinic staff and the cafeteria staff. The janitors and security we usually call “ate” or “kuya”• Are there student councils or other form of student organization?The student council is from elected high school candidates. We experience how real elections go in our SC elections. There are even campaigning (for fun) where candidates come to class and promote him and his party and give their platforms. There are organizations like the Math, Science and Home Economics club, etc.• Can students decide something about the school system?The SC can voice the opinions of the students to the administration. Usually the requests are reasonable and get implemented.BEHAVIOR & PUNISHMENTS• What are some rules that every student have to follow?ID must be worn at all times. Proper and complete uniform at all times. These were in the handbook. Its been years I don't remember most. But pretty much the usually stuff against bringing liquor, porn, drugs, etc.• Do students in your country wear shoes when they are in school?We are required to wear black leather shoes all the time. In case you can not, a letter from parents is required (eg. You have a foot injury and need to wear slippers)• In your opinion, what are some rules that are common in your country but not inother places?There is no instances of cutting classes in our school. There is no way to leave the campus during class times. Everyone going out will be checked by the guard. Even if you sneak an outfit and change you will be inspected. If you are not in your seat in class time, your parents will be called and you will get a warning the next day.• Can students use smartphones/tablets in your schools?The must remain in the pocket or bag during class time. You may use them at breaktimes. For emergencies, a student may as permission to exit the room for the call.• Is it possible to punish a student? If yes, for what reasons?This is all listed in the student handbook. I can't remember much already. There are disciplinary actions such as warnings, up to suspension and sometimes being expelled.• Is corporal punishment allowed in your school? If yes, when and how?Absolutely forbidden.• What kind of punishment can a student face and for what reasons?For minor classroom punishment, you are scolded in class. Sometimes you are asked to exit and continue the class looking through the window while in the corridor. Serious offenders get sent to the prefect of discipline.BULLYING• Is bullying a serious issue in your country?It is bad in other schools but my school is pretty strict in discipline and handling it, that everyone is naturally not a bully. The most “bully” we experience is teasing.• How do schools react about it?Can't give a good answer for this• How do schools prevent it?Can't give a good answer for this• Is there racism in your schools?We do not have much foreigners in school. Pretty much everyone is Filipino-Chinese. The staff and most teachers are usually Filipino while some teachers are Chinese.• Is there homophobia in your schools?It is weird because I don't even recall an instance of homosexuals in my years in school. If there are LGBT, there are all closet gays and lesbians and we graduated without even knowing.• Is there sex discrimination in your schools?None at all. Most of the time the boys are even more fearful and shy of us girls but we don't harass them or anything as well.DRESS CODE• Do students have to wear a school uniform?We have a standard uniform. Each sex has their own design for Preschool, Grade 1-3, Grade 3-6 and highschool• What clothes are allowed and what aren’t?Casual clothes are only allowed during Christmas Party or special events. Everyone in the classroom has to wear the uniform• What happens if a student doesn’t follow the dress code?You can't even go in campus. You will be forced to call and be fetch, and be absent for the day.HEALTH & HYGIENE• Do you have doctors/nurses at school? If yes, do you have to pay for it?We have a clinic. Checking and mild conditions are free. If you need meds, it is charged at the end of the year.• What happens when a student is ill? Does he/she have to prove it?Our doctor is very skilled. It is hard to fake it. If you are well, you are sent back to class. If rest is needed, there are beds to rest in. For urgent cases, your parents are called to take you home.• Does your school also provide vaccines?You need to have your vaccinations in your own doctor before school starts.• Is your school clean?Very clean. If you trip you usually just need to dust off some dirt. That's it. No muddy pits or smelly canals.• Who cleans your school? Do students clean school sometimes?For classrooms, each class is required to keep it clean during the day. We have 1 room the whole year, it is our 2nd home. There is a team of janitors who clean outside during class hours, and the rooms after class.• If a student writes on a desk/wall, does he have to clean it?We have one desk every year. It is painted every summer. Any marks on the desk is usually your responsibility. You do not have to paint it but it will be a minor offense.• Do students have to shower at school (after sport, for example)?There is a shower in the gym. Usually during Thursday PE or for the varsity after practice.• If yes, do students feel at ease with it? If not, why?I have never experienced using the showers in school.

I have been reviewing the literature about Mao Zedong in the West. Sadly, most of it is pure propaganda, lies, and exaggeration about the man. Even finding hard evidence about the fantastic claims made about him is not easy to find. Most of the narrative surrounding him has become the usual set of lies, that once repeated enough, become burned into the brains of the public. “Mao killed 75 million,” we hear. “Worse than Joseph Stalin,” say others. Nonsense. Much of this garbage comes from The Black Book of Communism, a discredited propaganda piece that came up with the “Communism killed 100 million” figure. Not to be outdone, the numbers are getting even higher. I heard 300 million earlier today. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most biased book you’ve ever read?When I first googled “Mao Zedong” one of the first links was from Wikipedia. Scrolling down the initial biographical information about him, you then reaching a section where it states, with a straight face, that Mao killed 30–70 million people, according to Phillip Short, author of “Mao: A Life.” I started listening to interviews from Mr. Short and he takes great liberties to portray Mao in the worst possible light, without evidence. For example, he says that Mao was “ungrateful and treated his father terribly.” In reality the evidence we have shows that Mao did sometimes complain about his father, but this was common among the group of intellectuals with whom he would hang out. It was fashionable, but there is little evidence that he actually did treat his father poorly. This is just one example, but I have yet to find a Western accounting of Mao that hasn’t been a slurry of sensationalized exaggeration to sell books.The claims about Mao being responsible for 30–70 million deaths is fantastical and untrue. The evidence doesn’t support it. And those who have examined some of the supposed “proofs” based on census figures have been easily debunked. In fact, there were journalists and Western delegations that had visited during the Great Leap Forward and found there to be hunger but no evidence of mass starvation. Nevertheless, famines were a routine part of life in China going back for centuries. Many years ago there was a ridiculous book written about how Mao’s policy of killing sparrows was the substantial cause of the famine, that Mao had “violated the balance of nature.” While this had some effect, the author fails to mention that there were multiple causes for the famine, and that Mao was not the primary cause.Let’s assume there was a famine, for the sake of argument:Chinese history scholar Carl Riskin believes that a very serious famine took place but states “In general, it appears that the indications of hunger and hardship did not approach the kinds of qualitative evidence of mass famine that have accompanied other famines of comparable (if not equal) scale, including earlier famines in China.” He points out that much of the contemporary evidence presented in the West tended to be discounted at the time as it emanated from right-wing sources and was hardly conclusive. He considers whether repressive policies by the Chinese government prevented information about the famine getting out but states “whether it is a sufficient explanation is doubtful. There remains something of a mystery here.” 13Source: Monthly Review | Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?It therefore remains an open question why the accounts presented by these authors should be treated as certain fact in the west. In his famous 1965 book on China, A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene says that he traveled through areas of China in 1960 where food rationing was very tight but he did not see mass starvation. He also cites other eyewitnesses who say the same kind of thing. It is likely, that in fact, famine did occur in some areas. However Greene’s observations indicate that it was not a nation-wide phenomenon on the apocalyptic scale suggested by Jasper Becker and others. Mass hunger was not occurring in the areas he traveled through, although famine may have been occurring elsewhere. Why are the accounts of people like Becker believed so readily when the account of Felix Greene and the others he cites is discounted? Of course, the sympathy of Greene for Mao’s regime may be raised in connection with this and it might be suggested he distorted the truth for political reasons. But Becker, MacFarquhar and Jung Chang have their own perspectives on the issue too. Could anyone seriously doubt that these authors are not fairly staunch anti-communists? Id.Most of the supposed claims about the famine were elaborated by Roderick MacFarquhar, who also happened to be a paid propagandist for the CCF, which is directly funded by the CIA. No surprise. Robert Conquest, the founder of the idea that Stalin killed 30 million intentionally during the Ukrainian Famine was also a paid propagandist for the IDF, which was funded directly the the British Intelligence Services. Both fed information to journalists, the media, and other institutions. These are the typical propagandists front groups. Id.Further, there is substantial evidence that the Deng Xiaoping regime falsified some evidence to make the Great Leap Forward and the famine seem much worse, to legitimize the move from Maoism to enacting capitalist reforms. Id.Mao enjoyed popular support by the peasants who desperately needed land reform. They lived lives of desperate hunger and poverty. Mao brought the nation together. He brought enormous economic growth and prepared China to become one of the leading economic powers in the world. Mao’s strength was in mobilizing the majority of farmers and peasants to support him. He guided them. He had less power than any U.S. President.The supposed terror of Mao’s rule is total propaganda. In fact the supposed “famine” that he caused turned out to be a period of hunger, and the numbers extolling his supposed 45 million killed are unsubstantiated lies. Most of it comes from bitter members of the CCP who found themselves purged for embracing capitalism and had to do some service work in the country to learn the value of not being antisocial. Mao did not execute his political enemies. He believed in rehabilitation and service work. That is why President Xi’s father and Deng Xiaoping himself were not killed and Deng would eventually become the leader of China.The only landlords that got hurt were the ones who took up arms and violently resisted the land reforms. Landlords that caused deaths or had collaborated with the Japanese invaders would face a trial and if found guilty could be executed.Source: How Mao Greatly Strengthened ChinaThis man has just been given land as part of the land redistribution.Land was given to peasants, who previously were essentially serfsOn collectives food was more abundant than beforePhotos: COMMUNES, LAND REFORM AND COLLECTIVISM IN CHINAMassive irrigation projects improved the landFantastic series of photos of everyday life in Maoist China: Everyday Life in Maoist ChinaWhen the land reforms were announced Mao anticipated there would be resistance from the landlord class, as any privileged class is unlikely to just happily give up their riches for the well being of others. But landlords had the option to abide by the law and be fine. Estimating resistance is not a death sentence. In fact landlords that complied were given land to till and welcomed into the community. They were not exterminated.Source: The Land Reform -- china.org.cnLand is redistributed more equitablyI double checked the Wikipedia account of Mao’s land reform measures, and the citations refer to rabid anti-communist books that are filled with lies. I shouldn’t be surprised. The story of Mao in the West is filled with outright lies.You rarely hear it but the reality was that even though slavery was officially abolished, the practice continued before Mao stopped it. The Dalai Lama had slaves up until 1959. But for Mao this would continue.Source: White Paper on Tibet's March Toward ModernizationSource: Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to Is it true that landlords in China still owned slaves before Mao initiated land reform?The Mao as mass murderer lies began, interestingly, 20 years after his death with cooked numbers. But in the West these lies are entrenched.Monthly Review | On the Role of Mao Zedong Exploring the lies about Maocum monsterMonthly Review | Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to What happened to those who opposed Mao Zedong?Mao’s only screw up was during the Great Leap Forward, in which he tried to go too fast, causing a setback. But this in no way reduces his prior accomplishments. Further, the nation bounced back quickly.Graphs and sources charts from Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to Considering that China has a great firewall, what level do Westerners know about China and Chinese people know about the West? Who knows more objectively and comprehensively? and Godfree Roberts's answer to Was failure of communism the reason China switched to capitalism?The Mao Zedong you never hear aboutMao was not a brutal dictator. He was someone who deeply believed in bettering his country but also bringing socialism to all around the world, because he hated capitalism and wanted the masses to lift themselves up and build a Marxist society. As a Marxist Leninist, Mao embraced the model of socialism working toward communism. The goal was communism, a society which is moneyless, stateless, and classless. The workers would own the means of production and manage themselves. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That is why he was so horrified when Khrushchev backed down from international struggle, and why he was so angry about the capitalist reforms and the de-Stalinization of the USSR. He saw Khrushchev as a traitor to socialism, and this would cause an irreparable rift between the two major socialist powers.Khrushchev permitted some capitalist reforms, which led to the growth of the underground black market, which would ultimately do enormous harm to the official economy and lead to shortages, along with the refusal to adopt cybernetics, which was offered but declined. Cybernetics would have helped efficiently plan the planned economy and develop the consumer sector. He also ended the rotation of government officials to prevent corruption, which would ultimately destroy the Communist Party and the destruction of the entire USSR, as the corrupt elites would choose to dissolve the USSR and become oligarchs, to the detriment of everyone else.Khrushchev treated Mao Zedong poorly, and his de-Stalinization and abandonment of international world revolution horrified Mao. It would lead to a breakdown in relations with the two nations. Mao would later choose to form relations with the U.S., which proved fruitful because the sanctions were lifted, permitting the Chinese economy to blossom. Plus China was less likely to get invaded, meaning more money could be spent on the consumer economy and not the military.Stalin was against militarily invading other nations that might provoke a Western response. Insignificant countries, yes. So he would support conflicts in Korea, for example. The official position was still “Socialism in one country.” Lenin and Trotsky favored worldwide revolution for long term elimination of capitalism, thus making socialism safe from imperial attack. Mao still strongly favored worldwide revolution. He supported the Vietcong and Kim il Sung. When Khrushchev withdrew arms from Cuba Mao considered this a capitulation to the West. He believed that this would long term destroy the international communist movement. Mao also considered Khrushchev's rapprochement with Yugoslavia to be a capitulation that weakened the cause of international communism. Khrushchev's Human Dimensions Brought Him to Power and to His DownfallWhy people loved Mao ZedongMaoism appealed to the rural people and the young. It was anti-elitist. Most of Mao’s teachings were about mobilizing the rural proletariat, the peasants and common people. For what seemed an eternity the peasant farmers worked themselves to death while the landlords lived lives of relative comfort. Mao’s reforms improved the quality of their lives immensely. That is why the life expectancy doubled during his leadership. On the collective farms people could eat until they were full, which was unheard of previously. The communists also unified China and brought it into the modern era. The people loved Mao. After Deng Xiaoping’s rule in 1978 the official story about Mao became that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. But this was not the consensus in the 1960’s.Mao began to notice the infiltration of counter revolutionaries in the Communist Party. After 1953 when Stalin died Khrushchev began his de-Stalinization process, which was used to consolidate Khrushchev's power. He abandoned Stalinism and embraced some Western style reforms that would ultimately prove fatal to socialism. This disgusted Mao, first because the claims about Stalin were untrue, and because it was an attack on Marxism, and Mao was a firm believer in Marxism Leninism.Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khruschev for example, who are still nestling beside us.—Mao ZedongTo prevent what happened in the USSR Mao instituted the Cultural Revolution. The rural people and students were expected to help renew the spirit of socialism. And they willingly did.The Cultural Revolution was indeed a revolution, just a non armed one. But it was a war for the soul of the Chinese people. And its outcome would determine whether China would become a post Soviet Russia or become the world’s largest economy and the next superpower under the leadership of President Xi and the CCP.Mao taught that socialism is not a goal you reach. Instead, it is a continuing process of breakdown and renewal.After 1978 the Deng government portrayed the Cultural Revolution in a negative light. Of course Western journalists and historians have exaggerated the violence (which was not endorsed), have only spoken about the negatives, and have failed to discuss the benefits of the Cultural Revolution.BenefitsIt called for the peasants and students to join the democratic process. It required elitists to answer for their antisocial actions.It enabled peasants and students to voice their grievances.It chased away the reactionary elements that were present and sought to abandon socialism to embrace Western style capitalism and democracy, which would have resulted in the rise of oligarchs and the destruction of the society as seen in post USSR Russia.It had an enormous uplifting effect to the regular people.It rooted out corruption, stopped the capitalist reactionaries, and strengthened the leadership of the CCP. This would ultimately save China from the same fate as the USSR.Western propagandists will have you believe that Mao was a egomaniac trying to remain relevant, that nothing good came from it, that it was a disaster, and that Deng Xiaoping was the hero that “saved China from communism and Mao.” Total rubbish. This is revisionism at its finest. Deng Xiaoping had been purged during this process but was rehabilitated. So after he took power the government condemned the Cultural Revolution as being bad. But the non elites didn’t feel that way.High school and college students organized the Red Guards, pro-communist student groups. Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations was the guide.The negativesSome people took it too far, as young people do. Some individuals became violent, and killed people.Some people were shamed undeservedly. This caused some to become very stressed and a few committed suicide.A few leaders became overzealous and would later need to be reigned in.Some overzealous students destroyed rare antiquities, which was horrendous.Mao believed in rehabilitation. He was not vindictive. And he criticized Stalin for being violent when rehabilitation could have worked better. Mao believed violence would lead to internal contradictions that would later greatly disrupt the entire society, and unravel the legacy of those who used it. Nevertheless, he stated that Stalin was 70% right and 30% wrong. Interestingly, Deng Xiaoping would later say the same thing about him.An example of Mao’s generosity of spirit:This letter was written to students during the Cultural Revolution. Notice the generosity of spirit and call for understanding at the end of the letter. This was Mao.[SOURCE: Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought, a Red Guard Publication.]Red Guard comrades of Tsinghua University Middle School:I have received both the big-character posters which you sent on 28 July as well as the letter which you sent to me, asking for an answer. The two big-character posters which you wrote on 24 June and 4 July express your anger at, and denunciation of, all landlords, bourgeois, imperialists, revisionists, and their running dogs who exploit and oppress the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary parties and groupings. You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries; I enthusiastically support you. I also give enthusiastic support to the big-character poster of the Red Flag Combat Group of Peking University Middle School which said that it is right to rebel against the reactionaries; and to the very good revolutionary speech given by comrade P’eng Hsiao-meng representing their Red Flag Combat Group at the big meeting attended by all the teachers, students, administration and workers of Peking University on 25 July. Here I want to say that I myself as well as my revolutionary comrades-in-arms all take the same attitude. No matter where they are, in Peking or anywhere in China, I will give enthusiastic support to all who take an attitude similar to yours in the Cultural Revolution movement. Another thing, while supporting you, at the same time we ask you to pay attention to uniting with all who can be united with. As for those who have committed serious mistakes, after their mistakes have been pointed out you should offer them a way out of their difficulties by giving them work to do, and enabling them to correct their mistakes and become new men. Marx said: the proletariat must emancipate not only itself but all mankind. If it cannot emancipate all mankind, then the proletariat itself will not be able to achieve final emancipation. Will comrades please pay attention to this truth too.Source: The real Mao, not the Western caricature by Alexander Finnegan on PostsNotice the number of worldwide famines, most of which happened long before there was Stalin and Mao:Interestingly, Mao’s China was so enlightened that some black U.S. Korean War POW’s chose to stay in Red China instead of returning back to the U.S., where they faced lynchings, segregation, and other vile forms of racism.Black POW chooses Mao’s China over the U.S. by Alexander Finnegan on PostsDid people like living under Mao Zedong?Yes.The vast majority of the peasants loved Mao. They lived as serfs under an oppressive system. Landlords lived comfortable lives while the people could barely eke out a living. When Mao redistributed the land the people were given great hope. And landlords were welcomed to take part. But the elites hated him. The elites running China now hate Mao too, because they were made to work in rural areas to learn about the poor during the Cultural Revolution. Because some of them were shamed. Older people in China, the rural people, and many students love Mao. Sadly, there are many who were born after 1976. They only know about Mao what they have heard. In the West there is nothing good about Mao said. It is the usual anti-communist propaganda.I have read some Chinese Quorans who have said that some people have become so focused on making money that they have become superficial and materialistic, displaying their status and forgetting the importance of higher virtues. Mao’s life was a testament that we are not simply rats running on a spinning wheel, making money and thinking of nothing else:We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.Liberalism manifests itself in various ways.To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type.To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type.Not to obey orders but to give pride of place to one's own opinions. To demand special consideration from the organization but to reject its discipline. This is a fourth type.To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along--"So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell." This is a ninth type.To regard oneself as having rendered great service to the revolution, to pride oneself on being a veteran, to disdain minor assignments while being quite unequal to major tasks, to be slipshod in work and slack in study. This is a tenth type.To be aware of one's own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them, taking a liberal attitude towards oneself. This is an eleventh type.We could name more. But these eleven are the principal types.They are all manifestations of liberalism.Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.Source: Mao on Combating Liberalism by Alexander Finnegan on PostsFor a much more in depth analysis of Maoism and Neo-Maoism in China, click here.To understand the similarites and differences between the two giants of communism, Stalin and Mao, it helps to look at the question: “Why didn’t Mao and Stalin get on?”First, don’t read the secondary sources from the New York Times or other publications. These are inaccurate descriptions of the relationship between the two. There is an attempt to create a rivalry between the two that misrepresents their relationship. Were they best friends that went drinking together? No.However, Mao respected Stalin and after Mao proved himself Stalin trusted Mao. They also shared a common purpose—Marxism Leninism and socialism. Stalin helped Mao in many ways to develop China after 1949. As the more senior party controlling a more powerful nation, Stalin regarded himself as more of a senior figure. However, there is no indication of Stalin being especially rude to Mao or Mao being rude back to Stalin. But there were things Stalin did that Maowas angry about.Below is the transcript of their meeting in 1949. You see from it that Stalin is trying to consider the international implications of how the USSR and China get along, while trying to be of assistance to Mao to shore up some internal and external domestic matters. Stalin had more experience as a world leader and diplomat compared to Mao at this time. So naturally Stalin is going to take more of a lead.December 16, 1949Source: Cold War International History Project (Smithsonian Institution)Conversation between Stalin and Mao, Moscow, 16 December 1949[Classification level blacked out: "NOT SECRET" Stamped]RECORD OF CONVERSATION BETWEEN COMRADE I.V. STALIN AND CHAIRMAN OF THE CENTRAL PEOPLE'S GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA MAO ZEDONG on 16 December 1949After an exchange of greetings and a discussion of general topics, the following conversation took place.Comrade Mao Zedong: The most important question at the present time is the question of establishing peace. China needs a period of 3-5 years of peace, which would be used to bring the economy back to pre-war levels and to stabilize the country in general. Decisions on the most important questions in China hinge on the prospects for a peaceful future. With this in mind the CC CPC [Central Committee of the Communist Party of China] entrusted me to ascertain from you, comr[ade]. Stalin, in what way and for how long will international peace be preserved.Comrade Stalin: In China a war for peace, as it were, is taking place. The question of peace greatly preoccupies the Soviet Union as well, though we have already had peace for the past four years. With regards to China, there is no immediate threat at the present time: Japan has yet to stand up on its feet and is thus not ready for war; America, though it screams war, is actually afraid of war more than anything; Europe is afraid of war; in essence, there is no one to fight with China, not unless Kim Il Sung decides to invade China?Peace will depend on our efforts. If we continue to be friendly, peace can last not only 5-10 years, but 20-25 years and perhaps even longer.Comrade Mao Zedong: Since Liu Shaoqi's return to China, CC CPC has been discussing the treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance between China and the USSR.Comrade Stalin: This question we can discuss and decide. We must ascertain whether to declare the continuation of the current 1945 treaty of alliance and friendship between the USSR and China, to announce impending changes in the future, or to make these changes right now.As you know, this treaty was concluded between the USSR and China as a result of the Yalta Agreement, which provided for the main points of the treaty (the question of the Kurile Islands, South Sakhalin, Port Arthur, etc.). That is, the given treaty was concluded, so to speak, with the consent of America and England. Keeping in mind this circumstance, we, within our inner circle, have decided not to modify any of the points of this treaty for now, since a change in even one point could give America and England the legal grounds to raise questions about modifying also the treaty's provisions concerning the Kurile Islands, South Sakhalin, etc. This is why we searched to find a way to modify the current treaty in effect while formally maintaining its provisions, in this case by formally maintaining the Soviet Union's right to station its troops at Port Arthur while, at the request of the Chinese government, actually withdrawing the Soviet Armed forces currently stationed there. Such an operation could be carried out upon China's request.One could do the same with KChZhD [Chinese Changchun Railroad, which traverses Manchuria], that is, to effectively modify the corresponding points of the agreement while formally maintaining its provisions, upon China's request.If, on the other hand, the Chinese comrades are not satisfied with this strategy, they can present their own proposals.Comrade Mao Zedong: The present situation with regard to KChZhD and Port Arthur corresponds well with Chinese interests, as the Chinese forces are inadequate to effectively fight against imperialist aggression. In addition, KChZhD is a training school for the preparation of Chinese cadres in railroad and industry.Comrade Stalin: The withdrawal of troops does not mean that Soviet Union refuses to assist China, if such assistance is needed. The fact is that we, as communists, are not altogether comfortable with stationing our forces on foreign soil, especially on the soil of a friendly nation. Given this situation anyone could say that if Soviet forces can be stationed on Chinese territory, then why could not the British, for example, station their forces in Hong Kong, or the Americans in Tokyo?We would gain much in the arena of international relations if, with mutual agreement, the Soviet forces were to be withdrawn from Port Arthur. In addition, the withdrawal of Soviet forces would provide a serious boost to Chinese communists in their relations with the national bourgeoisie. Everyone would see that the communists have managed to achieve what [Nationalist Chinese leader] Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] could not. The Chinese communists must take the national bourgeoisie into consideration.The treaty ensures the USSR's right to station its troops in Port Arthur. But the USSR is not obligated to exercise this right and can withdraw its troops upon Chinese request. However, if this is unsuitable, the troops in Port Arthur can remain there for 2, 5, or 10 years, whatever suits China best. Let them not misunderstand that we want to run away from China. We can stay there for 20 years even.Comrade Mao Zedong: In discussing the treaty in China we had not taken into account the American and English positions regarding the Yalta agreement. We must act in a way that is best for the common cause. This question merits further consideration. However, it is already becoming clear that the treaty should not be modified at the present time, nor should one rush to withdraw troops from Port Arthur.Should not Zhou Enlai visit Moscow in order to decide the treaty question?Comrade Stalin: No, this question you must decide for yourselves. Zhou may be needed in regard to other matters.Comrade Mao Zedong: We would like to decide on the question of Soviet credit to China, that is to draw up a credit agreement for 300.000.000 dollars between the governments of the USSR and China.Comrade Stalin: This can be done. If you would like to formalize this agreement now, we can.Comrade Mao Zedong: Yes, exactly now, as this would resonate well in China. At the same time it is necessary to resolve the question of trade, especially between the USSR and Xinjiang [Sinkiang], though at present we cannot present a specific trade operations plan for this region.Comrade Stalin: We must know right now what kind of equipment China will need, especially now, since we do not have equipment in reserve and the request for industrial goods must be submitted ahead of time.Comrade Mao Zedong: We are having difficulties in putting together a request for equipment, as the industrial picture is as yet unclear.Comrade Stalin: It is desirable to expedite the preparation of this request, as requests for equipment are submitted to our industry at least a year in advance.Comrade Mao Zedong: We would very much like to receive assistance from the USSR in creating air transportation routes.Comrade Stalin: We are ready to render such assistance. Air routes can be established over Xinjiang and the MPR [Mongolian People's Republic]. We have specialists. We will give you assistance.Comrade Mao Zedong: We would also like to receive your assistance in creating a naval force.Comrade Stalin: Cadres for Chinese navy could be prepared at Port Arthur. You give us people, and we will give you ships. Trained cadres of the Chinese navy could then return to China on these ships.Comrade Mao Zedong: Guomindang [Kuomintang] supporters have built a naval and air base on the island of Formosa [Taiwan]. Our lack of naval forces and aviation makes the occupation of the island by the People's Liberation Army [PLA] more difficult. With regard to this, some of our generals have been voicing opinions that we should request assistance from the Soviet Union, which could send volunteer pilots or secret military detachments to speed up the conquest of Formosa.Comrade Stalin: Assistance has not been ruled out, though one ought to consider the form of such assistance. What is most important here is not to give Americans a pretext to intervene. With regard to headquarters staff and instructors we can give them to you anytime. The rest we will have to think about.Do you have any assault landing units?Comrade Mao Zedong: We have one former Guomindang assault landing regiment unit which came over to join our side.Comrade Stalin: One could select a company of landing forces, train them in propaganda, send them over to Formosa, and through them organize an uprising on the isle.Comrade Mao Zedong: Our troops have approached the borders of Burma and Indo-China. As a result, the Americans and the British are alarmed, not knowing whether we will cross the border or whether our troops will halt their movement.Comrade Stalin: One could create a rumor that you are preparing to cross the border and in this way frighten the imperialists a bit.Comrade Mao Zedong: Several countries, especially Britain, are actively campaigning to recognize the People's Republic of China. However, we believe that we should not rush to be recognized. We must first bring about order to the country, strengthen our position, and then we can talk to foreign imperialists.Comrade Stalin: That is a good policy. In addition, there is no need for you to create conflicts with the British and the Americans. If, for example, there will be a need to put pressure on the British, this can be done by resorting to a conflict between the Guangdong province and Hong Kong. And to resolve this conflict, Mao Zedong could come forward as the mediator. The main point is not to rush and to avoid conflicts.Are there foreign banks operating in Shanghai?Comrade Mao Zedong: Yes.Comrade Stalin: And whom are they serving?Comrade Mao Zedong: The Chinese national bourgeoisie and foreign enterprises which so far we have not touched. As for the foreigners' spheres of influence, the British predominate in investments in the economic and commercial sectors, while the Americans lead in the sector of cultural-educational organizations.Comrade Stalin: What is the situation regarding Japanese enterprises?Comrade Mao Zedong: They have been nationalized.Comrade Stalin: In whose hands is the customs agency?Comrade Mao Zedong: In the hands of the government.Comrade Stalin: It is important to focus attention on the customs agency as it is usually a good source of government revenue.Comrade Mao Zedong: In the military and political sectors we have already achieved complete success; as for cultural and economic sectors, we have as yet not freed ourselves from foreign influence there.Comrade Stalin: Do you have inspectors and agents overseeing foreign enterprises, banks, etc.?Comrade Mao Zedong: Yes, we have. We are carrying out such work in the study and oversight of foreign enterprises (the Kailan [?] mines, electric power plants and aqueducts in Shanghai, etc.).Comrade Stalin: One should have government inspectors who must operate legally. The foreigners should also be taxed at higher levels than the Chinese.Who owns the enterprises mining wolfram [tungsten], molybdenum, and petroleum?Comrade Mao Zedong: The government.Comrade Stalin: It is important to increase the mining of minerals and especially of petroleum. You could build an oil pipeline from western Lanzhou to Chengdu [?], and then transport fuel by ship.Comrade Mao Zedong: So far we have not decided which districts of China we should strive to develop first - the coastal areas or those inland, since we were unsure of the prospects for peace.Comrade Stalin: Petroleum, coal, and metal are always needed, regardless of whether there be war or not.Comrade Stalin: Can rubber-bearing trees be grown in southern China?Comrade Mao Zedong: So far it has not been possible.Comrade Stalin: Is there a meteorological service in China?Comrade Mao Zedong: No, it has not been established yet.Comrade Stalin: It should be established.Comrade Stalin: We would like to receive from you a list of your works which could be translated into Russian.Comrade Mao Zedong: I am currently reviewing my works which were published in various local publishing houses and which contain a mass of errors and misrepresentations. I plan to complete this review by spring of 1950. However, I would like to receive help from Soviet comrades: first of all, to work on the texts with Russian translators and, secondly, to receive help in editing the Chinese original.Comrade Stalin: This can be done. However, do you need your works edited?Comrade Mao Zedong: Yes, and I ask you to select a comrade suitable for such a task, say, for example, someone from CC VKP/b/ [All-Union Communist Party of bolsheviks].Comrade Stalin: It can be arranged, if indeed there is such a need.Also present at the meeting: comrs. Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin, Vyshinskii, [Soviet translator N.T.] Fedorenko and [Chinese translator] Shi Zhe /Karskii/.Recorded by comr. Fedorenko.[signature illegible 31/XII][Source: Archive of the President, Russian Federation (APRF), fond (f.) 45, opis (op.) 1, delo (d.) 329, listy (ll.) 9-17; translation by Danny Rozas.]https://digitalarchive.wilsoncen... This link provides the transcript of another meeting between Stalin and Mao, along with Molotov and Zhou En lai“December 21 of this year is Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. It can be anticipated that this birthday will call forth warm and affectionate congratulations in the hearts of all those people in the world who are aware of this event and who know suffering.“To congratulate Stalin is not merely doing something to observe the occasion. To congratulate Stalin means to support him, to support his cause, to support the cause of the Soviet Union, to support the victory of socialism, to support the orientation he points out for humanity, and to support our own close friend. Today in the world the great majority of humanity is suffering and only by following the orientation pointed out by Stalin, and with Stalin’s aid, can humanity be rescued from disaster.“We Chinese people are now living in a time of profound calamity unprecedented in history, a time when help from others is most urgently needed. The Book of Poetry says, ‘Ying goes its cry, seeking with its voice its companion.’ We are precisely at such a juncture.“But who are our friends?“There is one kind of so-called friends who style themselves our friends, and some among us also unthinkingly call them friends. But such friends can only be classed with Li Linfu of the Tang dynasty. Li Linfu was a prime minister of the Tang dynasty, a notorious man who was described as having ‘honey dripping from his tongue and a sword concealed in his heart.’ These friends today are precisely friends with ‘honey dripping from their tongues and swords concealed in their hearts.’ Who are these people? Part of those imperialists who say that they sympathize with China.“There is another kind of friends who are different; they have real sympathy for us, and regard us as brothers. Who are these people? They are the Soviet Union, and Stalin.“Not a single country has renounced its special rights and privileges in China; only the Soviet Union has done this.“At the time of the Northern Expedition, all the imperialists opposed us, and the Soviet Union alone assisted us.“Since the beginning of the anti-Japanese war, not a single government of any imperialist country has really helped us. The Soviet Union alone has helped us with its great resources in men, materiel, and money.“Is this not clear enough?“To the cause of the liberation of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people, only the socialist country, the socialist leaders, the socialist people, and socialist thinkers, statesmen, and toilers are truly giving assistance. Without their help, it is impossible to win final victory.“Stalin is the true friend of the Chinese nation and of the cause of the liberation of the Chinese people. The Chinese people’s love and respect for Stalin, and our friendship for the Soviet Union, are wholly sincere. Any attempt, from whatever quarter, to sow dissension by rumor-mongering and slander will be of no avail in the end.”—“Stalin Is the Friend of the Chinese People” (Dec. 20, 1939), MRP7, pp. 307-308, in full. A different translation is available in SW2, pp. 335-6.Source: Mao's Evaluations of StalinIn the above paragraph Mao shows his thanks to Stalin for the support given to China, and how the USSR has been a good friend to China, while others have sought to take advantage.“I believe we should do things honestly, for without an honest attitude it is absolutely impossible to accomplish anything in this world. Which are the honest people? Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin are honest, men of science are honest. Which are the dishonest people? Trotsky, Bukharin, Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao are extremely dishonest…”—“Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” (Feb. 1, 1942), SW3, p. 44. Id.Mao continued his respect for Stalin, and considered him a partner who had acted in good faith.[Excerpt from Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War quoting Mao’s private reaction to the first of two telegrams Stalin sent him urging him to personally go to Chongqing (Chungking) for negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek.]“In the first cable (dated August 22 [1945]), Stalin said that China must hold to the road of peaceful development, that he believed the Nationalists and the Communists should reach a peace accord because a civil war would destroy the Chinese nation, and that, accordingly, he thought both Zhou [Enlai] and Maoshould go to Chongqing. After receiving Stalin’s cable, an angry Maoremarked, ‘I simply don’t believe that the nation will perish if the people stand up and struggle [against the Nationalist government].’”—UP, p. 7. Ed. note: Later on (in early 1948) Stalin admitted that he was wrong in initially opposing the Chinese revolution in the period after World War II. Milovan Djilas reports him as saying: “True, we, too, can make a mistake! Here, when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to reach an agreement as to how a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek might be found. They agreed with us in word, but in deed they did it their own way when they got home: they mustered their forces and struck. It has been shown that they were right, and not we.” [Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 182.] Later still, on July 27, 1949, as the Chinese revolution was on the verge of complete victory, the authors of Uncertain Partners say that while speaking to a CPC delegation in Moscow Stalin“admitted that he was not ‘too well versed’ in Chinese affairs and may have caused obstacles in the Chinese revolution.” [UP, p. 73.] Id.Stalin and Mao had disagreements about strategy sometimes. When Stalin recognized he had been mistaken he admitted he was wrong. He was not acting in bad faith or to play games with Mao.[The authors of UP writing:] “In the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, Mao and other Chinese Party leaders repeatedly contended that Mikoyan [in his secret visit on Stalin’s behalf to Mao in early 1949] had recommended that the PLA not cross the Yangtze. That advice they charged up primarily to three reasons. First of all, the Soviets had simply erred in their estimate of the PLA and believed it could not defeat the Nationalists. Marshal Nie Rong-zhen comments that Stalin, lacking confidence in the military power of the Chinese Communists, ‘was somewhat like the ancient man of Qi who was worried that the sky might fall anytime.’ Fear that the crossing would raise the danger of U.S. armed intervention was the second reason, and, third, Stalin wanted to split China in half, creating conflicting ‘Northern and Southern Dynasties,’ the better to control the Communist half. [UP, p. 42. The UP authors go on to suggest that they have doubts about the truth of this story, but provide the following references in support of it:][The UP authors continuing in a footnote on p. 306:] “Mao’s first known statement on the ‘Northern and Southern Dynasties’ was made in the spring of 1949, when he said: ‘Some friends abroad half believe and half disbelieve in our victory. [They are] persuading us to stop here and make the Yangtze River a border with Chiang, to create the “Northern and Southern Dynasties.”’ … In 1954, Zhou Enlai told Liu Xiao, the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, that Stalin had ‘sent a representative to Xibaipo [i.e., Mikoyan’s secret visit in Jan.-Feb. 1949 —Ed.] principally for the purpose of understanding the situation in the Chinese revolution and the points of view from our side…. The Soviet Union was dissatisfied [with our intention to liberate all China] and demanded that we “stop the civil war.” In fact the Soviet Union attempted to create the “Northern and Southern Dynasties,” namely two Chinas.’ … Mao referred to this same issue on April 11, 1957.”[However, a cable from Stalin to Mao in April, 1949, just before the PLA crossed the Yangtze, shows that Stalin did not at that time oppose the crossing, though he still urged caution. On the other hand, not long before sending that cable Stalin was apparently still trying to mediate an end to the civil war and keep China divided. See UP, pp. 43-44.] Id.“We must not put on bureaucratic airs. If we dig into a subject for several months, for a year or two, for three or five years, we shall eventually master it. At first some of the Soviet Communists also were not very good at handling economic matters and the imperialists awaited their failure too. But the Communist Party of the Soviet Union emerged victorious and, under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, it learned not only how to make the revolution but also how to carry on construction. It has built a great and splendid socialist state. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it.”—Ibid., p. 423. Id.Mao was a very wise person. He was not arrogant and he knew there were things he simply did not know. Instead of putting on airs he devoted himself to learning from Stalin as China was the little brother to the USSR, its socialist older brother who had collectivized and industrialized first.Differences between the two“They [the Soviets] did not permit China to make revolution: that was in 1945. Stalin wanted to prevent China from making a revolution, saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish. But we did not do what he said. The revolution was victorious. After the victory of the revolution he next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia, and that I would become a second Tito. Later, when I went to Moscow to sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance, we had to go through another struggle. He was not willing to sign a treaty. After two months of negotiations he at last signed. When did Stalin begin to have confidence in us? It was the time of the Resist America, Aid Korea campaign, from the winter of 1950. He then came to believe that we were not Tito, not Yugoslavia.”—Speech at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the CPC (Sept. 24, 1962), CMTTP, p. 191. (Most of this passage is also in TMT, pp. 146-7.) Id.Stalin was a very anxious person. He suffered from many fears, including flying, dying in his sleep, being poisoned, and being betrayed. Stalin was eventually betrayed by Tito of Yugoslavia, who became independent of the USSR in many ways and Stalin was unable to reign him in. Stalin had his reservations about Mao Zedong and China. He didn’t know which way Mao was going to go. Stalinpreferred a divided China with Chiang Kai Sheik still keeping part of mainland China. Stalin figured this would be geopolitically more stable and safer for the USSR as the power would be more divided. Stalin was also nervous about irritating the imperial powers and causing another war, so he was reticent to do things that might provoke the West. Mao went ahead conquered the mainland anyway. Later Stalin would agree to assist China with different things like industrialization, technology, etc. But Stalin also imposed some terms that Maofelt were unfriendly, and more like something an imperialist nation would impose. This angered him. Mao had his differences with Stalin that he would later vocalize, such as disagreeing with Stalin’s use of repression against fellow comrades. Mao was not one to use repression against his own people. He believed in rehabilitating people. When Mao would have someone purged they would be given an opportunity to learn about the error of their ways, work with the proletariat, learn self-criticism and then rejoin the party. He felt this was part of the process of Marxism Leninism. This was the embrace of contradictions, of trying to understand the never ending role of class struggle within already socialist nations. He believed that Stalin had failed in engaging the masses of the people to fight counterrevolutionaries and capitalist roaders within the party. Mao demonstrated this later with the Cultural Revolution. This was to be done by the people themselves, the students and the peasants, not by the leadership itself. Mao believed that Stalin relied too heavily on cadres within the party to deal with these elements instead of relying on the people.Khrushchev gave his “Secret Speech” in which he denounced Stalin and scapegoated him for all the problems in the past. He had the statutes of Stalin removed, had his body buried, and moved away from Stalinism, trying to embrace more reforms. The effect of these changes would pave the way for the eventual demise of the USSR. It had a huge demoralizing effect on the public and the members of the Party. Mao discussed this frequently. It destroyed the narrative that held together the Soviet society. Mao was disgusted by this. Mao said that Stalin was 70 to 80% right. Mao saw the scandal and negative effects within the CCP as well. Many comrades were disturbed by Khrushchev's actions. Mao continued to honor Stalin and refused to remove the giant portrait of him in Tienanmen Square. Khrushchev's arrogant and condescending attitude toward Mao would also lead to a rift between the USSR and China that would change the course of the future. Eventually Mao would agree to an alliance with the U.S., and this led China to a level of stability against invasion from the US. and the removal of sanctions, which helped China develop economically compared to Cuba and North Korea, which have been subject to crippling sanctions for decades.“This Comrade Stalin of ours had something of the flavor of the mandarins of old… In the past, the relations between us and the Soviet Union were those between father and son, cat and mouse.”—April, 1958. Quoted in TMT, p. 154. Id.Stalin died in 1953. Mao discusses the sometimes paternal, and sometimes difficult relationship between the two. Reading the conversations between them you get that sense, too.“When Stalin was criticized in 1956, we were on the one hand happy, but on the other hand apprehensive. It was completely necessary to remove the lid, to break down blind faith, to release the pressure, and to emancipate thought. But we did not agree with demolishing him at one blow. They do not hang up his picture, but we do. In 1950 I argued with Stalin in Moscow for two months. On the questions of the Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Chinese Eastern Railway, the joint-stock companies and the border we adopted two attitudes: one was to argue when the other side made proposals we did not agree with, and the other was to accept their proposal if they absolutely insisted. This was out of consideration for the interests of socialism. Then there were the two ‘colonies’, that is the North-East and Sinkiang [Xinjiang], where people of any third country were not allowed to reside. Now this has been rescinded. After the criticism of Stalin, the victims of blind faith had their eyes opened a bit. In order that our comrades recognize that the old ancestor [Stalin] also had his faults, we should apply analysis to him, and not have blind faith in him. We should accept everything good in Soviet experience, and reject what is bad. Now we are a bit more skilful in this, and understand the Soviet Union a bit better, and understand ourselves.—Ibid., p. 101. In the 1950 treaty Stalin insisted on the creation of joint-stock companies in Xinjiang to develop oil and metal production. This continued the Soviet economic exploitation of the area that had already begun under the Nationalist regime. The USSR also kept control, for a time, of two important military bases in Manchuria and de facto control of the Chinese Eastern Railway which (among other things) was used to transport military supplies to those bases. A secret protocol to the 1950 treaty prohibited the Chinese from allowing citizens of any third country to participate in trade or industry in Xinjiang or Manchuria. —Ed. Id.Further, Mao felt that there were times when he had been treated poorly by Stalin.[Stuart Schram writing:] “When he [Mao] visited Moscow for the second time, in November 1957 to attend the conference of Communist and workers’ parties, Mao remarked that he still had a ‘belly full of pent-up anger, mainly directed against Stalin’, though he would not elaborate on the reasons, because it was all in the past. He then proceeded, in characteristic fashion, to do precisely that: ‘During the Stalin era, nobody dared to speak up. I have come to Moscow twice and the first time was depressing. Despite all the talk about ‘fraternal parties’ there was really no equality.’ Now, he said, we ‘must admit that our Soviet comrades’ style of work has changed a lot.’”—Nov. 1957. Quoted in TMT, p. 152. Id.Mao had many deep reservations about how Stalin’s legacy was handled.“Incidentally, let me talk a bit here about where our opinions differ from those of the Soviet Union. First of all, on the question of Stalin, we have contradictions with Khrushchev. He made Stalin appear so terrible! We do not agree with that, because he was made to appear so ugly! This is not a matter for their country alone; it is a matter that concerns all countries. We hang Stalin’s portrait outside our Tiananmen; this is in accord with the wishes of the laboring people of the whole world, and it demonstrates our basic differences with Khrushchev. As for Stalin himself, you should also give him [an evaluation of] 30 per cent [bad] and 70 per cent [good]. Stalin’s achievements count for 70 per cent; his mistakes count for 30 per cent. Even this may not be accurate; [his] mistakes may only be 20 per cent or perhaps only 10 per cent, or perhaps a little more than [20 per cent]. In any case, Stalin’s achievements are primary while his shortcomings and mistakes are secondary. On this point we and Khrushchev hold differing opinions.”—Speech at the Conclusion of the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee (Oct. 9, 1957), version I, WMZ2, p. 707.Mao was more democratic minded than Stalin. He disagreed with Stalin’s inability to accept criticism. He also felt that Stalin was too conservative at times and needed to be more bold.“To affirm everything we did, without analyzing it—this thing is wrong. The dogmatists of the past were just like that. Rákosi was like that, and so was Stalin. Can you say Stalin was entirely dogmatist? No, you can’t say that. This man, he did a lot of things, but he did have [some] dogmatism. This dogmatism of his influenced China, making us fail in our revolution during a certain period. If we were to do things as he bade us, we would not have been able to carry out the revolution in the later stage, and we wouldn’t be holding a meeting here. Who built the building? Not us. We wouldn’t have had the opportunity [to hold this meeting] because it would still be the government of the Kuomintang [and the] imperialists [running things in China]. Stalin had [things on] both sides; he also had [some] dogmatism—[wanting us to] transplant the [experience of the] Soviet Union in everything. We must learn from the Soviet Union. The things of the Soviet Union, both the mistakes and the achievements, are very worthy of being learned from. The slogan that we propose now is to learn from the Soviet Union’s advanced experiences. We didn’t say that we should learn from their backward experiences. When did we ever propose such a slogan? However, even though it was not proposed, some things like that came over with the [good ones] all the same, [especially] in the last seven years. Nonetheless, in general, we can’t say that we weren’t selective at all … because we have been critical of dogmatism, and the source of dogmatism comes from Stalin.”—Ibid., p. 401. Mátyás Rákosi was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Hungary at the time of Hungarian Uprising in 1956. For another translation, see SSCM, pp. 287-8.“It is good to have criticism. It would not be good to have no criticism, or to suppress criticism. It is this mistake that Stalin committed. Stalin did a lot of good things, but he also did some bad things. He confused the two; he used the methods that are for dealing with the enemy to deal with the people, with contradictions among the people. He wouldn’t let people say bad things about the government, or about the Communist Party; if you said anything bad or if there were any rustling in the air, any movement in the grass, he would say that you were a spy and have you arrested.”—Speech at [a] Conference of Members and Cadres of Provincial-Level Organizations of [the] CPC in Shandong (March 18, 1957), WMZ2, pp. 419-420. For a different translation, see SSCM, p. 308. Id.“Stalin was 70 percent a Marxist, 30 percent not a Marxist. [He] was 30 percent bourgeois, 70 percent Marxist.”—Ibid., SSCM, p. 173.“How [should we] look on the criticism of Stalin? We [humans] are also commodities of dual character. [This is an allusion to Marx’s comments about how commodities have the dual characteristics of use value and exchange value. –Ed.] The criticism of Stalin has a two-sided nature. One side has real benefit; one side is not good. To expose the cult of Stalin, to tear off the lid, to liberate people, this is a liberation movement; but his [i.e., Khrushchev’s] method of exposing [Stalin] is incorrect; [he] hasn’t made a good analysis, clubbing [him] to death with a single blow. On the one hand, this provoked the worldwide currents of the latter half of last year; on the other hand, it later also provoked the Hungarian and Polish incidents. But he [Stalin] had his incorrect side; although our published articles have not pointed at the [CPSU] Twentieth Congress, in fact [we’ve] talked about it. What have we discussed with the Soviet comrades face to face? About how the Stalinproblem has not been handled appropriately; [we] discussed our great-nation chauvinism….”—Ibid., SSCM, p. 178. Id.Mao was much more compassionate to counterrevolutionaries than the USSR:“The problem of eliminating counterrevolutionaries is a problem of the first type of contradiction [i.e., between the enemy and ourselves]. Speaking comparatively, in the last analysis how has our country handled the work of eliminating counterrevolutionaries? Poorly or well? In my view there have been shortcomings, but in comparison with other countries we have done relatively well. Better than the Soviet Union, better than Hungary. The Soviet Union was too leftist, Hungary was too rightist. We have drawn a lesson from this; it’s not that we’re especially clever. Because the Soviet Union has been too left, we have learned something from that experience. We ourselves have committed leftist excesses, too. During the period of the southern base areas, when we were still rather ignorant, we suffered losses and every base area without exception used the same Soviet method. Later [we] put things right, and only then did we gain experience. In Yan’an [we] finally enacted some rules. Not a single person was to be killed and the bulk [of offenders] were not to be arrested. Once in Beijing [i.e., after the 1949 Communist victory] there were some improvements, though naturally there are still shortcomings, errors. Still, by now progress has been made. Compared with the Soviet Union, it is two lines [i.e., two different lines on this were followed. –Ed.] (this refers to the past, not the present, namely the time when Stalin was in power; he did things badly). There were two sides to him. One side was the elimination of true counterrevolutionaries; that was the correct side. The other side was the incorrect killing of numerous people, important people.”—“On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” (Speaking Notes), (Feb. 27, 1957), SSCM, pp. 141-2, and footnote 11. An alternate translation of some of this passage is given above. Id.