Hu's China, as Stalin's Russia, Enshrouded in Oppression

Ethnic settlements of Uyghurs (who are of Turkish origin) exist in many countries, including the United States. But in China, such peaceful coexistence is not to be. The dictatorship of China wants its population to be homogeneous ethnically as well as culturally.

Rebiya Kadeer, a successful Uyghur business woman, suffered imprisonment in China from 1999 to 2005, for being too outspoken, but because of the pressure of the international community, she was released and now lives in the West as an “exiled activist.” The China dictatorship had evidently decided that she would be controllable.

She is 59, and her children are in China, in the Xinjiang region, where the Uyghurs live. Yet here is the first paragraph of her interview to The Epoch Times, a Chinese dissident weekly, published in New York (Nov. 8-14, 2007):

Epoch Times: Mrs. Kadeer, how are your children who are still living in the Xinjiang region?

Rebiya Kadeer: Two sons are imprisoned and are not allowed to contact their wives. So far, there has been no opportunity to visit them. Three others are under house arrest. My relatives and friends are being spied on and fear that they will be in trouble. The passports of my relatives have been confiscated so they can’t leave the country. Someone who supported me was hit by a car. I don’t believe this happened by chance.

The Chinese government tries to bring an end to my activities in the West, and is even writing letters to foreign governments. The Chinese Embassy wrote a letter to all members of the European Parliament not to associate with me because I am a terrorist and separatist. Ignoring their request would “disturb relations.”

Another paragraph is also worth quoting: “For 48 years Uyghurs tried to solve the conflict using peaceful means. We didn’t break the law. In 1954 they took away our rich and intelligent people after accusing them of being separatists, fanatic religious followers, etc. In 1957 they put all our intellectuals in prisons with the excuse that they were against the communist regime.”

As I began reading the interview I assumed that I would find nothing new compared with Soviet Russia, which had a similar problem: The new Soviet course of “Russian nationalism” oppressed all non-Russians living in Russia.

But here is what Kadeer says: “The CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] also covets our women. Females between 14 and 25 are sent to inner China against their will. That is very upsetting for us, as these young people have to work in bars and are put on display in windows. The CCP wants to increase the number of such girls to 1.2 million. Taking our females is gradual genocide.”

Kadeer is brilliant (she was, incidentally, the richest businesswoman in China). But has anyone ever seen her interviewed on American television? No — Americans do not know Hu’s China. But did they know Stalin’s Russia?

Those Westerners who were considered thinkers of genius, but who praised Stalin’s Russia, made up an impressive list of world-famous names. Take, for example, Bernard Shaw, who was on this list.

Long before he died (in 1950, three years before Stalin) he had become the greatest living man of letters in the English-speaking world. But where was his Nobel Prize-winning satirical genius when Stain’s Russia was concerned?

After visiting Stalin’s Russia (in the dreadful 1930s) and meeting Stalin, Shaw was their ardent admirer. In his preface to his play “On the Rocks” (1933), he justifies Stalin’s secret police deportation of millions of people. What about a Soviet famine? Shaw: “Slander!”

Why didn’t he live in the Soviet “paradise on earth”? His answer: He was a devil, fit to live only in a hell called England.

On the other hand, some actors in Stalin’s farce were no less blind. Stalin said that “the best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch” was “Mayakovskiy [Mayak means ‘beacon’ in Russian, ‘ovskiy,’ is a common family-name ending].”

In 1918, the Beacon was 25 years old, and he had been a figure familiar in all European countries: a “Futurist.”

Between 1918 and his suicide in 1930, he found “the Future”: Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia.

His Russian contemporary was Osip Mandelshtam, possibly the world’s greatest poet of the 20th century, who was born in 1891 and perished in Stalin’s concentration camps in 1938. Now, the Beacon was engaged in the replacement of poetry by rhymed slogan propaganda, posters and commercial ads that existed in Soviet Russia before the 1930s. Authors of these ads were well paid.

He called the contemporary Russian poets a “gang of greedy hacks,” and said that when “I come into the future”:

I will raise above the gang of greedy hacks

All of my hundred volumes

As a hundred Communist Party cards

Though Soviet Russia was a paradise on earth, the Beacon was fond of living in the West. He was especially fond of France, and he brought a French automobile to Moscow, which was an unimaginable luxury in Moscow for cars were not sold but “issued” together with apartments and then only to top-level officials of the dictatorship.

He versified Moscow commercial ads because his life in the West cost a lot of money, and in his “poetry” he said to the future generations that he was a sewage-disposal and water-supply worker (allusions to his posters, propounding cleanliness and the boiling of drinking water), “mobilized by the Revolution”:

And hence compelled to leave the gardens

Of Poetry, a capricious mamzel.

So, he was the only true poet in the world because he was a sewage-disposal and water-supply worker in the service of the Revolution.

Understandably, he was the only “Soviet citizen,” allowed by Stalin’s dictatorship to travel wherever he wanted and live wherever he wanted. Of course the “poems” he sent from those countries fit the Soviet propaganda — France was hell on earth compared with Stalin’s Russia. Thus, greedy capitalists were building in Paris an apartment house in great haste, and it collapsed on the builders.

The rhymed picture of blood and grief followed, with this conclusion:

I am a guest, and I don’t meddle in politics.

But I think as I chew on my cigarette:

“Monsieur Paris, on how many bones your luxury rests?”

Here is another sordid scene in Paris:

Having drunk much burgundy,

a restaurant guest

may wish to make a promenade.

The business of the mademoiselle

Is to give him a towel after he has washed his hands —

She is in this business an artist, no less.

What else did the Beacon expect? But he wrote:

I beg your pardon for such sordid scenes,

But the life is hard for a woman in Paris,

If she works, and not sells her body.

What is the restaurant arrangement in the Soviet paradise? Customers take towels on their own, while the mademoiselle sings in “Eugène Onegin” at the Bolshoi Theatre? What about those Soviet women who died of hunger in the countryside or did the hardiest work in cities?

Why did the Beacon commit suicide?

Stalin defined him as the best poet of our Soviet epoch, that is, of the world of all time, for no epoch was better than our Soviet epoch. Shortly before his death, Stalin decided to be known not as “vozhd” (a word that is in Russian more sublime than the German Führer), but as God!

If Stalin was to be God etatistically, the Beacon was God culturally. But Stalin extolled the Beacon after the Beacon’s suicide, so the Beacon had been mortally wounded by all kinds of slights (a smaller type of the announcement of his public appearance, etc.).

The god of culture could not stand such mortal wounds and revenged with his physical death. Yet he was worshiped for 60 years after his physical death, while God Stalin was represented by Khrushchev “as our Hitler, only worse,” in a report, never published, but read to the “meetings of Soviet working people” three years after the death of the god.

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You can e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.