Roland Boer's Blog, page 26

Concerning the Taiwan Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China

We need to get used to a simple fact: Taiwan is part of China. It is not a separate state and virtually no country or international body in the world recognizes it as such. Everyone you ask on the mainland simply assumes that Taiwan is part of China. We should do likewise.

The Chinese government has been exceedingly patient on this one, allowing for a long time a type of double-speak. On the one hand, people speak of ‘Taiwan’ as though it were a state, and yet governments around the world, as...

Sanctions – what Sanctions?

‘No, impossible!’ She said with the sweetest voice.

I had pointed my camera at a shop shelf full of products and looked over at the attendant hopefully. It was not to be, so I put the camera away.

Why could I not take a photograph in a shop in Pyongyang? I wondered as I bought some water and walked away. You can take pictures of almost anything, except military personnel. So why not the shop?

Like other shops I visited, it was indeed full. It had products made in the DPRK, from China, Vietnam...

Xinjiang’s soft landing to peace, stability deserves respect

Following on from my earlier piece on the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, the Chinese papers are producing a series of articles on Xinjiang, including:

‘Governance in Xinjiang stands on righteous side’ (here)

‘Interfaith harmony is mainstream in Xinjiang’ (here)

And this article as well, from the Global Times:

Xinjiang’s situation has been improving in recent years. Its flourishing tourism shows Chinese societal confidence in Xinjiang security is recovering rapidly. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autono...

An Effort to Understand the DPRK (North Korea) in Light of the Marxist Tradition

This year (2018) the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – or DPRK – celebrated 70 years. This is no mean feat, given the challenges it has faced. These include Japanese imperialism, United States imperialism, and what they call the ‘arduous march’ of the 1990s, when the web of connections with the Communist Bloc of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed. Through all this they have persevered through what they see as a struggle, for they define the transition period of socialism as a...

Reading Deng Xiaoping: On the Origins of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Deng Xiaoping’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics [zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi]’ is often mentioned in relation to his speech at the twelfth congress of the CPC in 1982. This was indeed a major statement and was elaborated on many occasions afterwards.

However, the idea was neither a new development, nor a departure from Mao Zedong. As part of my Chinese language study, I have been reading the key statements by Deng and came across a speech from 1956, called ‘Integrate Marxism-Leninism wi...

China and the Vatican sign provisional agreement on appointment of bishops

This happened faster than one might have expected, even with the 300 year history of the ‘Chinese Rites controversy’. They key, however, was not so much whether traditional Chinese rites were compatible with Roman Catholicism, but who would appoint the bishops. Would it be the Vatican or the state, an old controversy indeed even in Europe? Thus far, no agreement had been reached, so two branches of the Roman Catholic Church have been operating in China, one recognised by the state and the oth...

How to Deal with an Old Revolutionary: The Struggle over Engels’s 1895 Introduction to Marx’s ‘The Class Struggles in France’

A few months before Engels died a crucial struggle emerged in the communist movement. It had to do with Engels’s introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (Engels 1895 [1990], 1895 [2010]). Marx’s original text had been published as a series of articles in Neue Rheinische Zeitung over 1849-1850. In 1895 it was decided by the editorial board of the German Social-Democratic Party to gather the articles and publish them as a distinct book, so they approached Engels for a...

‘Like the sun shining over the world’: The Dalai Lama’s poem praising Mao Zedong

This poem was written by the Dalai Lama in 1954. But since the text is somewhat difficicult to find (for obvious reasons), I provide a translation here. It comes from an interview by Anna Louise Strong.

Preamble:

The great national leader of the Central People’s Government, Chairman Mao, is the cakravarti born out of boundless fine merits. For a long time I wished to write a hymn praying for his long life and the success of his work. It happened that the Klatsuang-kergun Lama of Kantsu monast...

Mao’s Liberation of Tibet

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It is useful to keep the whole picture in mind, rather than blindly follow what the ‘vegetarian between meals’ would lead us to believe (see further Sautman). To begin with, there is the simple historical question. Although accounts differ in relation to Tibet, the reality is that this region has been subject to Chinese rule in various ways since at least the eighteenth century under the Qing dynasty (with Chinese claims to de jure rule since the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century). Clai...

What about the Uyghurs?

I begin with a caveat: for more than six months I have not read corporate (sometimes called ‘western’) news sources. Instead, I read more reliable and in-depth sources, for reasons I have explained elsewhere. I find corporate news sources given to selective sensationalism, in which they select a few items, give them a twist and distort them, so as to produce a sensationalist account that does violence with the facts, fits into a certain narrative and attracts a certain readership (some ‘weste...