‘Who Are Our Enemies?’ China’s Bitter Youths Embrace Mao.
By Li Yuan, 7/8/21, New York Times

They read him in libraries and on subways. They organized
online book clubs devoted to his works. They uploaded hours
of audio & video, spreading the gospel of his revolutionary
thinking.

Chairman Mao is making a comeback among China’s Gen Z. The
Communist Party’s supreme leader, whose decades of nonstop
political campaigns cost millions of lives, is inspiring &
comforting disaffected people born long after his death in
1976. To them, Mao Zedong is a hero who speaks to their
despair as struggling nobodies.

In a modern China grappling with widening social inequality,
Mao’s words provide justification for the anger many young
people feel toward a business class they see as exploitative.
They want to follow in his footsteps & change Chinese society
— and some have even talked about violence against the
capitalist class if necessary.

The Mao fad lays bare the paradoxical reality facing the
party, which celebrated the centenary of its founding last
week. Under Xi Jinping, the party has made itself central
to nearly every aspect of Chinese life. It claims credit for
the economic progress the country has made & tells the
Chinese people to be grateful.

At the same time, economic growth is weakening & opportunities
for young people are dwindling. The party has nobody else to
blame for a growing wealth gap, unaffordable housing & a lack
of labor protections. It must find a way to placate or tame
this new generation of Maoists that it helped create, or it
could face challenges in governing.

“The new generation is lost in this divided society, so they
will look for keys to the problems,” a Maoist blogger wrote
on the WeChat social media platform. “In the end, they’ll
definitely find Chairman Mao.”

In interviews & online posts, many young people said they
could relate to Mao’s analysis of Chinese society as a
constant class struggle between the oppressed & their oppressors.

“Like many young people, I’m optimistic about the country’s
future but pessimistic about my own,” said Du Yu, a 23-yr-old
who is suffering from burnout from his last job as an editor
at a blockchain start-up in the tech-obsessed Chinese city
of Shenzhen. Mao’s writing, he said, “offers spiritual relief
to small town youth like me.”

Chinese tech workers are often expected to work 9 am to 9 pm
six days a week, a practice so common that they call it
“996.” Du’s schedule was worse. After he slept only 5 hours
over 3 days late last year, his heart raced, he was short
of breath & he grew sluggish. He quit shortly after. He
hasn’t looked for a job in 3 months & seldom ventures
outside. A doctor diagnosed mild depression.

“Most of my peers I know still want to succeed,” Du said.
“We’re simply against exploitation & meaningless striving.”

While Mao never went away, he was once out of fashion. In
the 80s, as freedom & free markets became buzz words, young
people turned to books by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul
Sartre & Milton Friedman. Studying Mao was required in
school, but many students blew off those lessons. After the
1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, martial arts novels & books
by successful entrepreneurs dominated best-seller lists.

But China has become fertile ground for a Mao renaissance.

Nominally a socialist country, China is one of the world’s
most unequal. Some 600 million Chinese, or 43% of the
population, earn a monthly income of only about $150. Many
young people believe they can’t break into the middle class
or outearn their parents. The lack of upward social mobility
has made them question the purity of the party, which they
believe is too tolerant of the capitalist class.

The party’s growing presence in everyday life has also
opened doors for Maoism. Intensifying indoctrination under
Xi has turned the youth both more nationalistic and more
immersed in Communist ideology.

“Dying for the country? Yes,” goes one online slogan.
“Dying for the capitalists? Never!”

New catchphrases among the young reveal this Mao-friendly
mind-set. With wages stagnant, young people talk about a
“consumption downgrade.” Their employers work them so hard
that they call themselves “wage slaves,” “corporate cattle”
& “overtime dogs.” A growing number are saying they would
rather become slackers, using the Chinese phrase “tang ping,”
or “lie flat.”

Those attitudes have helped make the 5 volumes of “The
Selected Works of Mao Zedong” popular again. Photos of
fashionably dressed young people reading the books on
subways, at the airports and in cafes are circulating
online. Students at the Tsinghua U. library in Beijing
borrowed the book more than any others in both 2019 & 2020,
acc. to the library’s official WeChat account.

“I’ll definitely reread the ‘Selected Works’ again & again
in the future,” a young blogger named Mukangcheng wrote on
Douban, a Chinese social media service focused on books,
film & other media. “It has the power to make a person
searching in darkness see the light. It makes my weak soul
strong & broadens my narrow worldview.”

Mukangcheng, who declined to give me his real name, uses an
email account named “Left Left.” His portrait is a red Mao
badge. His posts concern high pork prices and lack of money
for his phone bills. In 2018, when he visited the site of
the Communist Party’s first national congress in Shanghai,
he wrote on the visitors’ book, quoting Mao, “Never forget
class struggle!”

Others commenting online about “Selected Works” said they
saw themselves in the young Mao, an educated village youth
from a backwater province trying to make it in the early
1900s in the big city then known as Peking. They usually
call Mao “teacher,” a term he preferred to call himself.

Many social media users like to quote the first sentence
of the first volume. “Who are our enemies? Who are our
friends?” Mao wrote in 1925. “This is a question of the
first importance for the revolution.”

Many say their biggest enemies are the capitalists who
exploit them. The biggest target of their ire is Jack Ma,
the co-founder of the Alibaba e-commerce empire. He was
once cheered as the embodiment of the Chinese dream. Now
they jeer at his comments supporting the 996 work culture
& saying business itself is the biggest philanthropy.

“Workers are only moneymaking tools for people like him,”
said Xu Yang, 19, who went as far as to say people like Ma
“need to be eliminated physically and spiritually.” Ma later
walked back his remarks, saying he wanted only to pay tribute
to workers who put in long hours out of love for their jobs.

Similar online calls for violence against capitalists —
such as the French Revolution’s cry to hang the aristocrats
from lampposts, “à la lanterne!” — go uncensored on China’s
internet.

Xu, a high school grad in southern Zhejiang Province who
wants to major in fashion design in college, said he read
Mao because he wanted to change China for the better. The
portrait on his Douban account is an old poster of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao with the slogan, “Long live
Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought!” “A revolutionary
proletarian soldier,” his bio reads.

The Maoist youths’ anti-establishment sentiment doesn’t
stop at the capitalist class. The radical ones are also
questioning why the party allowed deepening social inequality.

“Didn’t the proletariat win the revolution?” Xu asked.
“But why are the masters of the country now at the bottom
while the targets of the proletarian dictatorship are on
top? What has gone wrong?”

After a classmate introduced Mao’s books to him last year,
Xu sought out dark facts about China by using software to
visit censored websites. He learned how the Chinese govt
had crushed the efforts of young Marxist activists to help
workers organize labor unions and arrested a meal-delivery
worker who organized his peers to seek better labor rights
protection.

“The bureaucracy & the capital are highly integrated,” he
said. “Our rebellion is unlikely to stop at the capitalists.”

The govt is wary of the intensifying sentiment & has begun
censoring some Maoist posts & discussions. A widely circu-
lated & since-deleted article analyzed why Mao’s revolution
was unlikely to succeed in China today. The reasons: govt
surveillance and background screening.

“People like Mao could write in newspapers 100 years ago,”
Xu said. “Now if we make any loud noises, we could
disappear instantly.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/china-mao.html

On Friday, July 9, 2021 at 12:02:22 AM UTC-7, David P. wrote:
> ‘Who Are Our Enemies?’ China’s Bitter Youths Embrace Mao.
> By Li Yuan, 7/8/21, New York Times
>
> They read him in libraries and on subways. They organized
> online book clubs devoted to his works. They uploaded hours
> of audio & video, spreading the gospel of his revolutionary
> thinking.
>
> Chairman Mao is making a comeback among China’s Gen Z. The
> Communist Party’s supreme leader, whose decades of nonstop
> political campaigns cost millions of lives, is inspiring &
> comforting disaffected people born long after his death in
> 1976. To them, Mao Zedong is a hero who speaks to their
> despair as struggling nobodies.
>
> In a modern China grappling with widening social inequality,
> Mao’s words provide justification for the anger many young
> people feel toward a business class they see as exploitative.
> They want to follow in his footsteps & change Chinese society
> — and some have even talked about violence against the
> capitalist class if necessary.
>
> The Mao fad lays bare the paradoxical reality facing the
> party, which celebrated the centenary of its founding last
> week. Under Xi Jinping, the party has made itself central
> to nearly every aspect of Chinese life. It claims credit for
> the economic progress the country has made & tells the
> Chinese people to be grateful.
>
> At the same time, economic growth is weakening & opportunities
> for young people are dwindling. The party has nobody else to
> blame for a growing wealth gap, unaffordable housing & a lack
> of labor protections. It must find a way to placate or tame
> this new generation of Maoists that it helped create, or it
> could face challenges in governing.
>
> “The new generation is lost in this divided society, so they
> will look for keys to the problems,” a Maoist blogger wrote
> on the WeChat social media platform. “In the end, they’ll
> definitely find Chairman Mao.”
>
> In interviews & online posts, many young people said they
> could relate to Mao’s analysis of Chinese society as a
> constant class struggle between the oppressed & their oppressors.
>
> “Like many young people, I’m optimistic about the country’s
> future but pessimistic about my own,” said Du Yu, a 23-yr-old
> who is suffering from burnout from his last job as an editor
> at a blockchain start-up in the tech-obsessed Chinese city
> of Shenzhen. Mao’s writing, he said, “offers spiritual relief
> to small town youth like me.”
>
> Chinese tech workers are often expected to work 9 am to 9 pm
> six days a week, a practice so common that they call it
> “996.” Du’s schedule was worse. After he slept only 5 hours
> over 3 days late last year, his heart raced, he was short
> of breath & he grew sluggish. He quit shortly after. He
> hasn’t looked for a job in 3 months & seldom ventures
> outside. A doctor diagnosed mild depression.
>
> “Most of my peers I know still want to succeed,” Du said.
> “We’re simply against exploitation & meaningless striving..”
>
> While Mao never went away, he was once out of fashion. In
> the 80s, as freedom & free markets became buzz words, young
> people turned to books by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul
> Sartre & Milton Friedman. Studying Mao was required in
> school, but many students blew off those lessons. After the
> 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, martial arts novels & books
> by successful entrepreneurs dominated best-seller lists.
>
> But China has become fertile ground for a Mao renaissance.
>
> Nominally a socialist country, China is one of the world’s
> most unequal. Some 600 million Chinese, or 43% of the
> population, earn a monthly income of only about $150. Many
> young people believe they can’t break into the middle class
> or outearn their parents. The lack of upward social mobility
> has made them question the purity of the party, which they
> believe is too tolerant of the capitalist class.
>
> The party’s growing presence in everyday life has also
> opened doors for Maoism. Intensifying indoctrination under
> Xi has turned the youth both more nationalistic and more
> immersed in Communist ideology.
>
> “Dying for the country? Yes,” goes one online slogan.
> “Dying for the capitalists? Never!”
>
> New catchphrases among the young reveal this Mao-friendly
> mind-set. With wages stagnant, young people talk about a
> “consumption downgrade.” Their employers work them so hard
> that they call themselves “wage slaves,” “corporate cattle”
> & “overtime dogs.” A growing number are saying they would
> rather become slackers, using the Chinese phrase “tang ping,”
> or “lie flat.”
>
> Those attitudes have helped make the 5 volumes of “The
> Selected Works of Mao Zedong” popular again. Photos of
> fashionably dressed young people reading the books on
> subways, at the airports and in cafes are circulating
> online. Students at the Tsinghua U. library in Beijing
> borrowed the book more than any others in both 2019 & 2020,
> acc. to the library’s official WeChat account.
>
> “I’ll definitely reread the ‘Selected Works’ again & again
> in the future,” a young blogger named Mukangcheng wrote on
> Douban, a Chinese social media service focused on books,
> film & other media. “It has the power to make a person
> searching in darkness see the light. It makes my weak soul
> strong & broadens my narrow worldview.”
>
> Mukangcheng, who declined to give me his real name, uses an
> email account named “Left Left.” His portrait is a red Mao
> badge. His posts concern high pork prices and lack of money
> for his phone bills. In 2018, when he visited the site of
> the Communist Party’s first national congress in Shanghai,
> he wrote on the visitors’ book, quoting Mao, “Never forget
> class struggle!”
>
> Others commenting online about “Selected Works” said they
> saw themselves in the young Mao, an educated village youth
> from a backwater province trying to make it in the early
> 1900s in the big city then known as Peking. They usually
> call Mao “teacher,” a term he preferred to call himself.
>
> Many social media users like to quote the first sentence
> of the first volume. “Who are our enemies? Who are our
> friends?” Mao wrote in 1925. “This is a question of the
> first importance for the revolution.”
>
> Many say their biggest enemies are the capitalists who
> exploit them. The biggest target of their ire is Jack Ma,
> the co-founder of the Alibaba e-commerce empire. He was
> once cheered as the embodiment of the Chinese dream. Now
> they jeer at his comments supporting the 996 work culture
> & saying business itself is the biggest philanthropy.
>
> “Workers are only moneymaking tools for people like him,”
> said Xu Yang, 19, who went as far as to say people like Ma
> “need to be eliminated physically and spiritually.” Ma later
> walked back his remarks, saying he wanted only to pay tribute
> to workers who put in long hours out of love for their jobs.
>
> Similar online calls for violence against capitalists —
> such as the French Revolution’s cry to hang the aristocrats
> from lampposts, “à la lanterne!” — go uncensored on China’s
> internet.
>
> Xu, a high school grad in southern Zhejiang Province who
> wants to major in fashion design in college, said he read
> Mao because he wanted to change China for the better. The
> portrait on his Douban account is an old poster of Marx,
> Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao with the slogan, “Long live
> Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought!” “A revolutionary
> proletarian soldier,” his bio reads.
>
> The Maoist youths’ anti-establishment sentiment doesn’t
> stop at the capitalist class. The radical ones are also
> questioning why the party allowed deepening social inequality.
>
> “Didn’t the proletariat win the revolution?” Xu asked.
> “But why are the masters of the country now at the bottom
> while the targets of the proletarian dictatorship are on
> top? What has gone wrong?”
>
> After a classmate introduced Mao’s books to him last year,
> Xu sought out dark facts about China by using software to
> visit censored websites. He learned how the Chinese govt
> had crushed the efforts of young Marxist activists to help
> workers organize labor unions and arrested a meal-delivery
> worker who organized his peers to seek better labor rights
> protection.
>
> “The bureaucracy & the capital are highly integrated,” he
> said. “Our rebellion is unlikely to stop at the capitalists.”
>
> The govt is wary of the intensifying sentiment & has begun
> censoring some Maoist posts & discussions. A widely circu-
> lated & since-deleted article analyzed why Mao’s revolution
> was unlikely to succeed in China today. The reasons: govt
> surveillance and background screening.
>
> “People like Mao could write in newspapers 100 years ago,”
> Xu said. “Now if we make any loud noises, we could
> disappear instantly.”
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/china-mao.html