Reflection: Session 10 – Prof Dubey (May 2)
Today’s session started with a discussion on Chen, the blind dissident leader who sought ‘asylum’ in the U.S. embassy – Chen Guangcheng – Read the story about this in today’s L.A. Times (2 May 2012). Prof Dubey enriched the dialogue with detailed background development leading to this climax.
Later, we focused on the ‘topic’ of week: ‘Land Reforms”. When the Communist Party govt. came into power, in 1949, two main tings were enacted: 1. Marriage ‘registration’, and 2. Land ‘ownership’. The purpose of land reforms was three-fold:
1. The State wanted to show who was in charge
2. The country was agrarian, based on agriculture
3. Establish solidarity’ with the poor
However, Land reforms did not achieve the expected results, like increased production. So, during 1952-53, Mao came up with idea of developing ‘Communes’ – cooperatives, from small individual land owners to large communes of each one about 20,000. Names of these included the latest space age name like ‘Sputnik’.
At the same time, one of the good things of this movement was building canals.
DO YOU KNOW THAT:
* ‘Flowers of War’ – most expensive Chinese movie ever made ($ 100 million). Out of which $20 million paid Christian Bale.
* “Every stomach comes with two hands which can be used to produce to feed the hungry”, was Mao’s famous line in response to data presented by Ma, president of Beijing University that we have too many people in China, something has to be done about it. This indicates, the decisions were based on politics and not on facts.
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