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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for pointing out the historical background of the name.

Despite being the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century (through the disastrous Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward), Mao is still a revered figure in China and is considered the father of the nation.

His face is even on the currency like the Queen of England is in Commonwealth countries.

The government of China censors have re-invented his reputation over there. You'll see the propaganda line that "Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong" deeply embedded in the psyche of people.

Rewriting history is the power of China's censorship system and media control. It's a pretty scary thing actually.

>Rewriting history is the power of China's censorship system and media control. It's a pretty scary thing actually.

Circling back to space, this is a fundamental reason why China will struggle to make advances in space once the easy gains have been achieved. Creativity and innovation require a free, liberal and open society to thrive.

These are the priciples which have propelled America's advances in science as they are principles which attract the brightest from around the world.

Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.

> Circling back to space, this is a fundamental reason why China will struggle to make advances in space once the easy gains have been achieved.

Are they struggling? Because it seems to me that they are catching up rather quickly.

> Creativity and innovation require a free, liberal and open society to thrive.

This is propaganda we are told over and over again and yet if we bother to think about it for a moment would realize it's a lie.

Human civilizations ( greeks, indian, egyptian, chinese, etc ) were never "free, liberal and open".

Modern science was built up by european and american societies built upon colonization, slavery and genocide.

The greatest leap in american innovation/science/etc happened while we were not free ( slavery/jim crow), illiberal and closed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

> Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.

What freedom? The best and brightest go where the money and opportunities are. And considering china has over a billion people, they don't have to look elsewhere to attract the best and the brightest since they have so many in house.

I don't see China's space program as developing particularly rapidly.

China did a manned mission to low-earth orbit in 2003. 17 years later China hasn't done much on the manned exploration front. Long March 9 isn't expected to even be ready for a manned Lunar mission until the 2030s.

America launched Alan Shepard in 1961 and 8 years later Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

That said, I think there's no reason why China needs to struggle to make advances in space because copying the innovation of other places works very well.

Priorities are simply different right now. Focus is mostly catching up on space infrastructure, indigenous capabilities for civil / military use i.e. actual purpose of space programs. The gap there use to be much larger. Innovative / exploratory missions for nationalism is a sideshow.

The Chinese don't like Mao because of the Great leap Forward, they like him because he led a peasant revolution and kicked the foreigners out of China, after decades of national humiliation.

We supported Chaing Kai-shek. He lost, retreating to Taiwan.

It seems that many Americans are not aware of the propaganda they are being exposed to. The world is not black and white. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Mao only defeated the war-weary KMT.

It was the KMT who kicked the foreigners (the Japanese) out of China with the help of the allies (Soviets and the US) declaring war on the Japanese mainland.

I did some more reading on this, and found various fuzzy and confounding factors. I have to admit that much of it might boil down to "winners get to write history". For example, whoever won their civil war was going to end up being credited with unifying China.

Lots of interesting stuff I bumped into, though. It did seem that the KMT made some pretty big mistakes, such as disbanding more of their army then they should have after the Japanese were defeated, mismanaging the economy causing hyperinflation, and being very corrupt. Also I had no idea that the KMT backed muslim insurgents on mainland China in the 1950s.

Given all of that Mao's popularity makes enough sense. There's also a lot of curb appeal in a successful peasant/worker revolution.

The Long March was in the 1930s. In itself, it was not particularly horrific -- just a successful retreat of the communists to preserve their forces for future fighting. 25 years later the disasters of Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution hit China.

Is this connection strong enough to make "Long March" a horrible name? Perhaps, but I want to point out that there is a greater depth to this question that might seem at first glance.

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Kennedy and Khruschev were unlucky playing their Cuban missiles game of chicken: they destroyed each other and plunged the world into the dark ages. Which names would be badly tainted with this event? Obviously, Kennedy and Khrushchev, and anyone connected to the Manhattan project would be hated beyond measure by the few survivors. What about Truman? FDR? Or maybe even Lincoln, or Washington, or the American Revolutionary War? What about the scientists who figured out the fundamental laws behind atomic weapons -- Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr? Or even scientists in general?

(I guess it's easier to answer for Russia: presumably the Soviet Union period will take all the hatred. Even then, arguably the mere existence of the USSR was partly due to the ineptness of several generations of Russian tzars, as well as Germany's assistance to communists, so they could share some of the blame?)

It's the equivalent of the Valley Forge Rocket. An arduous trial in the birth of a young nation which incidentally happened to go on and genocide an entire continent of indigenous cultures and people's and forever remove them from the world's collective heritage.

Just let people decide what parts of their own history they want to have pride in, especially if it doesn't affect you. Don't try and control the world and force everyone to think the same as you do.

Wait a minute, now I am kind of fascinated by your thinking. Am I to assume that if an Austrian member of hacker news were in fact proud of the Third Reich that you would refuse to criticize their decision to support calling something the Hitler rocket? In your words, after all, people should decide what parts of their own history they want to have pride in.

> He was the most genocidal man in history

Who did he genocide?

> responsible for something like 75 million deaths.

"Something like"?

> “Long March 8” is literally worse than calling it The Holocaust Rocket.

Not only is it not worse, but it's nowhere near it. A better analogy would be like naming our rockets, the Delaware Crossing or the Trenton Surprise.

> Anyone else have a problem with that?

Nope. Your propaganda would work better if it wasn't so obvious.

It’s almost become an anti signal at this point, whenever someone says Mao was responsible for xx millions of deaths you can safely assume that they are easily fooled. There is no serious historian of Chinese history would actually claim a number like that either. Direct responsibility is probably in the thousands range, he was fighting for decades after all, indirectly through 1 degree of separation probably hundreds of thousands, through 2 degrees of separation probably in the low millions if you include the cultural revolution and the very late stages of the famine when he became fully aware of the devastation. 3+ degrees? Perhaps in the 8 digit range, though at that point attributing malice or intent becomes absurd for anyone who understands how Beijing power politics works.

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