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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

> The son of two mathematics teachers who were sent to teach on farms during China’s Cultural Revolution, Dr. Chen grew up without any hope of becoming a scientist. His parents, the descendants of landowners, had a “bad classification” from the Chinese government, and were viewed suspiciously. His father warned him he would probably spend his life as a farmer. But then Mao Zedong died.

Chen moved to the US to experience the American equivalent of this.

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Indeed. A former colleague married a Chinese lady whose parents had suffered badly through the Cultural Revolution. He told the story, how she went off to the US for her PhD and how her parents drove her to the airport and told her never to return to China.

How things have changed within just a generation!

Can you elaborate how exactly? Was your former colleague sent to kill sparrows in rice fields too?

(It was the colleague's wife's parents.) Obviously I never got the full story, but from what I heard, the parents were academics who had their house vandalized by the Red Guards and were sent to work the countryside.

Did her parents ever leave China?

I don't know.

You're confusing the Cultural Revolution with the Great Leap Forward. If you read a little bit about the Cultural Revolution the connection will be obvious.

Deaths

Hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian, Red Guards and military deaths

Still not obvious.

You posted that response literally three minutes after my comment. That's barely enough time to read the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. I suggest you spend more than three minutes learning about a thing before complaining that things are not obvious to you about it. Three hours would be reasonable. You could spend the first hour or two just reading that article, or start with https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution, which is only about ten or twenty minutes of reading and better written, but of course much less objective. Either of those two starting points will give you plenty of links to explore.

Since it's one of the most important events in human history, one with extremely important parallels to current events in the US and extremely important influences on everyone in China, and you evidently don't know anything about it at all (except that it happened in China, I guess), it will definitely be worthwhile.

I don't see an equivalent turn of events in the US. Could you share what you mean?

No, nothing equivalent to the Cultural Revolution has happened anywhere else ever. Hopefully it never will.

You don't see parallels with the Pol Pot regime?

Yes, history is rich in parallels.

What is your definition of equivalent? Because I see the French Revolution and it’s Central European offshoots, the Russian revolution, the various Latin American and Asian communist revolutions all very equivalent; they all totally upended and and destroyed an existing culture and whole civilizations. If communistic elements and characteristics are involved, such a situation is equivalent to the Chinese communist “cultural” revolution of destruction by definition. You’re miss-classifying the vector as the cause. One may argue scale, but not equivalency.

"Interchangeable", or, at greater length:

      Equivalent \E*quiv"a*lent\ ([-e]*kw[i^]v"[.a]*lent), a. [L.
         aequivalens, -entis, p. pr. of aequivalere to have equal
         power; aequus equal + valere to be strong, be worth: cf. F.
         ['e]quivalent. See {Equal}, and {Valiant}.]
         1. Equal in worth or value, force, power, effect, import, and
            the like; alike in significance and value; of the same
            import or meaning.
            [1913 Webster]

                  For now to serve and to minister, servile and
                  ministerial, are terms equivalent.    --South.
            [1913 Webster]

The Cultural Revolution did not upend and destroy an existing culture and whole civilizations, but neither did the other events you're describing.

A big difference between the Cultural Revolution and things like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution is that the Cultural Revolution entrenched the existing leader of PRC, while the French and Russian Revolutions overthrew the existing leaders, which is generally considered to be one of the most important things about them. The Cultural Revolution was more akin to Stalin's purges of his opposition within the Party, the Night of the Long Knives, the Salem witch trials, the Cambodian Killing Fields (as CamperBob2 pointed out), the Terror, or the Roman Dominate, but it has important differences from each of them. For example, the Night of the Long Knives lasted three days, the Cultural Revolution lasted 10 years, and the Dominate lasted about 300 years.

Objectively speaking (I think both 'sides' are equally confused):

* People losing their careers over reactionary views/speech

* Historical monuments/names being destroyed (mostly relating to CSA/overt racism)

* Record levels of distrust. Anyone could be a Trumpist or "far left radical", so keep your distance.

* Large organizations are installing ideological offices to keep reactionary behavior in check, some going as far as "struggle sessions" (mandatory trainings)

* Political violence (not too severe yet)

It's not quite as extreme as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but the parallels are certainly there and I hope it doesn't intensify.

Also, apropos of this case:

* major paranoia about foreign subversion (with, in both cases, some justification, but self-defeating and grossly disproportionate responses)

* persecution specifically directed at intellectuals

How you can be "objective," live through the past twenty years, and wind up thinking "both sides" are equally problematic/at fault for the current situation? Maybe a little history will help?

America has been prone to succumb to demagoguery for a long time. Here's a novel from 1935 that you should be familiar with:

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Sinclair-Lewis/dp/19...

The reason it's finally happening now is that the 60-year old conservative project to remake America in the image of the John Birch Society and other right-wing nuts has borne incredible fruit. Essentially, they decided the end justifies the means and are now being consumed by the means. Here's a quick sampler of stuff to start reading up on.

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

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

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

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/474662-the-myth-of-t...

You provided a perfect example without realizing it, it just wasn't contained in the links you provided.

But he's correct. That's the part you're missing. If he was wrong, that would be completely different. You're focusing on the appearance of the rhetoric, when you should be attempting to determine the truth of the points presented (i.e. which party is correct).

Sometimes- more often than not, I would even say- there is at least one political faction in a society that is completely batshit crazy.

It's never both/all sides. But it can look that way, because whatever accusations are thrown at one side, even if true, are returned with the exact same rhetoric, even if false.

For example you see this in domestic violence court proceedings. Usually, the abuser will accuse the victim of being the real abuser and accuse them of all sorts of things, some of which might even be true (such as hitting an attacker in self defense). This is surprisingly effective, and often times people will side with the abuser or conclude that both parties are part of the problem. But that doesn't change the fact that there is ONE abuser (usually the party with a power advantage) against whom the accusations are justified, and the other party who is comparatively innocent. Even though they accuse each other of the exact same thing and their behavior looks identical from a distance.

USA was created in the wake of perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) and has been at war for >90% of its history. It has always been deeply racist (whether overt like KKK lynchings or subtle like census reporting and tokenism).

Whatever these rightoids are allegedly plotting, you can't say they are "remaking" America into something radically new.

How does mid-millenium colonization of America prove current-year racism? This is pure CRT-adjacent nonsense. The use of words like "rightoid" does not help your argument.

The Trail of Tears, the US Civil War and the appalling form of slavery that led up to it, the Chinese Exclusion Act, racially-biased "eugenic" involuntary sterilization, Jim Crow, the Japanese internment camps, the Indian Schools, Wounded Knee, cowboys & Indians movies, the Tulsa race massacre, per-country immigration quotas, mass deportation, child internment camps, etc., are not mid-millennium colonization. There's an unbroken chain of racism running through US history since before its foundation, one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years.

Idealizations of US history are common to all US factions, though their content differs.

>one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years.

Wherever you went, odds are it has an equally shitty history, and present.

Yup, but different enough to give me an outside perspective on the culture I'd grown up in. Argentina's present is actually shittier, but not in the same way.

Right. Sorry. I'll be more politically correct next time.

> perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent)

We're measuring by geographical area? If we are, very few people lived (or has ever lived) in most of the continent.

To suggest that the worst of someone is all there is, is just an old means to tear down the best, and to demoralize. I'm sure you can find much more.

Ethnic cleansing apologism on HN? Really?

> By the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million [prior to colonization]—with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indige...

To be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.

Sure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated.

Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.

Yes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee.

Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal.

The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.

There isn't a "someone" to tear down here. Everyone who lived in North America before 01900 is already dead, colonizer and colonized alike. And none of them were angels --- or devils. But this is not about whether they were good or bad; it's about how racist they were, which is important for understanding the degree to which modern US reactionary racism is or is not a novel phenomenon.

There's a lot of debate over the pre-Columbian population of North America, with modern population estimates ranging from under 4 million to over 15 million, all of which are much higher than estimates that used to be popular before 01960 or so, though still much lower than its current population. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

> Not to be confused with Cultural Revolution.

apparently it's a comon problem.

That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary, so you may well heed your own advice and read it for once.

My point was that any parallels between that and events in the USA are nothing but disingenuous exaggeration. Consider just how vague your allusions are: without knowing your political views I would be at loss figuring if you allude to the rise of proto-fascist American right or lament the assault of Left woke culture.

> That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary,

I couldn't find the quoted passage in the Cultural Revolution WP as you mentioned.

It's in the infobox in the right margin of the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. Why they thought it was relevant to the conversation is anybody's guess, but I guess people who don't know anything about a thing are likely to have a lot of random opinions about it.

In my view, though, accusing others of dishonesty and hypocrisy because they disagree with one's random unfounded opinions is unacceptable. Last time I said that I got downvoted to -2 and flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970

You have broken a number of guidelines in your various comments, for example:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." (this comment above)

Be kind. Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30116919

Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

While in some cases you are not correct, in other cases you are, and I appreciate the reminder.

Thank you.

Oh come on, lets not blatantly lie like this. China's "Cultural Revolution" was a mass extermination of the educated people in the country. There's zero comparison between the two.

A 10 year event encompassing a country’s worth of people leads to many secondary and tertiary effects can mean something different for every person.

What's that supposed to mean?

It means that a lot happened in 10 years, so when comparing a single event to the whole thing, obviously it can only match up to part of it, not the whole thing.

That's still silly as that would imply that the US is currently in the middle of a 10 year cultural revolution, yet there's no slew of dead educated people. So again, this is a poor comparison. Do you really think China's cultural revolution put people through a rule of law court system and acquitted people? Or do you think that they just went around murdering people on drumhead trials with no rule of law? (Hint, it's the latter)

What do you mean? I don't understand what the American equivalent of demonization of personal property and a communist uprising is.

Like being accused, exonerated, and then taking a victory lap over all the major publications to the sympathetic audience. Damn you America! Just like China, no?

Also:

"The FBI documents alleged that Chen received $19 million from China's Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).[9] [23] On January 22, 2021, MIT's President released a second statement pointing out that these funds went to not Chen, but to MIT itself to support a departmental research collaboration with SUSTech which Chen simply directed on MIT's behalf.[25] [26]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Chen_(engineer)

SUSTech, lol.

I think the "accused" part is the problem. Interacting with the court system is expensive both financially and emotionally. We need to be very careful where we apply it, and that means being careful about who we accuse and for what reasons.

Expecting zero mistakes is unreasonable. The system worked correctly. The person who was not guilty was found not guilty.

Yeah the system worked correctly. He only lost a year of his life. Whoopsies!

And all his grad students and the chair of a university department, based on accusations that turned out to be entirely false.

Yeah, what a victory lap, getting to rightfully speak out about his mistreatment. Tell me, would you trade a year of your life for the ability to take such a grand "victory lap"?

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