“It was very easy to kill somebody. If you said anything reactionary they would kill you and if you didn’t follow their leadership they killed you,” he said.
But to him, the party’s achievements are almost innumerable: advanced military technology, women’s rights, education. Unable to recognize a single character, he is proud that his grand and great grandchildren can read, “so their minds are more open than mine.”
Above all, there is food now, and plenty of it. He wolfed down his dinner of noodles with relish.
“Life is so good now, couldn’t be better,” he said. “When I was little, people ate the husks [of rice] and wild greens.”
There was mass starvation in the 1940s as corrupt KMT officials siphoned off foreign aid. But tens of millions would starve in the new China, too. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, intended to send industrial and farming output soaring, led to the Great Famine.
On one estimate, 36 million were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and hundreds of thousands killed. They included people who had devoted their lives to the party.
“How many hard-working farmers died of starvation during the last 60 years? How many mistakes were made? How many good and honest people have died?” Bao Tong (鮑彤), once a senior official and now a dissident, wrote last week.
“The long-term, nationally pervasive mistakes of the last 60 years were all led by and planned by the Communist Party,” said Bao, the most senior figure jailed over the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Though the party has admitted errors — Mao Zedong’s policies were only “70 percent correct” — no one expects the reassessment Bao demands, least of all in this anniversary year.
The founding of the new China is celebrated and so too are the achievements of the last 30 years, since Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) launched “reform and opening,” transforming the country’s economy.
But between them lies a large black hole, which will not be filled by the history promoted along the red tourism trail.
“There’s no political pay off behind reinvestigation,” Moses said. “This is not a party seeking catharsis. They want congratulation.”
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