Women In Uniform

Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day.  Here’s how the Travel China Guide describes it.

Falling on March 8th, Women’s Day is a festival for women worldwide. It is celebrated since 1975 for the purpose of remembering the women’s struggle for getting the reasonable right and peace.

In China, Chinese government designated it as a national holiday for women who are rewarded with a half day holiday on Mar. 8th. Children respect their mother by doing housework and husbands prepare dinner and presents for their wives. In some places, organizations and schools hold mountain-climbing competitions to add a festive atmosphere or communication meetings to talk about their life and work. Flowers are presented to women by students, children, or husbands.

It’s celebrated in Europe, too.  It’s basically a big socialist production extolling the virtue of womanhood, because a woman can work a lathe in a factory just as well as a man can.  Imagine propaganda artwork of women in overalls holding a wrench, smiling with glee at being able to do their part to serve the collective, that’s the general idea. 

Look online and you’ll find all sorts of whining maggots pissing and moaning that it isn’t celebrated here.

Interestingly, on that page of holidays quoted above I found this gem.

11. Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party
In May, 1938, Chairman Mao suggested that July 1st be the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to mark the first central committee of the Communist Party of China held in July 1921. From then on, Chinese people celebrate the birth of the Chinese Communist Party every year to remind them that without the Communist Party, there would be no precious happy life today.

Now, this is not as illegitimate a thing to say as you might believe.  It’s undeniable that the Communist Party took a disparate nation of various languages and cultures and uniformed them into the China we see today.  (Look at Iraq—life under Saddam was a hell of a lot more peaceful for the average Iraqi than it has been under the total clusterfuck we’ve unleashed.) Think of it as sort of a Communist 4th of July.  We’d have no problem saying that the founding of America, or the implementation of the US Constitution, has provided the American people with a “precious, happy life.” To the Chinese, I think most people would view the CCP in this manner.  With their market-oriented reforms, life for the average Chinese is exponentially better than it was just a generation ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an apologist for the CCP or communism or anything of that sort.  But, and this gets back to something I’ve written here before, our current misadventures in Iraq and my own personal adventure here in China have convinced me that there is no such thing as a universal definition of freedom that applies equally to all people.  It’s all relative to how bad things were in the past.  And for China, things have been quite good lately. 

Especially since the end of the Mao era.

Heinlein used to always say the communists were digging their own graves by uniting their people and educating them. It wouldn’t take long before they threw off the mantle.

Heinlein used to always say the communists were digging their own graves by uniting their people and educating them. It wouldn’t take long before they threw off the mantle.

I have no doubt that, one day, there will be massive reforms in China.  But China is a 5,000 year old country.  They think long term.  They plan things 100, 200 years from now, because in their mode of thinking that’s reasonable to do.  We in America, having only been a country for under 250 years, think in terms or years, decades at best. 

So will reforms in China happen any time soon?  Not a chance.  But it will happen, it just might take a couple hundred years to do so.  Heinlein was absolutely right, it’s inevitable.  Whether it happens in any timeframe we in the west would consider “reasonable” is another issue entirely.

As long as we’re on the topic of the Communist Party, a curiosity of mine: would you happen to know how difficult it is to join the CCP today? Back when Mao was still around it was very Stalinist in nature, with extreme difficulty, screening and background investigation, and an extraordinarily limited selection pool - plus, if anything got unearthed that was reactionary or interpreted as such, you had a good chance of disappearing. That said, giving that China’s government today is looking more like a proper political party, albeit a singular one, I imagine it wouldn’t be as much of a pain in the ass. Not that it would carry the same perilous clout, either, though…

Yeah, I don’t think it’s as difficult to join as in the past.  It’s weird, about half the resumes we receive have, featured somewhere prominently on the page, “party member.” We always get a laugh about that.  It might mean something with Chinese companies, but it’s as stupid to us as writing “Registered Democrat” at the top of your resume.  And in many ways it makes you look like a complete tool.

You’re right about it being a proper political party.  This is not the Stalinist dictatorship that it was under Mao.  (That odious distinction remains the purview of North Korea.) The modern CCP, while still not really tolerating dissent or any direct threats to its rule, is certainly many orders of magnitude more tolerant than it was in decades past.