Lin Piao Anachronistic Red Book

The Lin Piao book, The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler, saved from the dustbin of history, is an anachronism. A year after it was published in 1970, Lin Piao was gone. The first half of the book is a gossipy biography with insulting digressions and innuendos. The second half is a selection of Lin Piao's writings. The book itself, bound in clear plastic cover, is massive with classical, uneven, soft pages, a bit moldy but smelling more like the fifty-year-old "U.S. Army" library property hard cover that it is. With The History of the Little Red Book of Mao's Quotations I got a few weeks ago, it's a set. It came so quickly from the owner in France. The Lin Piao book came with a nice note, in French, hoping I enjoy the book.

       I had a series of weird out-of-breath dream lone night triggered by reading in Mao's Little Red Book; A Global History, edited by Alexander C. Cook, how loud speakers played Mao's Quotation in songs in China in the '60's. How firmly the PRC kept out subterfuge from the western powers. But I was disturbed by the thought of hearing loud speaker messages on the streets into homes. The book didn't specify how long the broadcasts were; only that the songs were a few minutes in length and mixed with speeches, local news and weather. Centralized speakers were used instead of shortwave signals to prevent outside subterfuge or clandestine tuning; I guess that was before signals could be jammed. 

     The notion of loud speaker announcements and songs is not strange to China and Taiwan; we still hear temple event announcements, political campaigns, and advertisements blaring from speakers in the street mounted to slow-passing vehicles.

       Lin Piao's Red Book was made into music, not unlike pop music of the west, and spread under everyone's skin. Today the west uses the internet of smartphones with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, ubiquitous outside China. China doesn't let it in.

     Today, China has its own controlled social media and, we learned,  used as surveillance. We now know Western media, thanks to revelations by Snowden, Manning, and Assage's WikiLeaks, is worse because of it's clandestine nature. China's is up front about theirs. Western propaganda derides China for not letting western propaganda in but doesn't mention not letting Chinese news into the U.S. without twisting it.

    I fell asleep uneasy about mandatory political socialization, but Mao's Quotations disseminated, was necessary to spread revolution against capitalist imperialism. The quotations ring true today to revolutionaries everywhere, inciting us as they do, I can see why they aren't promoted in China today; their people have passed through that phase and there are more subliminal ways, pioneered by the CIA and Western media, that China uses, too, for a better purpose than corporate and religious domination. 
     I ordered a 6"x 4" bilingual facsimile of Mao's Quotations so I don't have to use a magnifying lens to read the tiny edition I got at Alishan a few years ago. They sell it as a souvenir now but I have always taken it seriously. It has the main reasons why a revolutionary should fight opposing imperialist capitalism. Everyone should refer to it, but not necessarily memorize it. I like using it with DeFrancis Annotated Quotations to study Mandarin. I have given up hope of influencing anarchist Facebook pages, or friends, that criticize me for accepting state communism, yet I remain a Wobbly in my heart; anarchism in the workplace, socialist states.