1984 China Totalitarianism

Retrospection of Totalitarianism in China and 1984 The Cultural Revolution, during which Chairman Mao marshaled the youth of China in a campaign against capitalism and any party deviationist, was ten years of political upheaval that brought nothing but disorder, calamity, and terror, crippling the economy and eradicating lives or careers of those who showed any evidence of western influences (Kaiser). During that era, Mao Zedong exerted his absolute power over all forms of public expression through his little red book, propaganda posters, the monopoly on the national economy, and mobilization of his citizens against designated enemies. The Little Red book, a collection of statements and writings by Chairman Mao that entailed a guideline for

As a result, the mayhem was in full swing when Red Guards – formed by the Chinese students, workers, and soldiers – roamed around the city to destroy any symbols of “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary thoughts and the four olds: “old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture” (Phillips). Such occurrence was tantamount to the classical totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell’s 1984: a society comprised of junior spies, physical jerks, the two-minutes hate towards Emmanuel Goldstein, propaganda posters with the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”, and the prevalent blue uniform of the party (Orwell, 3-4). Similar to the students associated with Red Guards, the children in Oceania had been conditioned to obey the discipline of the party and adore Big Brother, thereby engaging themselves in the community as junior spies to report any person suspicious of committing thought crime to the police,

Sixty-seven years after Mao’s supremacy over the nation, China today is still in a midst of a totalitarian state where the Communist Party rules the country. However, it is not a live replay of the Cultural Revolution. The tactics to fortify the central government’s grip on power and the scale of suffering are of a different order. Hu Jintao, a populist politician and the director of the country’s Central Party School where most of the China’s outstanding national leaders were trained, took over China from 2002 to 2012 and was known as the “champion of the country’s poor” as he devoted much of his time and energy to the lower class than to the middle class (“Hu Jintao Biography”). After being recognized by the senior members of the China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, Hu was groomed for membership in the party. In order to familiarize himself with the people in the new province to which he was assigned, Hu Jintao visited homes of local residents and heard their most pressing problems of their day-to-day life, worming himself into the citizen’s hearts and leaving an image of a great leader in the populace. Throughout his presidency, Hu Jintao’s loyalty was frequently tested by tasks such as briefing party workers on the implications of the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and countering attacks on Jiang’s proposal to open the party to capitalists. Soon, as Hu followed