Jung Chang: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, because I read that book, actually, in preparation for this interview, to see if there were criticisms that I should be aware of. Honestly, while there were certain quibbles about the part before Mao got into power about the Long March and such, which I don't know enough about to comment, when they start talking about the important things, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, they are not at all contesting the facts. It's the most sort of excusatory language. It is the same sort of stuff, by the way, that is said about Cuba and Stalinist Russia, like "the literacy went up," and what about North Korea? North Korea today has high literacy. Are you going to say that North Korea is okay? Actually, can you talk about this? What do you think explains some parts of the left who want to find excuses for these regimes? Whether it's Venezuela or whether it's Edward Snow writing his book about Mao, there's a need to excuse these communist regimes and socialist regimes. What explains this? From what I know, I think there were people who had illusions about these regimes, and a lot of academics who were kind of controlling the faculties to do with Mao and universities probably had got their sort of illusions because they had access to Edgar Snow's book. They were radicals in the 1960s. They want to hang on to their own now. Sorry, let me just... not get into the subject. Sorry, I'm faltering on this because I don't know. I don't know why, but I don't know why, I don't know why they are like that. They don't know the facts. They don't care to know the facts. And also, I think probably some people think China has always been awful under the emperors and so on, and so somehow the Orientals must feel differently today. I know when Deng Xiaoping visited America in 1979 and established diplomatic relations with America with Carter, he was at the banquet with some deluded film star or something, and then people were saying to him that when they visited China, they'd seen professors who'd been subject to forced labor. But they were told that they enjoyed it because all these hardships and being in the labor camp had turned them into the new men. And Deng Xiaoping just said they were... I mean, they were mean to the Westerners who didn't know the truth, just took their word for it. They didn't know people couldn't tell them the real truth. Even in the case of Stalin in Russia, there was a famous New York Times reporter who was doing the Russian coverage for The New York Times, and reports would come in about the Ukrainian famine or these other atrocities, and he would write, knowing that no, this is not happening. I think there's a famous headline that says "Russians are hungry but not starving." So actually, let's talk about Deng Xiaoping. And I want to ask about, so, during the Cultural Revolution, he is exiled and purged. And his son because he is known as, I don't know what exactly, the black...…

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