Lüqiu Xiaotong
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His Excellency Lüqiu Xiaotong | |
|---|---|
| 陆秋晓彤 | |
.jpg) Lüqiu Xiaotong in 1970 | |
| 14th President of China | |
| In office 25 January 1982 – 23 February 1987 | |
| Premier | Zhu Min (1982–83) Li Hwei-ru (1983-86) Luísa Wong (1986-88) |
| Vice President | Yang Lei Cao Fen |
| Preceded by | Tatiana Antonova |
| Succeeded by | Cao Fen |
| 27th Premier of China | |
| In office 21 January 1968 – 11 April 1970 | |
| President | Yuni Tian |
| Preceded by | Zhao Lei |
| Succeeded by | Su Wuying |
| Leader of the Patriotic Labour Party | |
| In office 4 March 1965 – 15 December 1970 | |
| Deputy | Sima Jia |
| Preceded by | Position Established |
| Succeeded by | Hu Yaobang |
| Minister of Economic Affairs | |
| In office 9 February 1962 – 27 November 1964 | |
| Premier | Sima Jia |
| Preceded by | Deng Xiaoping |
| Succeeded by | Na Mu |
| Chairman of the Western China Development Authority | |
| In office 10 March 1960 – 9 February 1962 | |
| Premier | Sima Jia |
| Preceded by | Yu Qiuli |
| Succeeded by | Ma Hong |
| Member of the Legislative Yuan | |
| In office 9 February 1962 – 23 February 1987 | |
| Preceded by | Constituency established |
| Succeeded by | Lüqiu Tianqiao |
| Constituency | Yangpu (1968-87) |
| In office 4 February 1956 – 19 March 1960 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 26 March 1924 Shanghai China |
| Died | 23 February 1987 (aged 62) Lagos Nigeria |
| Cause of death | Malaria infection |
| Political party | Patriotic Labour Party (1965-1987) |
| Other political affiliations | Solidarity (1956-1965) Minmeng (Before 1956) |
| Spouse | Xia Jie |
| Children | 13, including Zhenglong and Tianqiao |
| Parents |
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| Education | Zhejiang University (BA) London School of Economics (MA) |
| Profession | Economist |
| Religion | Chinese folk religion Three teachings |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  Republic of China |
| Branch/service | National Revolutionary Army |
| Years of service | 1947-1948 |
| Rank | Sergeant |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
| Awards | Order of Victory |
Lüqiu Xiaotong (26 March 1924 - 23 February 1987) was a Chinese politician, economist, and political philosopher who served as Premier of China from 1968 to 1970 and President of China from 1982 to his death in 1987. Ideologically a Principled Communist and left-wing nationalist, Lüqiu promoted his philosophy of traditional socialism as a democratic socialist alternative to the Marxism-Leninism of the French Commune and the liberal capitalism of the United States. As Premier, Lüqiu significantly expanded state control over the economy and promoted redistribution of wealth, and as President, Lüqiu helped cause the French Commune's dissolution, helped end the Sino-American alliance that existed since World War II, and carried out an explicitly ideological foreign policy, sponsoring democratic socialist, left-wing nationalist movements in much of the Third World and allying with socialist states such as India and the FECR. These policies, amongst others, made Lüqiu Xiaotong one of the most consequential and controversial politicians in Chinese history.
Lüqiu Xiaotong was born in Shanghai in 1924 to a middle-class, liberal family, and attended Zhejiang University from 1942 to 1946, where he became a Marxist. After graduating from Zhejiang, Lüqiu enlisted in the National Revolutionary Army, serving as a Sergeant during the late stages of World War II. After the War ended, Lüqiu temporarily served as a Buddhist monk before studying international relations at the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1952, coming under Harold Laski's influence.
After graduating from the LSE, Lüqiu briefly worked for the Chinese Solidarity and Labour Federation, a large democratic socialist union federation which spearheaded the merger of the Minmeng's socialist faction and the Communist Party of China into the Workers' Party in 1953, swiftly banned under the Political Organizations Act. He subsequently became a professor of development economics at Tsinghua University in 1953, promoting government-directed industrialisation and the ideas of Michal Kalecki, particularly in relation to the importance of agrarian reform and the reserve army of labour.
Lüqiu was then nominated and successfully elected to the Legislative Yuan in 1956 as a member of the far-left Solidarity Party, formed by independent, Workers' Party-aligned activists, and became Chairman of the Western China Development Authority in 1960 and Minister of Economic Affairs in 1962. Then, Lüqiu's 1964 Martyrs' Blood speech, praising the Plural Left Coalition and denouncing the KMT's campaigning tactics, catapulted him to national prominence. Though the Plural Left Coalition lost the 1964 election, the Speech helped elect Lüqiu Leader of the Patriotic Labour Party, a merger of Plural Left Coalition's largest parties, in 1965. As PLP Leader, his major electoral strategy - appealing to rural, historically KMT voters - mirrored his support for a social conservative-socialist alliance, which led him to author From Zongzu to Minsheng: On Tradition and Socialism, beginning the traditional socialist movement.
After the Patriotic Labour Party made gains during the 1968 parliamentary election amidst an economy just exiting recession, Lüqiu Xiaotong became Premier, leading a coalition government between the PLP, the Islamic socialist and regionalist Fidesian Workers' Coalition, and the centrist Progressive Coalition. During Lüqiu's Premiership, the government endeavored to establish a social-democratic welfare state, guaranteeing universal, subsidised childcare through the Families First Program and old-age pensions through the State Pension Fund. Lüqiu's Premiership also saw agrarian reform through the National Agricultural Board and Regional Agricultural Boards, enjoying a monopsony on staple crops and owning agricultural machinery and warehouses. Lüqiu Xiaotong's government also nationalised the Four Northern Banks and Three Southern Banks, and reorganised China's mining and extractive industries into the State Mining and Extraction Corporation. Seeking to render a capital strike ineffective, Lüqiu established the State Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund which, by owning plurality or majority shares in government-linked companies, helps ensure substantial state power over the Chinese economy to this day. However, Lüqiu's election also led to severe capital flight by American investors, and the unpopular establishment of additional Special Economic Zones failed to prevent this. China's export-oriented economy entered into recession in late 1969, causing an attempted coup d'état in early 1970. While this attempt failed, it nevertheless caused most Progressives and many moderate Patriotic Labourites to leave the government, triggering an election in 1970 that the rump Patriotic Labour Party lost in a landslide.
Politically isolated and out of power, Lüqiu emigrated to Communist-ruled India, where he had political connections since the 1960s, serving as a Professor at Delhi University and economic advisor to the Indian government, though he remained a Legislator. However, after the Lei Machine scandal revealed most elections since 1964 were fraudulent, to the Progressive Coalition's benefit, and after the Chinese economy entered into an economic recession in 1980 following several years of prosperity, Lüqiu returned to China, forging strong relations with FECR leaders, engaging in a high-profile campaign against the right and for the PLP, and becoming President after the Patriotic Labour Party and its allies won a landslide victory in 1982.
As President, Lüqiu Xiaotong covertly armed various left-wing national liberation movements in French Africa and French Indochina, seeking to confront the French Commune, greatly expanded Chinese soft power through Project National Glory, especially by establishing the internatoinal Chinese broadcaster InterB, and offered substantial economic aid and infrastructure investment to independent African countries, in exchange for establishing military bases in Africa that were covertly used to fund national liberation movements in French Africa and letting the State Mining and Extraction Corporation acquire a virtual monopoly on mining and extraction in Africa. Lüqiu Xiaotong also strengthened relations with socialist India and the Fedederation of European Council Republics, leading to the formation of the International Solidarity Pact, a defense pact consisting of China, India, the FECR, and those nations' various allies. After Lishan Hubei assassinated Georges Marchais, China's aid to French rebels led to near-nuclear war between China and the French Commune; however, before Lüqiu could respond to this crisis, military forces led by Claire Poincaré and Liang Zemin staged Operation Qingyun, a coup d'état. However, despite this coup leading to a collapse in the Chinese chain of command, the military government successfully pursued Lüqiu's plan to invade and disarm nuclear silos in French Indochina; subsequently, Liang Zemin ceded power to the elected government after it became apparent that resistance to the coup would be much greater than expected. Lüqiu Xiaotong preceded to assemble a multilateral coalition that invaded the French Commune in Operation Just Cause, leading to the French Commune's dissolution and the establishment of the democratic French Republic.
Under Lüqiu's influence, the ex-French African colonies became democratic socialist, Chinese-aligned states with the exception of Senegal, which briefly became a Marxist-Leninist, white-dominated remnant of the French Commune before a Chinese-led invasion made it a democratic socialist states like its neighbors. However, in Just Cause's aftermath, the anti-Chinese American President Donald Rumsfeld dissolved PATO and replaced it with organizations excluding China and the Federation of the European Council Republics collapsed, replaced by democratic socialist states in Central Europe and capitalist states - some democracies and others dictatorships - replaced it, though by the early 1990s the former FECR states all reverted to democratic socialism. Simultaneously, the French Levant descended into civil war as genocide engulfed the ex-FECR Caucasus; accordingly, Lüqiu Xiaotong directed China to military intervene in both areas, and led an invasion of Communist-ruled North Egypt, uniting it with constitutional monarchist South Egypt in order to secure Chinese and ISP control over the Suez Canal. In tandem with this increasingly interventionist and aggressive China, Lüqiu Xiaotong reorganized and greatly expanded the Chinese military, notably increasing the National Revolutionary Navy's budget to twice that of 1982 in pursuit of a blue-water navy and establishing the National Revolutionary Space Force and the National Revolutionary Cyber Force, the first separate military branches devoted to space and cyber warfare in the world. However, Lüqiu Xiaotong's foreign interventions had, at best, mixed effects; though the invasion of North Egypt was quickly successful, the interventions in the Levant and the Caucasus proved bloody, protracted affairs that lasted years. While in Lagos to gain African support for the Chinese invasion of North Egypt, Lüqiu contracted malaria and died shortly thereafter, though conspiracy theories abound alleging foul play.
Over three decades after his death, Lüqiu remains intensely controversial, both domestically and internationally. Supporters praise him as a champion of democratic socialism and anti-imperialism whose domestic policies lifted many Chinese, especially in rural areas, out of poverty and led to the 1970s economic miracle and whose foreign policies led to substantial economic development in Africa along democratic socialist and social-democratic lines, the establishment of democracy in former Marxist-Leninist states, and China rapidly transforming from a middle power into the world's strongest nation; Lüqiu is particularly beloved in Africa, India, and Indochina, and amongst the Chinese left. Conversely, left-wing critics, concentrated on the African and European far-left, and amongst Chinese pacifists, denounce him as a social-imperialist whose policies entrenched, rather than weakened, neocolonialism in the Third World and failed to seriously challenge Chinese capitalism, while right-wing critics, concentrated on the Chinese political right and in Western Europe and the United States, blame Lüqiu for capital flight and economic recession in the late 1960s and for greatly increasing China's national debt in the 1980s. Both leftist and rightist critics castigate Lüqiu for foreign interventions that they perceive as reckless, and allege that his policies helped cause World War III.
Early life
Youth and Family
Lüqiu Xiaotong was born in 1924 to Zhen Qigang, a housewife, and Lüqiu Xuejing, an economics and business professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, the scion of a long line of middle-class academics who had been scholar-officials for centuries before the Xinhai Revolution; Lüqiu Xuejing's father, Lüqiu Zhihao, notably served as a Confucian scholar at the Hanlin Academy and obtained the status of jinshi during the Imperial Examination. Unlike most residents of Shanghai, both in the 1920s and in contemporary, the Lüqiu family's ancestral home was in Shanghai itself; records indicate that a patrilineal ancestor of Luqiu Xiaotong emigrated from northern Jiangsu to Shanghai during the eleventh century, making the Lüqiu family one of the oldest in Shanghai.
Lüqiu's father, Lüqiu Xuejing, was an ardent liberal, Georgist, and proponent of modernization, notably taking part in the Shanghai Uprising during the Xinhai Revolution and, as a doctoral student at Peking University, taking part in the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement. Dring the 1930s, Xuejing became a founding member of the Shanghainese branch of the Minmeng as an outgrowth of his support for political liberalization and democratization. Thanks to this extensive political involvement, the well-connected Xuejing became a member of the Shanghai City Council in the 1940s after the International Settlement's abolition. In 1946, Xuejing's political connections and economic knowledge thanks to his academic work led him to become a Vice President at the newly-formed state-owned China Petroleum Corporation. Though he was a founding Minmeng member, Xuejing initially supported the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen, and always considered himself a supporter of the Three Principles of the People. During the late 1910s, however, Xuejing became increasingly disillusioned at what he perceived to be the Kuomintang and Sun's authoritarian tendencies. His diary indicates a deep admiration for Chen Jiongming and disappointment at Chen's military losses to the Kuomintang in 1922-23, though he still considered the KMT a better alternative than its rivals. His final break with the KMT came during the Shanghai Massacre of 1927; though he was an anti-communist, Xuejing was disgusted with Chiang's ideologically-motivated purges of the CCP thanks to his liberal values. These purges affected an extremely young Lüqiu Xiaotong as well; one of his earliest memories was wandering the streets of Shanghai as a child, and witnessing KMT soldiers summarily execute Communist Party members, a memory which Xiaotong claimed to have recurring nightmares of until his death and which Xiaotong claimed taught him "the horrors of tyranny and the lengths to which the bourgeoisie will go to maintain its power."
Education
As a child, Lüqiu Xiaotong was homeschooled by private tutors, his mother (who shared her husband's liberal values and whom her husband saw as an equal), and extneded family members, mainly his uncles and his grandfather. Thanks to his parents' liberal influences, Lüqiu Xiaotong received a far more Westernized education, mainly according to the principles of John Dewey, than most of his peers; at a young age, Xiaotong extensively read Western philosophy, including classical Greco-Roman philosophy - not only the mainstays of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Boethius, but the more obscure texts of Neoplationists and Epicureans - the works of Rationalist and [[Wikipedia:Empiricism|]] philosophers , and early modern and modern Western political and moral philosophy, including Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Lüqiu Xiaotong also learned to speak English, French, and Russian during this period, and extensively read both classical and modern Western literature, including Joyce, Conrad, von Goethe, Herman Melville, Pushkin, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; from this period Lüqiu Xiaotong also gained a lifelong admiration for Russian literature and culture, calling it as "a synthesis, in the dialectical, Hegelian sense, of the Western and the Eastern intellectual traditions." In his education into this intellectual tradition, his father's influence pervaded; though his father's work meant that he was oftentimes absent from his family's lives, he nevertheless made an effort to be present in his children's lives, and later in life, Xiaotong always said that the happiest time in his life was when his father read Western philosophy and literature to him. Lü
However, the influence of his extended family, especially his conservative grandfather - who by the 1920s devoted his time to helping raise and educate his grandchildren - meant that Lüqiu Xiaotong also received an extensive education of traditional Chinese philosophy and culture, notably reading the Four Classical Novels and the Four Books and Five Classics, alongside more obscure works such as summaries of the teachings of Mozi. Later in life, Lüqiu Xiaotong would speak to the influence of both his father and his grandfather: "As a child, I studied the works of three distinct ideological traditions: the Three Teachings, the Western liberalism of Rousseau and Dewey, and revolutionary socialism as Marx and Engels espoused. But while these influences were supposedly distinct and contradictory, a natural understanding of these texts - devoid from the ways the powerful perverted these texts, as did the Emperors of old, the Western bourgeoisie, and the French and Soviet nomenklatura, respectively - shows that these traditions are not contradictory, but are in fact quite complementary. This was the key insight of Dr. Sun, whose Three Principles of the People take from all these of these ideologies: the principle of national rule and tradition, which in China means the Three Teachings, the principle of democracy as the liberal philosophers promoted, and the principle of people's livelihood which only socialism can assure."
At the age of fourteen, Xiaotong - not yet a socialist - was sent to a formal school for the first time in the form of the Nankai Middle School, a prestigious boarding school in Tianjin organized according to strict, Western lines. At Nankai, Xiaotong excelled academically and was one of the valedictorians for his class. Former students at Nankai recalled Xiaotong as a highly methodical student who could be charming if he wanted to be, but who remained alone but for a few close friends, and who spent most of his time brooding, alone with his thoughts, "preoccupied with either some great or terrible thing."
After graduating from Nankai in 1942, Xiaotong enrolled at Zhejiang University, graduating in 1946. It is at Zhejiang where Xiaotong first became a socialist, notably joining a student branch of the democratic socialist Minmeng faction, through which he met his wife, Xia Jie, a physics student at Zhejiang. Though Xiaotong initially opted not to enlist in the National Revolutionary Army as the Army was engaged in waging World War II, instead choosing to study at Zhejiang in 1942, he felt increasingly guilty at not doing so, and once World War II restarted in early 1947, Xiaotong immediately enlisted.
Military Activities
After enrolling in the National Revolutionary Army, Lüqiu Xiaotong is deployed as a private to the Central Asian Front. After a relatively uneventful few months for Xiaotong, his life permanently changed in June 1947 when his regiment liberated a Nazi concentration camp as part of the early stages of Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan to exterminate the vast majority of Slavs. This experience - which Xiaotong one of the "two or three most important in [his] life" - profoundly affected Xiaotong, as it "shattered" his previous, youthful idealism and sense of optimism. Following this, Xiaotong fell into a deep depression, up to the point of being suicidal, going so far as to state that "I wanted desperately to die and to leave this meaningless, moral-less world, but only as a last protest and defiance in the name of, and done for, meaning and morality."
On August 16th, 1947, Xiaotong thought he had found his chance; amidst a Nazi counteroffensive in Central Asia, one soldier threw a hand grenade at him and his squadron, Xiaotong without hesitation jumped on this grenade, thinking it would mean certain death. Miraculously, however, the grenade did not detonate and Xiaotong survived. Following this experience, Xiaotong's will to live emerged once again, as he believed that divine providence saved him and called on him to serve a higher purpose.
Shortly thereafter, Xiaotong's division, like most others in Central Asia, made a full retreat. Once safely behind Chinese lines, Xiaotong's limited knowledge of German and Russian causes his superior officers to reassign him to a prisoner-of-war camp. Interacting with these prisoners, Xiaotong comes to believe that they are human warriors just like him, and that they are neither inhuman nor responsible for the war in any way, instead holding the German and Japanese ruling classes responsible. In a few short months, however, Xiaotong would soon be discharged from his post as a guard; thanks to a socialist revolution in Germany, the war was over.
Monastic Period
However, peace for China did not bring peace to Xiaotong's mind. Deeply traumatized and affected by his wartime experiences, Xiaotong became a Buddhist monk in a highly remote, rural region of Tibet, deliberately chosen because it was as "far away, both in its physical distance and its level of modernization, from Shanghai as I could get." To assuage his family's concerns, Xiaotong claims he only intends to temporarily serve as a monk, agreeing to apply to the London School of Economics to enroll as a student in the fall of 1949, an application which the LSE accepted. Privately, Xiaotong had no intention of leaving the monastic life, so distraught was he at his wartime experiences. However, in his capacity as a monk, Xiaotong interacted very closely with the laypeople of this desperately poor, rural region, and consequently encountered tremendous, desolate poverty, including individuals suffering severe malnutrition and starvation and dying os easily preventable diseases. While as a monk he did his best to alleviate this poverty and this suffering, there was little he could do, feeling that "I and my fellow monks, alone, were powerless to end the tremendous suffering of this region; that I could only do by reentering the world of Shanghai and politics." In the fall of 1949, Xiaotong enrolled at the London School of Economics as a student of economics and international relations.