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What ever happened to Red China?
I mean, where did it go? Somewhere around the time the Berlin Wall was coming down and the Soviet empire was breaking up, a billion people traded their Mao suits for Brooks Brothers’ and one more Red Menace did a quick fade to pink and sort of slipped away.
Next thing we knew, the Bamboo Curtain was hanging right there in the Wal-Mart down the street. It seems Joe McCarthy was right after all, there are Reds under every bed — of course, now they’re the shoes we pull out and put on every morning.
Fifty years ago, who’d a thunk it?
Yeah, back then the Chinese were the really scary communists. The Ruskies made us nervous: They had the Bomb and a lot of grumpy looking guys in bad suits with little medals. But we really weren’t afraid of even a really big country that couldn’t come up with more than one kind of peanut butter or manufacture a decent bra. The only thing that made us nervous was a nagging suspicion that the Kremlin electrician had somehow wired the Button backwards and we were all going to be blown up by mistake.
But the Chinese, well we knew the Chinese were serious about this whole world domination thing. The Russians looked like so-many Americans, but with bad haircuts and ill-fitting clothes. Given a choice between being them and us, we just knew they’d be us every time, even if it meant they’d have to start believing in God and put the KGB out to pasture.
But the Red Chinese — all dressed in the same baggy blue pants, baggy blue shirt with the little round collar and big, big buttons up and down the front, all topped off with that puffy round cap with the little round bill and little red Mao button smack dab in the middle — they really looked like they were taking this “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” stuff seriously.
And if that wasn’t enough, Chairman Mao wasn’t shy about telling the world how the Bomb didn’t scare him. There were 600 million Chinese, he said, kill 300 million of them and there’d still be 300 million left, then he gloated a bit, pointing out to us that there weren’t quite 200 million Americans all told.
We heard this, looked at each other and tried to figure, if Mao had his math right, who, out of every three of us, would be the unlucky guy to get incinerated twice.
No doubt, when it came to communists, it was the Chinese communists we were taking seriously.
After Korea and the Red Guard, we didn’t have to read that Little Red Book to know what Chairman Mao thought — he thought the world would be a better place without us, and it was going to take everything we had to keep that wish from coming true.
So for 20 years we did all we could to keep the Chinese buttoned up — nobody from here went there, nobody from there came here. If ignoring a quarter of the human race could make them go away, we were doing our official best to show them out. We could talk to the Russians, but not the Red Chinese … not until Nixon.
It was an event of such cosmic proportion it found itself enshrined in Vulcan legend — as Mr. Spock pointed out, “Only Nixon could go to China.”
But when he did, he didn’t bring back much. When the first selection of Red Chinese imports showed up in a booth at the State Fair the summer after Dick had his first shot of Mao-tai, unless you were in the market for an enameled Mao badge, a red plastic covered pocket volume of “The Thoughts of Chairman Mao” or badly stuffed panda wearing a cheap red scarf, there wasn’t much the Chinese had to sell to you.
Then Mao died and Deng Xiaoping paid us a visit, went to a rodeo, put on a cowboy had and the reds suddenly seemed a lot less menacing.
We hardly noticed as more and more of what used to be stamped “Made in Japan” or “Made in Korea” now came labeled “Made in China” and it wasn’t the China we’d left on Taiwan. There was that unpleasantness with the guy and the tank in Tiananmen Square, but the lure of really low-cost office supplies overcame that in short enough order. It wasn’t long after that Wal-Mart quit bragging about “buying American…”
Well, the Red Russians didn’t bury us, like Khrushchev claimed they would and the Red Chinese didn’t attempt the thermonuclear population control we were afraid they would, but 50 years ago, who would have thought there’d be a law proposed that U.S. flags sold in Minnesota have to be made in America to keep the Chinese from putting the native heirs of Betsy Ross out of business.
Now, tell me again: Who was it that won the Cold War?
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3522 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com.
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Re: Jason wrote on Jun 26, 2007 10:58 PM: