Interesting comparison of China and north Korea from a Chinese tourist point of view. Excerpt:
“I love [North] Korea!” exclaimed one of the tourists, who teaches physical education at a school in the central province of Hubei. “It is like a pure maiden, while China is like a heavily made-up young wife,” he went on, to murmurs of approval from others as they drove through Pyongyang’s grim streets. The teacher jokingly asked an accompanying guide how he could emigrate to North Korea.
A retired official from a state-owned oil firm praised the “purity” of North Koreans compared with the Chinese, whose hearts were “filled with black-and-white cats”; a reference to Deng Xiaoping’s famously pragmatic dismissal of ideology, that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.
V/R
Dave
Chinese Maoists in North Korea
Paradise lost
In North Korea, Chinese Maoists find the land of their dreams
Nov 24th 2012 | HOECHANG, PANMUNJOM, PYONGYANG AND SHENYANG | from the print edition
Those were the days
AFTER a long drive up a narrow dirt track through hills east of Pyongyang, a North Korean tour bus dropped the Chinese tourists near a wooded graveyard. In front of it, on a concrete pedestal, stood a bronze bust of Mao Anying, the eldest son of Mao Zedong. This was their holy grail. One by one they laid wreaths and bowed in reverence (see picture). One man kowtowed. Several wept as they delivered speeches in honour of the younger Mao, who died during the Korean war. “We must clean China up and turn it a brilliant red,” said one. Another led the group in chants of “Socialism will be victorious!”
For most members of the group of 15 tourists (except one who was there to report for The Economist) the visit to North Korea was a welcome relief after a grim year. As die-hard Maoists, they believe that China’s leaders are betraying the ideals of the communist country’s founder and leading it to enslavement by the West and perdition. The past few months have seen the purging of their idol, a Mao-quoting member of the Politburo, Bo Xilai, and the closure by the Chinese government of some of their most outspoken websites.
Many of China’s new middle class regard the Maoists as members of a nutty fringe. But to the poor and marginalised, as well as a few idealistic intellectuals, their views are appealing. During their four days in North Korea in October, the Maoists found a country that appeared to be following the right path: one that, in their view, Mao had started down but which his diminutive successor, Deng Xiaoping, had abandoned. “Dwarf Deng destroyed the lives of peasants,” says one member of the group, staring from the bus at new two-storey houses in the countryside on the way to Mao Anying’s memorial in Hoechang county. The suspicions of Potemkinism that constantly prey on the minds of foreign tourists in North Korea appeared not to trouble them.
(Continued at the link above)
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