ustxtxb_obs_1973_02_02_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

r TDA PRESS 901 W 24th St Austin Multi copy service. Call 477-3641 existence of the Red Army. In 1935, Mao’s armies were on a forced march in Southwest China, running froin Chiang Kai-shek’s armies, and marching toward the base areas from which they would then fight the Japanese. Mao’s armies had to move very quickly through a densely forested and mountainous wilderness on the edge of Tibet in order to beat Chiang Kai-shek’s armies to the Tatu River. In the very same gorges the last of the Taiping rebels, an army of 100,000 had been pinned down and annihilated by the officers of the Manchu dynasty. In order to avoid the same fate it was necessary to get through the wilderness in a hurry. But these mountains were inhabited by Lobos, a tribal people whose hatred of the Han Chinese was traditional and fierce. But Mao approached them in a distinctly different way. Having discovered a number of Lobo chiefs in the jails of some recently liberated towns, Mao returned the chiefs to 18 The Texas Observer CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, P.O. Box 28-1, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. MARJORIE A. DELAFIELD TYPING SERVICE: Theses, dissertations, manuscripts, reports, etc. I.B.M. Selectric II typewriters, multilithing, mimeographing, addressing envelopes. Public Notary. 25 years experience. Call 442-7008, Austin. WE SELL THE BEST SOUND. Yamaha pianos, guitars; Moeck-Kung-Aulus recorders; harmonicas, kalimbas and other exotic instruments. Amster Music, 1624 Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. THURSDAY DISCUSSION GROUP meets at noon weekly at the YMCA, 605 North Ervay in Dallas. No dues. Everyone welcome. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. Spanish Village, 802 Red River, second Monday of each month. From noon. All welcome. CABLE REPORT. Cable television could be a spy in your bedroom. It may also allow you to shop from your living room. We are the only people reporting on the development of this industry from the citizen’s perspective. $7 per year. 192 North Clark Street, Room 607, Chicago, Illinois 60601. NOW IS THE TIME for war tax resistance. The most powerful acts against war have been those of the young men of the Resistance who have said NO to the draft. Now it is time for those of us who have been paying for the war in Indochina to say NO to taxes for war. Join us! War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., N.Y., N.Y. 10012. Write and ask for information. “IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to imagine, at the moment, a more worthy cause than the campaign launched by Ramsey Clark, Julian Bond, Patricia Simon and others to raise funds to rebuild Bach Mai Hospital.” The Nation, Jan. 15, 1973. Contributions can be sent to Bach Mai Hospital Emergency Relief Fund, 140 6th Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02142. the mountains and began negotiations with them. Explaining that there were both White Chinese and Red Chinese, just as there were both Black Lobos and White Lobos, Mao proposed an alliance between the Red Chinese and the Black Lobos. The alliance was cemented with Red Chinese guns, given to the Black Lobos, and with their aid the Red Armies made it across the river in plenty of time to escape the Chiang Kai-shek armies. The end destination of Mao’s march, known in Chinese history books as the Long March, since it covered about 6,000 miles, was a town called Yenan. Yenan became the Communist capital from about 1937 until World War II ended. Even under wartime conditions, the first National Minorities Institute was set up in Yenan. After the Communist Party succeeded in winning the entire country \(with the capital was moved to Peking, and a National Minorities Institute was set up there in 1951. This institute now has three departments: politics, language and art. Minority nationalities come here to learn Chinese, and Han Chinese ,come here to learn a variety of minority nationality languages. The literature and history of the minorities are studied, written languages developed for illiterate tribes and the music and dance of all are taught at a very advanced level. The best cultural performance that we saw in China was performed by the students of the Institute. In addition, there is now in China a variety of autonomous political units, varying in size from provinces to counties. Among other things, the various advantages in being declared an autonomous area include tax rebates, the use of the local tongue both in school and in official government publications and exemption from birth control plans designed to limit the Chinese population to about a 2 percent annual increase. Among groups such as the Mongolian herdsmen, whose numbers were dwindling before the revolution due to epidemic diseases, babies are encouraged. IMPRESSED BY the efforts to strengthen what in several cases had been withering-away nationalities and playing the Devil’s Advocate, I asked the “Responsible Person” \(as people in Institute, “If the goal of communism is the withering-away of the state and the internationalization of the proletariat, why are you building up the national cultures of these people?” “Oh,” he said, “that is a very dialectical question. And the answer is also a matter of dialectics. The purpose of the autonomous regions is to ensure the equal rights and benefits of the minorities and to promote their socialist revolution. As long as there is a problem with regard to Han Chinese relations with the minorities, there will be autonomous regions. By problem, I mean as long as there are differences, there will be autonomous regions. “By differences, we mean differences in language, culture and habits. If we do not pay respect to the cultures of the various nationalities, the objective situation will be that one nation is oppressing another. It is only by respecting their culture that they will feel that learning their own culture is not enough. “According to our viewpoint, class and state will disappear, and certainly national distinctions will disappear, but that is a long term perspective. Before Liberation [the Revolution in 1949] there were antagonistic feelings between the Han and the national minorities not just differences, antagonisms. After Liberation there are still differences, but no antagonisms because we follow the principles of unity and mutual aid. “The differences will be overcome by all of us learning from the cultures of other peoples. We will create a culture that is a culture of all the Chinese people, not of just the Han. So, in this sense we are diminishing the differences. But the crucial point is to eliminate class oppression. If there is class oppression, there are antagonisms.” What this responsible person was saying was that until there is integration on the basis of economic and social equality, there is no real integration. There is only dominance of one over the other. After there is social and economic equality, integration is a moot point. What occured to me was that the very reason for the integration movement in the South was that although the blacks and the whites were indeed separate, they were not equal. It was because black schools were inferior that we agitated for integrated schools. And yet one result of that integration has been that many, many black teachers from the old black schools are now unemployed. Black girls who would have been chosen in an all black school to be cheerleaders now sit in the bleachers. Black voters, who were once unregistered, can now vote for the white president of their choice. None of the above is meant to imply that we should return to the old ways of separate and unequal. It is meant to imply, however, that there might be a better way to reach the root of the problem. Perhaps a movement should be built around stopping the war in Southeast Asia in its tracks and demands for job security, decent pay, decent and cheap education, medical care and other social services for everyone. It might do more for the cause of “Black and White Together” than busing.