The Statue In Yorba Linda
抗议毛铜像在尼克松图书馆

October 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff Nixon Library, Nixon in the News,

“Leader’s Exhibit:” A statue of Mao ZeDong is featured with the bronze likenesses of nine other world leaders during RN’s presidency at the Nixon Library.

Today, as is noted elsewhere at TNN, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. The day is being marked with celebrations throughout that nation and in Chinese communities around the world. But there are also a considerable Chinese with a profound distrust and dislike of Communism who are, here and there, registering their protests of the PRC’s policies.

Probably the largest number of active protesters are associated with the Falun Gong movement, but there are also some whose animosity toward the PRC’s institutions is very personal and heartfelt. One of these people is Kai Chen. Chen is a 56-year-old resident of Los Angeles in the real-estate business. He was born in the People’s Republic, into a family associated to some degree with the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, who had, in 1949, been forced to leave the mainland for Taiwan. This status meant that Chen’s family suffered considerably in the Cultural Revolution, and that he was, as a teenager, denied a university education and sent to work in the countryside.

However, it happened that by the age of fifteen, Chen had reached the height of six-foot-seven, quite unusual for a Chinese, and, around the same time, discovered the game of basketball. By this time the Cultural Revolution was moving toward its final stages and the PRC’s premier, Zhou Enlai, envisioned basketball as one of the sports that might enable his country to end its twenty years of comparative isolation and reach out to the world.

Of course, the big breakthrough in this area came when the PRC’s ping-pong team, after playing against its US counterpart in Japan, invited the Americans to China, which dovetailed with behind-the-scenes diplomatic overtures and helped make possible President Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972. But although it would take a few more decades before players like Yao Ming became NBA superstars, the Chinese basketball team, on which Chen played for a time, played a significant part in the 1970s and 1980s in building friendly relations between the PRC and the West.

In 1981, Chen moved to Los Angeles to further his education. After obtaining his degree from UCLA, he went into business in California, found success in his field, and raised a family. But his memories of his mistreatment in the China of Mao Zedong have remained, and, as such interviews as this one (and his 2007 autobiography One In A Billion) show, he feels that not only was he exploited as an athlete for the political purposes of a regime he has long detested, but that Beijing has continued to use sports in the same way to the present, most spectacularly in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last year, Chen visited the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, and entered the room which features one of its most prominent and written-about exhibits. What he found there upset him, and led to the protest which he made, with several others at the Library today.

When the original staff of the Library was planning the building’s permanent exhibits two decades ago, they decided to devote one of the rooms to a set of life-size bronze statues of nine men and one woman, from around the world, whose leadership qualities had formed the subject of individual chapters in Leaders, one of RN’s most readable and fascinating books. The ten statespersons selected for the Hall of World Leaders were, alphabetically, Konrad Adenauer, Leonid Brezhnev, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Nikita Khruschchev, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Shigeru Yoshida, and Zhou Enlai. In the exhibit Mao and Zhou are depicted sitting on couches, much in the way that they had talked with Nixon during his trip in 1972; the others are standing. Near the statues is this quote from the President: “They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they have willed it.”

When Chen came to the Library, he was angry that Mao, a person he regards as a mass murderer comparable to Hitler and Stalin, was featured among the other leaders, and he wrote about this to Timothy Naftali, the current director of the Nixon Library. Chen’s letter and Naftali’s response can be found here.

For a while, word of Chen’s dismay with Mao’s presence in the Hall was limited to his own website and to a handful of blogs. But yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Mike Anton’s article describing the controvery and Chen’s plan to stage a protest. In it, Chen is quoted as saying: “Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history. His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. … How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It’s a perversion of American freedom. You don’t put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum.” Naftali wrote to Chen that he personally was less comfortable with having a statue of Mao in the room than was the case with the other leaders, and his view of the issue, as reported in the Times article, is much the same:

“I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect,” he said. “I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they’re all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

“It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum,” Naftali added. “I don’t think it’s the best way to teach history.”

Naftali’s remarks have met with some puzzlement and criticism from those who worked, full-time or on a volunteer basis, at the Nixon Library during the decade and a half that it was operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation before becoming a part of the National Archives group of presidential libraries a few years ago. In all that time, Foundation assistant director Sandy Quinn told Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register yesterday, no visitor made a complaint about Mao’s being featured in the Hall. Since Chen’s correspondence with Naftali a notice has been put in the Hall saying that the presence of these ten figures in the room does not constitute an endorsement of all of their policies.

The questions that Chen’s protests raise are not that easy to dismiss. The website of the NBC station in Los Angeles played the controversy for laughs today with an article titled “Pinko, Commie Statues Shock, Offend At Nixon Library.” The piece is credited to Olsen Ebright and Joseph McCarthy (presumably not that one, returned to earth at age 101) and is illustrated with the familiar photo of RN flashing the double V at the entrance to the helicopter on August 9, 1974 – but tinted as pink as, presumably, the late Helen Gahagan Douglas’s underwear.

However, Chen is deeply serious about his complaint, and his years of trauma in the turbulent China of the 1950s and 1960s make his anger at Mao’s presence in the Hall understandable. But I don’t think the founder of modern China should be removed from his couch. Mao is in the Hall because, although he wrested power violently from the Kuomintang regime in a civil war that killed tens of millions; although his misguided ideas of a “Great Leap Forward” and a Cultural Revolution brought about the deaths of millions more; and although his troops bitterly fought United States and United Nations forces for two and a half bloody years in Korea, in his last seven years he sought, with Zhou, to set aside violence and extend the hand of friendship to the United States. President Nixon reached out as well, and, with substantial help from Dr. Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord, Dwight Chapin and Foundation president Ron Walker, and many others, the stage was set for the handshake at the Shanghai tarmac between Nixon and Zhou, and the meeting with Mao, which ended almost a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility, helped prevent the possibility of a third world war between the superpowers, and made possible ties which have been truly beneficial to both countries.

As former Library director, TNN’s John Taylor, points out here, Nixon was a lifelong anti-Communist. He spent more time face-to-face with Chiang Kai-shek than with Mao. But in his years as Vice President, he was ready to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union, in the years after it emerged from Stalin’s shadow, and so met Khruschchev and then, as President, Brezhnev. Both of those men had been part of Stalin’s savage world for decades in their early careers, but when they came to power, they proved able to move beyond that awful legacy.

And so, too, did Mao and Zhou, in the years after 1969, make their efforts to move beyond the chaos, misery and isolation of the Cultural Revolution. That’s why these four men are in the Hall of Leaders – because they met that ultimate test of leadership, to try to make a more peaceful world for coming generations.

奥运自由衫全球运动发起人陈凯和张汉废、郭树人、鲁德成等多人10月1日在克森图书馆前举行抗议，要求将最大杀人狂毛泽东逐出尼克森图书馆。

（摄影∶袁玫/大纪元）

外电：毛雕像引不满 恐遭美图书馆撤除
Global Day to Denounce Mao

【大纪元10月5日讯】（大纪元记者曾去执编译报导）

加州Yorba Linda市的尼克森图书馆以前属于私人经营，后来改由美国政府管理，多年来馆中的展览室陈列10位世界名人的雕像，大家都习以为常，但是近来其中毛泽东的雕像引起了争议。 一名华裔移民不认为毛配称为世界伟大领袖，要求将之撤除，新任的图书馆负责人也认同这个看法，将会在改建世界领袖雕像展览厅时改进，但尚未决定如何处理。

根据《洛杉矶时报》（Los Angeles Times）的报导，由2,100万美元私人捐款资助，于1990年成立的尼克森图书馆，近20年来，毛泽东与周恩来的雕像就结结实实的座落在展览室里。雕像是坐在安乐椅上，展现两人正在交谈的模样，其他人的雕像则分置于展览室各处。

报导说，展览室的墙上镌刻着尼克森的题词：“这些领袖表现卓越，他们不只是心存愿望，而是以毅力实践。”展览室里除了毛、周的雕像外，其他还有苏联首脑赫鲁雪夫、埃及总统沙达特、以色列总理梅尔、法国总统戴高乐，以及英国首相邱吉尔等人的雕像。

毛泽东雕像引起一阵风波

最近这几个月，参访的人开始有不同的想法：“为什么这些雕像要呈列在这里？自从2007年7月政府接管这做图书馆以来，这些雕像并不表示美国政府认同这些领袖的作风。”

以近例而言，56岁的洛杉矶房地产投资者陈凯先生，曾经是中国国家篮球代表队的成员。去年他与太太参观尼克森图书馆，对馆方竟将毛泽东的雕像与世界领袖并列于馆内，感到惊讶与不可思议。他说：“我万万没想到会这样。我跟我太太只是希望能高高兴兴的玩一天。我当场就跟馆方人员抗议，毛的雕像让我非常不舒服。”

陈凯表示，毛泽东当权近30年，杀人无数，他的亲朋好友都是共产党整肃迫害的受害者。现在中共试图走向现代化，加入世界经济体系，却刻意想将毛泽东残民的恶行模糊淡化。 而更让他受不了的是，一些流行或庸俗的现代文化，将毛当成前卫文化标志。

陈凯表示，他不是不同意将中国的领袖放在馆内，毕竟1972年中共与美国的关系正常化，是尼克森任内一项大成就。但是陈凯激动的说：“毛泽东是有史以来最残忍的杀人魔。他的手沾满了韩战、越战时代美国士兵所流的鲜血。他的雕像怎么可以跟邱吉尔、戴高乐这些领袖搁在一起？你们不该把反美的人像放在展览馆，这是颠倒黑白。”

陈凯先生抗议到底

早在2007年，陈凯就曾要求阿尔汉布若市（Alhambra）的人员，将市政府内毛泽东的画像撤走。参访尼克森图书馆后，陈凯向国家档案局官员抱怨，并散发请愿单，希望撤走馆内的毛泽东雕像。

陈凯与支持者在中国成立60周年国庆当天赴尼克森图书馆抗议，希望这一天成为“将毛泽东从我们生活中铲除”的一天。

陈凯的主张获得尼克森图书馆馆长纳福塔利（Timothy Naftali）的支持。他表示，在馆内竖立一个人的雕像是表示尊敬，邱吉尔、梅尔、沙达特或可表示他们是同类型的人，但是毛泽东却是个杀人魔头。他说：“对一个公立的图书馆而言，这样似乎不妥当。这恐怕不是教育下一代历史的好办法。”

纳福塔利表示，他计划在未来重新展示世界领袖雕像，但尚未决定改建时间及方式，因为他正在图书馆进行另一大规模改建，以反映水门案的真实历史。

“我不赞成让人自历史消失”，他表示，毛将永远是尼克森图书馆的一部分，但毛的雕像则未必属于这里。

陈凯对纳福塔利的看法表示赞同，但是只有雕像确实撤走，他才能了却心愿。

陈凯一语： Kai Chen's Words:

这位尼克松基金会发言人的文章正说明许多美国人们对毛共中共的天真无知与道德混乱。 将毛共中共的权宜韬晦说成是为了世界和平是对真实的绝大扭曲与对人类良知的无耻践踏。 --- 陈凯

This article is from the website of Nixon Foundation. It just shows you how naive, ignorant and morally confused many Americans today are. To view Mao and the Chinese communist regime's expediency for maintaining its power/control over its own people as from their "yearning for world peace" is nothing more than a blatant insult on human intelligence and world conscience. --- Kai Chen

www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

http://thenewnixon.org/category/cold-war/

Naivete/Moral Confusion - The Statue In Yorba Linda
无知、天真与混乱

October 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff

“Leader’s Exhibit:” A statue of Mao ZeDong is featured with the bronze likenesses of nine other world leaders during RN’s presidency at the Nixon Library.

Today, as is noted elsewhere at TNN, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. The day is being marked with celebrations throughout that nation and in Chinese communities around the world. But there are also a considerable Chinese with a profound distrust and dislike of Communism who are, here and there, registering their protests of the PRC’s policies.

Probably the largest number of active protesters are associated with the Falun Gong movement, but there are also some whose animosity toward the PRC’s institutions is very personal and heartfelt. One of these people is Kai Chen. Chen is a 56-year-old resident of Los Angeles in the real-estate business. He was born in the People’s Republic, into a family associated to some degree with the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, who had, in 1949, been forced to leave the mainland for Taiwan. This status meant that Chen’s family suffered considerably in the Cultural Revolution, and that he was, as a teenager, denied a university education and sent to work in the countryside.

However, it happened that by the age of fifteen, Chen had reached the height of six-foot-seven, quite unusual for a Chinese, and, around the same time, discovered the game of basketball. By this time the Cultural Revolution was moving toward its final stages and the PRC’s premier, Zhou Enlai, envisioned basketball as one of the sports that might enable his country to end its twenty years of comparative isolation and reach out to the world.

Of course, the big breakthrough in this area came when the PRC’s ping-pong team, after playing against its US counterpart in Japan, invited the Americans to China, which dovetailed with behind-the-scenes diplomatic overtures and helped make possible President Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972. But although it would take a few more decades before players like Yao Ming became NBA superstars, the Chinese basketball team, on which Chen played for a time, played a significant part in the 1970s and 1980s in building friendly relations between the PRC and the West.

In 1981, Chen moved to Los Angeles to further his education. After obtaining his degree from UCLA, he went into business in California, found success in his field, and raised a family. But his memories of his mistreatment in the China of Mao Zedong have remained, and, as such interviews as this one (and his 2007 autobiography One In A Billion) show, he feels that not only was he exploited as an athlete for the political purposes of a regime he has long detested, but that Beijing has continued to use sports in the same way to the present, most spectacularly in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last year, Chen visited the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, and entered the room which features one of its most prominent and written-about exhibits. What he found there upset him, and led to the protest which he made, with several others at the Library today.

When the original staff of the Library was planning the building’s permanent exhibits two decades ago, they decided to devote one of the rooms to a set of life-size bronze statues of nine men and one woman, from around the world, whose leadership qualities had formed the subject of individual chapters in Leaders, one of RN’s most readable and fascinating books. The ten statespersons selected for the Hall of World Leaders were, alphabetically, Konrad Adenauer, Leonid Brezhnev, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Nikita Khruschchev, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Shigeru Yoshida, and Zhou Enlai. In the exhibit Mao and Zhou are depicted sitting on couches, much in the way that they had talked with Nixon during his trip in 1972; the others are standing. Near the statues is this quote from the President: “They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they have willed it.”

When Chen came to the Library, he was angry that Mao, a person he regards as a mass murderer comparable to Hitler and Stalin, was featured among the other leaders, and he wrote about this to Timothy Naftali, the current director of the Nixon Library. Chen’s letter and Naftali’s response can be found here.

For a while, word of Chen’s dismay with Mao’s presence in the Hall was limited to his own website and to a handful of blogs. But yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Mike Anton’s article describing the controvery and Chen’s plan to stage a protest. In it, Chen is quoted as saying: “Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history. His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. … How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It’s a perversion of American freedom. You don’t put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum.” Naftali wrote to Chen that he personally was less comfortable with having a statue of Mao in the room than was the case with the other leaders, and his view of the issue, as reported in the Times article, is much the same:

“I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect,” he said. “I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they’re all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

“It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum,” Naftali added. “I don’t think it’s the best way to teach history.”

Naftali’s remarks have met with some puzzlement and criticism from those who worked, full-time or on a volunteer basis, at the Nixon Library during the decade and a half that it was operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation before becoming a part of the National Archives group of presidential libraries a few years ago. In all that time, Foundation assistant director Sandy Quinn told Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register yesterday, no visitor made a complaint about Mao’s being featured in the Hall. Since Chen’s correspondence with Naftali a notice has been put in the Hall saying that the presence of these ten figures in the room does not constitute an endorsement of all of their policies.

The questions that Chen’s protests raise are not that easy to dismiss. The website of the NBC station in Los Angeles played the controversy for laughs today with an article titled “Pinko, Commie Statues Shock, Offend At Nixon Library.” The piece is credited to Olsen Ebright and Joseph McCarthy (presumably not that one, returned to earth at age 101) and is illustrated with the familiar photo of RN flashing the double V at the entrance to the helicopter on August 9, 1974 – but tinted as pink as, presumably, the late Helen Gahagan Douglas’s underwear.

However, Chen is deeply serious about his complaint, and his years of trauma in the turbulent China of the 1950s and 1960s make his anger at Mao’s presence in the Hall understandable. But I don’t think the founder of modern China should be removed from his couch. Mao is in the Hall because, although he wrested power violently from the Kuomintang regime in a civil war that killed tens of millions; although his misguided ideas of a “Great Leap Forward” and a Cultural Revolution brought about the deaths of millions more; and although his troops bitterly fought United States and United Nations forces for two and a half bloody years in Korea, in his last seven years he sought, with Zhou, to set aside violence and extend the hand of friendship to the United States. President Nixon reached out as well, and, with substantial help from Dr. Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord, Dwight Chapin and Foundation president Ron Walker, and many others, the stage was set for the handshake at the Shanghai tarmac between Nixon and Zhou, and the meeting with Mao, which ended almost a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility, helped prevent the possibility of a third world war between the superpowers, and made possible ties which have been truly beneficial to both countries.

As former Library director, TNN’s John Taylor, points out here, Nixon was a lifelong anti-Communist. He spent more time face-to-face with Chiang Kai-shek than with Mao. But in his years as Vice President, he was ready to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union, in the years after it emerged from Stalin’s shadow, and so met Khruschchev and then, as President, Brezhnev. Both of those men had been part of Stalin’s savage world for decades in their early careers, but when they came to power, they proved able to move beyond that awful legacy.

And so, too, did Mao and Zhou, in the years after 1969, make their efforts to move beyond the chaos, misery and isolation of the Cultural Revolution. That’s why these four men are in the Hall of Leaders – because they met that ultimate test of leadership, to try to make a more peaceful world for coming generations.

Protesters want statue out of Nixon library
逐毛行动

By Sandra T. Molina, Staff Writer
Posted: 10/01/2009 05:54:49 PM PDT

The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda has received a petition put forward by a group of Chinese-Americans in protest of its statue of the Chinese Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung.



(Correspondent photo by Mike Mullen)

[size=18]Nixon Library Controversy [/size]

YORBA LINDA - Even 15 years after his death, Richard Nixon is still a lightning rod for controversy.

On Thursday protesters stood on the sidewalk in front of the 37th president's museum to object against a statue of the late Communist leader Mao Tse-tung.

A handful of people carried signs and tried to get signatures to have the lifesized bronze statue of Mao sitting on a bench with Chou En-lai removed from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, said Anthony Curtis, director of marketing.

They were led by anti-communist activist Kai Chen, a former Chinese national basketball player, who's gathered more than 200 signatures on his Web site demanding the removal of the statue.

"I understand their concerns," Library Director Timothy Naftali said.

"This is a debate about an exhibit we inherited," he said. "It's been our mission to transition from a private library to a public one."

Mao's likeness has been in the World Leaders' Gallery since the library opened in 1990 as a private institution sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation.

Nixon himself was integral to the display, Naftali said.

"He helped design the entire museum beginning two years before its opening," said Naftali, who is a Cold War scholar.

A quote from Nixon - "They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because the willed it" - overlooks the 10-statue display.

The other leaders depicted include France's Charles de Gaulle, Egypt's Anwar Sadat, Britain's Winston Churchill and Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev.

"Their presence in the museum does not imply that the United States government has a position on their legacies," Naftali said.

Since the summer of 2007, the library has been run as a scholarly institution overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration.

"As a public institution, one of the challenges for us is to be mindful of the public concern," Naftali said.

A disclaimer has been posted near the world leaders exhibit. The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda has recieved a petition against its statue of the Chinese Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung by some Chinese-Americans.

(Correspondent photo by Mike Mullen)

Chen, who came to America in 1981, said he was shocked by the statue's existence during a visit to the museum last year.

"I was so upset when I saw it, especially among democratic leaders," he said. "There's something very wrong about it."

Chen called Mao "a murderer."

Naftali said there are no plans to remove the statue.

"We are gradually updating the museum, but there is no timetable as to when the `World Leaders' gallery will be updated," he said.

Naftali added that while there are no plans on the overhaul of the leaders gallery, the remodeled Watergate exhibit is nearly complete.

"I will pay attention to what eventually happens to the gallery," Chen said. "I've presented my case; it's up to the library now."

sandra.molina@sgvn.com

(562) 698-0955, Ext. 3029