Re: China's Great Leap Forward

[Alan G Isaac <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well Henry, If you accept that you have outlined how Mao's
romanticism (well chosen word!) led him to create economic
havoc by promoting policies based on a complete
misunderstanding of human nature but nevertheless to do some
good things as well, we often aren't saying things that are so
different after all.  There are a couple exceptions however.
I will be try to be a bit light-hearted in highlighting
them.

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002 16:40:38 -0400 "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The only problem came from bourgeois intellectual rebellion.

Those damn intellectuals.  They're always thinking about things
and wanting liberty (!!) of all things.  Better get rid of them.
And he did. Luo Ruiging, one-time Minister of Public Security,
is reported to have said in 1964 that four million people had been
executed from 1948 through 1955.  (Others have offered much
higher estimates, of course.)

But I suppose that to make an omelette one must break a few
eggs, eh Henry?

>  Mao's call for open criticism was serious and genuine,

Maybe.  It certainly exposed his critics, which allowed him
to round them up and silence them.  Anyway, at the very
least I find Li Zhi-Sui's interpretation more plausible than
yours:
  http://www.brainsnchips.org/hr/100flowers.htm

>  but the discussion  he had conceived of as a safety-valve
>  reached a degree of intensity he had not anticipated.
>  Mao over-estimated the stability of the political
>  climate.

Those damn critics.  They're always louder than anticipated.
Better get rid of them.  (And he did, although with much less
killing than before.)

By the way, I especially savor Mao's circulation of a
"revised" version of his call for criticism.  Orwell could
not have dreamed of anything better.

> The GLP was successful in many areas.  The one area that failed
> attracted the most attention.  It was the area of backyard steel furnace
> production.

Perhaps you meant "one of the areas" rather than "the one
area"?  Of course this one did fail spectacularly, as in a
struggle to meet centrally imposed quotas the people who had
been herded into communes melted down the very implements of
their livelihood in order to make useless steel.  As is well
known, this added to the inability of the agricultural
sector to meet China's food needs during the great famine.

>   The attempt failed conspicuously, but its
> damage to the economy was overrated.

So you claim.
Others claim otherwise.

> To describe Mao as
> a dictator merely reflects an ignorance of the CPC power structure.

I do not recall anyone on this list so characterizing Mao.
I did use the word 'demagogue', but that seems fully
supported by your description.

> The failures of the GLF and the People's Commune were
> caused more by implementation flaws rather than conceptual
> error.

That is surely the most dangerous claim you make in this
post.  Fortunately almost nobody believes this.

> These programs resulted in much suffering,

Yes indeed.

> but the claim by some that 30 million people were murdered
> by Mao with evil intent does not hold up to serious
> examination.

Again, I do no recall anyone on this list making such a
claim.  In the fact the most important point is that good
intent is not good enough.

> Is it true, as Vicento Navarro of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene
> and Public Health  argues, that China's success from the outset of the
> revolution until the beginning of the Deng reforms in introducing health
> and hygiene measures resulted in it having saved millions of lives?

I do not know.  Forming the proper counterfactual is
difficult.  But I find it plausible.

> There would have been no deaths in the 1961-62 famines if
> not for the US embargo.

That is the silliest claim you make in this post.  The
reasons are legion, but let's just focus on one you
acknowledge to a certain extent.  Because the desire not
to hear bad news and an ideologically charged environment
that made truthful reporting dangerous---a habit China has
not lost, as evidenced by its handling of its AIDS
problems---the ongoing famine was not even acknowledged by
the leadership until it was well under way.  (At which point
they continued grain seizures, which contributed to the
famine, in order to ship grain to the USSR.)

Even if China could have gotten the grain quickly enough
(which it couldn't) and could have gotten enough (which it
couldn't), it couldn't have distributed it effectively
enough.

It is time to drop this silly claim at let China take
responsibility for its own history.  (Indeed, I am surprised
you would want it any other way.)

> One could, for example see the US war on Vietnam as a more
> direct attack on people with intent to kill, than Mao's
> policy and the famine coincidental to it.

This is certainly true.  It was easy to oppose the US war on
Vietnam for this reason.  It is easy to see how intent to
kill can lead to killing.  The harder thing is to see how an
intent to do good can be just as deadly and thereby also
needs to be condemned.

Cheers,
Alan