Re: China's Great Leap Forward

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I do not respond to accusations of  "silly".
People have disagree with me but few have describe me as giving "silly" arguments.
Alan Issac shows himself to be a small and narrow minded individual who tries to win
points not by a show of his wealth of information or insight, but by innuandos.
Calling people who have different views "silly" is more than silly.

Why doesn't he post a pieve of substance rather than nitpicking in the most
perdestrain manner.  Fill the list with intelligence and information, not bar room
insults. It should be a minimum standard for an academic.

Henry C.K. Liu

Alan G Isaac wrote:

> 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