People were mobilized to accomplish the goals of industrialization. They built backyard furnaces for iron and steel (pic) and worked together on massive infrastructure projects, including one undertaken during the winter of 1957-58 in which more than 100 million peasants were mobilized to build large-scale water-conservation works.
By comparing the number of deaths that could be expected under normal conditions with the number that occurred during the period of the Great Leap famine, scholars have estimated that somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961.
It was a giant national effort and it failed - it took China forty years more to reach British steel output. Yet, Mao started with a nation of 400 million and left one billion. Should China be a country of 400 million today, it would have no chance at all to become a large power, larger that the USA as it is today. Through famine and suffering Mao more than doubled China's population and destroyed the thousands years old social order. Good or bad, he shook up China in its roots and made it ready to become an advanced industrial society.
10 comments:
You could just as well ask "Was AH good for Izrael?"
You dont understand me.
The connection between the deaths of those millions in the Great Leap Forward period and the increase in population by Mao's death is tenuous. This business about the misery shaking up the social order and propelling China to greatness is also imprecise hand-waving. Do you think that the Cultural Revolution, in which the educated and elders were made to suffer rather than the peasants, was also good because it shook up the social order?
Murder is never justifiable. The murder of millions is heinous. I don't care if Mao turned China into a paradise (which he didn't) - his hands are stained with blood, he is evil personified.
K
Anonymous: I see you did understand.
(1) "The connection between the deaths of those millions in the Great Leap Forward period and the increase in population by Mao's death is tenuous." I dont think so. Mao consistently followed a pro-population growth policy, and he considered China's population as a strength. He even said a stupid yet revealing sentence: If we Chinese jump all together, the Americans will fall of Planet Earth. (I dont have the quotation before me).
(2) "This business about the misery shaking up the social order and propelling China to greatness is also imprecise hand-waving." No, it is not. China in 1948 was a feudal rural country, with some small foreign enclaves in Shanghay, HongKong, Tientsin, etc. It was a population deeply educated in Confusian tradition, excessively immersed in ancient thinking, practicing the most primitive kind of agriculture. This people had to be uprooted and cut off from tradition to make it receptive to modernization. You can see it today, the countryside is still resistant to modernization but the rootless immigrants in Shanghay and Hong Kong and Taiwan managed to organize themselves following Western (modern) social forms and create a modern society.
Mao wanted to modernize China and fast, and saw before his eyes the example of the Soviet Union, that succeeded in becoming an industrial power in the twenties and thirties (and win a very hard war against a Western industrial state - Germany). He was a Communist and followed Stalin's methods, brutal he may have been but he built up modern China.
Regarding the Cultural Revolution - it was a civil war and nothing to do with the Great Leap Forward. It was very bad.
The US today is about 400 million people, yet you say that had China remained at 400 billion it would have had no chance to match America. Apparently you think China needs more than twice as many people to even come close to achieving the same level of industrial and economic achievement.
Thats a sobering reflection.
USA today is about 320 million people. A 400 million China would have been strong, but a 1300 million China is stronger.
Maybe not: "by 2040, more Chinese will be suffering from Alzheimer's
than the total populations of all the developed nations combined"
found via alfin
And on a related note: America to Remain on Top?
Apparently, even the most successful individual in the remade Chinese society would like to leave China:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/31/us-china-immigration-idUSTRE79U2CG20111031
(link courtesy of The Slitty Eye blog)
Left to their own devices, Russia and China would have achieved far more in the economic field. But the accursed Communists had to screw things up. Even if the mountains of dead are just a statistic, the gross misallocation of resources and constant disruption of normal activities through Great Leaps and Stalin orders ensured that the economy will always perform abysmally. The Indians were able to move from the 2% 'Hindu growth rate' to the current 5-7% simply by dismantling the command economy.
Ivan
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