Mao, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution: an assessment

The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution: the price of China's takeoff

A man orders the killing of every sparrow in the country. With no birds, insects devour the crops. Millions of people die of hunger. This is not a fable: it is one of the episodes of the Great Leap Forward, the chapter that separates two irreconcilable readings of twentieth-century China. On one side are those who argue that the Chinese Communist Party lifted the country out of a century of warlordism and a misery they describe as fifth-world. On the other are those who reply that it was a genocide and the epitome of everything perverse about totalitarianism.

From an ungoverned China to an industrial China

The starting point is not disputed: a territory divided among warlords for more than a century, without a functioning government. The Kuomintang, besides being ultra-corrupt, failed in its attempt to modernize the country and eliminate old customs, according to the thesis that defends the CCP's necessity. Only the party had enough strength to propel the Asian giant forward, that school of thought holds.

The rebuttal comes quickly. China was not Afghanistan: an essentially civilized and prosperous territory for millennia, with millions of skilled workers. Simply by providing four decades of stability, eradicating the most glaring scourges and repairing the infrastructure, the communists had already laid much of the groundwork for later development. The credit, in that reading, is smaller than advertised.

The Great Leap Forward: mistakes, harvests and sparrows

Here the consensus breaks down. The mildest defense admits mistakes —such as exterminating the sparrows— but maintains that the intention was positive and the path, the right one. The closing argument: China had suffered periodic famines since its founding, and after that episode it has suffered none since.

The refutation is devastating. Starving millions of people usually increases the rations of the survivors: in Europe, those who survived the Black Death also enjoyed an economic and cultural boom. And it was precisely in that era that the advances of the Green Revolution spread worldwide, and that was no communist invention. Since 1970 famines have all but disappeared across the globe, not just in China.

The technical detail usually missing: famines do not occur because too little food is produced, but because an area has little and it cannot be brought in from elsewhere for whatever reason. Chinese agriculture had extremely low mechanization; rice does not allow economies of scale the way wheat does. It was the recovery of the family-village agrarian structure, together with political stability and communications, that boosted production.

Backyard steel, communes and the economic balance sheet

The industrial chapter is the most cited. Mao intended to surpass England's steel output with no investment or prior preparation, purely by brute force and quotas imposed on every municipal government. Artisanal furnaces, smelting hoes, plows and farm equipment. The resulting steel was useless because of impurities. As a consequence, Mao was sidelined and capable statesmen were put in charge of governing.

The underlying balance sheet is uncomfortable for both sides: under Maoism, China remained fifth-world. When Mao died, India was slightly richer than China. The communes and collective farms were another blunder; the takeoff came when the country freed itself from Marxist toxicity, at least economically and in values, even though the party kept ruling.

What remains of Maoism in today's China

The official ideology today is socialism with Chinese characteristics: the state controls banking and strategic companies. The current president, Xi Jinping, was sent to work the land during the Cultural Revolution. Ten million Red Guards launched, at their peak, a campaign to reeducate the people and eliminate hostile elements. That is the unsettling fact: the same structure that led that campaign governs today's second-largest economy.

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The comparison nobody makes comfortably: while people in mainland China were still lighting their homes with oil lamps, Taiwan was manufacturing watches and radios for half the world. China's industrial takeoff came when big Western capital set up factories there, drawn by millions of workers willing to work for peanuts. The industrialization Mao pursued with backyard furnaces was ultimately delivered by foreign capital three decades later.