The Chinese myth of the doer politician versus Europe's actor-politicians
Merit-based advancement in China does exist, but the Great Leap Forward and the war on sparrows left tens of millions of dead in their wake.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The myth of the Chinese doer politician and the European actor
Do Chinese leaders really rise purely on merit while Europe elects actors? That is the claim doing the rounds on social media, and an opening comment defends it without nuance: since Jiang Zemin, the last three generations of Chinese leaders have been «among the most outstanding politicians of the contemporary world», and the West cannot even imagine leaders like them. The argument has appeal. It also has holes the size of a backyard furnace.
The first objection is the usual one: China is not a democracy. And then comes the uncomfortable concession: merit-based advancement within the single party does exist, and that allows some to compare with the casualness with which certain mistakes are handled here. The contrast being drawn is brutal: a Spanish minister responsible for a negligent disaster would stay in office; in China, the claim goes, they could end up facing the death penalty. Exaggeration or not, the rhetorical punch lands.
The Great Leap Forward and the famine the story leaves out
The counterattack comes quickly: Mao caused a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The reply does not deny the fact, it deflects: where does that come from, the proge West? It is the classic move of shooting the messenger. But the data eventually win out.
The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) involved millions of peasants abandoning the harvest to melt pots and fences in poorly built backyard furnaces, convinced that China would overtake the United Kingdom in steel production within fifteen years. The result was steel with more impurities than a statistical pamphlet and a third of the 1958 harvest rotting in the fields. Then came the worst part: total collectivization, the expropriation of rations, and the «wind of exaggeration» among local cadres, who reported record harvests to climb the ladder. Up top, planning was done with those invented figures, and grain was requisitioned accordingly. People ate grass, bark and dirt.
The war on sparrows: when wiping out a pest creates another
The Four Pests Campaign of 1958 added an ingredient that would be comical if it were not tragic. Mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. The sparrow eats seeds, so it is a saboteur of socialism. The population was mobilized with pots, cans and flags so the birds could not land: sparrows flew until they dropped from exhaustion. Millions of carcasses and destroyed nests, displayed in public squares as trophies.
The problem came the trinc year: without sparrows, caterpillars, aphids and locusts ran rampant through the crops. A natural predator had been eliminated. In 1960 it had to be replaced with imported Russian sparrows, and the sparrow became a protected species. The worst years of the famine ran from 1959 to 1961. The lesson about central planning writes itself.
Did kings and emperors also cause famines out of ignorance?
The next question seeks an equivalence: did the Catholic Monarchs or any Roman emperor not decree stupidities out of ignorance? The answer is yes, and the catalogue is long. Diocletian froze the price of absolutely everything by law in the year 301, with the death penalty for anyone who insisted; the result was scarcity and black markets, seventeen hundred years before we saw the same thing under different labels.
In imperial Spain, the grain tax (tasa de granos) of 1565 ruined wheat farming and created a chronic black market for a century. The expulsion of the Moriscos between 1609 and 1614 devastated the orchards of Valencia. The ban on planting vineyards and olive groves in the Indies, so as not to compete with the wines of Jerez and Andalusian oil, cut off at the root a crop that took decades to mature.
The difference with Mao, however, is not the existence of error. It is the scale and the ideological framework that turned catastrophe into non-negotiable public policy. A king who gets prices wrong creates scarcity; a five-year plan that gets the harvest wrong mobilizes hundreds of millions of people into the same mistake.
The conclusion left hanging is uncomfortable for both sides: merit-based advancement can be real and still produce disasters of historic dimensions. Chinese leaders are not actors. No one has said acting is easy, but governing a country of 1.4 billion with figures invented by the intermediate levels does not seem like the role of a lifetime either.
Do Chinese leaders really rise purely on merit while Europe elects actors? That is the claim doing the rounds on social media, and an opening comment defends it without nuance: since Jiang Zemin, the last three generations of Chinese leaders have been «among the most outstanding politicians of the contemporary world», and the West cannot even imagine leaders like them. The argument has appeal. It also has holes the size of a backyard furnace.
The first objection is the usual one: China is not a democracy. And then comes the uncomfortable concession: merit-based advancement within the single party does exist, and that allows some to compare with the casualness with which certain mistakes are handled here. The contrast being drawn is brutal: a Spanish minister responsible for a negligent disaster would stay in office; in China, the claim goes, they could end up facing the death penalty. Exaggeration or not, the rhetorical punch lands.
The Great Leap Forward and the famine the story leaves out
The counterattack comes quickly: Mao caused a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The reply does not deny the fact, it deflects: where does that come from, the proge West? It is the classic move of shooting the messenger. But the data eventually win out.
The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) involved millions of peasants abandoning the harvest to melt pots and fences in poorly built backyard furnaces, convinced that China would overtake the United Kingdom in steel production within fifteen years. The result was steel with more impurities than a statistical pamphlet and a third of the 1958 harvest rotting in the fields. Then came the worst part: total collectivization, the expropriation of rations, and the «wind of exaggeration» among local cadres, who reported record harvests to climb the ladder. Up top, planning was done with those invented figures, and grain was requisitioned accordingly. People ate grass, bark and dirt.
The war on sparrows: when wiping out a pest creates another
The Four Pests Campaign of 1958 added an ingredient that would be comical if it were not tragic. Mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. The sparrow eats seeds, so it is a saboteur of socialism. The population was mobilized with pots, cans and flags so the birds could not land: sparrows flew until they dropped from exhaustion. Millions of carcasses and destroyed nests, displayed in public squares as trophies.
The problem came the trinc year: without sparrows, caterpillars, aphids and locusts ran rampant through the crops. A natural predator had been eliminated. In 1960 it had to be replaced with imported Russian sparrows, and the sparrow became a protected species. The worst years of the famine ran from 1959 to 1961. The lesson about central planning writes itself.
Did kings and emperors also cause famines out of ignorance?
The next question seeks an equivalence: did the Catholic Monarchs or any Roman emperor not decree stupidities out of ignorance? The answer is yes, and the catalogue is long. Diocletian froze the price of absolutely everything by law in the year 301, with the death penalty for anyone who insisted; the result was scarcity and black markets, seventeen hundred years before we saw the same thing under different labels.
In imperial Spain, the grain tax (tasa de granos) of 1565 ruined wheat farming and created a chronic black market for a century. The expulsion of the Moriscos between 1609 and 1614 devastated the orchards of Valencia. The ban on planting vineyards and olive groves in the Indies, so as not to compete with the wines of Jerez and Andalusian oil, cut off at the root a crop that took decades to mature.
The difference with Mao, however, is not the existence of error. It is the scale and the ideological framework that turned catastrophe into non-negotiable public policy. A king who gets prices wrong creates scarcity; a five-year plan that gets the harvest wrong mobilizes hundreds of millions of people into the same mistake.
The conclusion left hanging is uncomfortable for both sides: merit-based advancement can be real and still produce disasters of historic dimensions. Chinese leaders are not actors. No one has said acting is easy, but governing a country of 1.4 billion with figures invented by the intermediate levels does not seem like the role of a lifetime either.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (23 replies).
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