They then overused insecticides which decimated pollinator species. Now farmers have to resort to hand pollinating flowers to maintain their orchards[1]. The town is called Maoxian; was it named after the Chairman?
No, Mao Xian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_County) in Sichuan is not named after Chairman Mao. The 'Mao' in its name and the 'Mao' in his name are different characters. (Chairman Mao --> 毛
Yes, the PRC has been run so incompetently by the standing committee of the Politburo of the CPC it has become by some measures the largest economy in the world.
How about when they were so eager to increase production that they failed to prevent wind erosion, causing massive crop failure, starvation, and I guess that means its OK to call it a genocide? Oh yaa, that was in the USA, 19 years before this happened. Where are the article on the Dust Bowl GENOCIDE ? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl )
Yes, since Mao's death and the complete reversal of his economic policies and embracing of capitalism by Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy, the economy of China has rapidly developed. There is a reason this article lays the blame for the senseless waste of life at Mao's feet and not the CCP leadership as a whole.
Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology?
> Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology?
Doubling down? It was more like an excuse to introduce the absurd economic plan. FDR's New Deal featured the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which ultimately tried to restore prosperity by paying farmers not to farm and burning crops as a price-support tactic. (Won't even go into the non-agricultural price-fixing schemes of the NRA which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. No, the other NRA.)
Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward, of course (and of course unrelated to more reasonable programs like Social Security).
Zhao Ziyang embraced capitalism, and he was arrested after the June 4th incident. Capitalism run by the communist party of China?
Also, Mao and Zhou Enlai are who made peace with the USA, not Deng Xiaoping.
> Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy
Mao and Deng had a falling out in the mid to late 1960s, but Mao empowered Deng again in 1974.
Deng Xiaoping called himself a communist, not a capitalist. He did say it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. If China was a capitalist system, it would be more like Japan or South Korea or the US or Western Europe.
Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically. If you don't know what that means, then you don't know what communism is, and you wouldn't be able to tell if Deng was a communist or not. Actually Mao was accused by people to his left of abandoning communism due to his interpretation of the theory of productive forces (as well as the role of peasantry and proletariat etc.) Deng just expanded on that.
The reason Deng Xiaoping had to use a coy phrase about cats to avoid admitting to his policies running counter to communism is that communism is at the core of the Party's identity and history, and that abandoning it openly would seriously undermine their legitimacy. The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The "socialist market economy" allows private ownership, even of means of production and allows the private accumulation of capital. If you want to argue that it's actually communist because the transition was slow and the leadership still claims to be communist with a straight face, I'm not going to bother rebutting that.
The reason China's system is not more like the countries you listed is that it is autocratic, and the reason Zhao Ziyang was arrested was his excessive and open sympathy for a people's democratic movement.
> The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist.
The dialectical approach is the traditional approach, invented by Marx and added to by Engels and others, which they used to explain pretty much everything. It's not something invented by Deng Xaioping. It is in fact the essence of Marx's philosophy.
In a nutshell, the dialectic is an explanation for the evolution of society that looks at the systems by which society produces what it needs, i.e. "modes of production," and how contradictions in these modes of production are resolved through the creation of new modes. Hegel used the dialectical framework to describe the evolution of ideas, but Marx turned it upside down and argued that ideas were a consequence of the material conditions of life, the basis of which is the mode of production.
The classic example of Marx's dialectical thinking is his analysis in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism "produced its own gravediggers," the industrial proletariat. The proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but existed because of capitalism. The contradictions in the capitalist system caused the creation of an entire class of people which would eventually overthrow it and create a socialist society, and then a communist society. In other words, communism could never exist without capitalism having existed first, because the social class which would create communism would not have existed unless capitalism had created it.
Marx, followed by others including Lenin and Stalin, insisted that the full development of the productive forces was a necessary precursor to communism. He elaborated on this in the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he advocated a different distribution of resources than in a full communist society -- some people would get more than others, according to their contribution to society rather than their need. At a later time, the productive forces would be developed to the point that they could provide enough wealth to distribute to everyone according to need, regardless of their contribution to society. (It's not unlike the arguments of some basic income proponents -- automation (productive forces) has created a society in which there is enough wealth to spread around to everyone, regardless of whether or not they have jobs.)
Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.
The reason Marxism and Maoism are distinguished from each other is that Mao rejected that view, which was originally formulated by Marx, and advocated that communism be built by rural peasants rather than the industrial proletariat. Deng's ideology was closer to orthodox Marxism than Mao's was, in many ways. Deng argued that Mao tried to move too fast and skip the stages of social evolution that were necessary preconditions for communism, namely a thriving capitalist economy. If you want to redistribute wealth, you have to create it first. Deng argued that a market economy was the best way to do that, and that some people would get rich, but that's acceptable because it could be sorted out later when the productive forces were sufficient to support a true communist distribution of wealth. This is very similar to the views Marx expressed in Gotha, but more accepting of private property -- as long as it remains useful.
Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.
This is probably the best post I've ever read on HN. Thank you for making it. Deng's leadership, as you note, is so canonically, textbook Marxist that arguments to the contrary sort of make me blink and go "what?".
Your post reminded me that the thing nearly everybody forgets (and I'm totally being generous when saying "forgets", because I'm convinced most critics of Marxism--and I consider myself a partial one--have never read Marx) is that Marx considered capitalism, in its state as, you note, as a necessary precursor, to be a good thing. Capitalism, for its many, many, many faults, is a damned sight better for your average person than feudalism is. (This is a reason why, despite my own beefs with capitalism and even mixed economies, I will hold up pitchforks and torches when the anarcho-capitalists come to town, because anarcho-capitalism is functionally either wishcasting nonsense or feudalism in a funny hat--no intermediate stage.)
I'm not sure Marx would have agreed that capitalism was good, but rather that it was necessary for society to pass through a capitalist phase in order to get to the really good part, communism.
The sad thing is, most people who graduated high school in countries other than the United States know this stuff. Considering the impact these ideas have had on the world, they are worth learning about. I had to explain this stuff to a lot of students when I was in academia, except the foreign students.
To be clear, I mean "good" in a relative sense. I mean--like, capitalism, to Marx, is if not a strict positive development, it's real, real close to that relative to the alternatives at the time Marx was writing.
Also, yes, that this is obvious to people who didn't have a K-12 education in the United States is...troubling. But so are a lot of things about K-12.
> most people who graduated high school in other countries know this
Really? When traveling, I've often found myself surprised by the history that others don't know.
Granted, as an American I had indeed not known any of what you just said before, but I would be rather surprised if your perception of what most people know wasn't skewed.
This is a very thorough and informative post, and there's nothing in it which I would outright disagree with.
I was under the impression that Mao's unorthodox approach to revolution built on peasants rather than the industrial proletariat was and is seen, by the CCP itself, to be vindicated by their accession to power, and that that particular Maoist tenet was never really overturned.
I've never studied Marxism itself in depth, only come into contact with it in studying history, and it seems that you have a more in-depth understanding, but I thought that what Historical Materialism held about the necessity of capitalism as a precursor to communism was that in concentrating property and the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it oppressed the proletariat, giving them an incentive to revolt if they ever developed class consciousness, and caused conflict between different bourgeois groups (e.g. governments), causing capitalism to be completely unstable and necessarily bringing about its demise.
That is a very different chain of events to a communist government deliberately allowing a capitalist economy to flourish under its aegis. Capitalism leads to exploitation and thus unrest, but the most unwavering ideological pillar of the CCP is that the Party fosters social harmony and that it has an absolute mandate to rule and should not cede power. Deng himself made that clear when he decided to crush the Tiananmen protests, and the modern CCP has not budged on that front either.
Did Marx ever consider what a communist government who came to power before the full development of productive forces should do? Given that the reality Deng found himself in was at odds with the orthodox prediction of historical development, was his dialectical approach actually in line with Marxist orthodoxy?
> I thought that what Historical Materialism held about the necessity of capitalism as a precursor to communism was that in concentrating property and the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it oppressed the proletariat, giving them an incentive to revolt if they ever developed class consciousness, and caused conflict between different bourgeois groups (e.g. governments), causing capitalism to be completely unstable and necessarily bringing about its demise.
That's the most important part of capitalism's role in the dialectical framework, but the theory of productive forces is also very important.
Communists were not oblivious to the fact that capitalism is by far the most powerful engine of wealth creation and technological innovation in history. They recognized that fairly early on, which is why Marx believed that it was important to have a transitional stage between pure capitalism and pure communism, which he outlined in Gotha. I believe he discussed industrial automation as a way to free the majority of people from work. When Lenin needed to rebuild the Soviet economy after WWI, he turned to capitalism as the right tool for the job, and openly referred to it as capitalism.
I think Deng's approach was fairly well in line with Marxist orthodoxy in terms of the necessity of the development of productive forces, but he was more permissive of private ownership of capital and property than Marx would have been. Marx advocated a society with socialized ownership and management of the economy during this period, but Deng embraced a market economy instead. Both Marx and Deng believed that during this period, people would be rewarded proportionally to their contribution, not their need.
Deng's famous cat quote was an attempt to reconcile his use of the market with Marx's theory, by asserting that it didn't really matter by which method one developed the productive forces, as long as the method was effective. After all, it's only a transitional stage, and it's over when the productive forces can generate the wealth and goods necessary to support communism, so if a market economy gets you there fastest, why not use it? It's difficult to know how long Marx thought that would take, but I suspect he had a faster time scale in mind than Deng had.
Some good points, twablalock, but you left out some essential stages in the history.
To start, Marx predicted that the alleged contradictions in capitalism in advanced industrial economies would lead to a workers revolution, with a pre-industrial country going first to socialist economics without the capitalist phase being seen as rather dubious. When decades went by and this failed to happen, it lead to a great crisis in the communist movement. One faction, lead by Eduard Bernstein concluded that revolution was impossible and so joined in with the social democrats, hoping to bring about socialism by gradual reforms.
The other faction, lead by Lenin, stuck with revolution as the means, but lead by a tightly-disciplined group of intellectually-oriented political activists. Lenin also thought that revolution had failed to occur because European nations used the profits from imperialism to pay-off the workers. That is important because he also thought this system, once it had expanded around the world, would lead to a world war that would destroy it, and then all the workers would revolt.
That in turn mattered because Russia, as a largely pre-industrial state, was not seen by marxist ideology as ready for communism, and so it would seem the communists should not try to provoke a revolution there, but Lenin believed that after the European war and communist revolutions there, the industrialized would aid a Russian communist state.
Well the great war came, the Russian communists started a revolution and took over, but after the war capitalism did not collapse. The question then was whether to switch to a capitalist state, or try to go ahead to socialism anyway. Lenin pushed for the first option, then died, there was a long power struggle between Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin, with the last eventually winning.
Stalin said he was for the capitalism option, but after a while switched to a brutal, totalitarian version of socialism, and this produced very rapid industrialization, but never a transition to true egalitarian socialism.
But in the meantime Mao took this to be proof that a non-industrialized nation could move directly to industrialization and eventually true communism (as did a great many 3rd world leaders and revolutionaries), and so when he came to power, went ahead with an even more brutal version.
In both cases, Russia and China, totalitarian industrialization eventually stagnated and went backwards. The Russians, under Putin, eventually opted for crony capitalism, the Chinese for a freer but still quite corrupt version.
It's a long, crazy story, full of delusions and failed predictions.
> Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.
Yes. The irony of course is that prior to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and publishing the April Theses, Marxists in Europe, Marxists in Russia, and even the leading cadre of the Bolsheviks expected the same thing in Russia - that Lenin would support the provisional government formed by the February revolution. The Russians advised the Chinese CP not to do what they did. Of course, China had even less of a proletariat than Russia. When the KMT government fled to Taiwan in December 1949, only one ambassador left with them instead of remaining on the mainland - the Soviet Union's.
> Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.
Right. Lenin wrote a rebuttal to what he called infantile left wing communists in 1920, which was before the NEP when they really started saying capitalism had been restored in Russia. Stalin disbanded the Comintern and spoke of socialism in one country. Khrushchev was called a revisionist by Mao and Hoxha, and he switched a lot of capital production over to production of consumer goods. Actually people were probably right, because that really was the beginning of the end of the Russian (and Eastern European) economy which had been growing like gangbusters prior to that.
The economy has been growing, but the growth was not sustainable for a number of reasons - after 20 or so years of 'communism' the planned economy started massively missallocating investments, the technical expertise carried over from germany and eastern europe after the war was less and less relevant, and many of the people who got to the top were clueless sociopaths. There was no real pressure for effectivity - it took for example about 10 years to develop a consumer car in a socialist country, and then they could not hit production targets, whereas in the West cars were abundant and cheap. And then there were price controls. The market did not work, because it was forbidden from doing it, and the alternatives did not work either, so the economy went bust.
The dust bowl was caused by a natural drought combined with individual farmers using bad practices.
The US Government paid an army of researchers to solve the problem and go into the field and teach the farmers about soil erosion, etc. Also the rains returned.
The US government also created a program in which 100's of millions of trees were planted across more than 18,000 linear miles in a massive attempt to reduce the wind-caused erosion and dust storms.
The american government never claimed control over people's decision to farm that land. Certainly never did by force.
Also, I've said it elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: No amount of whataboutism changes what happened here.
Mao is quite possibly the most murderous, irrational dictator of all time. The communists party of China has more blood on their hands than the German Nazi party.
Estimates of Stalin's body count range from 14 million to 70 million, so he's at least a close second. And Pol Pot might hold the record for rate of mass killing, wiping out over 2 million people in six weeks.
Some people scoff when I ridicule them for saying "Communism has never been tried." No, the communists have never been tried - in a court of law.
Honestly, the sort of True Believer who classifies Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, etc, as all "true Scotsman" communism isn't worth talking to about communism anyway.
Rare is the person who is willing to describe some randomly selected totalitarian dictatorship as a "capitalist" regime.
That's because capitalism isn't a form of government. It's an economic system. Communism is both a form of government and an economic system (although there is variance in the form of the economic aspect of it).
If you look at where the actual political power lies in (say) the United States, it's clear that capitalism is both a form of government and an economic system too.
Until we create a form of government where money and politics can't mix, a country's economic system and form of government will always be complementary.
My point stands. It doesn't matter if you're bribing someone with seashells or hundred dollar bills: it's still a bribe.
Corruption can exist in any form of government. Just because a form of government might be moneyless doesn't mean that you can't exert influence with power or wealth.
Hand-wavy conflation of communism-as-economic-system and communism-as-government to describe brutal totalitarian states that happen to have a communist economic system is exactly what I'm talking about. It's an easy thing to do, because
>Communism is both a form of government and an economic system (although there is variance in the form of the economic aspect of it)
My example of calling some randomly selected totalitarian dictatorship "capitalist" isn't interesting or informative because it's clearly referencing the economic system, rather than making the implicit claim that it's also the government form, as does describing the regime as "communist".
It's actually totalitarian dictatorships that get me passionate. Try reading my comments again. Or, just keep saying "communism" until it becomes what I was talking about -- it worked for the vast majority of Western culture.
Rare is the person who is willing to describe some randomly selected totalitarian dictatorship as a "capitalist" regime.
It's rare to see people being shot trying to escape a capitalist regime. That's one way to resolve the moral ambiguity that some here are trying to introduce.
The more I read about Mao (from the Four Pests campaign to making peasants create mini-furnaces in their backyards), I'm amazed how someone as incompetent could ever come to rule a country.
I mean, Sacha Baron Cohen could play him in a parody and it would come across as more sensible than the real thing
Probably. Wiki estimates WWII deaths at 50-80 million, and Mao's deaths at 40-70. Given Japan's role in WWII, it's pretty likely Mao has a higher raw death count than just the deaths caused by the Nazi side of the war.
Most of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.
I'm not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China's population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can't really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events.
Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.
It's certainly true that China massively changed its land use policy following the PRC's formation. What I think is most interesting to consider, though, is whether the collectivization process had the same catalyzing action as enclosure in pre-industrial Britain. In both cases villages were pushed from a subsistence-driven existence towards top-down control, trade, and an uprooting of labor that could subsequently move to cities and work in factories. China's development into a modern industrial country may well have been premised on the massive application of violence of the early PRC era.
This prompted me to Google for "enclosure vs collectivization" which brought up this interesting-looking article on the topic [0].
China has far less arable land per capita than most large countries.[1] There's not much slack for major screwups in agriculture. This has been a major driving factor in China's history. China had six famines in the 20th century, and a long history of them before that. The Great Leap Forward was the last and worst one.
> The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.
Most countries in the world did significantly better post-WW2 than before. No thanks to their leaders, but thanks to technological progress.
This is an interesting point. My wife is Chinese and she explained this to me: people like her grandfather are thankful for Mao while they acknowledge his failures. The reason is simple: before Mao there was a long period of Chaos, and before that the Qing dynasty was an extremely oppressive government. Without going into too many details, the peasants were being screwed for hundreds of years. Because of Mao's efforts China became a unified country. Sure, there were decades of terror and famine the severity of which are astonishing, but they were relatively brief historicaly speaking and the people were just happy that China was "theirs". Moreover, the government was stable enough that the people who came after Mao were able to improve things, which didn't always happen historically.
It's not a great comparison but a similar thing happened with the Ming dynasty. If I recall correctly, the Ming emperor was terribly brutal, but people were so thankful that it wasn't the mongolians that they didn't care.
In a broader Chinese context it makes some sense to see the suffering and rebellions of the late Ming dynasty and perhaps until Deng Xiaoping as the 'usual' chaos of a dynastic transition.
The dead don't have living rooms or portraits to hang there. Nor do they have children, or grand children.
This is the same logic that is often heard in day to day life after corporate reorganisations "everyone now agrees that the redundancies were unfortunate but necessary."
Maybe it's a kind of large scale Stockholm syndrome. On the other hand, it was countryside Chinese vs City or intellectual Chinese (Han, specifically) so there isn't an ethnicity vs ethnicity aspect to it, which probably makes it less troublesome in people's minds.
If you were to refer to an ethnically Chinese person in Taiwan as "Chinese", they might get irate pretty quickly if they though you were mixing up the ROC with the PRC. And then they'd let you know that they prefer "Han" as an ethnicity marker separate from national identity. Or, that's how my limited experience has gone...
Funny that I still hear and read people who see things that way in the modern west: "if you don't contribute, you deserve nothing from society". Welfare still seems to be taboo for some voters.
I prefer to view the Great Leap Forward as a tragedy, rather than a genocide or mao murdering people like it's a plain open intent. I mean if I align myself with the definition of genocide and wikipedia's article, am I so wrong? To me, the moment you starts saying "this was bad, this was worse", you take sides, and I don't think it's objective enough when you deal with a country that is so far away from the west.
I think chinese leaders were eager to not see their oldest civilization falter (at least it was their political belief), so they chose to make huge sacrifices, meaning cracking down on remote rural places that were anti state.
Pointing fingers and comparing the number of people dying with the soviets or hitler, and dismissing the context seems a little easy, and will be perceived as taking sides.
If we're recommending books, there's "Music, Food and Love: A Memoir" by Guo Yue (whose name means "Little leap forward"). He grew up in the hutongs of Beijing, when food and traditional music were pretty much the only subjects you could talk about freely, he therefore became a musician and chef.
In fact he requested the position of flautist when he was forced to join the Red Army, a remarkable request, only more remarkable because they made the position for him.
Every chapter of his life is defined by the smells and flavours of the food at that time, and so each chapter ends with those recipies so you can experience it yourself.
He now owns a restaurant in London where he hosts 16 course banquets of his food, serenading the diners with his flute music.
He's a lovely guy and his memoir, and food is the closest I'll ever get to having a real feel for that time.
Half of China population is under 30 and only known the good times of plenty. The original revolution, the cultural revolution,,etc are as about remote as the US revolutionary war and civil war to US citizens.
the 'great leap forward' was a result of the policy of forcing all the peasants into big collective farms (aka collectivization); it has been a tragedy in all former communist countries that adopted this policy (Poland didn't adopt it). In the Soviet Union it led to the famine of 1932-1933; this one killed seven millions.
Now the collective farms were supposed to press money out of agriculture, money that was needed for developing heavy industry; they did that, but it cost millions of lives, In China they also had strange notions of backyard steel furnaces in agricultural communes and the four pests campaign. In Russia they had the great terror - but that came later than collectivization.
A comment that begins "hahahaha another apologist" is a bad comment for HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Especially on inflammatory and divisive subjects.
that's because the previous commentator posted something against the known human history (read: wikipedia) from a unverified, biased source, and with a hn comment history of misogyny, antisemitic and racial comments, sir. i would rather show my frustration this way rather than other explicit words. sorry for the inconvenience.
Whataboutism refers to an appeal to hypocrisy, which this article is not. Your comments are pretty much the textbook example "And you are lynching Blacks!" that used to be the Soviet retort to American criticism of their society, which don't change the truth about those criticisms. America being terrible does not factor into the equation of whether or not this was genocide.
Basically, I think you may be right, and there is a lot to criticize from both societies, and the important thing is to keep doing it, and keep calling a spade a spade.
To require critics themselves to be blameless distracts us from the issue.
The United States voted against General Assembly Resolution 2758. In what alternate universe "did the US force [the Republic of China] out of the UNSC"?
I wasn't aware 40-70 million black people had died by police brutality in the US. I mean listen, it's a problem, but are you actually trying to stretch that far?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign