Ninety years ago today, the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai. There's a big celebration in Beijing, and Chinese media are in overdrive reporting on the successes of the Party. To round out the picture a bit, I thought it would be a good day to remember the Great Leap Forward, which is, in my opinion, the greatest failure of the CCP and Mao Zedong.
To keep things in historical perspective, here is Roderick MacFaquhar in a review of Frank Dikotter's book:
Nevertheless, a verdict can be passed on Chairman Mao. He seemed to relish being compared to Qin Shi Huangdi, the harsh ruler who welded warring states together into China’s first empire, but with such draconian measures that he has been excoriated by Chinese historians down the ages. On one occasion Mao admonished Marshal Lin Biao for implying that the CCP had treated intellectuals less oppressively than the emperor had! But Mao can rest easy. He will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured.
Justifying, or just plain ignoring, "the worst man-made human catastrophe ever" poses something of a problem for CCP apologists. Notice how The China Daily deals with the Party's "several serious mistakes" in an article today:
The "Great Leap Forward" came about largely because, faced with oppressive pressure from the world powers, Chairman Mao Zedong believed China would risk being "dismissed from the earth" if it did not reverse its backwardness rapidly, the book reads.
In the same way, Mao had intended to build an ideal socialist society by starting a sweeping "cultural revolution", Xie writes.
"Good intentions, however, failed to yield good results; they were followed by wrong methods and actions," Xie [Chuntao, deputy director of the Party history division of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee] said.
But even in those tumultuous years, the CPC was leading the way with economic and diplomatic changes that had long-lasting implications.
The country successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, ended its dependence on oil imports in 1965, resumed its legal seat in the United Nations in 1971 and signed the Sino-US Joint Communique the following year.
To overcome the ensuing hardship, senior CPC leaders went through thick and thin with the masses. A well-known anecdote goes that, in addition to reducing his salary, Mao gave up his favorite dish of pork braised in brown sauce during the famine years and had only a bowl of cornmeal porridge for supper on his 69th birthday.
While it may be true that Mao and the Party leadership did not intend to oversee a massive, man-made famine, Professor Xie elides the full scale of the event, failing to mention that we are talking about the death by starvation of something like 30-40 million people in four years. And wasn't that big of Mao: while millions of people are starving to death because of failed policies that he obstinately clings to (and crushes those, like Peng Dehuai, who tried to put a stop to the starvation), he gives up his favorite pork dish on his birthday. Now, there's empathy for you....
It should be noted, also, that the PRC could likely have developed an atomic bomb, etc., without starving millions of people to death. The ends of certain developmental outcomes do not justify the means of mass death. And Prof. Xie is wrong when he says, later in the article, that PRC leaders have been good in owning up to past mistakes. Full and free debate about the Great Leap continues to be repressed in China. Yang Jisheng's book, Tombstone, is still officially banned, so his views, like this point from the preface (sub. required), cannot be widely discussed in China:
In the chapter on population loss, readers will see that I consulted many types of
material, from both China and abroad, to confirm that some 36 million people died of starvation in China from 1958 to 1962. Because starvation also caused a drop in the birth rate, there were also an estimated 40 million fewer births in China during those years than would ordinarily have been the case. Together, that is a total of 76 million lives lost to famine in those four years.
None of that will be mentioned in today's celebrations, but they must be remembered, and factored into any historical assessment of the CCPs ninety years.
But on a more light-hearted note, one of the best overviews of CCP history I have seen today is Jeremiah Jenne's post, "It's a Mad, Mad 90th Anniversary," which views party history through the lens of Mad Men. Among his many great points he gives us this:
Apart from the whole Mao was “70% correct, 30% incorrect” blather which the Party has been clinging to like a crazy shut-in on an episode of Hoarders, there’s also a growing tendency to excuse the worst excesses of the 1958-1976 period as simply “Mao being Mao.” Like a kindly but eccentric drunk uncle who gave out candy to little children but also did to 5-10 for putting the candy store owner in a coma with a 2×4. I’m don’t count myself among the “Mao the Monster” crowd, but give the guy his due: He presided over some of the rockiest and most destructive events in 20th century history, and whether he was the mastermind or a dupe is kind of irrelevant.[7] As bad ideas go, having this guy run your country is up there with hitching a ride with Ryan Dunn or hiring R. Kelly as your baby sitter.
Whatever his other qualities as a political visionary, poet, revolutionary general or connoisseur of stewed fatty pork, when that many people die on your watch and the NEXT guy (or the next, next guy – sorry Hua) watches as the country embarks on a historically unprecedented period of economic development…that’s not good. That’s not even 30% not good. That’s like 70% sucks and 30% really, really sucks and all the Red Songs in the world aren’t going to change those numbers.
He also suggest that Hua Guofeng had a sort of Taoist career in Chinese politics....hmmm, I'll have to get back to that.
In sum, let's keep it real for the ninetieth anniversary....
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?book_id=31114&fuseaction=wwcp.title
"The literature on sanctions has largely concluded that they tend to be ineffective in achieving foreign policy objectives. This study, based on recently declassified documents in the United States, Great Britain, China, and Russia, is unusual in that it looks at both sides of “the China embargo.” It concludes that economic sanctions provide, in certain circumstances, an attractive alternative to military intervention (especially in the nuclear age) or to doing nothing. The author argues that while the immediate effects may be meager or nil, the indirect and long-term effects may be considerable; in the case he reexamines, the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Anti-Rightist campaign were in part prompted by the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies."
Posted by: perspectivehere | July 02, 2011 at 05:38 PM