I am from China and this reply was translated by DEEPL. In my province there is a high school with outstanding results called Double Ten（双十）. We often hear stories about this school. This school was established to commemorate the Xinhai Revolution, which took place on the 10th of October. The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the imperial system and established the Republic of China, which retreated to Taiwan Province and part of Fujian Province in 1949, which was under the control of the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution that school was plundered several times because of its name. There were many absurdities during the Cultural Revolution and the victims were not bourgeois, maybe they were just returning from studying abroad, maybe they just had problems with certain people but were criticised for it.
Ordinary people in China respected both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. Although Mao produced mistakes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he established the People’s Republic of China and the industrial, political and military achievements of the Mao era laid the foundations for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Mao and Deng were not adversaries, they were close collaborators, and together they made China what it is today. (Of course without the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution perhaps China would be a better place today)
Workers did have a high status in Mao’s time, but the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, were not well off. In the north, a peasant could only keep 180 kg of grain, in the south it was 200 kg. In many places peasants therefore kept arable land for themselves and refused to allow it to join collective farms, but these were disparaged as “capitalist”. Some peasants felt that they could not benefit from joining a collective farm and wanted to leave but were refused. Incidentally, today China has about 500 kg of food per person and the quality has improved, not only in terms of corn and potatoes, but also in terms of meat, vegetables and fruit. Mao promised to give the peasants a better life, but from the 1950s to the 1970s the food situation in China did not improve much and could even be described as stagnant, with the vast majority of peasants still living in poverty, excluding some of the model socialist villages, and it was in this context that Deng Xiaoping began his reforms.
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms introduced Western capital, which came to China to exploit the Chinese. But on the other hand, the Western investment also increased China’s productivity and a large number of peasants became workers, which did not affect China’s agricultural production, as there were too many peasants compared to the cultivated land. As for agriculture, since Deng Xiaoping no longer collected surplus grain but used taxes, farmers would not only grow 180 kg or 200 kg of grain, they were willing to grow more.
Every era has its own problems, but to reject reform because of the problems is like 因噎废食（Refusing to eat because of fear of food getting stuck in the throat）
Without Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, socialist China would probably have disappeared long ago, as the Soviet Union did. Marxism is about keeping up with the times. Mao’s measures were out of date and therefore had to be reformed, and the left had to be realistic.
Great leap forward was not a mistake. It’s the unavoidable cost of choosing to be independent and sovereign. If China didn’t want to make the “mistake” of the GLF all they had to do is hand over the country to the Soviet Union like what Japan/South Korea is to the United States. Joint command army, military bases, advisors with authority over the president, all that jazz. Then you would still have your investments and your imports.
By making the “mistakes” of the Great Leap Forward in China and March of Hardship in DPRK, these countries retain the fruits of their own labor and remain in full control of the destiny of their own people into the future.
By avoiding the “mistakes” and taking the easy way out on your knees, you will earn the praises and suffer the consequences. Like how South Korean people can work honest and hard for 20 years and be bought out for cheap and not a peep is to be uttered about it. How the Japanese does the same thing goes much higher and face the same result into their lost decade, lost 2 decades, 3… 4… Like the “leaders” who gets promptly replaced and meet dead ends if they do not serve foreign interests, much less daring to stand up and make their own decisions. Like tolerating extrajudicial bases, like accepting to put targets on their backs and pretend it increase defense, like the treaties that forever serves the need of the “ally” at the cost of yourself. There is no end to this torture. You can be sucked for decades and it will not stop until you die. We are in 2022 and just last week US automakers demanded forced technological transfers of key secrets from South Korea battery makers. You can’t even keep crumbs.
I don’t know why you think the great leap forward took place to keep the achievements of the revolution. The great leap forward was eager for success. The rapid collectivization led farmers to sell off the means of production and reduce their labor enthusiasm before joining the cooperatives. At the same time, they happened to encounter natural disasters, resulting in famine. Another absurd example is large-scale steelmaking. In order to increase steel production, iron products are put into the boiler to start steelmaking.Steelmaking is also to make iron products. Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse? I can only say that without the great leap forward, it may be easier to keep the achievements of the revolution
Rapid collectivization was a move to greatly reduce the cost of trade (movement of goods). It is Mao’s version of Transaction Cost Theory, in the west proposed by Williamson in the early 80’s, where the idea is that the optimum organizational structure is one that achieves economic efficiency by minimizing the costs of exchange.
In Mao’s words to Chen Yun, who is in charge of economics and facing the challenges of coordinating the economy: “You had trouble dealing with the 400 million peasants, this is like a head of messy head hair that’s hard to grasp. I have now put them into 4 million cooperatives, this is like making them into braids so now you can easily grasp all the hair.” In modern speak, instead of the government having to deal with 400 million individual units, Mao’s collectivization greatly improved efficiency by now only having to deal with only 4 million commune units.
The large scale steelmaking is a desperate measure to sustain heavy industry, and most of the stupidity lies with local governments, the central government led by Mao was at worst kept in the dark, not intentionally doing significantly stupid things.
Mostly due to the Korean war, China became a close strategic ally of the Soviet Union and was granted enormous help in building heavy industry. Ones that make steel, oil, tractors, automobiles, planes, which means capacity into tanks, military equipment. This kind of heavy industrial transfer in world history can be count on one hand, it is fundamentally different than getting assembly lines for toys, textiles factories (these already can make developing countries salivate), it came at a great cost but very crucial for independent industrialization.
It is after the pullout of Soviet investments and experts on top of soft “sanctions” due to the breakdown of relations with Khrushchev, that great leap forward was declared as a response. Because the alternative is to lose everything you put in, and suffer increased harm on top. Because the nature of capital projects, losing investment in the middle is literally worse than just never starting in the first place. Once again, like the march of hardship of DPRK, things like the great leap forward movement are solutions crafted that transitioned a dying country into a poor country, not solutions that just transitioned a perfectly stable country into poor country as people assume in ignorance, unable to see the incoming death.
This is not mentioning details that even if great leap forward was dumb, the dumb things often did not come from “Mao” but merely attributed to him. The mass boiling and wastage of steel & iron for example, is a much localized response to the central government’s advocacy for “increased enthusiasm”. It is not like Beijing thought mass boilers would help. In fact, nobody in Beijing did it while it is those far away from the central government that did such acts the most.
I feel like lots of those who criticise the goals of the GLF forget that this was a mass driven movement that the people themselves had to struggle through to gain revolutionary experience. Yes, leadership set expectations, but the intent was for the working masses to forge their own revolutionary destiny. It’s not surprising that great failures came from this as well. It’s a country of mostly semi-feudal peasantry finding it’s own way into the future. We have the benefit of judging it in hindsight.
Mao Zedong did not want it to become a violent movement, but unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution was out of control, and people even used it to report private hatred. Schools will even be criticized for teaching capitalist English, students will be exiled to remote mountainous areas, and historical sites will be destroyed because they were built in the feudal era. Therefore, the cultural revolution is a painful lesson. We must learn a lesson to make the future better. Translated by Baidu
Exactly, 90% of the country was illiterate pre-communism. China was horribly down in a century of humiliation and less developed than Africa back then. Anything at all is a miracle but I’m not even going into this line of perfectly valid justification.
Since the real issue is when you look into it, things like GLF had layers and layers of purposeful achievements unspoken, at the obvious costs that are the only being talked about and insistently attributed to one single man for political reason.
And nobody can come up with a better plan to the dilemma of the late 50’s to this day, and outside of these discussion places, the average lib is completely ignorant and don’t even have the mental power to conceive that they had a problem and GLF was a response to the incoming disaster in the first place, not just someone randomly waking up and creating a disaster because dumb clueless dictator.
Yes, which is why I said it’s not a mistake in the first place, results were good… Instead of China losing all its once-in-a-lifetime industries, and not having opportunities to industrialize like the African continent; instead of losing all your economic/military/diplomatic sovereignty and just be a lamb to the slaughter every few years like the rest of East Asia, China went on a path to become the largest economy plus an independent nation in its decision making.
All you got was 3 years of increased deaths (horrible event, yet objectively not anything special for China in the early 20th century), followed by the exact opposite, the largest increase in life expectancy unseen in human history on top of population growth anyways.
If one want to claim the results of GLF is bad, that’s fine, but the idea of historical materialism is you need to present what the alternative action should have been, and what the better result would be from that action, so people can judge if the claims are valid. Otherwise just a vague claim of “GLF bad cuz bad things happened” often heard on this topic, is like saying chemotherapy was bad because it makes you bald and kills your cells, and when pressed nobody can come up with an alternative better than praying it away.
A better solution would have been to refrain from a people’s communisation campaign and to curb the culture of pomp and circumstance so that there would no longer be serious famine. And such a measure would not affect the industrialisation of China. In fact there were institutional problems with Chinese agriculture in Mao’s time. I have a book on Chinese agriculture in Mao’s time, but it’s all in Chinese and I don’t know how to send it to you
I can read Chinese, merely communicating in English to provide information to other readers. Feel free to link Chinese sources, even though I’m probably aware of the bad sides of the famine you want to present. The idea here, among others, is that actions like GLF are done with a reason, often extremely good reasons that outweighed the bad, that again no solid better alternative can be presented even in hindsight, much less back in the moment in time.
If you refrain from communization, how is Chen Yun supposed to realize 统货统销 and distribute goods with the 400 million individual peasants? China today is not communized as you wish, and we are now armed with 21st century technology, what is the plan? Even today, collecting simple electricity bills from Wang family in random rural town #82742 is still more often unrealistic and simply not done. Even getting accurate information on the ground is near impossible house-to-house, and China is decades ahead and vastly more reliable than other largescale developing nations like India in this. Now what is the better measure that can achieve it 70 years ago?
If you curb the culture of pomp, (which is driven by localities, which they even did try to curb) where else is the resources going to come from? How do you pay back debts to the Soviet Union? Why would it not affect the industrialization of China? If steel factory #821 need 1 billion capital investments in year 1959, it’s a hard number. You don’t dump 1 billion you can see it evaporate, period. If you do not want to have industrialization affected, then your claim is 1 billion is going to be raised without GLF, the question is how else do you raise the input of 1 billion.
The people’s communalisation movement led to peasants selling their means of production and livelihood, while local governments exaggerated food production leading to high taxes, which, combined with natural disasters, led to the Great Famine. This was also part of the Great Leap Forward. The Great Famine did not conflict with what China achieved during the Great Leap Forward, but the Great Famine did happen as part of the Great Leap Forward. If the Great Leap Forward did not include the People’s Communization Movement and did not lead to the Great Famine, then the Great Leap Forward was good. that industrial achievements did not necessitate a people’s communisation movement and lead to the Great Famine.
This is true, but notice how the man-made aspect of the famine is caused by “local governments exaggerated food production leading to high taxes”, like you say. This is hardly a mistake of “Mao”. If I only make 80k, but decide to pretend to be rich and declare a 500k income on my tax return, do I blame the tax authority when I pay the corresponding taxes and starve?
Mao’s fault in this is merely trusting that officials weren’t just lying in order to shoot their own foot. Not to mention the government needed the money after Soviet investment dried fast. Even then, when output numbers were becoming suspicious and contradict new information, he was among the first to call it out. Not to mention we still have videos of his colleagues like Liu & Deng visiting satellite farms. The narrative that GLF is categorized under Mao’s mistakes, and presenting Deng as a contrast to such types of mistakes, is a contrast that does not stand when you look into it.
I am from China and this reply was translated by DEEPL. In my province there is a high school with outstanding results called Double Ten（双十）. We often hear stories about this school. This school was established to commemorate the Xinhai Revolution, which took place on the 10th of October. The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the imperial system and established the Republic of China, which retreated to Taiwan Province and part of Fujian Province in 1949, which was under the control of the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution that school was plundered several times because of its name. There were many absurdities during the Cultural Revolution and the victims were not bourgeois, maybe they were just returning from studying abroad, maybe they just had problems with certain people but were criticised for it. Ordinary people in China respected both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. Although Mao produced mistakes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he established the People’s Republic of China and the industrial, political and military achievements of the Mao era laid the foundations for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Mao and Deng were not adversaries, they were close collaborators, and together they made China what it is today. (Of course without the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution perhaps China would be a better place today) Workers did have a high status in Mao’s time, but the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, were not well off. In the north, a peasant could only keep 180 kg of grain, in the south it was 200 kg. In many places peasants therefore kept arable land for themselves and refused to allow it to join collective farms, but these were disparaged as “capitalist”. Some peasants felt that they could not benefit from joining a collective farm and wanted to leave but were refused. Incidentally, today China has about 500 kg of food per person and the quality has improved, not only in terms of corn and potatoes, but also in terms of meat, vegetables and fruit. Mao promised to give the peasants a better life, but from the 1950s to the 1970s the food situation in China did not improve much and could even be described as stagnant, with the vast majority of peasants still living in poverty, excluding some of the model socialist villages, and it was in this context that Deng Xiaoping began his reforms. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms introduced Western capital, which came to China to exploit the Chinese. But on the other hand, the Western investment also increased China’s productivity and a large number of peasants became workers, which did not affect China’s agricultural production, as there were too many peasants compared to the cultivated land. As for agriculture, since Deng Xiaoping no longer collected surplus grain but used taxes, farmers would not only grow 180 kg or 200 kg of grain, they were willing to grow more. Every era has its own problems, but to reject reform because of the problems is like 因噎废食（Refusing to eat because of fear of food getting stuck in the throat） Without Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, socialist China would probably have disappeared long ago, as the Soviet Union did. Marxism is about keeping up with the times. Mao’s measures were out of date and therefore had to be reformed, and the left had to be realistic.
Great leap forward was not a mistake. It’s the unavoidable cost of choosing to be independent and sovereign. If China didn’t want to make the “mistake” of the GLF all they had to do is hand over the country to the Soviet Union like what Japan/South Korea is to the United States. Joint command army, military bases, advisors with authority over the president, all that jazz. Then you would still have your investments and your imports.
By making the “mistakes” of the Great Leap Forward in China and March of Hardship in DPRK, these countries retain the fruits of their own labor and remain in full control of the destiny of their own people into the future.
By avoiding the “mistakes” and taking the easy way out on your knees, you will earn the praises and suffer the consequences. Like how South Korean people can work honest and hard for 20 years and be bought out for cheap and not a peep is to be uttered about it. How the Japanese does the same thing goes much higher and face the same result into their lost decade, lost 2 decades, 3… 4… Like the “leaders” who gets promptly replaced and meet dead ends if they do not serve foreign interests, much less daring to stand up and make their own decisions. Like tolerating extrajudicial bases, like accepting to put targets on their backs and pretend it increase defense, like the treaties that forever serves the need of the “ally” at the cost of yourself. There is no end to this torture. You can be sucked for decades and it will not stop until you die. We are in 2022 and just last week US automakers demanded forced technological transfers of key secrets from South Korea battery makers. You can’t even keep crumbs.
I don’t know why you think the great leap forward took place to keep the achievements of the revolution. The great leap forward was eager for success. The rapid collectivization led farmers to sell off the means of production and reduce their labor enthusiasm before joining the cooperatives. At the same time, they happened to encounter natural disasters, resulting in famine. Another absurd example is large-scale steelmaking. In order to increase steel production, iron products are put into the boiler to start steelmaking.Steelmaking is also to make iron products. Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse? I can only say that without the great leap forward, it may be easier to keep the achievements of the revolution
Rapid collectivization was a move to greatly reduce the cost of trade (movement of goods). It is Mao’s version of Transaction Cost Theory, in the west proposed by Williamson in the early 80’s, where the idea is that the optimum organizational structure is one that achieves economic efficiency by minimizing the costs of exchange.
In Mao’s words to Chen Yun, who is in charge of economics and facing the challenges of coordinating the economy: “You had trouble dealing with the 400 million peasants, this is like a head of messy head hair that’s hard to grasp. I have now put them into 4 million cooperatives, this is like making them into braids so now you can easily grasp all the hair.” In modern speak, instead of the government having to deal with 400 million individual units, Mao’s collectivization greatly improved efficiency by now only having to deal with only 4 million commune units.
The large scale steelmaking is a desperate measure to sustain heavy industry, and most of the stupidity lies with local governments, the central government led by Mao was at worst kept in the dark, not intentionally doing significantly stupid things.
Mostly due to the Korean war, China became a close strategic ally of the Soviet Union and was granted enormous help in building heavy industry. Ones that make steel, oil, tractors, automobiles, planes, which means capacity into tanks, military equipment. This kind of heavy industrial transfer in world history can be count on one hand, it is fundamentally different than getting assembly lines for toys, textiles factories (these already can make developing countries salivate), it came at a great cost but very crucial for independent industrialization.
It is after the pullout of Soviet investments and experts on top of soft “sanctions” due to the breakdown of relations with Khrushchev, that great leap forward was declared as a response. Because the alternative is to lose everything you put in, and suffer increased harm on top. Because the nature of capital projects, losing investment in the middle is literally worse than just never starting in the first place. Once again, like the march of hardship of DPRK, things like the great leap forward movement are solutions crafted that transitioned a dying country into a poor country, not solutions that just transitioned a perfectly stable country into poor country as people assume in ignorance, unable to see the incoming death.
This is not mentioning details that even if great leap forward was dumb, the dumb things often did not come from “Mao” but merely attributed to him. The mass boiling and wastage of steel & iron for example, is a much localized response to the central government’s advocacy for “increased enthusiasm”. It is not like Beijing thought mass boilers would help. In fact, nobody in Beijing did it while it is those far away from the central government that did such acts the most.
I feel like lots of those who criticise the goals of the GLF forget that this was a mass driven movement that the people themselves had to struggle through to gain revolutionary experience. Yes, leadership set expectations, but the intent was for the working masses to forge their own revolutionary destiny. It’s not surprising that great failures came from this as well. It’s a country of mostly semi-feudal peasantry finding it’s own way into the future. We have the benefit of judging it in hindsight.
Mao Zedong did not want it to become a violent movement, but unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution was out of control, and people even used it to report private hatred. Schools will even be criticized for teaching capitalist English, students will be exiled to remote mountainous areas, and historical sites will be destroyed because they were built in the feudal era. Therefore, the cultural revolution is a painful lesson. We must learn a lesson to make the future better. Translated by Baidu
Exactly, 90% of the country was illiterate pre-communism. China was horribly down in a century of humiliation and less developed than Africa back then. Anything at all is a miracle but I’m not even going into this line of perfectly valid justification.
Since the real issue is when you look into it, things like GLF had layers and layers of purposeful achievements unspoken, at the obvious costs that are the only being talked about and insistently attributed to one single man for political reason.
And nobody can come up with a better plan to the dilemma of the late 50’s to this day, and outside of these discussion places, the average lib is completely ignorant and don’t even have the mental power to conceive that they had a problem and GLF was a response to the incoming disaster in the first place, not just someone randomly waking up and creating a disaster because dumb clueless dictator.
The key to evaluate whether an action is good or not lies in it’s result, not for what purpose it is implemented
Yes, which is why I said it’s not a mistake in the first place, results were good… Instead of China losing all its once-in-a-lifetime industries, and not having opportunities to industrialize like the African continent; instead of losing all your economic/military/diplomatic sovereignty and just be a lamb to the slaughter every few years like the rest of East Asia, China went on a path to become the largest economy plus an independent nation in its decision making.
All you got was 3 years of increased deaths (horrible event, yet objectively not anything special for China in the early 20th century), followed by the exact opposite, the largest increase in life expectancy unseen in human history on top of population growth anyways.
If one want to claim the results of GLF is bad, that’s fine, but the idea of historical materialism is you need to present what the alternative action should have been, and what the better result would be from that action, so people can judge if the claims are valid. Otherwise just a vague claim of “GLF bad cuz bad things happened” often heard on this topic, is like saying chemotherapy was bad because it makes you bald and kills your cells, and when pressed nobody can come up with an alternative better than praying it away.
A better solution would have been to refrain from a people’s communisation campaign and to curb the culture of pomp and circumstance so that there would no longer be serious famine. And such a measure would not affect the industrialisation of China. In fact there were institutional problems with Chinese agriculture in Mao’s time. I have a book on Chinese agriculture in Mao’s time, but it’s all in Chinese and I don’t know how to send it to you
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I can read Chinese, merely communicating in English to provide information to other readers. Feel free to link Chinese sources, even though I’m probably aware of the bad sides of the famine you want to present. The idea here, among others, is that actions like GLF are done with a reason, often extremely good reasons that outweighed the bad, that again no solid better alternative can be presented even in hindsight, much less back in the moment in time.
If you refrain from communization, how is Chen Yun supposed to realize 统货统销 and distribute goods with the 400 million individual peasants? China today is not communized as you wish, and we are now armed with 21st century technology, what is the plan? Even today, collecting simple electricity bills from Wang family in random rural town #82742 is still more often unrealistic and simply not done. Even getting accurate information on the ground is near impossible house-to-house, and China is decades ahead and vastly more reliable than other largescale developing nations like India in this. Now what is the better measure that can achieve it 70 years ago?
If you curb the culture of pomp, (which is driven by localities, which they even did try to curb) where else is the resources going to come from? How do you pay back debts to the Soviet Union? Why would it not affect the industrialization of China? If steel factory #821 need 1 billion capital investments in year 1959, it’s a hard number. You don’t dump 1 billion you can see it evaporate, period. If you do not want to have industrialization affected, then your claim is 1 billion is going to be raised without GLF, the question is how else do you raise the input of 1 billion.
看起来你认为大跃进用饥荒换取了工业建设，并且它是值得的。那么我们的分歧在于是否值得的主观问题。我尊重你的看法，然我仍不认为通过牺牲大量生命换取工业化是正确的
The people’s communalisation movement led to peasants selling their means of production and livelihood, while local governments exaggerated food production leading to high taxes, which, combined with natural disasters, led to the Great Famine. This was also part of the Great Leap Forward. The Great Famine did not conflict with what China achieved during the Great Leap Forward, but the Great Famine did happen as part of the Great Leap Forward. If the Great Leap Forward did not include the People’s Communization Movement and did not lead to the Great Famine, then the Great Leap Forward was good. that industrial achievements did not necessitate a people’s communisation movement and lead to the Great Famine.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
This is true, but notice how the man-made aspect of the famine is caused by “local governments exaggerated food production leading to high taxes”, like you say. This is hardly a mistake of “Mao”. If I only make 80k, but decide to pretend to be rich and declare a 500k income on my tax return, do I blame the tax authority when I pay the corresponding taxes and starve?
Mao’s fault in this is merely trusting that officials weren’t just lying in order to shoot their own foot. Not to mention the government needed the money after Soviet investment dried fast. Even then, when output numbers were becoming suspicious and contradict new information, he was among the first to call it out. Not to mention we still have videos of his colleagues like Liu & Deng visiting satellite farms. The narrative that GLF is categorized under Mao’s mistakes, and presenting Deng as a contrast to such types of mistakes, is a contrast that does not stand when you look into it.
我说了，一项运动好与坏必须看结果。既然你承认由于大跃进的浮夸风和人民公社导致的对生产资料生活资料的损毁是导致饥荒的重要原因那么这不就证明这项运动是有问题的吗？人民公社化导致大规模的损毁生产与生活资料，不就代表了这是根本上的制度问题？政府推动人民进行新的运动，人民却做出不合理的事，即使这不是政府所设想的。那么这些不合理的事情的发生不就是由于政策推动的吗？大跃进期间的饥荒很大程度上不就是当时的政策造成的吗？大跃进期间的饥荒本可以不发生，没必要发生，但它发生了，所以它是坏的