12.3 — China: Mao, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution

In 1958 the Chinese government decided to overtake British steel production within fifteen years.

Backyard furnaces were built in villages across the country. Peasants melted down their cooking pots, tools and door hinges. Trees were cut for fuel. Labour was pulled off the fields at harvest.

The metal produced was, by and large, useless pig iron of a quality unusable for anything.

And the fields were not harvested.

The famine that followed killed somewhere between 15 and 45 million people, with figures around 30 million commonly cited. It is the largest famine in recorded history and it was caused by policy.

How the Communists won

Chapter 11.8 supplied the setting: China had been at war since 1931.

The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek bore the main weight of the Japanese offensives and were exhausted, discredited by corruption and by hyperinflation, and dependent on American support.

The Communists built rural bases in the north, conducted land redistribution where they controlled territory, maintained better discipline with the peasantry — which was a deliberate policy and a decisive one — and expanded their forces from a few tens of thousands to over a million.

The civil war resumed after Japan's surrender and the Communists won by 1949. The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, where they governed under martial law until the 1980s and where they built the economy of Chapter 9.13.

Mao proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949.

The first years

Achievements that should be recorded.

Land reform, which redistributed land from landlords to peasants — and which involved public struggle sessions and the killing of somewhere between one and two million landlords.

The unification of a country that had been fragmented by warlords and war for four decades.

Literacy campaigns and the simplification of characters.

Public health. The barefoot doctor programme trained large numbers of paramedical workers in villages. Life expectancy rose from around 35 in 1949 to over 60 by the mid-1970s — one of the fastest such improvements anywhere, achieved at very low income, and it is the strongest item in the Maoist ledger.

Women's legal position improved substantially — the Marriage Law of 1950 banned arranged marriage, concubinage and child betrothal, and permitted divorce.

And the suppression of opium addiction, which had been endemic.

The Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign

In 1956 Mao invited criticism — let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

Intellectuals criticised the Party.

In 1957 the invitation was reversed and those who had spoken were persecuted. Several hundred thousand people were labelled rightists, dismissed, sent to labour camps or to the countryside.

Whether it was a trap from the start or a genuine opening that alarmed the leadership is argued. Its effect is not: it removed the possibility of anyone telling the leadership anything it did not want to hear, which is the precondition for what followed.

The Great Leap Forward

1958–62.

The plan. Rapid industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation simultaneously. Villages were merged into large communes with communal kitchens, communal childcare, and collective work. Private plots were abolished.

Why it produced famine, and the mechanism has four parts.

Collectivisation destroyed incentives. A peasant working a collective field for work points has no reason to work as hard as one farming their own plot.

Labour was diverted — to steel furnaces, to irrigation projects of doubtful design, and to pest campaigns. The Four Pests campaign targeted sparrows, on the reasoning that they ate grain; the sparrow population collapsed and locust and insect populations exploded, which damaged the following harvests. It is the standing example of an ecological intervention with an unconsidered second-order effect.

And the information failure is the decisive one. Local officials, terrified after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, reported inflated harvest figures. The state took its procurement share of the reported figure. Where the reported figure was double the real one, the procurement took most of what actually existed.

Grain continued to be exported during the famine, and aid was refused, because acknowledging the famine would have acknowledged the policy's failure.

Peasants were prevented from leaving affected areas.

Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist whose father died in the famine, spent years in provincial archives and published Tombstone, the most detailed account — banned in mainland China. Frank Dikötter's work from provincial archives reached comparable conclusions.

Mao stepped back from day-to-day management afterwards and did not accept responsibility publicly. Peng Dehuai, the defence minister who wrote privately to Mao criticising the policy, was purged.

The Cultural Revolution

1966–76, and it was launched substantially to recover Mao's authority after the Great Leap.

Its stated purpose was to prevent the restoration of capitalism and to attack the "four olds" — old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas.

What it actually was.

Students formed Red Guard units and were encouraged to attack authority. Teachers were beaten by their pupils; some were killed. Party officials, intellectuals, doctors and anyone with a foreign connection or a landlord grandparent were subjected to struggle sessions — public humiliation, forced confession, physical assault.

Universities closed for years. An estimated 17 million urban young people were sent to the countryside for re-education, losing their education entirely.

Cultural destruction was systematic. Temples, monasteries, libraries, artworks and historical sites were destroyed across the country. The damage in Tibet was particularly severe — a large majority of monasteries were destroyed.

And it became factional violence. Rival Red Guard groups fought each other, in some cities with weapons taken from army arsenals. The army was eventually sent to restore order and the Red Guards were themselves sent to the countryside.

Death estimates range from several hundred thousand to two million, with tens of millions persecuted.

The Party's own 1981 assessment described the Cultural Revolution as responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic, and assessed Mao as 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong — a formula that permitted criticism of the policy while preserving the legitimacy of the Party he founded.

And discussion of both the famine and the Cultural Revolution is restricted in China.

What to make of it

The honest ledger, because both halves are real.

Under Mao: life expectancy roughly doubled, literacy rose enormously, women's legal status was transformed, the country was unified and industrialised from a very low base, and China became a nuclear power in 1964 and was never again subject to foreign dictation.

And under Mao: the largest famine in history, the Cultural Revolution, and a scale of death from policy comparable to the Soviet total.

Reconciling them is not a matter of averaging. The health and literacy gains were achieved by mass mobilisation of exactly the kind that, applied to steel and grain, produced catastrophe. The same system did both, and the variable that separated success from disaster was whether the policy required accurate information from below. Vaccination campaigns work when everyone is vaccinated. Grain procurement fails when everyone lies.

The turn

Mao died in September 1976. The Gang of Four, including his widow Jiang Qing, were arrested within a month.

Deng Xiaoping, purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, took effective control by 1978 and began the reforms of Chapter 9.13.

And the political settlement he made is the one China still runs on: economic liberalisation without political liberalisation.

Tiananmen, 1989, is where that was enforced. Weeks of student-led demonstrations in Beijing and other cities, demanding political reform and an end to corruption, ended with the army clearing the square and the surrounding streets on 3–4 June. Death estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand and remain uncertain. The event is comprehensively censored in China.

Where this shows up in your life

China's rise since 1978 is the largest economic event of the last half-century (Chapter 12.7), and it happened in a country that, thirty years earlier, had been through the Great Leap and was about to enter the Cultural Revolution. That is the strongest available evidence that a country's trajectory is not fixed.

And the information point generalises well beyond China. A system in which reporting bad news is dangerous will get bad information and will make decisions on it. This is a failure mode of any hierarchy — corporate, military or governmental — and the famine is its most extreme documented instance.

Chapter 6.17's finding stands beside it: India has not had a famine since independence, and the reason Sen gives is that a government facing elections and a free press cannot ignore one. China's famine happened in a system where nobody could report it.

What the next page covers

Chapter 12.4 covers the proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the interventions in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It covers what each was about, how each was fought, what each cost, and the honest assessment of what superpower competition did to the countries where it was actually conducted.