This week, I would like to take up where I left off in my July 17 column when reviewing James Bradley’s book, The China Mirage.
In his book, Bradley trashes Chiang Kai-shek as corrupt, inept, and greedy, while he praises Kai-shek’s political opponent, Mao Zedong.
Bradley writes of Mao’s early rise: “Mao put his social ideas into play, becoming a Robin Hood who took land from the rich and gave it to the poor. Mao’s policies against opium use, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage improved peasants’ lives. Mao pushed mass education, and in some areas, the populace attained a higher degree of literacy than rural China had seen in centuries. His movement spread, attracting many converts, and soon he had established bases in neighboring provinces. Chinese peasants supported Mao because he gave them land, which meant that they and their families could live. Mao also lightened taxes and promised resistance against Chiang and his landlord allies. Soon Mao held sway over constituency of five million people.”
Bradley also reports that each time Mao tried to develop ties with America, he was rebuffed.
That may be true, but that’s not the end of the story. As we know, after Mao won the Chinese Civil War, he turned the Middle Kingdom into a Communist powerhouse, where he took back the land from the peasants.
In 1955 and 1959 at least 550,000 intellectuals and dissidents were persecuted under Mao’s reign with the Sufan movement and the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
It only gets worse from there. Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to transform China into an industrial nation. This led to the Great Chinese Famine and the deaths of up to 55 million people between 1958 and 1962. Some villages lost 50 percent of their population to starvation.
To purge China of dissidents, Mao bragged about burying alive 46,000 scholars.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under Mao’s leadership, was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 65 million by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine, giving Mao the distinction of being the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
Never forget this was the result of Communism, a natural byproduct of Socialism.
In the next chapter of China’s history, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, led the Country in a process of Reform and Opening Up, starting in 1976, giving the people of China a measure of a free-market society.
According to Helen Raleigh, a Chinese immigrant, and author of Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Backfired, “The more freedom the party granted its citizens, the more the nation prospered. Within three decades, China transformed from an impoverished nation into the world’s second-largest economy. In that time, 800 million Chinese lifted themselves out of poverty.”
In July 1979, China reversed its policy and started encouraging foreign investment, resulting in rapid economic growth of 9 percent or more per year. Its GDP growth in 1984 was 15.19 percent. By comparison, the GDP growth rate of the US in 2022 was 1.94 percent.
Under Mao’s reign, China had an eight-grade wage scale, giving everyone the same pay no matter their worth. That changed after his death with wage reform that added bonus pay to increase incentives, and a piece-wage system introduced in 1979-80.
During this time of China’s interest in a free-market economy, many Chinese entrepreneurs went from poverty to becoming millionaires and billionaires.
Then came Xi Jinping and chapter three. “For Xi, the path to more prosperity was not more freedom,” says Raleigh, “but more government control. So Xi deliberately forced China back toward the socialist economic model envisioned by Mao.”
China’s economic growth is now shrinking, and its population is declining. In June 2023 youth unemployment was pegged at 21 percent.
Xi is now China’s president for life. That’s a nice way of saying dictator.
Raleigh said it well, “Socialism never fails to fail.”
—————————————
On Thursday, July 18, one of my favorite comedians, Bob Newhart, passed away. Known for his deadpan and stammering delivery, Newhart made you laugh without vulgar language. The current generation was introduced to his style on the Big Bang Theory. He was the last of the great comedians I grew up with. He will never be equaled.
