*Snort* *Giggle* *Chortle*.
I had written:
>
>I no longer find it funny...
I withdraw my claim. It *is* funny--in a sick, perverted, demented, and despairing kind of way...
Mao decides--throwing aside everything about economies of scale in industrial development that had been learned over the previous two centuries--that the people of China are to stop farming and make steel in their backyards. No one dares tell Mao that this policy is having a catastrophic effect on agricultural production. Thus when the local bureaucrats backed up by the PLA come to requisition the harvest, they take away so much of it to feed the cities that a very large number of people--perhaps between 8 and 80 million? we don't know in large part because the then-regime had no interest in permitting any contemporaneous documentation of what was going on--starve to death.
And in a bold act of staring the facts in the face, Mr. Burford categorizes this as a "weakness of a socialist state."
Surely it would be more appropriate to say something like my:
> Alas! The fact remains that Mao Zedong was (along with
> Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler) the head of one of the very,
> very few regimes that managed to kill more than thirty million
> people in this century. Mao's Great Leap Forward and the
> Cultural Revolution count as among the greatest human
> disasters of this century...
But instead Mr. Burford wants to blame the "irregular" climate of China. And he wants to plead that it is "ahistorical" to judge "Socialist China in its early formation" by "21st century standards of social management."
The first principle of power and rule--a principle very early established after the invention of agriculture, once it became clear that agriculture meant that the peasants couldn't run away from their fields, and thus that your thugs-with-spears could obtain an easy life for you and your priests by coming up to them and saying "your grain or your life"--the first principle of power and rule is that when your thugs-with-spears requisition grain, *leave* *enough* *for* *the* *peasants* *to* *live* *on*.
It is not by 21st century A.D. standards of social management that Mao Zedong is weighed in the balance and found (severely) wanting. It is by standards of social management that were well-known to Sargon of Akkad, to Alexandros of Ilium, to Agamemnon of Mykenai, to Minos of Knossos.
There is indeed a "problem of logic" here. But it ain't mine...
*Snort* *Giggle* *Chortle*.
Brad DeLong