Henry C.k. Liu
Subject: laws of history
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 07:05:27 -0400
From: Patrick Manning <manning at neu.edu>
Reply-To: H-NET List for World History <H-WORLD at H-NET.MSU.EDU>
From: Jeff Sommers, World History Center, Northeastern University jsommers at lynx.dac.neu.edu
I can't speak for Professor Webb and Mr. McInerney, but I don't think many who wish to understand the complexity of imperialism, followed up by anti-imperialist movements for economic development to escape the effects of imperialism, followed by the consequences of both, are accurately described by Brad DeLong's caricature of those positions as legitimizers or apologists for certain political leaders, such as Mao. Some of this may exist, but I don't think it's what motivates all those investigating these historical, and in many senses all too still contemporary, questions.
Some questions addressing the Chinese experience:
Did the Chinese revolutions attempt to break a 150 year long cycle of poverty and famine; and did they fail, succeed, or partially succeed? If something like 4-5% of China's population was dying every 20-30 years from famine, were desperate measures (which might include an all out industrial drive) to break the cycle desirable? Was it likely (not necessarily inevitable) that given the scale of the task, that there would be great failures along the way? Did the ending of the cycle of famine after the GLF failures in any way suggest some level of success with China's development program? This last question should would, I think, have to look at the entire history of the revolution with mean figures for growth figures and various health indices over its 50 years.
More questions:
Is it true, as Vicento Navarro of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health argues, that China's success from the outset of the revolution until the beginning of the Deng reforms in introducing health and hygiene measures resulted in it having saved millions of lives? This can be seen when we compare China to a comparable nation in terms of poverty and development at the outset of the Chinese revolution, such as India. For example, China's infant mortality rates equaled India's in 1960, but by 1983 were only a third of India's. Life expectancy was also similar in these two nations in 1960, but by 1970 China's people lived on average 10 years longer. This margin widened over the 1970s and 1980s. This was all done while their per capita incomes remained similar. Does this suggest the situation is more complex than an evil dictator at work possessed by bad ideology with Mao and China?
Russia:
If Stalin, Hitler, Mao, all get lumped together, does someone like Boris Yeltsin get thrown into the mix? Under his rule many millions have died (not close to the 30 million club yet) as a consequence of policies undertaken to "develop" Russia, which have had just the opposite effect. Infant mortality has drastically risen and people are dying much earlier. Millions have paid with their live through premature death. This said, I wouldn't just call Yeltsin, nor his legion of Harvard advisors, Hitlers. His intention wasn't to exterminate people. His policies though, and yes, he himself, can be judged. Yet, this dehistoricizing of historical phenomena by labeling everyone a Hitler serves both to prevent understanding of the causes of these tragedies, while simultaneously preventing us from developing the knowledge and tools to assist in ending their repetition when we just attribute them to "bad" leaders.
Brad De Long wrote:
> >This appears to be still the problem of logic....
> >
> >Of course it is a weakness of a socialist state that 10 years after a
> >revolution it is not able to manage resources and reserves to avoid
> >substantial deaths from major natural disasters. It is also true that Mao
> >and others were associated with major left errors which disrupted the rural
> >economy through the Great Leap Forward. But it is also true that the
> >climate of China is regularly irregular.
> >
> >
> >It is ahistorical if Socialist China in its early formation is judged by
> >21st century standards of social management of economies.
> >
> >Chris Burford
> >
> >London
>
> *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