>*Snort* *Giggle* *Chortle*.
Obviously I am not completely convinced by this argument. I register Brad DeLong cordial intellectual contempt but I am not quite sure what we are disagreeing about.
I have already amended the thread title once, to remove his name. I am not sure exactly how he compared Mao to Hitler of whether Henry's claim was that this was the "thrust" of his argument on another list. Really it is better only to criticise people where evidence can be presented.
In an earlier post Henry did quote Prof DeLong thus:-
> So I think that it is safe to say that--in dealing with Mao's China of
the late 1950s, a regime with totalitarian aspirations, a regime largely
closed to the outside, a regime in which high state officials like Peng
Dehuai were sufficiently alarmed by what was going on to sacrifice their
careers, liberty, and lives in an attempt to bring some sanity to
policy--the rule should be that we should take the bad evidence we have
seriously, and presume that the deaths were likely in the tens of millions.
<
I can see from Henry's point of view this is logically a comparison of Mao and Hitler, and does suggest that the deaths were of the order of 20 or 30 million.
BDL clarifies his own position in this post:
>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.
Just a moment. What is the evidence that Mao told the people of China to "stop farming"? That is not a very likely, or objective, analysis of what happened.
Furthermore what is the evidence that he gave the leftist lead he did, by purely arbitrary decree?
We are reviewing this in a context in which the Chinese regime has gone over Mao's errors with a toothcomb internally, and has published detailed criticisms. It is clear that Henry Liu has access to these sort of sources.
It is not necessary to write loosely to be able to accuse Mao with evidence of grave errors. But if a figure is chosen like 30 million, as with the excess deaths in the former Soviet Union there has to be scholarship about whether the figure is accurate and what the various causes were.
Henry has posted one piece of evidence that the 1953 census data figures were inaccurately high, and has thereby questioned the order of magnitude of the figures.
BDL:
>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.
This is indeed a complex problem of control in an early socialist society. Mao is responsible for how he argued on the Central Committee, but it is more complex than a story of a tyrant to whom people grovel.
Since this post, it appears BDL agrees with some of the point made by Carrol that Zhou described the eagerness of thousands to report success.
Another aspect of this, seems to be that Mao favoured the personal visit of inspection rather than statistics. This resulted in certain villages or enterprises being promoted as a model. Part of the preliminary skirmishing before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution was that the different sides were promoting different model villages.
The economic policy of the Cultural Revolution was dropped in the 70's not by finding new models but as far as I can see, by toning down the emphasis on models, and improving statistics.
Nevertheless Mao and those who thought like him were not silly in the early years after the Revolution to be wary of simply importing Soviet methods which could be bureaucratic in practice. People's China had the rare experience of being able to build up social and economic practices by trial and error, with lots of enthusiasm, in the liberated base areas.
Mao was correct that the Chinese people needed to change their cultural level rapidly in the 50's if China was to catch up with the rest of the world. People learn best by combining practice with theory. The theory was probably much too deficient in the Great Leap Forward, but the practice is no more illogical than asking chemistry students to perform chemical experiments.
How did Britain for a time become pre-eminent in the industrial revolution? Thousands, probably tens of thousands, spent their lives with inefficient techniques, making charcoal in the woods, collecting iron, puddling, finishing, and interacting with the rising bourgeoisie.
When Wordsworth visited the river Wye, at the height of the Napoleonic War, and produced "lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey", 1798, he wrote -
" Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive woods run wild; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless wood, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone."
Now Wordsorth preferred to see this "green pastoral landscape" which evoked for him the "still, sad music of humanity".The people who were lurking uncertainly for him in these houseless woods he preferred to assume were odd hermits. But the Forest of Dean had long had independent free miners and it is more likely that stimulated by the war, humanity was in fact really represented by them, having their own little leap forward.
All right, there was no Mao to spur them on and to tell them to be careful that bread prices might be high next winter. But I feel BDL loses sight of the enthusiasm that must have been there in China for building socialism and which must have been part of the self deceit.
The alternative is for a new country to be "sensible" and to cooperate entirely with the capitalist system as it has come into being in the world. In South Africa, with half the population not properly employed, it was decided this decade to sink enormous sums of money into a high technology aluminium smelter employing a mere 3,000 people.
>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...
The logic of saying that the historical formation goes back to barbarism is that "we" are judging Mao as if he was a person ordering around "thugs with spears". That is rather in conflict with the problem of over-enthusiasm for industrialising China. Presumably there is some evidence for it, but one of the reason why the Tienanmen incident was so bloody 10 years ago was because everyone assumed the People's Liberation Army was a people's liberation army, and it was not equiped with water cannon and other methods of controlling the civilian population.
If Mao and the CPC is to be blamed for loss of life in the late 50's and early 60's through famine, should they not be also be credited with managing the transition to agricultural cooperatives with much less loss of life than in the Soviet Union?
The need to learn from the experience of the Soviet Union is specifically discussed by Mao in his article, "On the Question of Agricultural Cooperation July 1955.
I deduce from remarks by Henry he has been emphasising the loss of life under the system of world capitalism. Everywhere agricultural revolutions occur they are major changes.
When you read of children been killed in the slum cities of the third world this is the result of unplanned capitalist agricultural revolution. Whose hands is their blood on?
To take one example from apartheid South Africa. I do not need to emphasise how much the USA and Britain benefitted from the extra surplus value extracted from the blacks through the apartheid system. A study in the South African Medical Journal February 1988, compared infant mortality rates in urban areas of South Africa. The IMR for blacks was between 7 and 10 times that of whites. Extrapolated to the annual black birth rate, this implied that an excess of 30,000 black infant deaths was occuring per year. Who was responsible for stopping that?
To come to more recent events, the dominance of neo-liberal economics has ensured that billions of dollars have haemorrhaged from Indonesia over the last year of so. The cost of this has been paid in lives lost through bitter ethnic violence across large areas of the archipelago.
Come, come, in the twentieth century civilised decent people might be expected to know that if you extract billions of dollars from an economy, fights may break out for resources. Why could that not have been factored in?
After all modern finance capitalism does not need thugs with spears to snatch purchasing power from the poorest of the people. But it can count. When it suits it to do so.
Many countries of black Africa have AIDS endemically now. There is no way they can afford effective western medicines. They will die in millions, for the want of redistribution of purchasing power in the global capitalist system, that would hardly be inflationary in its impact.
Is not this all predictable? As predictable as western scholars say it was clearly wrong for socialist China to try to make a spurt to harness the enthusiasm of people to promote an industrial revolution in a country vulnerable to natural disasters.
As I write this, I feel a bit of Henry's indignation in a way that may not help clarify issues with Brad DeLong, which is the proper purpose of polemic.
It is not clear to me that BDL actually said that Mao was similar to Hitler, but there is a suggestion of a comparison. I think he should make clear how far he wants to take it.
I sense however the question is more fundamental than respect for Mao, since it is not controversial that Mao made major errors. It is a question of respect for the Chinese people.
Chris Burford
London