A glossed over and poorly reported disaster of the modern age has to be Mao's- Great Leap Forward. Mao was so inspired by Nikita Khrushchev's call that the USSR would overtake the United States in industrial production in just fifteen years.
The Chinese leader promised that the Chinese nation would overtake the British in the same fifteen years and so was launched a program, that would eventually kill close to thirty six million Chinese peasants who died of starvation while members of the communist party lived fairly well fed lives.
How did this come to be? When you have a cocktail of lies, stupidity and bravado disasters are not too far away and lurk at every turn.
Mao began by 'collectivizing' all private land holding in China, which was very unpopular with the peasants. This was done to improve productivity. He next said that steel production must go up substantially and encouraged and then ordered people to set up backyard steel furnaces to produce steel at home.Neither Mao nor the peasants understood steel making technology and the upshot was that most peasants melted their tools- shovels, rakes, pikes, axes in the smelting furnaces of their homes. The end result was that the tools were gone without any steel. The communist party was too afraid to tell Mao that his plan was an unmitigated disaster and that food production across China was dropping. What they kept telling him was that food ( rice ) production had gone up and that people were singing paeans in his praise! Mao like all megalomaniacs was so full of himself that he believed the lie.
The story has interesting take away's for all of us:
1.Science leave alone the rocket science kind is not common sense and its planning and execution is best left to experts.
2. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
3. Eventually it is the famous
'aam admi' that gets the short end of the stick, however else you plan it, simply because the rich did not become so by being daft and swallowing patriotic propoganda!
Did this have a bearing on India? I think it did, as by 1961 starvation deaths had reached a peak and Mao was desperate for a way out.
In 1962 the Chinese fought us in a short war...................a timely diversion!
1 comment:
Mao's cultural revolution was quite inhuman as well. and it is curious that whenever nations are down in the dumps they find some scapegoats either within, or outside. the pretext is used to go to war.In the case of the Black death in medieval england,the public found the jews as responsible for all the ills of society- widespread anti semitic pogroms were the inevitable fallout.Hitler used the great depression as his illness of germany,claiming alsace lorraine as part of germany and of course blamed the jews for all the ills of the world. sir as you have rightly pointed out absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hitler, stalin and mao did cause untold misery. their achievements were monumental but they did cause overall misery on a grand scale. and the war came as an initial boost to their economies. in hitlers case the second world war was also a fallout of the great depression. and it helped the revival of the USA's economy through its armaments industry.
Mao's use of the 1962 war may well have been for similar reasons.
another recent phenomenon was witnessed in Russia where the 1990's saw a decline in the effervescence of Russian economy. to divert attention, Boris Yeltsin even had soviet tanks invade Chechnya.
Lets hope and pray such trends diminish
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