Looking back on the Great Leap Forward

I like the part where they killed all the sparrows and triggered huge famines when insects started devouring crops unchecked.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four_Pests_Campaign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four_Pests_Campaign</a>

Mao is quite possibly the most murderous, irrational dictator of all time. The communists party of China has more blood on their hands than the German Nazi party.

Most of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was <i>constant</i> famine before communism.<p>I&#x27;m not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China&#x27;s population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can&#x27;t really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events.<p>Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it&#x27;s not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.

And the survivors still put portraits of him in their living rooms.

&gt; ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’<p>Funny that I still hear and read people who see things that way in the modern west: &quot;if you don&#x27;t contribute, you deserve nothing from society&quot;. Welfare still seems to be taboo for some voters.<p>I prefer to view the Great Leap Forward as a tragedy, rather than a genocide or mao murdering people like it&#x27;s a plain open intent. I mean if I align myself with the definition of genocide and wikipedia&#x27;s article, am I so wrong? To me, the moment you starts saying &quot;this was bad, this was worse&quot;, you take sides, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s objective enough when you deal with a country that is so far away from the west.<p>I think chinese leaders were eager to not see their oldest civilization falter (at least it was their political belief), so they chose to make huge sacrifices, meaning cracking down on remote rural places that were anti state.<p>Pointing fingers and comparing the number of people dying with the soviets or hitler, and dismissing the context seems a little easy, and will be perceived as taking sides.

The book &quot;Wild Swans&quot; (written a good while ago) gives a very good insight into what it was like for a young person to grow up in this madhouse.

I found most horror stories retold here are very familiar to what I heard throughout the school years way back in Taiwan.

Half of China population is under 30 and only known the good times of plenty. The original revolution, the cultural revolution,,etc are as about remote as the US revolutionary war and civil war to US citizens.

the &#x27;great leap forward&#x27; was a result of the policy of forcing all the peasants into big collective farms (aka collectivization); it has been a tragedy in all former communist countries that adopted this policy (Poland didn&#x27;t adopt it). In the Soviet Union it led to the famine of 1932-1933; this one killed seven millions.<p>Now the collective farms were supposed to press money out of agriculture, money that was needed for developing heavy industry; they did that, but it cost millions of lives, In China they also had strange notions of backyard steel furnaces in agricultural communes and the four pests campaign. In Russia they had the great terror - but that came later than collectivization.