[Good Government, Bad Government] Mao Zedong’s China, Deng Xiaoping’s China

If China continues its economic growth at the current pace, it will not be long before it surpasses the United States and becomes the world’s strongest economic power. This is the result of nearly 10% average annual growth since 1980. The Chinese people are full of energy and buoyed by hope.

But before the 1980s, China was nothing like this. China under Mao Zedong was a place filled with poor, hungry, and listless people. It was in 1949 that Mao Zedong’s People’s Army occupied all of China. Having achieved unification, the Communist government wanted to create a perfectly equal proletarian paradise on Chinese soil.

To that end, the very first thing it undertook was the purge of all opponents. It confiscated and nationalized all kinds of private property, which it saw as the greatest obstacle to building an egalitarian society, and eventually abolished the private property system itself. In this way, equality could be achieved, but people’s incentive to produce declined, and agricultural output fell rapidly. It was equality in poverty.

Beginning in 1958, China also launched the Great Leap Forward. It was an attempt to transform China, then an agricultural nation, into an industrial country in one stroke. Under the pretext of promoting industrialization, furnaces were installed in every village, and people threw not only household goods such as pots, kettles, and knives into them, but even dismantled tractors and fed them into the furnaces. But what this produced were miserable lumps of metal that were unusable. In order to meet assigned steel production quotas, all usable metal objects were melted down.

Mao Zedong also destroyed knowledge. To prevent class stratification from becoming entrenched, he regularly sent intellectuals down to the countryside to herd pigs. As a result, intellectuals disappeared from China, and for a time knowledge itself seemed to disappear as well. In the end, the Communist government under Mao Zedong, which had sought to build a utopia on Chinese soil, brought nothing but disaster to the Chinese people. It is said that between 30 million and 40 million Chinese died during the period of the Great Leap Forward.

After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the Deng Xiaoping government that came to power adopted significantly different policies. It began, in effect, to recognize private property. Once people were allowed to bring crops harvested from their kitchen gardens to market, agricultural output rose explosively. And when limited freedom to start businesses was allowed, and people were permitted to keep what they earned, countless firms were established and industrial output increased as well.

The private property and economic freedom that Deng Xiaoping allowed made it possible for more than 1 billion Chinese people to realize their potential.

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Original title: [좋은 정부, 나쁜 정부] 마오쩌뚱의 중국, 등소평의 중국

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2008-12-22

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=18&idx=10722