this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Something a lot of anti-China people don't want to understand about it. It had a lot of failures, sure, but China actively learned from them and became a stronger nation as a result. I think it is telling that the big part of the GLF that the west talks about is the famine, the natural disaster, the one part China couldn't learn from their mistake because it was caused by climate conditions, not by direct action. They talk about it almost like China was "smited by god" for daring to be socialist. Like they deviated from the One True Correct Path of Capitalism and faced divine punishment in the form of natural disasters and "authoritarian dictators."
There was the Four Pests Campaign contributing to it, though that impact is overstated.
It's looked at with hindsight. At the time sparrows weren't thought to be a major part of the ecosystem and were thought to mostly eat seeds. We now know that they were insectivores, but only partially due to the GLF. Had any other nation at the time undergone a national pest eradication campaign, they likely would've targeted sparrows as well.
You are right that that was the common belief, but it was long known that ecosystems are delicate things and carrying out such a campaign without so much as a test run on a smaller portion of the country to observe the impact was irresponsible. It was a case of Mao's genuine faith in the people backfiring due to not always being tempered by the "scientific" part of "scientific socialism".
"Sparrows can fly,"
Yeah, test results would not be 1:1 with a wider-scale implementation, but it surely would have still shown bugs getting out of hand, even if to a lesser extent.
That's true, their methodology was flawed as well. I get a sense that there was a sense of desperation at the time, that they felt they needed to industrialize ASAP and rushed a lot of processes instead of examining them to make sure they would work as intended.
there was such a feeling, and the idea that they could double iron production in such short time (which was absurd, and something other people better informed about the economy, like zhou enlai, did insist on saying before 1958) is pretty illustrative of that
i really like mao and i agree with a lot of what he wrote, he's probably the most important marxist for my own views after marx and lenin. but i think starting from 1956 he unfortunately kind of let idealism take too much of his views on development
First rule of the fight club: Don't mess with the birbs.
You are spot-on here, this is exactly, unironically believe and hope happens again to socialist nations. During the Cold War, there were many religious people in the West who unironically believed that the Warsaw Pact was the Antichrist. And let's not forget Adrian Zenz literally believing that he was "sent by God to punish Beijing".
If any god believes that people should suffer for turning towards socialism, or for any reason whatsoever, they must be opposed.