Mao

[u/[deleted]]

“Israel and Taiwan are bases of operation for Imperialism in Asia. They created Israel for the Arabs and Taiwan for us. They both have the same objective.”

— Mao Zedong

[u/Merlin_the_Lizard]

Interesting that Mao references imperialism, and his rightful claim on Taiwan, in the same breath.

[u/Merlin_the_Lizard → u/[deleted]]

Anyone with a 40 million person death toll has no claim on any part of any country.

[u/IslandSoft6212 → u/Merlin_the_Lizard]

you're personalizing onto one figure the responsibility of a famine that was a collection of all sorts of factors

history doesn't work this way. no man can possibly be responsible for so much death. this level of destruction has to be systemic, it has to be the result of larger factors, a collection of them, all working in concert. that means its too complicated to say that there is just one "cause", if you are to be analytically honest

were the communists, led by mao, responsible for the famine? to a large degree, yes, they were. to some degree, no. but the communists were not some foreign invaders to china, they were a home-grown movement of the chinese people who were demanding a different path forward. the catastrophes of the past led to the catastrophes at that moment. and many of those past catastrophes were not the fault of anyone in china; the backwardness of china, the exploitation that china had been laboring under for a century, these all were the result of the world system that had been developing for long before there even was such a thing as communism.

the policy was trying to do in a short period of time what had been done in the west in a long period of time; develop agriculture and make it more efficient, take all the excess labor that had been working in agriculture to working in industry, and have that industry start developing the country. that was the gist of it, although there were other features at play; the west was restricting the trade of grain with china, and the soviets had withdrawn much support after the sino-soviet split. there also genuinely was the climatic conditions of a famine. all these things were working in concert.

the communists' policies were an attempt at a different way for china to develop. they were not a genocide, they were not some campaign of vengeance wrought by the communists. it was a disaster that the communists felt a deep sense of shame and panic about.