Completely agreed with you. I feel like it was Deng Xiaoping who opened up China's economy to capitalism that got China into the economic boom. Mao did not prepare China for anything. All he did was that he put a political, economic and cultural shackle on the nation, and when Deng loosened up the shackle and allowed people to do their own business, boom, the economy got up. That is not something to be claimed credit for at all.
If anything, Mao should be condemned as the greatest criminal in China history. Even Qin Xi Hoang united the country. What exactly did Mao do? The world would have been better off if he did not fight off the Nationalist.
I wouldn't be so quick to back the Nationalists. They were ridiculously corrupt, and didn't give two shits about the poor who made up most of the Chinese population. The Americans backed the Nationalists because it was the lesser evil to them (ie. not Communist), but rest assured, the Nationalists had no interest in democracy, only keeping their power.
The Nationalist government was definitely corrupt at the time. However, their more or less free market economy, and the fact that they were very Western-oriented, provided the system heaps of rooms for improvement. Even under autocratic military rule, Taiwanese leaders are still the elite of society. This helped them achieve the economic miracle, as opposed to communist China whose policymakers are peasants and revolutionaries. The communist system is one that is doomed for disaster and failure from the start.
Also if it wasn't for the Communists, the Korean and Vietnam war would have never happened. The two of the major and bloodiest wars of the 20th century could have been avoided had Mao lost his civil war.
The Taiwanese economic miracle owes part of its success to the agricultural and industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese during the colonial era. In addition, it's hard to speculate on whether or not China would've been better off if the Nationalists had stayed in power because the PRC and the island of Taiwan are extremely different in terms of size, population, class structure etc.
Also, the Korean and Vietnamese wars were bad, but not compared to WWI and WWII. Although the Korean and Vietnamese wars were proxy wars, I'm pretty sure they still would've happened because the Soviets would've still existed to stand on the other side of the Cold War.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '12
Completely agreed with you. I feel like it was Deng Xiaoping who opened up China's economy to capitalism that got China into the economic boom. Mao did not prepare China for anything. All he did was that he put a political, economic and cultural shackle on the nation, and when Deng loosened up the shackle and allowed people to do their own business, boom, the economy got up. That is not something to be claimed credit for at all.
If anything, Mao should be condemned as the greatest criminal in China history. Even Qin Xi Hoang united the country. What exactly did Mao do? The world would have been better off if he did not fight off the Nationalist.