this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I don't think I've seen this position before and it sounds pretty wild ngl. Let me just lay out my understanding.
Mao disagreed with the party on the basis that he felt the peasants had more revolutionary potential than the small, new proletariat working in what few factories existed in China. Mao's arguments were rejected, and the party's commitment to rigid ideology over analysis of the specific material conditions of China led to them being crushed by the Nationalists and massacred. It's the whole reason that the Long March happened.
The few surviving members of the party regrouped, though they were hunted to the ends of the earth and had extremely little manpower or resources. Despite this, because they used Mao's approach of appealing to the peasants, who reflected the majority of the working poor, the communist revolution spread like wildfire, gaining more and more supporters everywhere it went.
Once the communists gained power under Mao's leadership, this happened.
I don't deny that the party before Mao had good intentions, but it seems to me that history has proven their approach wrong in an incredibly decisive way. They tried their approach when the party was in a better position and failed miserably, they tried Mao's approach after that miserable failure and it succeeded on an enormous scale. I'm pretty curious to know where you disagree with that.
Mao's approach led to the largest Proletarian Revolution in history that resulted in almost equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
In response to your graph and the question of what changed - antibiotics became widespread after ww2, and medical care in general advanced greatly.
Is there some specific policy you think mao implimented that had a bigger impact than those?
Not to mention the many miliions who died during the great leap forward, I'm sure they were reassured by such statistics while they starved to death.
US life expectancy in 1940 was 62, almost double that of China. The state of medical knowledge and technology doesn't matter if the people don't have access to it, as was the case with many Chinese, especially rural people. What actually made up a large part of the difference was not antibiotics but vaccines, which were around well before WWII, but Chinese people had virtually no access to them. Under Mao, China implemented something called the Barefoot Doctors program, through which large numbers of doctors were trained quickly and sent out to rural regions, relying primarily on Western medical knowledge, though they also used some traditional herbal remedies due to the massive amount of medical supplies needed to expand care across all of China. The program was a success and resulted in the sharp rise around 1968, when it was implemented.
Another factor was land reform and increasing food security. Yes, the GLF was a failure, but before the communists came to power, famines were an extremely common occurrance. Rural Chinese were suffering under extreme poverty and brutal exploitation under the landlords (really more like fuedal lords), and the communist uprising redistributed the land which allowed farmers to keep more of what they produced.
Generally, there were a lot of improvements in the lives of rural Chinese that were very basic and obvious. Anyone who went and observed their conditions could plainly see things that needed to be changed. But no other faction - the KMT, the invading Japanese, the European colonizers, the Qing, etc, hell even the communist party before Mao wasn't interested in trying to reach them, as I mentioned. The reason Mao got so much support from them, and the reason that he knew they could be radicalized, is because he actually took the effort to go out and live among them and listen and learn about what their lives were like.
Those reasons are why, despite the failure of the GLF (which we can discuss if you like), I would still argue that there have been a lot of material improvements for the people of China which wouldn't have happened under any historical faction but the communists. Notably, Chinese life expectancy has now surpassed that of the US, while China has emerged as a major economic and geopolitical power, despite having once been one of the poorest countries in the world.
Thanks for the detailed response, you've certainly given me a lot to think about.