This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
A centrally planned economy.
Shiver. It's a bogeyman of the hardly-ever-Right that liberals and environmentalists want to foist a centrally planned economy on the US. They point to the Soviets, the Chinese, the human misery caused by perpetual shortages based on miscalculations of demand, the failure of price signals, the inflexibility of industrial response.
Those systems were inefficient, it's true. Consider:
The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1959-1965, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period. ... The central idea behind the Great Leap was that rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. ... To achieve this, Mao advocated that a further round of collectivisation modelled on the USSR's "Third Period" was necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives would be merged into huge People's communes. ... At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Astonishingly for such a dramatic social change, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5,000 households.
... On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers.
... With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where as a result of massively inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao's reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.
... Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a "dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public.
... In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to 1978.)" ...
Even authoritarian China had to reject the disastrous local effects of collectivized mass agriculture. Even a figure such as Mao was brought low by failures that led to the deaths of millions. But now look where they're at today, and also consider this:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true.
Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into.
In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment.
Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves.
Paradise Burned
Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911
For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease.
The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark:
The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon.
The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirredChinesenationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.
Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?
