Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Great Leap Forward were encouraged to consolidate and develop
further. The issue of how to make the rural population part of an integrated
development still faces China today. According to Wen (2005),
even with the present rapid rate of industrialization and urbanization
there will still be 800 million people living in rural China by 2050.
Therefore, I would like to argue that the Great Leap Forward idea was
not some kind of madness, but theoretically guided rationality.
The economy in the Mao era
MAO: THE KNOWN STORY
There is plenty of evidence that supports the known story in which
hundreds of millions of people were affected positively. The increase
of life expectancy in the era of Mao alone, in the words of Williems
(2005), has given an estimated 35 billion extra collective years of life
to the Chinese people. Though living standards remained low, and
were for many at subsistence level, it is plain truth that except for the
Great Leap Forward Years of 1959 and 1960 and the Cultural Revolution
years of 1967 and 1968, Chinese economic growth was not only
steady but also outpaced most developing countries. By 1976 China
had laid down a sound industrial and agricultural base for an
economic take off. These facts are proven and accepted by both
Chinese and Western scholars in their macro studies (Meisner 1986,
Lardy 1978, Rawski 1993, Chow 1985, Perkins 1985, and Field 1986)
as well as micro case studies (Forster 2003, Bramall 1993 and Endicott
1989). Even the Chinese official statistics released by the post-Mao
authorities who shout loud anti-Mao rhetoric of economic calamities
cannot deny these facts.
One should be cautious in quoting claims by the post-Mao Chinese
authorities that intend to denigrate the Mao era, so as not to fall into
the trap that ‘it must be true since the Chinese themselves say so’. The
instinct that ‘the Chinese would not say things bad about themselves
unless they were true’ does not work all the time. Foster’s case study
of Zhejiang is a good example to illustrate this point. The post-Mao
authorities and elite intelligentsia in Zhejiang province condemn the
Cultural Revolution by stating in the literature that the it caused ‘grave
losses to economic construction’ and that: ‘the leftist policies caused
the gross output of agriculture over four successive years (1968–71) to
be lower than the that of 1967.’ But if one looks into the details one
finds that ‘Zhejiang experienced double-digit rise over the following
five years from 1969 to 1973. These were of the impressive magnitude
of 19.2 per cent, 16.2 per cent, 15.4 per cent, 10.2 per cent and 11.5 per
cent’ (Forster 2003: 147). The Cultural Revolution did not ‘cause the
disaster to the provincial economy’ and there was ‘a rapid growth of
rural industry’ (Forster 2003: 148).
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