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

HOW A MEDICAL DOCTOR DOCTORS HISTORY
had not only the power but the intention of freezing the Chinese
people’s standard of living.
As it is common knowledge, most of the concrete economic policy
measures that were responsible for the people’s standard of living
were not designed, let alone implemented, by Mao himself. The policies
of monopoly sale and purchase of agricultural produce, the
rationing of commodities and the grades of salaries, some implemented
before the Great Leap Forward and some after, were designed
by people like Chen Yun, Li Fuchun and Bo Yibo. The policy of
squeezing the peasantry and controlling consumption was based on
the Soviet model to accumulate capital for industrial development.
In fact Mao was not happy with China’s copying the Soviet Model
of economic development in which everything was planned from the
centre. The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to find an alternative
in which planning was not concentrated in Beijing. An indication of
this idea is the fact during the Great Leap Forward all the important
conferences about policies were not held in Beijing but locally:
Zhengzhou, Wucahn, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Nanning. Clearly Mao
wanted a decentralized model of development in which various levels
of leadership and the broad masses of workers and farmers participated
in the planning process of economic construction. It was largely
due to the work along this direction during the Great Leap Forward
and later in the Cultural Revolution that China’s post-cold war reforms
were able to develop differently from those of the former Soviet Union
and to succeed (Shirk 1993).
Mao’s strategy of a different approach was not only premised on the
fact that there were not enough technical and professional experts in
China when the Communists took over power. More importantly, as
brilliantly analysed by Schumann (1968), Mao did not want the professional
and technical elite to monopolize economic planning and
management. He wanted the non-expert to lead the expert (waihang
lingdao neihang) and wanted politics to control economic activities and
ensure that 1) a correct political line was upheld and 2) the masses and
revolutionaries who were not experts were not marginalized in
production and construction.
Of course to do that Mao had to bring the others along, and in trying
to bring his colleagues along he was very often bullying and dictatorial.
At the end of the day, most, if not all, of Mao’s colleagues did go along
and some of them even went further than Mao intended. According to
Chen Boda (Chen Xiaonong 2006), it was Bo Yibo, Chair of the powerful
Economic Commission who was responsible for the backyard furnaces.
In fact the three fatal ideas all came from Bo: China could catch up the
UK in two years (in this he was supported by Liu Shaoqi), that industry
should focus on the production of iron and stee, and that the target
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