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

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY II
PRC took over a legacy of backward economy and the era of Mao made
rapid progress.
The second response is to claim that statistics based on information
provided by the Chinese authorities are not reliable. This
response however shows a lack of critical reflection in at least two
ways. First, it was the post-Mao political and professional elite who
had conducted a comprehensive statistical evaluation. Those Chinese
political and professional elite who had been the victims of Mao’s
Cultural Revolution and other political movements had no reason to
inflate statistics for the benefit of the Mao era but every motivation to
show the Mao era in negative light. Therefore, if anything the officially
sanctioned Chinese statistics are most likely to present a more
negative picture. Second, those who are critical of Mao and China’s
economic performance in the Mao era base their criticism on statistics
which are also provided by the Chinese authorities. To claim that the
statistics from China are unreliable when they could render a positive
evaluation on the one hand but use statistics from the same sources
to present a negative evaluation on the other is logically inconsistent
and hypocritical.
The third response is represented by a respected professor, Qin
Hui of Qinghua University, who argues that it is doubtful whether
the kind of growth in the Mao era is anything worth talking about.
Qin argues that India’s economic performance was as good as that of
China without much human cost and that the Chinese economy
during the late 1920s and early 1930s of the Republic period was as
good as and even better than the Mao period (Zhong Lantai 2006).
The underlying argument is that there could not have been, or cannot
be, better economic performance under a communist regime. This is
the reason why there has been so much debate and concern over the
comparison between China and India and an increasing trend of
positive appraisal of the Republic period under Chiang Kai-shek.
Amartya Sen’s famous thesis that democracy could prevent largescale
famine – famine usually is not really the result of shortage of
food but the result of unaccountable governance – is constantly cited
in this debate. However, as Chomsky (2000) points out, Sen’s other
thesis, that equity and equal rights to public goods are essential for
the well-being of people, is always ignored by the anti-Maoists. Sen
argued that compared with China’s rapid increase of life expectancy
in the Mao era, the capitalist experiment in India could be said to
have caused an extra 4 million deaths a year since India’s independence.
That ‘India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more
skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of
shame, 1958–1961’ (Sen 2000) is an argument that academics like Qin
Hui do not want to contemplate.
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