The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

were confident and eager to unleash their production
power to turn China around.
Organski, while working on his power transition
theory, took note of the Chinese upward movement
and believed that China had entered the stage of transitional
growth. He also noted that some in the West
already suggested that the world make room for this
awakened and soon-to-expand China. 25 However, the
Chinese move soon turned out to be a misguided false
start. Once again, the Chinese leaders had taken some
very questionable measures. In almost 3 decades, instead
of making China great, they brought this nation
to ruins.
The most questionable measure was still about
government. Like its Qing predecessors, the CCP rejected
the Western democratic way of government.
Yet for blind-minded ideology as well as ill-advised
practical reasons, it chose to replicate the Soviet dictatorship
in China. 26 In so doing, the CCP created a
“modern” government that ironically retained the
fundamental flaws of past Chinese governments—it
was a government ruled by man but not by law, without
checks and balances, and good on political repression.
Thus although the CCP claimed to have broken
from China’s dynastic tradition, this political system
would soon make it a ruling party no different from
those of the past and was also largely responsible for
its paramount leader Mao Zedong’s abuse of power
and much of the catastrophic destruction he brought
to China during his reign.
Mao might be a great revolutionary and war fighter;
but he was no good on economic development. He
used political rather than economic approaches to run
the nation. In 1957, Mao launched the first of his many
political movements in the PRC. It was the senseless
“Anti-Rightists Movement (反右运动)” in which over
42