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

26. Recent studies show that Mao was interested in the U.S.
model when he was a young revolutionary. But as soon as he
learned about Marxism and Leninism, he started to dismiss the
United States as part of the European imperialist aggressors who
had ill-designs for China. Mao showed interest in the United
States again during the Anti-Japanese War and shortly before the
2nd KMT-CCP Civil War broke out in the late 1940s, but it was
Mao’s attempt to solicit support from the United States against
first the Japanese and then the Nationalists. It was a matter of
strategy but not genuine interest. As the United States openly
supported the KMT during the KMT-CCP war, Mao believed that
the United States had showed its true colors—it was a bitter enemy
of China. As his view of the United States turned from bad to
worse and the Cold War was heating up, Mao decided to take the
“leaning to one side” approach to form an alliance with the Soviet
Union and to build China after the Soviet model in practically
every aspect. See Tang Zhouyan (唐洲雁), 毛泽东的美国观 (Mao
Zedong’s Views on the United States), Xian, China: Shaanxi People’s
Publishing, 2009; and many other recent writings about this topic.
27. The CCP sources admit that about 550,000 were “capped
as rightists.” But recent studies estimate that the number may
well be over a million.
28. See “New Year’s Day Editorial,” People Daily, 1958.
29. The CCP calls these 3 years the “difficult period” (三年困
难时期) and admitted that human errors rather than natural disasters
were responsible for the problems. See 刘少奇文选 (Selected
Works of Liu Shaoqi), Beijing, China: Renmin Press, 1985. There
is speculation that about 30 million Chinese people died of starvation
in those 3 years from 1959 to 1961. But the CCP has never
released any reliable information on this matter. A recent study
by Yang Jisheng is rather telling. “The Fatal Politics of the PRC’s
Great Leap Famine: the Preface to Tombstone,” Journal of Contemporary
China, Vol. 19, No. 66, September 2010. See also Frank
Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s Most Devastating
Catastrophe, 1958-1962, New York: Walker & Co., 2010.
30. Energy consumption and iron and steel production are the
key indicators in the COW National Material Capabilities dataset.
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