SolarCross wrote:Yeah China had a "Great Leap Forward" instead.
Maybe you should read a history book.
China reformed itself after the death of Mao, from 1977.
Deng Xioping is widely credited, by Chinese, for having saved China.
Mao Zedong was a great military commander and founder of the modern Chinese nation, but his dictatorship was ultimately disastrous and led to the destruction of a lot of progress. This is all well acknowledged.
Perhaps if Mao would have done a George Washington and relinquished power things would have been different? Nobody really knows.
The USA had chattel slavery at the time of its founding, and this institution persisted for nearly another one-hundred years, until it was finally overthrown as consequence of the horrible American Civil War.
One factoid related to the events of the Great Leap Forward that is often ignored, which I throw in for the reason of this ignorance, is that the communes were intended to be self-sufficient, in order to enable China to survive a nuclear war--a nuclear war which almost indeed occurred in the 1950s.
I'm not an apologist for Mao, but people are clearly stuck in the past on China, and that is really to their own detriment. People have been criticizing China and dismissing China continuously, based on their perspective of China in the 1960s. Meanwhile, China is emerging as
the new superpower, and the achievements since the 1970s of lifting masses of people out of poverty since the 1970s are unequaled in the history of the world.
How did China avoid a serious recession during the 2008-9 events, when the whole globe was plunged into economic crisis--despite the overgrown America-bound export sector, which suffered from a tremendous secular demand shock? The answer is that it did so through state intervention in the economy.
I have heard people continually dismiss China for years, and every one of them has been proven wrong, in my eyes. So keep clinging to the vestiges of past Chinese failure, it should be sufficient to blind you from adapting to the changing world, to your own detriment. That is due justice, for those who prefer to wallow in ignorance.