Central Planning Gone Wild
posted in Book reviews
In 1957, Nikita Khrushchev bragged that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in production of steel and other important products within 15 years. Not to be outdone, Mao Zedong immediately decided that China’s own steel industry would overtake Britain’s–then the world’s second-leading manufacturing country (14). Thus began the Great Leap Forward, one of the tragedies of modern history.
According to one estimate, the Great Leap Forward led to as many as 55 million “excess deaths” between 1958 through 1962 (334). That’s nearly as many as died as a result of World War II, which lasted longer and involved far more nations.
Historians have blamed most of the Chinese deaths on starvation. But Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian who is equally fluent in English and Chinese, shows in his book, Mao’s Great Famine, that the real cause was central planning. Dikötter gathered his information from provincial archives, which had been made available to the public during a period of unusual openness that preceded the Beijing Olympics.
What he found is horrifying. The Chinese Communist Party, eager to create a socialist utopia ahead of the Russians, created instead a culture of violence equal to if not greater than that of Nazi Germany. To say “people starved” makes it appear to be an act of God; in fact, millions were deliberately starved by officials who considered some people uncooperative or “rightist.” Millions more were beaten to death, often for the crime of stealing or hoarding a few ounces of grain for themselves or their families. Most simply died because government planners got it wrong.
The Great Leap Forward began by collectivizing rural farms. Farmers were no longer allowed to grow food for themselves and for profit; instead, they grew it for the collective and the nation. Kitchens were also collectivized; in many places, people were not allowed to own pots and pans because they were required to take all their meals in community dining halls.
To boost crop production, planners took people who once grew grain and put them to work on new irrigation projects. Other farmers were told to work on community iron smelters, thousands of which were built in the campaign to overtake Britain. To produce “steel,” party leaders required many villages to melt down all metal in the community, including farm tools. The resulting pig iron was often of much poorer quality than the source metal.
The lack of incentives to work combined with the lack of people and, in some cases, the lack of farm implements led almost immediately to reduced crops. But provincial leaders who were rewarded for meeting targets didn’t want to admit declines to the central party, so they reported great successes. The national government appropriated 25 to 33 percent of the reported crops for export and to feed the cities. But with actual crops much less than reported, this didn’t leave enough to feed the villages, who in many cases were forced to eat the seed reserved for next year’s crops.
Given that collective farmers had no positive incentives to work, party officials quickly began using negative ones, namely violence against anyone not working hard enough. One county leader considered violence a “duty” and told people working for him, “having a campaign is not the same as doing embroidery; it is impossible not to beat people to death.” Another county leader told cadres, “There are so many people working, it doesn’t matter if you beat a few to death” (300).
The people who passed out food in the community dining halls knew who worked and who shirked; they would dip to the bottom of soup pots to provide the former with meat and vegetables while the latter would get a watery gruel skimmed from the top. Eventually, some people were denied access to food at all and beaten if they were found with food. One boy who stole a few ounces of grain was stripped, bound, and thrown into a pond where he eventually died of exposure (294). In some regions, as many as 10 percent of the deaths were due to violence, not food shortages.
If the steel mills were failures, the poorly engineered irrigation projects were no better, often actually reducing the productivity of the land. Within a few years, thousands of poorly built dams collapsed. The failure of one set of dams during a storm in 1975 led to floods that killed 230,000 people (183).
Dikötter shows that these were not isolated problems but were both systematic and known at all levels of the Communist Party. When confronted with stories about the famine, Mao himself said, “It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill” (134). At the same time, Mao refused to take the blame or accept that collectivization and central planning had failed. When, by the mid 1960s, the evidence was incontrovertible, Mao’s response was to launch the Cultural Revolution, which purged anyone who dared to question Mao or the socialist ideal.
No one thinks American planners want to starve or beat people to death. Yet people who would be horrified by the idea of starving others to death because of political differences think nothing of creating artificial housing shortages in order to force the share of families living in single-family homes to fall from 65 to 41 percent (as proposed in the 2040 plan for Portland, Oregon). People who would be outraged by a government that beats people for not working hard enough think nothing of passing a law mandating a 50 percent reduction in per capita driving (as Washington state has done). People whose stomachs would turn at the idea of subjecting a young boy to a cold, painful death for stealing a few shafts of wheat still heartily approve of government controlling how everyone can use their property...
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