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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SeaViewer who wrote (63558)	6/30/1999 2:11:00 PM
From: RealMuLan	Respond to of 132070

<<I was told the government gave away free lunches to show the 'greatness' of communism. >> Your sentence is only partly true. My sisters and brother were actually among the recipients of the free meals. It was kind of fun for young children, a whole apartment building (have 40 units of 3-4 bedrooms) had one dining hall. All you need to do was showing up to eat on time<g>. Since adults were working, so usually just children went there to eat. Not only lunch, actually 3 meals a day. This was going on for only a couple of days, before the gov. figured it out this kind of free meals would bankrupt the gov. very soon. Why the gov. did that? It was because someone (Mao himself and a couple of others) in the gov. thought this would increase the productivity a great deal. And why to increase the productivity? Because the productivity was so low in China. The whole reason behind the Great Leap Forward was because of the over-simplified and naïve assumption that if 500+ million Chinese people worked hard enough, China could catch up the US and Britain in terms of economy in a very short time. The slogan during that time was "Surpass the Britain, and Catch-up the US". Why China wanted to catch up the US and Britain? Because China was so poor, and it wanted to develop faster in as short time as possible. Nothing was wrong with the original goal. But the way to achieve it had become a laughing stock not only in Chinese history, but also in the world. I often heard my own parents making fun of that period. The Great Leap Forward was not for showing how great the socialism is (I prefer referring China as a socialist country instead of communist because China is a socialist country in terms of its economy. Communism is only an ideology in China for the last 50 years, a belief, sort of like religion. A lot of people in this country cannot separate one from another), although it would be a by-product if that movement were a success, which was not. Before anyone attacking me, I want to make myself clear. I just talked about what happened in China at that time. Make the judgement yourself, and I will leave my judgement to myself.