The media strikes (out) again on Jones resignation

EARLY COMMUNIST RULE UNDER MAO

After the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China was ruled by the “Eight Immortals,” which included Mao at the helm and Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao. Under Mao, factories were put under central control, land was taken from landlords and redistributed among peasants, and the population was organized into several million work units under pyramidal central control. In 1953, with inflation brought under control and industrial production restored, Mao launched his first five-year plan, which boosted heavy industry but failed to increase farm productivity.

Once in power, the Communists, who had rebelled against the despotism of the Kuomintang, became despots themselves. Trained as fighters not managers, they became inward-looking, conservative, authoritarian, suspicious of change, corrupt, and suspicious of intellectuals. Repeating a pattern established by the Chinese emperors that preceded him, Mao withdrew China from the international community and the international marketplace. He created a state economy which controlled and owned everything from flower shops to pig farms to munitions factories.

Mao era China was a remote, mysterious, drab place of ration cards, uniforms, Big Brother watchfulness—sort of what North Korea is like today.

Mao Cleans Up China

Mao was very successful in cleaning up the decadent mess left by the Western powers. Almost overnight, Shanghai was given a face lift. Chinese ghettos were torn down, hundreds of thousand of opium addicts were forced into cold turkey and child and slave labor were abolished. In Beijing, the splendid medieval wall with its 44 bastions and 16 gates, was torn down in 1952 to ease traffic congestion.

The opium problem was solved with a declaration that anybody found using it or selling it would be put to death. Severe punishments were also dished for prostitution, helping to virtually eradicate venereal disease. Mao clamped down on wife selling by ordering the keeping of marriage records to discourage the practice. It seemed like the only vice the Communists couldn’t eliminate was smoking. Most party leaders were heavy smokers, and no doubt peasants would have smoked more if they could have afforded it.

Instead of sex and drugs, Communists were encouraged to participate in volunteer public works programs and attend self-criticism sessions. Mao also encouraged people to head off to the frontiers of Tibet, Qinghai and Xinjiang. “A good comrade, he wrote, “is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater.”

Mao thumbed his nose at traditional Chinese culture, undermined traditional scholarship and criticized Confucius for not being a revolutionary.

Order Restored

Describing the scene at Nanjing a few months after the Communist takeover, AP reporter Seymore Topping recalled in the New York Times, “Before long, the prices of daily necessities stabilized. Most shops reopened, as did dance halls. Beggars disappeared from the streets. Censorship was imposed on the local newspapers and radio.”

“University students, enthusiastic about the new government, gathered in public assemblies to sing songs that commissars had taught them with lines like, ‘Reactionaries who exploit the people deserve to be cut into thousands of pieces.’”

“People began grumbling about the new Communist administration. Taxes had risen sharply as the city’s commercial life withered. The local press reported of sabotage of Communist offices in the surrounding countryside…Ideological structures on the universities and other spheres of intellectual life tightened. In schools, factories and municipal offices, study groups were formed to discuss Maoist theory and participants were required to confess ideological sins.”

Land Reform Under Mao

The Communist Party’s greatest legacy arguably has been taking land from wealthy landlords and rich farmers and redistributing it in rural areas among the poorest peasants under the principal of “land of the tiller.” During their struggle to take power, the Communists promised land to the poor. When the Communists came to power they began seizing land from landowners. Land owners that resisted, even those with as little as two thirds of an acre, were often executed.

Farmers classified as “poor peasants” by the Communists were given ownership to land taken away from local landlords and rich farmers. Estates and large farms were divided up. Each family got no more than 1.3 acres. One farmer told the New York Times, “Of course we were extremely happy—everyone was happy we got land!”

The seizure of land was not always easy. In some cases “certain necessary steps” had to be taken and this resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people. In many cases villagers were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers to get their land. See Violence in the Early Years of the People’s Republic Below.

The peasants didn’t hold on to their land for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership was eliminated and peasants were given usage rights to the land but not ownership. The land from then on was owned by the state. Peasants were organized into mutual aid teams and lower-level cooperatives and then collectives in the early and mid 1950 and became property-less members of “people’s communes.”

Similar scenarios were played in the cities. Rich families who stayed in Shanghai after Communist Revolution were told they had nothing to worry about, but in the end their land and property was expropriated. The Communists also confiscated their art. One Hong Kong art dealer told the New York Times. “The Shanghai museum’s best pieces are all from those private collections.”

Top down economic plans after independence bore fruit. The national income rose at rate of 8.9 percent a year between 1953 and 1957 but created problems down the road. Giving peasants usage rights rather than ownership paved the way for the seizures of land by local officials and businesses which is taking place today. See Land Seizures, Agriculture, Economics

Just sayin………….

sonnyspats1 on September 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM