Few people know that in 1944, years before the Party took power, Mao offered to travel to Washington to talk with President Roosevelt, “China must industrialize. This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict,” but the message never reached the president.
He repeated the invitation to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower but they ignored him and embargoed Chinese goods, technology, finance, diplomacy, and grain. Western media then began the practice of lying about China’s problems, telling Western readers that it was on the verge of collapse, and claiming that its economy was stagnating while America’s was booming. The truth was quite different, says Yale’s Maurice Meisner:
In the post-Mao era, it has become fashionable to bloviate about the blemishes of the historical record of the Mao era and to keep quiet about the achievements of the time.. In fact, far from being the era of economic stagnation that is now commonly perceived, Mao’s era was one of the greatest modernization in world history, comparable with the most intense industrialization in several major latecomers in modern times, such as Germany, Japan and Russia.
Starting with an illiterate, typhus-infected population living in rubble, and working entirely under massive Western sanctions , Mao provided basic universal health care and doubled life expectancy from 35 to 68. A healthy workforce is the foundation of all economies, and no country matches the rise of life expectancy as China under Mao:
Nor can any country match the increase in prosperity under Mao:
Germany developed at 33% per decade from 1880-1914.
Japan at 43% from 1874-1929
USSR at 54% between 1928-58.
Mao's China was 64% between 1952-72.
Mao’s economic achievement was all the more remarkable in that it was accomplished by the Chinese people themselves on the basis of their own meager material resources, with little outside assistance or support yet, when Mao retired, he left China debt free.
Mao’s impact on China’s economic policy is clear: he taught people to read and write, how to be healthy, and how to grow an economy faster than anyone had ever imagined. Despite the West’s crushing, twenty-five-year embargo on food, finance, technology, and medical and agricultural equipment, and its exclusion of China from the family of nations, he showed China how to grow its economy independent of the West – a lesson they took to heart.
The higher crop yields in later years would have been impossible without Mao’ vast irrigation and flood-control projects–dams, irrigation works and river dikes–constructed by collectivized peasants in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Between 1951 and 1974, Mao
* ended death from starvation
* doubled the population from 542 million to 956 million
* doubled life expectancy
* doubled caloric intake
* quintupled GDP
* quadrupled literacy
* increased grain production 300%
* increased gross industrial output 4000%
* increased heavy industry 9000%.
* increased rail lineage 266%
* increased rail traffic from 102,970,000 passengers to 814,910,000.
* increased rail freight tonnage 2000%
* increased the road network 1000%.
* increased steel production from zero to 35,000,000/pa
* Increased industry’s contribution to China’s net material product from 23% to 54% .
* Put satellites into orbit
* Developed the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb faster than anyone in history
So completely did Mao transform China’s economy that, by the time he stepped down, China’s basic key demographic indictors rivaled much richer middle income countries.
By 1974, he had reunited, reimagined, reformed, and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized its economy after a century of failed modernizations, and ended millennia of famine. He had banished invaders, bandits, and warlords; eliminated serious crime and drug addiction; doubled the population, its life expectancy and its literacy; liberated its women and educated its girls; erased its disparities of wealth and land; built all its basic infrastructure; grown the economy 65%; led four revolutions and succeeded in three; produced jet aircraft, locomotives, oceangoing ships, ICBMs, hydrogen bombs, and satellites: the foundation of today’s tech-based economy. Says Harvard’s John King Fairbank,
The simple facts of Mao’s career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28, with a dozen others, to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung’s scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao’s achievement is almost beyond our comprehension. – John King Fairbank, The United States and China.
NOTES
[Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, various years)DataBank | The World Bank (DataBank | The World Bank (DataBank | The World Bank (DataBank | The World Bank))). –The Enigma of China’s Growth. Zhiming Long and Rémy Herrera. Monthly Review, Dec 1, 2018; China Statistical Yearbook (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China, various years), http://stats.gov.cn/english (http://stats.gov.cn/english) (http://stats.gov.cn/english(http://stats.gov.cn/english)) (http://stats.gov.cn/english (http://stats.gov.cn/english) (http://stats.gov.cn/english(http://stats.gov.cn/english))).]
According to data provided by the World Bank, expressed at constant prices (base 1980) and in ten-year averages, China’s economic growth rate was 6.8 percent between 1970 and 1979, i.e., more than double that of the United States during the same period (3.2 percent, also at 1980 constant prices).4
Furthermore, according to the official GDP series published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) since its creation in 1952 up until today, the growth rate of China’s GDP averaged 8.3 percent annually from 1952 to 2015, with a strong 6.3 percent between 1952 and 1978 and an even stronger 9.9 percent between 1979 and 2015. These percentages are expressed at constant prices in base 1952 and standardized to take into account the statistical breaks that marked the accounting transition from the Material Product System (MPS) to the more “modern” System of National Accounts (SNA).5 Nevertheless, if we exclude the very first years of the People’s Republic from 1952 to 1962—i.e., between the completion of the unification of the continental territory and the period of the break with the Soviet Union—there is a recorded average of 8.2 percent per annum GDP growth rate in the period of 1963–78, reflecting very rapid growth even during the Cultural Revolution.the average growth rates of the capital stock that we called “productive” (including equipment, machinery, tools, industrial buildings, and facilities, but not residential buildings and their land value) showed very little difference over the two subperiods of 1952–78 and 1979–2015: 9.7 percent for the first subperiod and 10.9 percent for the second. If we retain a larger productive capital stock, including the inventories, which are important for calculating the rotation rate of circulating capital, we see that the average rhythm of accumulation of such a stock was slightly higher between 1952 and 1978 (10.41 percent) than between 1979 and 2015 (10.39 percent). Moreover, if we select an even larger capital stock to also include the constructed residential buildings and their land, not directly productive components, the growth rate of this very large capital stock continued to be high, averaging 9.1 percent from 1952 to 1978 compared to 10.9 percent from 1979 to 2015. It is, therefore, quite clear that the capital accumulation effort is not a recent phenomenon, but that it has been continuously decided and planned by the Chinese authorities over the past six decades.
It is this sustained effort of accumulation, enabled in particular by surplus transfers from rural areas, that explains the success of industrialization and, to a large extent, the robust rate of GDP growth.[Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, various years)DataBank | The World Bank. –The Enigma of China’s Growth. Zhiming Long and Rémy Herrera. Monthly Review, Dec 1, 2018; China Statistical Yearbook (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China, various years), http://stats.gov.cn/english.]
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/12/01/the-enigma-of-chinas-growth/
Re. Mao and FDR: Covert Action Quarterly had a fascinating piece on this last year. I'm appending a few of the opening paragraphs below, but the lengthy text is worth reading in full, not least to see some wonderful historical photos included. FDR was a complex figure in this regard; no socialist, clearly in the capitalist camp, he nonetheless had a fairly enlightened attitude towards global development, not seeing it in the rigidly imperialistic zero-sum game way that so many of his successors have, who did everything they could to dismantle what remained of his progressive legacy.
CAQ -- Unknown for decades, declassified documents show that FDR’s mail was deliberately diverted and falsified to prevent a historic meeting with Mao Zedong that might have shortened the war, changed history, and reshaped the modern world.
Historians cite the 1972 meeting between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon as the original spark for U.S.-China Globalization in which the U.S. and China began cooperating to industrialize China and integrate the two countries’ economies.
But a much younger Mao Zedong had tried to interest President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Globalization 27 years earlier, and history would have turned out differently if Roosevelt had agreed.
The Korean and Vietnam Wars—which resulted in millions of deaths—could have been avoided along with the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1958, which nearly resulted in a nuclear apocalypse, and Taiwan would not have been separated from Mother China.
On January 9, 1945, Mao Zedong reached out from his headquarter in Yan’an to President Roosevelt. U.S. Army Major Ray Cromley—acting chief of the U.S. mission in Yan’an— forwarded this message to U.S. Army headquarters in Chungking:
Mao and Zhou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.
[...]
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/06/23/how-fdr-was-manipulated-and-betrayed-by-his-own-naval-intelligence-chief-in-the-fateful-last-months-of-wwii/
Thank you Godfrey for your illuminating information on China. I have been ignorant of most of what you write. I took Colin Brace's recommendation to read your blog.