Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation Read Online Free PDF Page B

could only have entered the modern age under the steely guidance of a megalomaniac like Mao Zedong. Indeed, this view is often expressed empirically as 70:30—70 percent of what Mao did was pretty darn good, while 30 percent of his actions were a trifle excessive. This is, in fact, the official view in China.
    Of course, the government acknowledges, here and there mistakes were made. In retrospect, the Great Leap Forward was probably not such a good idea after all. In the spring of 1958, Mao had decided that China should be a superpower. Not just any superpower, mind you; Mao was nothing if not ambitious. As he unleashed his Great Leap Forward, Mao idly drew plans for what he called the Earth Control Committee. At the time, China was a land of peasants still reeling from years of war and centuries of impoverishment. And yet Mao believed China should rule the world. He just needed a year or two to boost the country up and prepare it for global domination. And thus the Great Leap Forward, a headlong rush to transform a country of farms into a nation of factories. Gazing at a vista of temples and pagodas from his perch in the Forbidden City, Mao declared: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”
    And so it would be. Throughout China, city walls that had withstood the Mongols were destroyed and replaced with steel factories. The ancient cores of cities were flattened and from the ashes new power plants were built. Some people, of course, objected to this willful destruction of China’s cultural heritage. In response, Mao put them on the wrecking crews. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a half-billion peasants suddenly found their lives in turmoil. Massive waterworks projects were inflicted on the country, including a dam in Henan Province that would subsequently collapse in 1975, killing 250,000 people. Villages were abandoned for communes, where soon the villagers lost their names and gained a number. Numbers, after all, were more efficient than names. Tools and cooking utensils were melted into steel in millions of backyard furnaces so that Mao could claim to have doubled China’s steel production within a year. The steel, of course, was useless, and any pilot flying a plane made with the steel produced in a backyard furnace would soon be dead. But the steel quotas were met, and this is what mattered to Mao.
    So too did the grain quotas. Superpowers exported grain. Ergo, China must export grain. To achieve this, Mao ordered the death of every sparrow in China. Sparrows ate grain seeds; thus they had to die. This probably looked like a good idea on paper. Who would have thought that the sudden demise of the lowly sparrow would contribute to one of the worst catastrophes to ever befall humanity? Over the next three years, China would starve like no other nation had starved before. There were, of course, scientists and economists and steelmakers and farmers who could have told Mao that these were not particularly good ideas. But no one dared raise their concerns to the Chairman, who had nothing but disdain for experts, those irksome people who possessed something so irritating as knowledge.
    Indeed, in 1956, during what came to be known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao encouraged dissenting voices to speak up, which they did. So identified, Mao unleashed one of his periodic purges. He ultimately praised the province of Hunan, which had “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000,” and concluded, “the other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.” In the 1950s alone, as Mao consolidated his power, his purges took the lives of more than 800,000 people. Subsequently, no one dared point out that the steel the peasants were ordered to produce in backyard furnaces was worthless, that the elimination of every sparrow would lead to a plague of locusts, and that the revolutionary changes he had applied to farming were based on nothing more than nonsensical musings. In the