Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So many of Mao's actions, like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that, are literally attempts to outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin was not able to do, the Chinese communist regime will be able to bring off. And the toll for that hubris is vast.
So it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses, out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese communist cause, to industrialize China overnight.
That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were just because of their sheer gigantism supposed to be by definition, more efficient than small scale farming. Um,
it ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural methods techniques that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lysenko. that produced more agricultural disaster.
That involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow, but were supposed to produce super plants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. So the context for all of this is a race that, to get first to the achievement of full-scale communism.
One of the themes that I think it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to some of his own assistants.
He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961, perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner in this competition, and it would have achieved full communism. So that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to temper that a
Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect of real successes just around the corner. But what happens when the date arrives and you haven't actually achieved that goal? That's one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union. And the case of China must have been something similar.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign is a chance for Mao, who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, to regain some of that momentum. And the whole Hundred Flowers campaign, officially titled the Rectification Campaign to Set Things Right, is still shrouded in mystery.
Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives, and to let a full discussion happen.
And then, after some of them had ventured that, to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this idea.
without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin with, the end result is the same. The end result is, once again, negative selection. The decimation of those who are most venturesome, those who are most talented and intelligent, are punished relentlessly for that.
That's right. I mean, think of the impact on officials. who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. Don't be venturesome. Do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true, and that'll be the safe route, even if it ends in, ultimately, stagnation.
Mao himself had a view of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all for a country as big as
and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of what other episodes in Chinese history had showed, the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes.
What we've seen since, after Mao passes from the scene and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long and now are allowed to reemerge.
Yeah, not 69, not 71.
Its essence is questing, not certainty. Constant questing.
Well, I think that there is, without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness, the regime actually undertook a new venture. And that venture was to open up economically to gain access to world markets and and to play a global role, always with the proviso that the party retained political supremacy.
It's been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries in the Soviet Union in 1956, especially with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin's crimes, he tries to go back to the founders' intentions of Lenin, Nothing like that it's argued is possible in the Chinese case. Because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for communist China. Mao was the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder.
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