Sam writes:
You have to weigh that against “the great leap forward” which killed off around 42 million Chinese. Any rise in productivity may have been because anyone with any weakness at all starved to death. There was no going down they were already there.
There were no 42 million dead in the Great Leap. All of those nutty figures were arrived at because the birth rate dropped precipitously during the Great Leap. So those huge figures are arrived at by throwing in tens of millions of people as “dead” who never even got born in the first place! Because they should have been born except for famine you know. Capitalists are such liars.
15 million died during the Great Leap. But even during the Great Leap, the death rate was a lower than it was before the Revolution pre-1949. So even with the Great Leap deaths, the people were still better because far fewer of them were dying. You wonder why people support Mao despite all the bad things that went on, and that is why.
Sam writes:
I’m hardly the capitalist hegemonic defender but I can’t believe this is true. How can anyone be more productive when they’re running around all day waving banners and attacking the school teachers?
Because that wasn’t all they were doing.
I heard that if you average it all out, it boiled down to average 10% growth rate per year.
The deaths in the Cultural Revolution were wildly exaggerated. All the capitalist propaganda says the Cultural Revolution resulted in “millions of deaths.” It didn’t. There were 1 million excess deaths over that period, but most of those were suicides. 30,000 people were killed. That is 3,000 killings per year.
30,000 does not equal “millions.” I guess capitalists can’t do math, or maybe they are too busy lying to remember the math they learned in school. You would think Communism would be bad enough that the capitalists wouldn’t have to lie about it all the time, but that’s exactly what they do. If Communism really is the worst thing on Earth, then the capitalists wouldn’t have to lie about it. It would be like Nazism. No need to exaggerate and lie because the truth would be bad enough.
