Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Mao era crudele, ma la Cina oggi non sarebbe industrializzata senza di lui

Piu' o meno lo stesso discorso si puo' fare per Stalin e la Russia.
O,se e' per questo, per i primi ministri vittoriani che uccisero
milioni di Indiani e Irlandesi e l'Inghilterra.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1992821,00.html
Mao was cruel - but also laid the ground for today's China
The crimes of communist China's founder shouldn't blind us to
achievements which paved the way for its current modernisation
Will Hutton
Thursday January 18, 2007
The Guardian
Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five
years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the
Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been
30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but if
today's China ever completes the transition to a more plural economy
and society it will be more obvious than ever that he was the man who
partially laid the platform for today's China. And from this may one
day emerge a country with the liberties of the rest of Asia and the
west.
Article continues
In the first place, there is context. Life in the China of the first
half of the 20th century was cheap, as writer Lu Xun wrote after
witnessing the nationalists clinically murder students in Shanghai in
1926. After the imperial throne fell on New Year's Day 1912, China
imploded into territories dominated by warlords over whom the
nationalist government never established proper dominion.
China was in economic stasis. The Confucian gentry - mandarin
officials, landlords and merchants - had so effectively delivered the
stability that hundreds of millions of peasants craved, that together
they became an obstacle to vitally needed change. The peasants were
wedded to obsolete farming techniques on tiny plots; the Confucian
gentry were wedded to a system that allowed them to become absentee
landlords for around half of China. They continued to run the country
at the behest of the warlords, still genuflecting before Confucian
maxims that were now hopelessly outdated. Japan's invasion in 1931
could not be effectively opposed.
There was a craving for a decisive rupture with all that had produced
this. Radical egalitarianism, a kind of transformed Confucianism,
seemed the only way to respond. The Confucian mandarinate had to be
broken. The land had to be taken off absentee landlords. Savings had to
be mobilised in a collective effort to create a modern industrial base.
There seemed no other viable prospectus.
Mao gave vent to this ambition. The negative side of the Maoist balance
sheet is well-known: mass murder, famine, injustice, and economic
waste. But there are less well-known positives. Industrial output
climbed 13-fold, albeit from a tiny base. The rail network doubled.
Half of Chinese land became irrigated. There was a dramatic lowering of
illiteracy. Near universal healthcare was established. Life expectancy
rose; and despite Mao's appetite for imperial-style concubines, women
were given the same right to petition for divorce and education as men.
Their position was transformed.
And if Mao created an economy that while desperate for reform at least
existed to be reformed - a statement that could not be made in the
hyperinflation of 1949 when the Communists took over - he also
bequeathed an ideological legacy that would permit reform. The Maoist
communist concept of the so-called mass line meant that ideology and
policy would emerge from respecting local differences and conditions.
As a result, state planning and collectivisation of agriculture could
be reversed more quickly in China than in the Soviet Union, under the
guise of respecting local autonomy and creating local responsibility.
Deng Xiaoping, the mastermind of the reform programme, was punctilious
in describing the first phase of market-led reforms and
decollectivisation in these Maoist terms.
Few western critics today appreciate the scale of the task confronting
any moderniser of China in 1949. Western economies created the
surpluses to finance industrialisation through incredible exploitation
- of their own working class, and in the US via slavery. It was never
likely that China could achieve self-sustaining economic growth without
great collective pain to achieve its own surpluses, or that this could
be done without the involvement of the state. Spontaneous market-led
industrialisation is a myth.
This is certainly how Mao saw the task, with egalitarianism and
collectivism the means. The German sociologist Max Weber, in a famous
essay, argued that statesmen facing these kinds of challenges - of
winning a war or of master-minding economic development - have to be
judged by different moral criteria. Their decisions are means to
achieve this ultimate end, and their choices have to be judged by this
criteria rather than their inherent moral worth. Truman, for example,
justified dropping the atom bomb on the Japanese because of the value
of the ultimate end. Mao would justify his radical egalitarianism in
the same way. We know that he was wrong. He, authentically and
passionately, did not.
Yet that is insufficient excuse. The superiority of liberal democracy
over communism is that when politicians take ultimate-end decisions
they know they will have to justify them before a wide and critical
audience - which means they must have very good arguments to justify
them. Truman's nuking of Japan is still questioned, tribute to the
vigour of democracy. Mao only had to justify his decision to himself,
or arrest or kill his critics. Even today's Chinese communists
recognise it is an inadequate framework.
The condemnation of Mao that convinces the majority of Chinese they
need to change has to be more subtle than simply joining, say, Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday in their book on Mao and seeing him as
unrelievedly evil. Most Chinese are never likely to accept the verdict,
not least because it is only a partial version of the truth. The better
course is to build on Deng's description of Mao's Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution as China's " treasure", because they proved
that radical egalitarianism was wrong.
But the lesson Deng drew - that the party can remain in Leninist
control of a market economy that needs no democratic institutions -was
as wrong as Mao's. Today's China is in many ways going back. The
healthcare that covered nearly all of rural China under Mao now covers
just 5%. China spends less on education than other developing
countries. Inequality is high. The country is sliding down
international indices for good governance, corruption and business
competitiveness. To return to Mao's solution to these issues would be
wrong and immoral; but neither can China continue as it is. The best
option is to embrace democratic institutions - and the path to doing
that is not to repudiate Mao but to see him for what he was. Wrong and
cruel, but part of China's groping to find a way to cross the river.
·

 milioni di Indiani e Irlandesi e l'Inghilterra.
E perche' non per Mussolini che creo' l'IRI e bonifico' le paludi
pontine?
Sono banalita' che non valgono piu' di tanto
Ciao
R.

 pontine?
Mmmmmm.... Il titolo del thread parlava di industrializzazione.
Mussolini non ha industrializzato nulla.
GT