11. A Tyrant’s Ambitious but Poorly Thought-Out Plan Led to Disaster
China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong, seized power in 1949. Referring to the period of Chinese weakness before their victory as “The Century of Humiliation”, the communists set out to restore the country’s standing as a global power. That could only be accomplished via rapid and massive industrialization. Other countries had industrialized gradually, by accumulating capital and buying heavy machinery. China had neither the time nor the money. Its population was rapidly outstripping the available resources, and it was too poor to accumulate enough capital anytime soon for the massive industrialization necessary.
So Mao and his communist acolytes decided to mobilize China’s vast population. They would use labor-intensive means of industrialization that emphasized manpower, of which China had plenty, instead of machinery and industrial plant, of which China had little. Thus was born the Great Leap Forward in 1958, a revolutionary campaign to rapidly transform China from an agrarian economy into an industrial giant. Unfortunately, Mao’s understanding of economics was faulty, and his expectations were wildly unrealistic. The result was a disaster on a massive scale.