Gwynne Dyer, a London-based freelance journalist, has penned an exceptional article on the canard that China’s success story if proof of how marvelous its 1949 revolution was – a canard recently repeated with gushing enthusiasm by a popular (in his country) leader.
Arriving in Beijing on 23 August for his third China visit in five years, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised the country’s Communist leaders to the skies for having rescued China from a ‘practically feudal’ situation and made it one of the world’s largest economies in less than half a century. It was an entirely predictable remark by the firebrand Venezuelan leader. It was also entirely wrong.
Dyer goes on to demolish the myth point by point in a manner that will no doubt infuriate today’s die-hard Marxists. I’ll just give one more snippet, and encourage everyone to read it all.
So here we are again, with the Chinese Communist regime taking credit for all the improvements in China since they won the civil war in 1949, and foreign leftists like Hugo Chavez holding out China as an example of what wonderful things can be accomplished under ‘socialism.’ But what would China be like now if the Communists had not won power in 1949? Much richer, much freer, and not much less equal, either.
The right comparison is not between China in 1949 and China now. It is between China’s economic progress since 1949 and that achieved by its neighbors that were in a roughly similar state of development at that time. The two closest parallels are South Korea and the ‘other China,’ Taiwan. Both had been Japanese colonies for decades before 1945, so they were a bit ahead of the mainland – but then Taiwan’s population grew overnight by almost forty percent in 1949 as Nationalist refugees from the lost civil war flooded in, and Korea was devastated by the war of 1950-53.
Both Taiwan and South Korea were ruled for the next three decades by oppressive and ruthless military regimes. Neither country adopted raw free-market capitalism – the state protected infant industries and nourished them with low-interest capital – but at least they weren’t tied to Marxist economics. By the 1980s both countries had achieved economic takeoff, and democracy came soon afterward.
Expect to hear the usual chorus: But China is different…but China has so many people…but China need a tough ruler who can pull the country up by its bootstraps….but….but…but…. All those things might be true. But none of those things justifies the horrors prepetrated against China’s citizens by their own rulers, the beloved CCP.
Dyer’s closing remarks devastate.
They may be closet capitalists these days, but if they don’t have the myth that the revolution was beneficial, how can they justify their own monopoly of power?
Well, they can’t, actually.
No, they can’t.
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