A Small Mistake

Thursday, September 18th, 2014

When Mao died, The Economist made a small mistake describing his legacy:

In the final reckoning, Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.

The emphasis is David Friedman’s:

The current estimate is that, during the Great Leap Forward, between thirty and forty million Chinese peasants starved to death.

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