The Great Leap Forward

大跃进:

China is better than us in some ways, says Mr. Thomas Friedman:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand....

There are three things that have to be said about this.

1) This precise aspect of Chinese society, far from being praiseworthy, is what gave us arguably the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century. Given that this century also included the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, etc., even to be in the running is a dishonor of remarkable proportion.

The Great Leap Forward (sometimes pejoratively called the Great Leap Backward) (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dàyuèjìn) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization and industrialization. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces. It ended in catastrophe as it triggered a widespread famine that resulted in millions of deaths.

"Exactly how many millions of deaths?" you might wonder. The figure is unclear, because the Chinese government -- to preserve social harmony, and public confidence in the government -- refused to admit it was happening at the time. Estimates run from about sixteen and a half million deaths, to upwards of thirty million.

The second world war caused at least twice as many deaths, but that was the result of global fighting over a large number of causes. The Holocaust was an act of explicit malice, but killed far fewer people. These 16.5-30 million lives were lost simply because a country's "leadership" made a decision on "critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 20th century."

The current Chinese government is a direct descendant of that previous one. While it is unlikely in this incarnation to force changes that cost millions of lives, neither can we so lightly pass over the graves of these people. To describe this quality as "a great advantage" of the Chinese system is obscene. I trust that Mr. Friedman will have the grace to be humiliated when he realizes what he has written.

2) Furthermore, as someone who has lived in China and traveled outside of the cities as well as to some of its cities, to industrial and to agricultural regions, it is absurd to suggest that China will be overtaking us in "clean energy" in any but the most symbolic ways. China absolutely depends on coal. There are days when you can see the smog stepping down in grades if you climb high enough. When I would wash my bedding, the water turned black.

Yet millions flock to those polluted cities because the alternatives in the countryside are even worse.

China's government isn't doing anything substantive about the pollution, and nor should they. These steps are mere propaganda designed to distract from China's absolute refusal to take the steps that would be necessary to actually clean up China.

Thank goodness those steps have fooled people so well, I suppose. The cost of switching away from coal and to a clean energy base would destroy the Chinese economy and cast hundreds of millions into chaos. The resources do not exist to make China clean while also avoiding another famine on the scale of The Great Leap Forward. God defend the Chinese people from such a decision as Mr. Friedman seems to want to advocate!

3) Finally, as to the propaganda of out producing us on electric cars: yes, it's true that China can decide to focus its resources on a given area, and that can allow them to outperform the United States in that area. If, that is -- if and only if -- it is an area we don't care about.

The United States' economic system is unimaginably more powerful than China's. If the Chinese autocracy decides to make a showpiece of electric cars, they could indeed outproduce us in electric cars, because Americans don't much like them or want them. If the American people were to decide that they did want such cars, however, that casual decision -- a simple switch in our preferences -- would result in a boom in the construction of such cars that China could never hope to match.

Doc Russia rightly explained why the Chevy Volt will fail. It's a simple essay in pictures: what GM promised versus what it delivered.

Promised:



Delivered:



You can see that he's right. That makes the point: the only reason China has even a hope of making a showpiece of this is that there aren't any electric cars Americans actually want. Change that, and you'll see some electric cars.

I know that Mr. Friedman has often written insightful things, so I don't wish to scold him too harshly or at too great a length. Still, this was an example of blindness both to the facts and to the moral history of China. We ought to wish for the decent, honorable people of China to enjoy a future of freedom more greatly resembling our own, than to wish even for a moment for a system that could give us our own Great Leap Forward.