“Acalamity ordained by Heaven may be escaped; A calamity ordained by oneself is inescapable.” So warns Shujing, the ancient Chinese Book of Documents. If only Mao Zedong had heeded this call to humility.
Despite a long history of civil strife, conflict brought by foreign powers, and countless natural disasters, the worst of China’s sufferings were self-inflicted wounds. Mao’s regime took power in October of 1949, and he unleashed too many horrors to capture in a brief essay. The policies of his poorly named Great Leap Forward led directly to the deaths of 36 million people. The long shadow of its horrors still haunts the Chinese economy and culture.
Five years prior to Mao’s assumption of national power, Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek published The Road to Serfdom. In it, he observed, “Whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served…in short, what men should believe and strive for.” Once property is centrally controlled, that is, the goals of men are made subject to the goals of the owner. In the Chinese case, Mao’s goals were for steel and industrial production to exceed that of the West. At the outset of the Great Leap, he demanded “more, faster, better, cheaper” manufacturing.
What the Chinese people got instead was mass starvation and the worst famine in human history.
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