> shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again... It's how you turn a billion serfs into a billion entrepreneurs.
In your telling, how does the resulting famine that killed of tens of millions fit in?
In your telling, how does the resulting famine that killed of tens of millions fit in?
My understanding is the famine was essentially the middle managers of these collectives over stating yields and being too afraid to admit their lies. To maintain the lie, they shipped off food while the farmers starved.
Painting it as if Mao era collectives are the same as the state quotas that exist today is highly misleading. The HRS was 1979:
"The household responsibility system replaced collective farming." [1]
Broadly speaking, the collectives can and should be blamed for the famine, just as in the Ukraine. Getting into the weeds on the specific mechanisms is fine, but using it to undermine the broader lesson is apologetics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste...
I think not. Your framing thus far is so wildly inaccurate that I believe this is a propaganda account, and hesitate to engage further. But in case any not familiar with the history read this in passing, I will leave a reference to an actually reputable source:
"Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history." [1]
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...