By Jeff J Brown

I was sent a good mainstream article about China’s development (Looking Back Last 40 Years Reforms China – RayDalio). Ray Dalio, a billionaire hedge fund manager talks about all of China’s successes since 1978, which is the end of the Mao Era. As usual, you would never know that China’s many developmental successes started in 1949, when the Communist Party of China (CPC) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA), defeated and kicked out Japanese and Chinese fascists, along with their partners in crime, Western capitalists and drug cartel dealers, mainly Americans, British and French. 

In books #2 (China Rising) and #3 (China Communist Dammit) of (The China Trilogy), I wrote extensively about the amazing success story of Mao Zedong and his government’s leadership, in freeing their people from foreign exploitation, while transforming the nation into an industrial, agricultural, military and technological powerhouse. This, in spite of Uncle Sam’s illegal and cruel blockade of the country, just like what it is still doing to other communist-socialist countries such as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Eritrea and Venezuela today. 

I thought it would be interesting to take the statistics table from Mr. Dalio’s article and add a column for 1949 (see below). The results from the beginning to the end of the Mao Era are remarkable. After 110 years of Western rape, plunder and unlimited importation of illegal opium, per capita income in China was only $23/year when its people gained their freedom from imperialism. Virtually the entire population was living in poverty, except the elites. Life expectancy was an unbelievable 35 years of age. One-fifth of infants were dying, due to Western/Japanese colonialism. Only one in five citizens could read and the country had no spoken lingua franca, with thousands of regional and local dialects keeping citizens separated. Few people went to school and not for very long. 

The only numbers that are outlying are the share of world GDP, but this and the high percentage for poverty in 1978 have an explanation. Due to the Mao Era’s communist economic system, prices of inputs and goods were much lower than in Western countries. Thus, the $1.90 per day threshold for poverty is skewed, since $1.90/day back in the day could actually buy a lot, not to mention close to free housing, medical and education costs. This communist pricing system therefore also artificially deflated the share of world GDP. 

Within two years of liberation, the Mao administration had wiped out drugs, organized crime, prostitution and gambling. During the Mao Era, hundreds of thousands of clinics, hospitals, schools, post/telegraph offices, dams, canals, irrigation projects, businesses and factories of all sizes were built. Tens of thousands of kilometers of roads and rail lines were laid. The GDP increased 600%, grain production 300% and the Great Leap Forward saw the greatest burst of industrial production in human history, far outstripping the three best years for Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan during the Industrial Revolution [. . .]

Source: Expert: Wildly successful Mao Era is airbrushed out of Western media and history books.