[force_reboot]

Most of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.

I'm not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China's population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can't really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events.

Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.

[zubat]

It's certainly true that China massively changed its land use policy following the PRC's formation. What I think is most interesting to consider, though, is whether the collectivization process had the same catalyzing action as enclosure in pre-industrial Britain. In both cases villages were pushed from a subsistence-driven existence towards top-down control, trade, and an uprooting of labor that could subsequently move to cities and work in factories. China's development into a modern industrial country may well have been premised on the massive application of violence of the early PRC era.

This prompted me to Google for "enclosure vs collectivization" which brought up this interesting-looking article on the topic [0].

[0] http://praxeology.net/SEK3-AQ-3.htm

[Animats]

China has far less arable land per capita than most large countries.[1] There's not much slack for major screwups in agriculture. This has been a major driving factor in China's history. China had six famines in the 20th century, and a long history of them before that. The Great Leap Forward was the last and worst one.

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC

[d8421l01vv4r]

> The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.

Most countries in the world did significantly better post-WW2 than before. No thanks to their leaders, but thanks to technological progress.