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Inheritance
The roots of China’s recent boom extend deep into its imperial and communist past. But tradition’s legacy is a complicated one. To achieve modern development, China had to throw off the “yoke” of traditional society. Yet the long traditions of centralized government administration, kin-based entrepreneurism, and value placed on education and diligence prepared the Chinese well for capitalism. Despite catastrophes like the Great Leap Forward and the famine in its wake, Mao Zedong’s nation building efforts between the founding of the PRC in 1949 and the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 laid socialist foundations for the subsequent boom. Even the disastrous, decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution contributed to the boom: By eroding public support for radical politics, the ground was cleared for a transition from revolution to reform—for new policies that were gradualist, internationalist and capitalist. |
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The Cultural RevolutionPeriod: Inheritance (Pre-1978)
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Click to expand Actually I do think the cultural revolution, the role of the cultural revolution in making the Chinese leaders very bold in their pursuit of reform, that was quite significant. Unlike what is often said by the Chinese leaders now the ten years during the cultural revolution, actually the scale of the economy grew very fast. As far as industrial production is concerned, for instance, in the 10 years from 1965 to 1975 the annual average growth rate was over 10%. But because of the increase in population because of the lag in technological development, the standard of living of the people did not go up and technological standards were quite limited. So that situation, I think really, ironically pushed the leadership very hard towards making very bold decisions and making a very big leap compared to countries like Russia and Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations at that time. China was able to move very fast, faster than those countries. The sheer increase in the number of youth who were unable to find jobs for instance, so the government had to find a way to provide jobs to these people and the only way they could find was to allow them to setup of these individual businesses and that was certainly outside the realm of the planning system. So, structurally, China was ready to grow out of the plan. I think that was the positive result, as it were, of the cultural revolution.
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