China’s Cultural Revolution 

To understand how the Chinese economy got where it is today, you need to know a bit about China’s Cultural Revolution and what happened after that.

In 1966, 17 years after Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China as a Communist state, he set in motion the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” whose purpose was to “to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the Capitalist road.”

Soon gangs of students and the government’s so-called Red Guards attacked people wearing “bourgeois clothes” on the street, “Imperialist” signs were torn down, and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide. Those that submitted to the revolution were forced to publicly admit to their status and repent for their past transgression, before they were stripped of their homes and other private property and sent out to the country to work as laborers for the party.

The result was 10 years of economic destruction, famine, repression, and widespread violence that crippled the economy and left more than a billion people poverty-stricken and hungry.

But then, after Mao died, China liberalized its economy under Deng Xiaping, whose Boluan Fanzheng program dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution and allowed for a significant amount of private enterprise.

As a result, China is no longer the overpopulated, poverty-plagued country it was 40 years ago. It is a major military and economic power – as large or nearly as large as the US, and growing much faster. And without the US’s terrible debt problem.

Click here for a good, quick review of the Cultural Revolution.