Prod Info 2007 Core 7

At the beginning of my notes, I list just a few errors:

On page 8, Mrs. Wise Bauer suggests that the sun rises and sets each day because of the earth’s orbit instead of its spin.

On page 165, she erroneously refers to “Hearst and Randolph” instead of “Hearst and Pulitzer.” (The two publishers’ names were William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.)

On pages 176-177, she completely confuses the concepts of capital and profit on the one hand and profit and salary on the other.

On page 204, she confuses a relatively small group of Chinese for “the people of China” as a whole.

On page 287, she places Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1930s—a good decade after the fact.

One of the most offensive portions was where she speaks of Chairman Mao of China. For example:

p. 359: “Under Mao, China began to grow more prosperous. Peasants who owned their own land worked harder. . . . ”

Here's what I wrote in response (I have eliminated my footnote references to the sources from which I quote):

I am unaware of Mae ever advocating for peasant ownership of land. Instead, he is credited with proposing—and then implementing the policies that brought the peasants under “[Communist] Party control by the establishment of agricultural collectives.”

This policy was gradually pushed through between 1949 and 1958, first by establishing "mutual aid teams" of 5-15 households, then in 1953 "elementary agricultural cooperatives" of 20-40 households, then from 1956 in "higher co-operatives" of 100-300 families. These reforms (sometimes now referred to as The Little Leap Forward) were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they "voluntarily" agreed to join the collective. This doesn't sound like peasant ownership to me.

And as for prosperity: The first phase of collectivisation was not a success and there was widespread famine in 1956, though the Party's propaganda machine announced progressively higher harvests.

In 1957, . . . Mao began the Great Leap Forward . . . intended to increase the production of steel and to raise agricultural production to twice 1957 levels. . . . Steel production did show significant growth, to over 14 million tons of steel a year, from the previous 5.2 million. . . . However, much of the steel produced was impure and useless. In the meantime, chaos in the collectives and unfortunate climatic conditions resulted in widespread famine, while Mao continued to export grain to save face with the outside world. According to various sources, the death toll due to famine may have been as high as 20 to 30 million.

Wise Bauer wants to call any of this prosperity?

p. 360: “(B)efore long, the prosperity [Mao] brought to China would begin to disintegrate, and China would sink once more into fighting, unhappiness, and violence.”

Besides questioning where Wise Bauer comes up with the idea of Chinese prosperity under Mao, one wonders what kind of “happiness” and lack of violence she believe China sank out of after Mao was gone.

Mao’s first political campaigns after founding the People’s Republic were land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, which centered on mass executions - often before organized crowds. These campaigns of mass repression targeted former KMT officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies, intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of rural gentry. The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign. Mao himself claimed a total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53). However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution," 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead. In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labor" camps (laogai). Mao’s personal role in ordering mass executions is undeniable. He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.

And Wise Bauer wants us to believe that anything besides this could entail “sink[ing] . . . into fighting, unhappiness, and violence”?

And then, just one more example. As she discusses the Korean War, she says,

p. 370: “By 1953, more than three million people had died in this pointless fight.”

“Pointless” to whom? I doubt many of almost 50 million South Koreans of today would wish to live under the Communist leadership of their cousins in North Korea!