The Chinese Economy

Spring 2020

Week 3

 

Expect a quiz on Tuesday

 

Some things in the news:

1. This person is an idiot. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/01/24/coronavirus-versus-flu-influenza-deadlier-than-wuhan-china-disease/4564133002/. I calculated the conditional probability of death from the flu to be 0.051 percent. At the time this came out the conditional probability of death from the Wuhan virus was already 2.1 percent.

2. Even if you say you can’t leave, people find a way. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047720/chinese-premier-li-keqiang-head-coronavirus-crisis-team-outbreak

3. It’s a bad situation in China. https://apple.news/AHW1WdWdBQ_qqa52Po8CSkw

4. When China makes something a priority, it happens! https://apple.news/AUo9XE3eAQ4uEGvp-hhilzQ

5. A short video about Chinese New Year and the annual mass migration (from 2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSpNAm9SsRI (from 2019) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFakFlddIg0 (from 2020)

6. A question that came up in class was how many people died as a result of the various campaigns waged by Mao. This article doesn’t say how many died in the Hundered Flowers campaign, but it estimates that 550,000 people were caught up and purged. https://www.rfa.org/english/china/china_antirightist-20070619.html.

 

In regard to the number of people killed during the Cultural Revolution, I came across this article by Yongyi Song https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/chronology-mass-killings-during-chinese-cultural-revolution-1966-1976. The article is lengthy. The first paragraph, which I reproduce below, pretty much sums it up.

 

The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a historical tragedy launched by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It claimed the lives of several million people and inflicted cruel and inhuman treatments on hundreds of million people. However, 40 years after it ended, the total number of victims of the Cultural Revolution and especially the death toll of mass killings still remain a mystery both in China and overseas. For the Chinese communist government, it is a highly classified “state secret,” although they do maintain statistics for the so-called “abnormal death” numbers all over China. Nevertheless, the government, realizing that the totalitarian regime and the endless power struggles in the CCP Central Committee (CCP CC) were the root cause of the Cultural Revolution, has consistently discounted the significance of looking back and reflecting on this important period of Chinese history. They even forbid Chinese scholars from studying it independently and discourage overseas scholars from undertaking research on this subject in China.

 

 

 

  

Topics

This week we study the economy during Mao’s era (central planning), 1949-1976. Industrial policy, the Great Leap Forward, rural policies of collectivization, the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

 

1.     Segment 1 Topic 4. The Communist Revolution and central planning during the Mao era

a.     Watch the documentary the Mao Years 1949-1976. (required).

b.     Read Naughton, chapter 4

c.     Read Kissinger chapter 4 Mao’s Continuous Revolution  (Federico Ivanissevich and Chasen Brutocao) ../LectureSlides/Kissinger_ Chapter 4.pptx

d.     Slides

2.     Read Kissinger chapter 7 Decade of Crises (Regina Zavala Rangel and Edward Yuan) Presentation

a.      Moving this to next week:  Li and Yang, “The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster.” Journal of Political Economy.

b.     Slides