A Small Mistake
I have been reading How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. It's a fascinating account and I will probably post more on it later, but one detail struck me.
When Mao died, The Economist wrote:
“In the final reckoning, Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.” (emphasis mine)
The current estimate is that, during the Great Leap Forward, between thirty and forty million Chinese peasants starved to death. Critics questioning that figure have suggested that the number might have been as low as two and a half million.
I am curious—has the Economist ever published an explicit apology or an explanation of how they got the facts so completely backwards, crediting the man responsible for what was probably the worst famine in history with creating a state "where nobody starves?" Is it known who wrote that passage, and has anyone ever asked him how he could have gotten the facts so terribly wrong?
I now have a partial answer from the Economist:
"Though The Economist was by no means blind to Mao's totalitarian rule, the newspaper was not able to observe firsthand its worst effects. As a consequence, The Economist rendered too kind a verdict upon Mao's death in 1976. Among other accomplishments, he was credited with having built an “egalitarian state where nobody starves”; true, perhaps, that nobody was starving to death at the moment of writing, but the horrible fact that 20m to 30m of Mao's subjects had perished in famine would emerge only years later."
https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/01/08/old-hands
No explanation is offered of why, if they knew his rule was totalitarian and knew that they had no reporters in China, they believed his government's claims of how good things were. I think the Economist of 1976 is still guilty of biased reporting in favor of a communist government.