The Economist on Mao

“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.” (The Economist on Mao’s death, 1976, emphasis mine)

I came across that passage, quoted in Coase and Wang’s very interesting book How China Became Capitalist,¹ many years later and commented on it on my blog, struck by the contrast between its claim and the fact of a famine, created by Mao, in which something between 15 and 55 million people (estimates vary widely) starved to death.

I wrote:

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?"

I now have an answer, thanks to Tim Lambert, a commenter on a forum I am active in and, long before that, on my blog, a valuable commenter because he often disagrees with me and is sometimes right.

Tim located:

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. (Old Hands, The Economist, Jan 8th 2014)

That is an explanation but not an apology, and I think one is owed. The Economist, by its account, knew that China was a totalitarian state. They knew that neither they nor other western media were permitted to have reporters in China. So how did they know that China was an egalitarian state where nobody starves?

The only answer I can see was because the government of a totalitarian state said so.

Imagine that the Economist had published an optimistic account, four decades earlier, of Hitler’s achievements in Germany. Would they, after a similar delay, offer a similar non-apology?

The explanation of the author’s credulity is that the intellectual classes of the UK, as of most western states at the time, had a wholly unjustified bias in favor of communism, viewed it as a noble, if perhaps sometimes misguided, effort. Insofar as what was by then known of Stalin’s Russia — purges, show trials, and the Ukraine famine — made a positive view of that variant of communism more difficult, communist China, of which less was then known, made a satisfactory alternative. The unknown author of the Economist’s eulogy on Mao believed the official account of the good effects of Mao’s rule because he wanted to believe it.

He was not the only one:

Finally, what are we to make of the Western indifference to the great famine? Eyewitness stories of refugees who fled to Hong Kong were widely dismissed and rarely reported during the famine years. Two generations later a journalistic account is the only fairly comprehensive volume on the famine published in the West.² Incredibly, the 1997 edition of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica does not even list the catastrophe in its tabulation of famines of the past 200 years. (Vaclav Smil, “China's great famine: 40 years later,” BMJ 1999)

There are, I think, two explanations for that bias — which, in a somewhat weakened form, still exists. One is that communism was a movement of the left and western intellectuals, then and now, mostly regard the left as the good guys. The other is that

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. …

… In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion – that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware – will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. (George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”)

The Soviet Union no longer exists and China, having sensibly abandoned communist economics if not communist politics, is no longer left, but there are still the welfare states of Scandinavia for an American intellectual to look up to.

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1. My review: A Very Coasian Revolution.

2. Becker J. Hungry ghosts. New York: Free Press; 1996.