the federal government and institutions for their cause. The whole process was also facilitated by the fact that, with the massive outmigration of blacks from the South and the mechanization of cotton production, economic conditions had changed so that southern elites were less willing to put up more of a fight.
REBIRTH IN CHINA
The Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong finally overthrew the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949. The People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1. The political and economic institutions created after 1949 were highly extractive. Politically, they featured the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. No other political organization has been allowed in China since then. Until his death in 1976, Mao entirely dominated the Communist Party and the government. Accompanying these authoritarian, extractive political institutions were highly extractive economic institutions. Mao immediately nationalized land and abolished all kinds of property rights in one fell swoop. He had landlords, as well as other segments he deemed to be against the regime, executed. The market economy was essentially abolished. People in rural areas were gradually organized onto communal farms. Money and wages were replaced by “work points,” which could be traded for goods. Internal passports were introduced in 1956 forbidding travel without appropriate authorization, in order to increase political and economic control. All industry was similarly nationalized, and Mao launched an ambitious attempt to promote the rapid development of industry through the use of “five-year plans,” modeled on those in the Soviet Union.
As with all extractive institutions, Mao’s regime was attempting to extract resources from the vast country he was now controlling. As in the case of the government of Sierra Leone with its marketing board, the Chinese Communist Party had a monopoly over the sale of produce, such as rice and grain, which was used to heavily tax farmers. The attempts at industrialization turned into the infamous Great Leap Forward after 1958 with the roll-out of the second five-year plan. Mao announced that steel output would double in a year based on small-scale “backyard” blast furnaces. He claimed that in fifteen years, China would catch up with British steel production. The only problem was that there was no feasible way of meeting these targets. To meet the plan’s goals, scrap metal had to be found, and people would have to melt down their pots and pans and even their agricultural implements such as hoes and plows. Workers who ought to have been tending the fields were making steel by destroying their plows, and thus their future ability to feed themselves and the country. The result was a calamitous famine in the Chinese countryside. Though scholars debate the role of Mao’s policy compared with the impact of droughts at the same time, nobody doubts the central role of the Great Leap Forward in contributing to the death of between twenty and forty million people. We don’t know precisely how many, because China under Mao did not collect the numbers that would have documented the atrocities. Per capita income fell by around one-quarter.
One consequence of the Great Leap Forward was that a senior member of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, a very successful general during the revolution, who led an “anti-rightist” campaign resulting in the execution of many “enemies of the revolution,” had a change of heart. At a conference in Guangzhou in the south of China in 1961, Deng argued, “No matter whether the cat is black or white, if it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” It did not matter whether policies appeared communist or not; China needed policies that would encourage production so that it could feed its people.
Yet Deng was soon to suffer for his newfound practicality. On May 16, 1966, Mao announced that the revolution was under threat from “bourgeois” interests that were undermining China’s communist society and wishing to re-create capitalism. In response, he announced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, usually referred to as the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was based on sixteen points. The first started:
Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, and customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present our