Symmetry wrote:I don't think you understand the basis of my argument- that Communism is an efficient transitional system, but one with flaws. If you can, please suggest a major Communist country that was better before Communism.
To be honest, Symmetry, I don't know enough to answer that question. I think you'd find a resounding majority in mainland China saying no, China was a mess before the communist takeover. Here in Hong Kong, the response would probably be more nuanced, but you could probably find historians to support both sides, that yes, China was better after the takeover, and no, it wasn't.
I did a little digging around, and I came up with these sources.
Here's the first, from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is obviously a pro-Western source. This was written in 1954 by C.M. Chang, a former professor at Nankai University.
The five years of Communist rule in China can thus be written down as years of betrayal. The democratic rights and freedoms promised by the Communists, the "union of the four classes," and the land reform were decoy programs bearing no relationship to the final objectives. The Communist rulers may be able to carry out an industrialization program more successfully than their predecessors, but at terrible human costs. Since the Chinese people live under a revolutionary totalitarian police régime it is too much to expect them to rise in revolt against their oppressors. It simply is not possible. However, the will to revolt, though smothered, is not dead. It may burst into vehement flame if the opportunity presents itself. At present the régime has been weakened by the disillusionment of its people and the critical economic dislocation. It needs the help of its enemies to forge ahead. Will the Western World oblige?
Source:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... e-in-chinaIf you favor economic advancement, then yes. If you care more about individual human rights, then no, at least according to Chang.
Here's a book that might be worth looking at,
The Rural Chinese by Steven W. Mosher. Here's a selection from the
New York Times review:
Mr. Mosher's book belongs to a growing body of literature on contemporary China that, reversing favorable portrayals written in the early and mid- 1970's, places the People's Republic squarely in the 20th-century totalitarian mainstream. But, while others have stressed urban life, the havoc of such mass campaigns as the cultural revolution and the absence of political freedoms in Maoist and post-Maoist China, Mr. Mosher's emphasis is on the hardness and brutality of everyday life. In describing the countryside, he is more critical of the effects of the Communist revolution than other recent writers. He concludes that for the Chinese peasantry - at least the 400 million peasants in the southern part of the country where he did his studies - life was better during periods before the revolution of 1949 than after the country's new rulers began to overhaul age-old patterns of everyday life.
That conclusion is striking if only because, as Mr. Mosher observes, it is ''the paramount myth of the Chinese revolution'' that Communist rule, whatever it has done in other areas of life, has produced great strides in the countryside where 80 percent of China's one billion people live.
So that's another source that says, actually, life was better in China before the communists took power.
And of course, there's always Tibet.
From an article in the
Washington Post:
Chinese troops entered Tibet in 1950, restoring Chinese rule after 40 years of Tibetan independence. A year later the Communist Party forced Tibetan negotiators to sign a deal that would guarantee Tibet's autonomy from China as long as it acknowledged Chinese rule. In late 1955, Tibetans revolted against the Chinese when Communist Party members carried their revolution into traditional Tibetan lands in Gansu, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. The revolt spread to Tibet itself; it was brutally suppressed, and the Dalai Lama fled China in March 1959.
Over the next 20 years, Tibet's religion and traditional ways of life were under almost constant attack. Repression reached a fever pitch during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Gangs of Red Guards destroyed almost every Tibetan monastery.
In 1980, Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang traveled to Lhasa to apologize for "letting the Tibetan people down." But after Tibetans began to demonstrate for greater freedoms, martial law was imposed in 1989 and Beijing's policy changed again, with the emphasis on suppressing dissent. Since then, Lhasa has witnessed 100 violent incidents connected with independence activities, said Lhasa Deputy Mayor Ha Jie.
China says it's brought new economic wealth to Tibet. Tibetans, however, say that only a few people have gotten rich, and meanwhile, their traditions, customs, religion, and language have all been systematically under attack.
So in China, tentatively, the answer is no, the country was not better off with the communists in charge, but I should read much more about it. I can't speak about Cuba pre-Castro, but it seemed to be a pretty great place when Hemingway was there, at least what he wrote about it. The economy took a nosedive in the 1970s, and another hit after the fall of the Soviet Union, and human rights are strictly limited, so if economics or individual freedoms are a measurement of the state of a country, it's not great. However, as I said before, Cuba has good healthcare indicators, in part due to their emphasis on prevention over treatment. I think with Cuba you have a mixed bag. In some ways, life is better, and in some ways, it's worse, but it's not Haiti, and that's a good thing.
