Jung Chang: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, I was working in the commune for several years during the Cultural Revolution in two places, and our lives consisted mainly of work. There were fixed hours you were allocated food and fuel and other things depending on how many hours you worked. So your life was centered around work. The commune controlled everything. If you wanted to travel somewhere, you needed the commune to give you a note, a kind of passport, to allow you to travel. If you wanted to get married, you had to get permission from the commune. During the famine, this is how Mao ensured that the peasants didn't rise up in arms because of the control from the commune. Every now and then, the regime would issue stiff orders to stop peasants from fleeing their villages. If they did manage to flee into the cities to beg, for example, the communes were told to bring them back. The commune is the organization, in some ideology, but in reality, it's how the party controls China's 500 million peasants. There were only a few tens of thousands of communes, imagine that highly concentrated organization. So people were no longer individual farmers like they were before communist rule. Well, basically, Mao's ambition after he took power in China was to build a superpower to dominate the world. He needed to buy these machines, military-industrial complexes, mainly from Russia and from Eastern Europe. But he didn't have the money to pay. China wasn't rich as today, so he exported food, and he needed a lot of food. Whereas in China, traditionally, we never produced enough food to feed the population. The emperors banned food export and brought a lot of food into China. So traditionally, China was a food importer for a few hundred years, and Mao stopped that. So to start with, there was always a food problem throughout his and now the Great Leap is basically to import vast quantities of technology and equipment, mainly from Russia. That's why it's called the Great Leap. He wanted to build an industrialized system in a few years to be fast. That's what he said. I mean, that's why his demand for food was vastly elevated, Mao's demand for food. And this food had to come from the peasants. So he basically seized this food to export to Russia and Eastern Europe, knowing his people would die of starvation. There was a time Mao kept saying, seemingly philosophically, "death is a good thing. If we don't have death, the Earth..." These seemingly philosophical things were taken at face value by some academics. But what he really said these things to his officials in order to harden their heart when they went to seize the food from the peasants, seeing how pitiful their conditions were. And that's the origin of the famine. It's as simple as that. It's food export. I mean, Liu Shaoqi, his number two and his main target in the Cultural Revolution. It was thanks to a visit back to his old village that made up his mind to stop Mao's policies, because he went back to his village. aoqi, his number two and his main target in the Cultural Revolution. It was thanks to a visit back to his old village that made up his mind to stop Mao's policies, because he went back to his village. His brother-in-law had died of starvation. His sister was on the edge of dying of starvation. He saw the villages, saw the just heart-rending things, and he opened the lid of a work saucepan and saw there was nothing, just water, a few drops of grain, and he did a very unusual thing and he bowed to the peasants and said, "I'm very sorry." It was after this, in 1961, he made up his mind to stop Mao's policies which led to the Cultural Revolution and his tragic death. And then you also talk in the book about how these peasants, not only was all this grain being exported which caused them to starve, but they weren't even allowed to harvest their grain because they had to talk about turning their own woks and their own stuff into iron and spending time doing that instead of farming.…

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