Quote from: MoonShadow on May 29, 2013, 04:43:13 AM

Quote from: oakpacific on May 29, 2013, 04:04:21 AM

Quote from: myrkul on May 28, 2013, 09:49:05 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on May 28, 2013, 09:42:15 PM

Bear in mind that once upon a time, the communist leadership in China believed that they could teach rice farmers to refine iron and make alloy steel in grass fired clay kilns across the countryside; and that was how they were going to be able to keep those evil capitalist American navies out of their business.

Really?

I mean, I know bureaucrats are out of touch with reality, but this strains credulity.

It's not the bureaucrats' feat, but that of the revolutionaries. Bureaucrats wanted to maintain the status quo, revolutionaries wanted to change(read: impose their ideals of Utopia upon common folks) something, thus the tragedy.

One generation's revolutionary is the next generation's bureaucrat. That was a great part of the problem; Mao lived in an information bubble of his own making. He didn't trust the "intellectuals" but those whom he did trust were no more worthy of such faith, and tended to be less informed upon the subjects for which they were expected to advise than the intellectuals who proceeded them. Like anyone else, they were just trying to maintain the little fiefdoms that they had built up during the revolutionary period, even if that required deceiving the monarch in order to maintain political favor.

Yup exactly(in fact it's even worse, with the intellectuals evicted, the honest peasants refused to fill in the positions left by them, as they knew they are not qualified for such work, those who in the end occupying those positions were then, literally, thugs), so if it ends up being the same, better no revolution which causes far more deaths then you can possibly imagine during the peaceful times.

Aside from that, the Great Leap Forward had much to do with Mao's revolutionary ideal(yeah, he was a peasant, he should have known, right?)