Listening to NPR today, I heard a piece that staggered me… not so much the piece itself, but that it was on NPR. The short form: China has had 9% growth this last year. And they’ve had about that level of growth for about the last thirty years. What happened to turn a Communist disaster into a booming economic powerhouse? As it turns out, a few rural farmers figured out how to *actually* work the land in 1978. Prior to that point, the farmers had accepted and lived under the Communist system. And as a result, their farms were not productive. Farmers were reduced to begging for food. And why was this? Because everything was communally owned, and communally distributed. Which means… you eat the same whether you bust your ass, or sit around like a lazy slob. Collectivism had turned all the farmers into lazy starving losers. And the farmers came to understand this. So what did they do? They signed a secret pact that they’d divide the communal farms up into private parcels, and the farmers would keep what they grew. The result? After the first year, they’d grown more food than they grown in the previous five years *combined.* Rather than starving, they were competing to see who could grow the most.
The Chinese Communist party discovered what was going on. And remarkably… they came to understand that private ownership and capitalism were the ways to prosperity, not Communism. And so they adopted the system started by these few rural farmers, and China has been roaring ahead ever since.
Read/hear the story here:
The Secret Document That Transformed China
Of course, the Chinese Communist party was still a *Communist* party. So even though they were smarter than much of the American left in understanding that prosperity comes from private enterprise, not government control, they couldn’t bring themselves all the way out of the squint of collectivism, and so they kept screwing over some of the very farmers who pulled Chinas fat out of the socialist fire.
Interestingly, the Chinese farmers were following in the footsteps of early European colonists in the Americas. One of the most important American holidays comes directly from the Pilgrims dragging themselves out of the squalor that is collectivism, as described here: