I don’t think many people in Britain had heard of Wuhan or Hubei province before the present outbreak of Covid-19 (Coronavirus). The fifty largest Chinese cities each has a population greater than two million, yet few of us could name more than two or three. Chongqing, for example, was first settled in 316 BC and has a population of 30 million, but how many of us could point it out on the map? The danger isn’t so much a virus as our near complete and utter ignorance.
I only know one word in Chinese. I don’t know how to say “hello” and I don’t know how to say “goodbye”, but I do know how to say “little bottle” [小瓶, Xiǎopíng]. It’s possibly the most important word in modern Chinese history.
The Communist revolution in China was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Between 1949 and Mao’s death in 1976 the Communist party directly or indirectly killed between fifty and one hundred million people. Mao repeated the same mistakes that Stalin had made in the 1920s and 1930s, but with even worse results. The Great Famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) starved forty-five million Chinese people. Collectivisation in China did more damage even than in the Soviet Union.
One of the aims of the Great Leap Forward was for China to overtake Britain’s industrial output in fifteen years. It seems unimaginable today that China could have been behind run down Britain in 1958. Now we depend on Huawei to build our telecommunications network and if the Chinese economy contracts because of Covid-19 we will all catch a cold.
But China is where it is today, not so much because of what happened before the death of Mao, but because of what happened afterwards. China in 1976 was backward, poor and going nowhere. It was just another failed communist state with inefficient industry. It sold almost nothing to Britain.
[Interesting Read]
