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Communist dictatorship is an oxymoron, and China's governance system tends to rank highest among international poling for satisfaction of democratic representation.
That being said the Great Leap Forward did have mistakes. That's what happens when you try to modernize a SLAVE AGRARIAN SOCIETY RUN BY MONARCHISTS to a modern country. It also ended the famine cycle that had been common in China for several hundred years. Given modern estimates show 6-10 million deaths during the recovery of one of the largest revolutions and most drastic socioeconomic evolution in world history, that's a pretty good ratio.
As far as the 100 Flowers Campaign, yeah. That was a good thing and showed why education was more important before freedom of the press could be established. Mao et al naively thought China was immune to propaganda campaigns at that point in the revolution and believed that criticism would come from people that genuinely believed in freedom and progress. And they were right, for a large amount of the criticisms posted, all of which have since been addressed surprisingly enough. But the 'let's let the US own us, let's return to a puppet state, let's sow racial division instead of national unity,' propaganda campaigns threatened to split China, which would have resulted in additional western-owned colonial puppet states like Japan.
You're seriously defending the Great Leap Forward where peasants were made to live in communes and melt down their metal tools in backyard furnaces to make worthless pig iron while the nation starved due to inept and incompetent agricultural practices being enforced on them by the dictatorship? It's almost laughable if it wasn't so tragic - yes, farmers, just plant all your seed in a giant pit and it will grow thick enough to stand on!
My older Chinese born coworker who grew up in one of these communes didn't know who his parents were, didn't know his birthday, all because of that tyrannical shit. And it certainly wasn't necessary to "mature the economy" or whatever your joke of an explanation is.
You're entitled to your opinion, but to anyone else reading, everything he has said is easily disproven drivel. I won't be replying again.
Good, better luck next time spreading your propaganda.
While this is true, this isn't inherently a bad thing. The problem was creating an environment where 'Dirt Emperor's' could form without any infrastructure for oversight; as well as the overall lack of education, as mentioned previously. This has been shown and China admits this was a mistake, and communes were used as a part of Deng's argument for capitalist reform, showing that agrarian society cannot jump to socialism or communism.
However this laid infrastructure that wouldn't otherwise have been laid, allowing for the reforms and later top-down management from the government to be effective in modernization of regions at a pace that has never been rivaled in human history. Source 1
You act like this was a plan from the government, it wasn't. Again this is down to local corruption, and the reason China now has a strong centralized government. The Steel production quota was based on Soviet successes, but was incorrectly included in all regions as an expectation Cadres could be rewarded for; leading to severe local corruption without oversight. The expectation from the central government was that mines that were shut down due to the war and invasion would be reopened, and newer mines would be prospected.
Instead these regional bosses wanted to cook the numbers to look good, primarily believing they would be rewarded heavily, secondarily believing the new government was 'just another dynasty,' and thus would punish them if they failed to meet quotas or had issues or concerns. This was a false belief that lead to tragedy, but was not a consequence of the great leap forward as much as expecting corruption to not be so deeply entrenched in those that had management experience. Source 2
As a fun fact, this is why the current Chinese government system is set up the way that it is, with literally dozen of competing people reviewing any accomplishment of their peers.
This was more of a problem of individuals with the knowledge being essentially too worthless to keep in government. And that sounds odd given the results, but you fail to understand just how corrupt the previous government was. Any possible criticism you have of the Mao-led party, you can say was 10,000 times worse before the revolution, hence the revolution. There is a reason the KMT was a fascist dictatorship until the 1980s when they held their first ever elections for any office.
This wasn't a policy, but what was a policy, and what the tragedy actually was, was eliminating sparrows without understanding their greater effect on keeping pests under control. With more limited seed stock the solution they came to was to eliminate pests that would eat seeds, without any concern or understanding as to what other things those pests might eat that would cause more damage. Otherwise most planting was allowed to continue as it had been.
This would be a lie that he told you. The communes existed for exactly 3 years. The broader organization (sectioning the population into 26,500 sections for management) continued until the 1980s, but local communes were dissolved during and post famine. Additionally to this, there is no confidently documented cases of separating children from their parents or eliminating birthdays. There are some anecdotes on far-right websites, but there is no actual documentation of this happening or ever being ordered.
To your broader point with this third-party anecdote, no, it wasn't tyrannical to try to eliminate local lords and return control to the people. It wasn't tyrannical to try to implement a communal environment that was largely successful in its wider goal of national unity. It was too much, too soon, based on idealism over the hard reality of what living in a feudal agrarian society does to the human psyche.