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China is an important example of a country whose prosperity and economic development were held back for hundreds of years by bad governments of various sorts, despite the high education levels and the strong work ethic of its people.
For centuries, the Chinese suffered under parasitic emperors who appropriated a large part of the county’s wealth, including a foreign dynasty run by Mongolians rather than the Chinese. After the 1911 revolution that overthrew the emperors, the country degenerated into a civil war among various predatory warlords and then, in the 40 years before the communist takeover in 1949, into a fight between the corrupt kleptocracy of Chiang Kai-shek and brutal communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong.
China under Mao endured brutal violence against traditional local leaders in the early 1950s, followed by Mao’s catastrophic so-called “Great Leap Forward,” in which tens of millions of people died because of a famine induced by efforts to repeal simple economic laws and drive growth based on political mobilization. Then, in the mid-1960s, Mao launched the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” which doubled down on all of Mao’s worst policies. Millions more died, often because of political violence among various factions within the Communist Party vying for power.
For all its many faults, the current Chinese government is probably the least bad they have had in memory, and this has allowed China to come into its own. The key change came in the late 1970s, very soon after Mao died, when his successor, Deng Xiaoping, broke with their Communist ideological past, essentially dismantling Maoism and allowing for the flourishing of a private economy. We should not underestimate just how difficult and courageous a move that was.
Today, as my colleague Edward Cunningham, director of Harvard Kennedy School’s China Programs, has written, “Private firms contribute approximately 60 percent of China’s GDP, 70 percent of its innovative capacity, 80 percent of urban employment and 90 percent of new jobs.
