Chapter 67 The "Cultural Revolution": Ten Years of Disorder

The complete disorder of the national economy began in 1966. In May, Mao Zedong personally launched the "Cultural Revolution". He went to Tiananmen Square eight times and received 13 million Red Guards.Shouting the slogan "Rebellion is justified," these enthusiastic students smashed classrooms to pieces, tied up their teachers to criticize them, and then stormed into all temples across the country, smashing and burning Buddhist statues, books and other cultural relics.Immediately afterwards, the workers were also mobilized, and revolutionary rebel organizations of various names were born one after another. They shouted the slogan "Defend Chairman Mao" and fought brutally.

Since the beginning of the "Cultural Revolution", the central decision-making body has been paralyzed. In the past ten years or so, the leaders of the central government and ministries and commissions in charge of the national economy, except for Premier Zhou Enlai, have almost all been knocked down or sidelined. Among them, Liu Shaoqi was "expelled forever." Leaving the Party", died unjustly in Kaifeng in 1969, and Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun were sent to Jiangxi to work.Due to the total seizure of power by the rebels, the top-down command system of the planned economy was completely paralyzed, the economic management and statistics departments were smashed, and the annual reports of various places were delayed.In 1967 and 1968, when the situation was the most chaotic, it was impossible to formulate a national economic plan for the whole year, and 1968 became the only year since the founding of New China that there was no national economic plan.

This unprecedented catastrophe did not end until 1976, when Mao Zedong died.The ten-year "Cultural Revolution" had a huge impact on contemporary Chinese history. It produced two consequences. Psychological space and institutional space. The "Cultural Revolution" caused unprecedented social harm and economic loss.Hu Angang made a quantitative analysis of the economic losses during the "Cultural Revolution". According to his calculations, the long-term growth potential of China's economy is about 9%. The actual growth rate from 1952 to 1957 was 9.2%. The annual real GDP growth rate was 9.3%, while the real GDP growth rate from 1957 to 1978 was 5.4%, which was 4 percentage points lower. This growth rate was also far lower than other developing countries in Asia.In 1960, China's GNP was 145.7 billion yuan, comparable to that of Japan.By 1977, the size of China's economy was less than one-third that of Japan and only one-tenth that of the United States.It was during these ten years that Japan grew into a super economic power and the "Four Tigers" of Asia emerged one after another.According to Angus Maddison's calculation of the per capita GDP growth rate of Asian countries and regions in the book "The Long-term Performance of China's Economy (AD 960-2030)", from 1952 to 1978, China's mainland and other countries Compared with countries and regions, it is generally backward.The growth rate of GDP per capita in mainland China is 2.3%, and that of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan is 6.7%, 6.3%, 4.8%, 5.4% and 6.6% respectively.

As far as the four basic systems are concerned, China during the "Cultural Revolution" was the period with the highest degree of centralization in the two thousand years of national history.The central government has unquestionable control over the localities, which have no independent political and economic power; the thoughts of the whole people have been highly unified on the line of "dictatorship of the proletariat", and ideological "bathing" movements have emerged one after another; social elites have been basically eliminated Intellectuals were scorned as "stinky old nine", the free business class was cut off as a whole, tens of millions of young people wereted their lives in the countryside, and even the elites in the ruling group were purged round after round ; In terms of economic system, the command-type planned economy presents all its characteristics: economic power is highly concentrated in the command system of the central government; the product economic model that restricts and gradually eliminates commodities and trade relations; the investment strategy that prioritizes heavy industry and military industry ; Completely rely on state investment, comprehensively ban the economic governance thought of private capital; restrict distribution according to work, promote the principle of egalitarianism;Some people in later generations who believed in the planned economy deduced that if there had been no "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution", China's economy would not have suffered such a complete defeat.In their view, Chen Yun's crackdown on inflation in Shanghai and the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan proved the effectiveness of the system.In fact, this fantasy is difficult to establish.Because the logic of state governance has been consistent from the 1950s to before the reform and opening up, the "Cultural Revolution" has nothing more than made the negativity of the planned economic system appear in a more intense and extreme way.

By 1976, China was a closed economy that was basically "insulated" from the world economic system, highly concentrated and without vitality. Following Sima Guang's evaluation of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the rulers at this time "had the fault of destroying Qin." , and avoid the calamity of Qin's death."