What Do American Capitalists See in Mao's China?

"The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history." — David Rockefeller, New York Times 1973

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." — Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine 2010

MAC Sep 28, 2010 | Mao's Great Famine is "Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that 'fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era.' Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of 'one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,'— at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death — but also of 'the greatest demolition of real estate in human history,' as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble." — Amazon Review

So, given this devastating assessment of Maoist China, how was it that David Rockefeller, a prince of American Capitalism, was so unaware of the cost of the Great Leap Forward that he was able to say, "Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution it has obviously succeeded…in fostering high morale and community purpose." Further, how is it that today's American capitalists, aware of China's continuing spotty human rights record, have no problem subsidizing China's emerging superpower status with wide-open "free trade?"

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