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Townhall...
Capitalism
Did It
by Mona
Charen
Aug 03,
2012
A young
Chinese man is under arrest for a rampage killing in Liaoning province.
The
knife-wielding 17-year-old reportedly killed eight people, including
two
relatives of his estranged girlfriend, and wounded five others.
Terrible
story. But Agence France-Presse, in an account widely circulated by
Yahoo and
other news outlets, knew just whom to blame: capitalism. AFP explained,
“Violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades as the
nation’s
economy has boomed and the gap between rich and poor has expanded at an
alarming rate.
Experts say
the increase in assaults shows that China is paying the price for
focusing on
more than 30 years of economic growth while ignoring problems linked to
rapid
social change.”
Where to
begin? Do critics of capitalism and economic growth really want to
invite a
comparison of body counts between pre- and post-1978 China? That was
the year
that Deng Xiaoping began the turn away from communism and toward
free-market
principles in the world’s most populous prison.
Here’s the
way to begin thinking about poverty in China. Between 1958 and 1961, an
estimated 30 million Chinese died of starvation. It wasn’t a natural
disaster,
but an entirely political death toll. Mao Zedong had forcibly
collectivized
agriculture and then imposed farming practices that defied experience
and
logic. He insisted that “in company grain grows fast; seeds are
happiest when
growing together.” China’s farms were accordingly obliged to sow seeds
at five
to 10 times the normal distribution -- resulting in widespread crop
failures.
There were
other state dictates that contributed to the catastrophe; they
exterminated the
sparrows, which resulted in an explosion of the number of parasites;
they
increased flooding by contributing to soil erosion; they distorted the
ecosystem by focusing on one big cereal crop at the expense of other
land uses,
including the raising of livestock. As “The Black Book of Communism”
recounts,
“ ... the somewhat surreal slogan for the year 1958 ... was ‘Live
frugally in a
year of plenty.’” Many peasants were too weak from starvation to
harvest what
modest crops were produced, leading the national press to “begin to
sing the
praises of a daily nap, and medical professors came out to explain the
particular physiology of the Chinese, for whom fat and proteins were an
unnecessary luxury.” Reports of cannibalism were widespread...
Read the
rest of the article at Townhall
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