GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
06 OCTOBER 2026. CHINA POST #642
CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
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IN THIS ISSUE
THE POSITIVES AND THE NEGATIVES
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China challenges us. It is different. It is pursuing a path never previously trod. It is entering new territory and it is provoking reactions – good and bad; informed and ignorant; optimistic and negative.
This China Post – #642 – addresses itself to The Positives – a body of people who, in general terms, are favourable towards China. Generally, they support the narrative that China is making big strides in promoting the welfare of its people. Life is improving; poverty is receding; significant numbers of Chinese nationals travel overseas for holidays; the number of China’s S-T-E-M graduates far exceeds the number of U.S graduates and the volume of new rail lines has surged in recent years. This Positives are increasing in numbers as evidenced by recent surveys conducted by the Pew Institute, the Harvard Kennedy Institute and also, the Edelman Trust Barometer which measures the popularity of governments with their peoples.
At the same time the Positives recognise that China’s history has negative aspects as well and there are some events that they quite properly question such as; the Cultural Revolution (CR); the Tiananmin Deaths (TD); and the Great Leap Forward (GLF). This China Post, therefore, considers the right way and the wrong way for the China Positives to respond when confronted in discussions with the China Negatives – the people who clutch at each and every negative item on China to go on to the offensive and widen their criticism into a wholesale denunciation of China.
The theme in this China Post, therefore, is to consider how the China Positives – the people with a basic positive attitude to China – should respond to the often-intense discussions that arise when the China Negatives – the people with a basic negative attitude to China – focus on the GLF, the CR, or the TD. In a phrase, when these three topics arise how do you – a China Positive – respond? Do you get flustered and abusive? Do you lose your intellectual balance and objectivity? Do you talk yourself into a corner? Do you become ragged and rude? Do you behave intemperately and aggressively? We have all been there. Keeping your cool as the temperature rises is not easy – but it is always best to try.
We are talking about the negative events in China’s history which are always seized upon by those who, in the main, are determined to undermine and discredit China’s achievements. It helps if you (the Positive) – as you get into argument, have an attitude, an approach, and a narrative which has intellectual honesty, coherence and consistency.
And here’s the point. China is under scrutiny in any such intense encounter – and so are you? You are being tested and your commitment to the Positive China narrative is being subjected to examination. Become flustered and incoherent and you lose the argument and also some self-respect. And to be sure we are talking about life and death issues. It is too trite to recall the comment attributed to Lenin that making an omelette requires you to break some eggs but the GLF and the CR and the TD were about deaths and you cannot skate over deaths. You need to understand what went wrong and why it went wrong.
Let’s look at the Great Leap Forward of 1958 when Mao called on the country “to go all out” to double agricultural and industrial production. It did not happen. It could not happen. It was, at best, naïve and at worst an enormous setback that led to deaths on a large scale of many Chinese from hunger and malnutrition. It also called into question the capacity of the Chinese government to govern.
The goal was to transform the country from an agrarian society to an industrialized society through the formation of people’s communes but reports suggest, instead, that the GLF was a big failure that led to between 5 and 25 million deaths between 1959-1961.
The GLF grew out of Mao’s push for rapid development through mass mobilization. The strategy relied on persuading peasants to sustain themselves while supplying grain, cash crops, and even steel for urban industry, without major new state investment. In fact, the attempt to accelerate growth in the countryside was fundamentally misconceived. The state rushed the merger of private farms into large-scale militarized people’s communes. They abolished private property. They banned household cooking in favour of communal canteens, and they bore down hard on individual farming incentives.
There was more;- flawed farming techniques – eg crowding crops together and burying nutrients too deep – operated to reduce crop yields significantly. The mass extermination of sparrows (because they eat into valuable stocks of grain) operated, at the same time, to destroy the natural predators of crop-eating insects, which led to large scale locust swarms that ruined harvests.
The Backyard Steel Furnaces played a big role in the GLF disaster: many peasants were pulled away from farming to melt down household tools and metal in primitive backyard furnaces, producing largely useless, low-grade iron and causing severe deforestation. And then there was allegedly falsified production figures compiled to exaggerate harvest yields. And this led to the government extracting disproportionately high grain taxes based on these false numbers. And the consequence? Many rural villagers were left with nothing to eat. Malnutrition became widespread and deaths of Chinese citizens – in the main wholehearted supporters of the Revolution – mounted.
Reports suggest that deaths were estimated at between 5 million and 25 million people due to starvation, exhaustion, and violence between 1959 and 1961. The Chinese Communist Party was forced to dismantle the commune system by 1961–1962 and return some land to private plots. There was a political consequence as well. Mao Zedong was forced to step back from frontline economic policy-making, handing daily control to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, which contributed to the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Great Leap Forward was a very bad time for China.
And no one else was to blame. The “U.S. Imperialists” were not responsible. Some blame was placed upon the USSR due to the deteriorating political relations at the Government-to-Government and Party-to-Party level and the USSR were accused of withdrawing their many technicians – allegedly overnight – from China causing serious economic damage as industrial production was massively scaled back. There were also reports of the three droughts in 1959/60/61 which increased the widespread damage to agricultural production and also to the morale of the people. But the principle blame lay with the Party and the Government. Politics intervened. Priorities were re-arranged. Mistakes multiplied and deaths soared. Disaster – not too strong a word – ensued.
The Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Tiananmin Deaths on June 1989 also occurred whilst the CCP was in control and the blame lies internally with China and not externally with the U.S or the USSR/Russian Federation. China got it wrong.
Accept it. Don’t pretend. Don’t blame US Presidents or USSR/Russian leaders. The CR and the TD deaths were Chinese-conceived incidents. Neither Washington nor Moscow (except for the withdrawal of large numbers of Soviet technicians) were to blame. We have to be clear that we understand what went wrong. If we want to be able to talk up the Positives we cannot run away from the Negatives. We have to be sure that we have studied the faults and understand how they arose if we want to assert that China continues to merit our support. Can we emerge from the heat of objective analysis with a rational understanding of what went wrong? The answer is an unqualified Yes. We can emerge with a clear – albeit uncomfortable – grasp of what happened and why it happened. But there is a “but”. We have to be honest with ourselves. Anything less and we start falling apart.
So Back to the GLF and the plausible explanation.
And we go straight to the core – Mao got it wrong. He misread the thinking and mindset of the peasants. He hustled them into communes and a policy of land sharing when they wanted to enjoy the private ownership that came in 1949 when they wrestled land ownership away from the much-hated landlord class. And the peasant millions he antagonised were the very people who had played such a big role on the Communist Party side in the three Civil Wars from 1927 to 1949.
Mao also demanded obedience from his followers that led them to feed him good news instead of actual news. The Party at all levels idolised Mao and with good reason because he had played the leading role in defeating the KMT and inaugurating the new People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. But the Chinese deified Mao and Mao allowed the deification to happen. At the end of the day all generals have a debit balance as well as a credit balance. Things do go wrong in War. Victory is always achieved at a cost and that being the case the leaders have to ensure that their feet always remain firmly on the ground lest they lose contact with the real world – the world as it is and not how they would want.
I recall an event that was held during the Cultural Revolution at the Chinese Embassy in London. I attended with my father. It was drinks and dinner. The conversation was convivial. Suddenly, a guest made a toast to Chairman Mao and spoke about him in God like adulatory terms. The guests raised their glasses. One man desisted – it was a stand-out moment. When pressed for an explanation from fellow guests. Jack said “I gave up believing in Gods in 1933”
On this issue Mao’s followers were at fault for believing that they had to provide good figures on agrarian production even if they were untrue. But Mao was also at fault for creating an atmosphere of unbridled adulation. Mao should have interrogated all the information he was receiving from his team around him to ensure that they were truthful and not made up to please him. To the extent that so many around him compromised themselves and supplied false figures Mao has to accept a large measure of blame.
There is a point here; that you – a China Positive – are not being honest and frank with yourself if you do not recognise the negatives that happened in China during the GLF – the CR and the TD’s as well. The truth may hurt but that is because things do go wrong. See it. Analyse it. And then you are equipped to confront the China Negatives who will always – without fail – overdo the negatives in order to do down the China story.
No question, there is a positive China story. See the encouraging figures for China’s S-T-E-M graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics); the surge in the construction of new railway track; the big number (200 million) of Chinese tourists who will travel abroad by 2030; the Sputnik Impact of DeepSeek; and the flow of reports from non-political tourists who talk up to the pleasant relaxed feel of walking the streets of China’s cities and countryside.
For sure, China is on the move. This is the main geo-political development of our times. China’s progress will have a large world impact for the rest of the century. But that does not mean that China will be mistake-free or trouble-free. As this column – Good Morning From London – repeatedly asserts China may be on the right path but it is a path not travelled by any society in the history of the world. China has no blueprint. No biographies or autobiographies or historical treatises that refer to an earlier period of history which touches and relates to the period through which China is now travelling. The country is making it up as it goes along. Everything is new. And here is the point China requires the highest levels of management and of administration and of policy.
Today in China, Governance is Everything and it is interesting that in the articles on China there is an expanding reference to the Meritocratic Imperative. Some things will always go wrong. It is the nature of life. No Mistakes is Unrealistic. They will happen and when they do the response has to be calmly analytical and objective and devoid of political ingratiation. That is the lesson of the Great Leap Forward.
In future issues we will examine the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmin Deaths. But for today the focus is on the Great Leap Forward and two concluding points;- first, get yourself up to speed and try to understand what happened. Second, when going to head-to-head with the China Negatives acknowledge the negatives and the mistakes and allow yourself to be positive and informed as the conversation moves onto China’s future.
So eyes wide open. Be aware. Be alert. Big things are underway in China. And China’s path – its progress and its setbacks – matter on a world scale. People tend to be Country-Centric; the domestic news always prevails over the foreign news and people will always incline to home news first and overseas news – second. To a student in Durham or a Nurse in Orpington or a Public Relations Consultant in Bristol, China is not a priority. It features in a read-through of world news but usually the significance of China is overlooked as it takes its place in the queue.
In the great scheme of things, that will change – not because of compulsion or undue influence – but simply because what is going on in China today has growing consequences for the UK tomorrow. So, this is the general approach – good or bad China will move up the scale of priorities. Not, I hasten to add, because China is a threat to the UK – it isn’t – but because China’s progress is across the board and ever-encroaching into our daily diet of incidents, and experiences.
And as China grows in importance so the negative interpretations of life in China will increase. But why? Why is China often a bad news item – eg – repressive, totalitarian, vindictive, dominating, expansionist. There is a reason and it is not down to the Great Leap Forward (“GLF”), the Cultural Revolution (CR) or the Tianamin Deaths (TD). There is a bigger over-arching explanation. China is a Communist country ruled by a Communist Party. And it cannot be allowed to succeed, or to be positive, or to offer people in the UK another way of going forward. Communism, so the narrative goes, is bad, evil and threatening. It must be exposed wherever it appears and its model of development must be discredited. Fight the Negatives but with information, objectivity and cool-headed analysis. Good Luck.
GRAHAM PERRY
