The Communist Party has a saying: “From poverty to great rejuvenation”, that is, the Communist Party is to blame for China’s rise to wealth and power. But a study by Citi found that the people of China are “poor and penniless” mainly because of Mao Zedong!
The paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that “the flip side of post-reform success is usually pre-reform failure. Martin Ravallion, the researcher responsible for the study, used historical data to compare and find that two-thirds of China’s poor population in 1980 could be attributed to the influence of Mao’s line since 1950, and this is already a very conservative estimate. Lavallee found that China’s poverty rate in 1980 was 41.6 percent, compared to just 0.3 percent in 1980 for South Korea and Taiwan!
Under Deng Xiaoping, it took 10 to 20 years for China’s post-reform economy to make up the lost ground. The impact of Mao’s line began to fade in the 1970s, and by 1990, it had finally regained more than half of the lost ground.
Lavallee, from Australia, is an authority on poverty and now teaches at Citadel University in Chinatown, Citi. In short, the whole thing seems to be a travesty. You are made poor, then you finally have a chance to get out of poverty, and the culprits who got you there want you to thank them!
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