Economic logic was not enough to stop a ruinous Mao-era drive for self-reliance
foes threaten, an impregnable fortress is worth more than a comfortable home. Time and again, that doctrine guided China’s Communist Party in its first decades of rule. Under Chairman Mao Zedong, talk of invasion was a constant. In those dark times, the usual priorities of peacetime government—feeding and clothing the masses, striving to raise living standards—were all too often neglected. In their stead came campaigns to ready China for war.
Some tough but rational party bosses—among them Deng Xiaoping, the flinty survivor of several Maoist purges, and Mao’s eventual successor—tried to slow or shrink the Third Front when it was first mooted. Their resistance is ably described by Covell Meyskens, a historian at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, in his book “Mao’s Third Front: The Militarisation of Cold War China”.
History does not have to repeat perfectly to offer lessons in the present. Mao was a revolutionary who saw terror and anarchy as useful tools. By contrast, Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, is an austere nationalist obsessed with order and party control. For his part, Mao seems to have relished China’s break with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and the turn to autarky that followed. Mr Xi’s calls for self-reliance in food and in core technologies are more complicated.
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