So far in the story China has been the biggest tale of woe and fail. That doesn’t change after World War II, other than the fact that Mao finally manages to unite the Chinese people under a single banner and enforce his rule with an iron fist, with which he repeatedly punches China in the face.
How did Mao manage to persuade the peasants to join him and not the modern-oriented Nationalists? He offered them the Communist promise of the one thing that man has always fought for: ownership of the land. An interesting contrast is that the rest of the world had long since stopped fighting for land and money and were killing each other over ideology about economic redistribution. Stalin saw communism as locked in a death struggle with capitalism and feudalism. Enemies of the state were shot because their very existence objectively increased the strength of capitalism, which stood in the way of achieving utopia. Mao didn’t do any of that crap, he simply told people that if they killed Nationalist mandarins, he would give the peasants their land.
But what Mao cleverly did was maintain China’s Confucian tradition of a hierarchical society, so that even in communism where everyone is ostensibly equal, the Communist Party could replace the status of emperor and the people would bow. Using Lenin, Mao quickly built a bureaucracy that extended power directly from Beijing down to the smallest villages through a chain of command.
We don’t have any reliable statistics on Chinese agriculture or industrial production, but it seems that China was heavily dependent on Soviet aid and that it got whatever it needed until their split in 1960, when Stalin finally said no when Mao asked for nuclear weapons. Chinese politics gets really crazy after that, all we know is that somehow Mao and his proteges thought it would be a good idea to implement the Hundred Flowers, an attempt to allow direct consumer complaints. Chinese offices were promptly flooded with complaints about EVERYTHING – not enough food, not enough electricity, not enough water, service isn’t good, quality isn’t good, managers aren’t good, etc. etc. etc. It was a pretty good idea but nobody expected the level of fury and scale of complaints that Chinese had been bottling up for fear of being purged. Then the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s attempt to industrialize without the USSR and without such useless trivialities like engineers or factories.
What’s fortunate for China is that Mao was overthrown in a brief coup in 1958, after the Great Leap Forward. When Mao arranged his counterstroke in 1964, he struck first by imprisoning the coup’s right-hand man and its shrewdest leader, a guy named Deng Xiaoping. Mao ended up shooting the rest of the coup but somehow forgot about Deng. Mao then purged his own leadership to prevent another coup. He then decided to purge the entire country with the Cultural Revolution. Deng wasn’t spared (his son was thrown out of a four-story building), but he managed to lay low and not die during this time.
The Cultural Revolution is probably the stupidest event of the 20th century, which is amazing because I’ve already covered a lot of pretty stupid events. Nobody is sure what the human cost was, but it numbers in the tens of millions of people who were killed. What we can say with certainty is that China emerged from the Cultural Revolution as one of the poorest nations on Earth, with a GDP per capita that was half of India’s and on par with Tanzania and Mali.