"He was, as great a leader, as a Chairman Mao."

[phk]

Chairman Mao was one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen.

[phk]

Between 1949 and 1975, life expectancy in socialist China more than doubled, from about 32 to 65 years.

By the early 1970s, infant mortality rates in Shanghai were lower than in New York City!

The extent of literacy swelled in the span of one generation--from about 15 percent in 1949 to some 80 to 90 percent in the mid-1970s.

Let's go a bit more deeply into the profound difference socialism made to most people. Before the revolution came to power in 1949, China had been dominated by foreign imperialist powers. By practically all available measures, the economy was near the bottom of the world development scale. It had little industry. Agriculture was brutal serfdom. China had the most ruinous inflation in modern world history. It had a vast criminal underworld of gangsters and secret societies, and almost 90 million opium addicts. For women, it was a living ****: foot binding, arranged marriages, and child brides were widespread social practices.

These kinds of social evils and the extreme polarization of wealth that existed before 1949 were eradicated by the revolution: through the establishment of proletarian state power and the creation of a just social and economic order that unleashed the masses of people and served their interests.

Only a revolution could, and did, uproot the feudal economic system in the countryside. The land reform and repudiation of peasant debt carried out under the leadership of the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s represented the most massive expropriation and redistribution of wealth from rich to poor in world history.

Well lets look at China's industrial economy which under Mao grew impressively at an average rate of 10 percent per year, even during the Cultural Revolution.

China, the former "sick man of Asia," transformed itself into a major industrial power in the quarter century between 1949 and 1976 a rate of development comparable only to the greatest surges of growth in history.

Agriculture grew by some 3 percent a year, slightly exceeding population growth. By 1970, the problem of adequately feeding China's population had been solved. Keep in mind that the amount of arable land in China is only 70 percent of that in the U.S.but had to provide for four times as many people.

This was accomplished through integrated economic planning, a system of collective agriculture that promoted grass-roots mobilization, flood control, steady investment in rural infrastructure, and the equitable distribution of food to peasants and rationing of essential foods so that all people were guaranteed their minimal requirements.

This was a radical break with China's past in which floods, droughts, and feudal oppression caused routine mass starvation--a condition common today in many Third World countries.

To conclude.

Not only is the real record of Maoist China light years apart from what you've been told.

It is also completely different from the polarized and sweatshop-ridden capitalist China of today, which has nothing in common with socialism or Mao.