Now, online and offline, there are still some people who make a big fuss about the first thirty years of New China, make accusations, and infinitely amplify the suffering of the first thirty years: they have not eaten enough, and they have no clothes to cover their bodies. And ignore the difficult start and great achievements of the first thirty years. These people are either ulterior motives or historically illiterate. In order to set the record straight, it is necessary for us to talk about the basis on which New China struggled to come through in the first thirty years and made great achievements.
1. Poor and white
Before 1949, China was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial Old China that was oppressed and ravaged by Western powers, known as the "Sick Man of East Asia" and "Chinese and Dogs Are Not Allowed to Enter". At that time, she had lagged behind the West for more than 200 years, with bruises all over her body, the country was weak and the people were poor, with a per capita accumulation of assets of 21 yuan and a per capita annual national output of 23 yuan, ranking first in the world.
2. Dangerous environment
After 1949, western countries imposed a policy of comprehensive sanctions, blockades, embargoes, subversion, encirclement, interception and diplomatic isolation against New China for 30 years. From 1949 to 1955, more than 200 merchant ships from 16 countries were intercepted by the U.S. lackey Kuomintang Navy and the U.S. Navy pirates.
3. State of war
In the special international environment where the surrounding situation is very severe, New China has long been forced to be in a state of "quasi-resistance war" to safeguard national sovereignty and interests, and has successively experienced the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1949-1953), the Battle of Dongshan Island (1953), the Battle of the East China Sea (1954), the Battle of Yijiangshan Island (1955), the shelling of Kinmen (1958), the X-Tibet counterinsurgency (1959), the Sino-Indian Border Defense War (1959-1962), and the Sino-Burmese Border Operation (1960). Aid to the Vietnamese War against the United States (1965-1972), the Soviet Border War (1969) in the midst of millions of Soviet troops, counter-reconnaissance and counter-attack and harassment operations against the US and Taiwan Air Forces (1949-1972), the Sino-Vietnamese Battle of The Paracels (1974), and several nuclear strike threats and economic assistance to the "Third World" forced New China to spend 30 billion US dollars (at least equivalent to the current 3 trillion yuan) to defend the country.
4. Domestic banditry
It took 13 years before and after New China to thoroughly eliminate the thousand-year-old bandit plague in China. Among them: 2 million remnants of the Kuomintang bandits were eliminated. Eliminate 1.19 million backbone reactionary party groups and 1.2 million secret agents. A lot of energy is involved.
5. "Natural Disasters"
In the first three decades, there were also three years of special hardship and the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed more than 240,000 people and seriously injured more than 760,000 people...
6. Foreign Aid
Basically equal to zero.
In the first thirty years of construction under such poor conditions and environments, can the standard of living be high? But it is by no means hungry and clothed. The fact that a couple can support five or six children is proof of this.
The following are the world-recognized great achievements of the first thirty years:
1. In the first thirty years, the people of the whole country worked hard through self-reliance and hard work, but on the basis of ruins, they built New China into a socialist country with initial prosperity, with a population increase of 400 million and an increase in average life expectancy of 34 years.
2. If calculated in terms of total social output, according to the results of the book "China's Macroeconomic Structure and Policies" edited by Zhang Fengbo, from 1949 to 1978, China increased from 51.5 billion yuan to 684.6 billion yuan. It has increased by 11.29 times in 29 years, with an average annual growth rate of 9%. Such an economic growth rate is not only unprecedented in China, but also very rare in the world, far exceeding the average annual growth rate of post-war world GDP.
3. If calculated in terms of industrial and agricultural output value, according to the 1978 statistical bulletin published on the website of the National Bureau of Statistics, it was 46.6 billion yuan in 1949, but it reached 569 billion yuan in 1978. It has grown 12.8 times in 29 years, with an average annual growth rate of 9.5% (the world's first, compared to 3% in the world in the same period). Among them, the average annual growth rate of industrial production in the "Ten Years of the Cultural Revolution" exceeded 12.5%, which is not only the first in China, but also according to the statistics of the World Bank (table), China's industrial and agricultural growth rate is also the fastest in the world.
(4) In terms of per capita income, although the wage level in China in 1970 was equivalent to 1/10 of that of Japan in the same period, its welfare was more perfect than that of Japan. The sinister international environment of the first thirty years required China to give priority to the development of heavy industry, and only by laying a good foundation can it develop better. But by 2003, Wages in China were only 1/30th of Japan's (per capita disposable income of 5,500 yuan in 2003).
5. If you calculate the amount of gold reserves, China's gold reserves in 1976 were 400 tons, and the GDP denominated in rmb at that time was only more than 300 billion yuan, while China's gold reserves in 2003 were 600 tons (the GDP inflated by the renminbi after inflation has exceeded 10 trillion yuan).
6. If calculated in terms of domestic economic assets, it includes at least four major blocks: the assets of state-owned public enterprises, the collective assets of people's communes, the assets of unproductive public facilities and administrative undertakings, and the assets of science and technology and national defense and military. If the price at that time is calculated at 15 times (or 20 times), it is converted to the current price level, which can be equivalent to the current economic assets of 18 trillion yuan to 20 trillion yuan. If the intangible heritage of scientific and technological and defense military assets is converted to another 10 trillion yuan (for example, the first atomic bomb that is not included in the assets from uranium exploration to manufacturing, at 1957 prices, about 10.7 billion yuan, is it priceless according to today's value?!). Isn't it? The U.S. invasion of Iraq cost $500 billion, and there is still no hope of a complete victory. If Iraq has nuclear weapons, will they dare to fight them? Let Iraq die 620,000, the economy regressed decades), at least equivalent to more than 20 trillion yuan now. By 2007, the country's "financial assets" were only 60 trillion yuan (of which bank assets reached 44 trillion yuan, which is equivalent to five times the human resources of the previous three decades, and only doubled the assets after 31 years).
Some authoritative scientists, dignitaries, famous scholars, and heads of state in the world have made very fair and objective evaluations of the first thirty years of New China:
The Financial Times reported in 2007 that the average annual growth rate of China's economy before 1978 was 9.8% (including the XX period). The Financial Times also commented that the world's largest and most successful industrialization in the last century was in China.
By 1980, China's industrial scale had surpassed that of britain and France, the world's old industrial powers, and was approaching West Germany, which sat in the third place among the Western powers (see the famous American scholar Paul . Kennedy's famous book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers).
—Professor Morris Meissner of Yale University in the United States, after a lot of research, came to the conclusion that China's first thirty years were "one of the greatest modernization eras in the history of the world, no less than the most drastic periods in the industrialization process of several major rising stars in the modern industrial arena, such as Germany, Japan and Russia." ”
In its book Modernization of Japan and Russia, published in the 1970s, the United States argued that New China had achieved achievements that no other country had achieved.
The first thirty years are also commonly known at home and abroad as the "Mao Zedong era".
—Laris Jobenheimer (American military writer and critic): Who can bring a barren country to the ranks of the world's great powers in just a few years? In fact I remember that the United States used to have a president and he was George. Washington. But in a great power in the East, it is China, and one of his excellent leaders, Mr. Mao Zedong, led his people, under the pressure of poverty and hunger, achieved far more than George. Washington's great achievements.
—American scholar Michael S. Thompson. Hart said of the ranking of 100 celebrities that have influenced the world: "Mao Zedong ranked slightly higher than Washington, because the changes Mao brought to the country were more important than the changes that Washington made at home. ”
By the time of Mao's death, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, "China emerged as one of the six largest industrial countries in the world." ”
-- World Bank evaluation: In 1978, China's economy ranked sixth in the world, and in 2001 it ranked seventh. He Chuanqi, director of the Center for Chinese Modernization Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, showed that although China's economy has developed rapidly, it is still ranked sixth in the world ranking, just like in the 1960s.
The first thirty years were not the darkest age, but a great age, but no one with a sense of history, but anyone with a conscience, would blame this age and its leaders. You say yes?