Political Famines in the USSR and China

> Mao’s pronouncements about the peasants’ willingness to pay that tribute, and the supposed improvements in peasants’ and workers’ lives, also resemble Stalin’s 1929 public statements.

> The main purpose of these policies was to make agriculture pay for the country’s transformation by seizing an ever-increasing amount of agricultural output to feed expanding cities and to procure through exports part of the currency needed to import the requisite agricultural and industrial technology. The mobilization of peasants through forced collectivization would provide the necessary labor. In both countries, these policies were justified by the claim that the rapid socialization of the countryside would cause a jump in productivity—a long-standing tenet of European socialism, which deemed large-scale agriculture inherently superior to small-holder farming. Communist officials thus maintained that resources and labor could be extracted from the villages without damaging the interests of the remaining peasants. Indeed, their lot would improve too, or so the story went.