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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

One of the best contemporary counterexamples, and incidentally one of the largest organizations in the world by official membership, is the Communist Party of China.

A lot of Mao Zedong's policies are viewed as mistakes by the Party, including the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Heck, Mao himself publicly admitted that the GLF was a mistake for which he takes responsibility.

Yet the CPC, as an organization of millions of individuals, didn't implode and remains as formidable as ever.

There are a lot of reasons for this, not least China having 5000 years experience with running civilization-scale groups.

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> A lot of Mao Zedong's policies are viewed as mistakes by the Party, including the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Heck, Mao himself publicly admitted that the GLF was a mistake for which he takes responsibility.

My impression, from talking to modern Chinese people, is that the Cultural Revolution is viewed as a mistake, and the Great Leap Forward is not. The Great Leap Forward is viewed as having suffered from inclement weather.

I tend to suspect that this reflects current party orthodoxy.

> There are a lot of reasons for this, not least China having 5000 years experience with running civilization-scale groups.

That would make the comparison groups Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. Plus a much weaker argument for Pakistan.

How formidable are those governments, compared to the government of China?

I think the author was implicitly referring to loosely organized groups instead of dictatorships. In groups with strong leaderships, instead of being like a "group", they are more like a bunch of organized people following a (small number of) leader(s), in which case the risk of schism is less pronounced.

Just yesterday I stumbled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace Doesnt sound like Mao was that hot on admitting failure.

How about we read his actual words, spoken to a gathering of Party officials?

> I have committed two crimes, one of which is calling for 10,700,000 tons of steel and the mass smelting of steel. If you agreed with this, you should share some of the blame. But since I was the inventor of burial puppets, I cannot pass on the blame: the main responsibility is mine.

Read the whole thing for a little treat at the end.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...

The CCP under XiaoPing Deng creates indeed a schism. It no longer takes communism seriously. Its legitmacy comes from economic growth, rather than from whatever Mao cared.

It creates a schism among Western "leftists" -- which, surprise, are completely irrelevant to internal affairs of The People's Republic of China.

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