Yang Jisheng — How Hayek Helped Me Understand China’s Tragedy
Yang Jisheng’s 2013 Manhattan Institute Hayek Prize lecture:
In the space of four years, from 1958 to 1962, China experienced a disaster of historic proportions – the death by starvation of more than 30 million people. This occurred in a time of peace, without epidemic or abnormal climatic conditions. A confluence of historical factors caused China’s leadership clique to follow the path of the Soviet Union, which was supposed to make China strong and prosperous. Instead, it brought inconceivable misery, bearing witness to what Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom: “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?”
Why did Mao Zedong’s great ideals create such great tragedy? The answer can be found in Hayek’s writings. China’s revolutionaries built a system based on what Hayek called “the Great Utopia,” which required “central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint’” and for a “unitary end” while “refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme.” In China’s case, this “unitary end” was the “Great Utopia” of communism.
In order to bring about this Great Utopia, China’s leaders constructed an all-encompassing and omnipotent state, eliminating private ownership, the market and competition. The state controlled the vast majority of social resources and monopolized production and distribution, making every individual completely dependent on it. The government decided the type and density of crops planted in each location, and yields were taken and distributed by the state. The result was massive food shortages, as the state’s inability to ration food successfully doomed tens of millions of rural Chinese to a lingering death.
The designers of this system expected an economy organized under unified planning to result in efficiency. Instead, it brought shortage. Government monopoly blunted the basic impetus for economic function – personal enthusiasm, creativity and initiative – and eliminated the opportunity and space for free personal choice. Economic development ground to a halt. The extreme poverty of Mao’s China was the inevitable result.
An economy with “everything being directed from a single center” requires totalitarianism as its political system. And since absolute power corrupts absolutely, the result was not the egalitarianism anticipated by the designers of this system, but an officialdom that oppressed the Chinese people.
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