Learning about China after the revolution.……for the first time!

Abstract

How little we knew about China! It is almost as if we are learning about it for the first time. This knowledge gap is most manifest in the errors in what was once taken for granted. When B. Michael Frolic edited and published sixteen refugee interviews gathered before the death of Mao as Mao's People, he wanted to expose as frauds the accounts of short-term travelers to China during the Cultural Revolution decade who reported that China was free of crime, devoid of corruption and bursting with vigorous democratic human relations. No doubt Frolic's exposé is accurate: crime, corruption and fearsome despotism were rife. But Frolic insists that, in the oil industry, everyone can see that politics did not interfere with production. In oil, he says, it is obvious that technical expertise ran the show. (pp. 58-59) But is it? Did it?