World History

Unit 7: The World Since 1945

Chapter 29: Asia Since 1945

61. Thu, Apr 24, 2014

A frequent topic in this chapter is land reform, which is part of the bigger topic of economic reform — and this leads us to the big questions of what an economy should look like, and how much a government should be involved.

"Land reform" is a big category, but usually runs along these lines: generally speaking, there are far more people farming the land than there are people owning the land, i.e. most farmers are renting from landowners. As farming is rarely profitable as is, adding rent on top of that is frequently a major factor in keeping a lot of farmers poor. The call for land reform thus can go down a couple different paths. The Maoist model is to organize collective farms: no one person owns land, but the farmers as a whole own a lot of land (in theory). A more capitalist approach, or at least one favoring private ownership, calls for the land to be owned by the people who work it, i.e. each farmer gets his or her own fields. Either way, the land gets taken away from the landowners. One can see why this issue would raise a lot of tensions.

In any case, the land would be taken away by force, usually governmental force in Marxist/socialist questions. In contrast, whenever peasants clamored for land reform in more capitalist societies, they would be suppressed and dispersed by force as well, again governmental. The government served an ideology either way.

So how much should a government be involved in planning an economy? We have some egregious cases in this chapter — Mao may have been a good general, but when he tried to plan agriculture for an entire country, miliions of peole wound up dead from hunger. The book does seem to take some shortcuts, too. Burma, for example: "[Ne Win's] repressive government took strict control of the economy, which led to economc ruin." Compare that to Singapore: "Throughout his time in office, Lee [Kuan Yew] created a regulated society, imposing strict controls on labor unions, political activity, and the media. When Lee stepped down… Singapore was one of the world's most politically stable and prosperous countries." Strict government in both cases, but somehow one country wound up broke and the other wound up rich, with the book silent on why.

• What the book is silent on, maybe we can figure out: what seems to lead to economic prosperity? What seems to lead to economic disaster?
• How much should a government interfere in the economy — on one side or another? (Even "laissez faire" usually means the government will be involved in the economy, if only in the form of police.)
• What's the role of colonialism in this? Colonies were taken over for their wealth, and yet as the chapter shows, many of these former colonies were almost dirt-poor as soon as the empires left. What happened? What's the connection? Does colonization leave a nation inherently impaired, or is it due to mismanagement afterward?

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