oneman28

How China Beat India in Race for Success Half a century ago, Asia's
giants took divergent paths to the future. Today, India ponders why it
lags so badly in improving the lives of its people.

By RONE TEMPEST, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles Times Sunday August 10, 1997 Home Edition Part A, Page 1

NEW DELHI--Fifty years ago this week, the Indian subcontinent broke its
colonial chains with Britain, forming the nations of India and
Pakistan. India, crippled by partition and poverty, chose a democratic
path to the future.

"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny," Indian leader
Jawaharlal Nehru said in a speech on the eve of independence, Aug. 14,
1947, "and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge. The
achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of
opportunity, to the great triumphs and achievements that await us."

At the same time in China, Mao Tse-tung's Communists were on the final
leg of their Long March to victory in the civil war with Chiang Kai-
shek's Nationalists. Emulating the Soviet Union, the new People's
Republic of China--even poorer than India and struggling to survive
after years of war and occupation--chose a Marxist-Leninist road.

"Thus begins a new era in the history of China," Mao said on the eve
of the founding of the People's Republic, Sept. 30, 1949. "We, the 475
million people of China, have now stood up. The future of our nation is
infinitely bright."

In those heady early days, the leaders of Asia's two wounded giants
pledged to lift their countries out of despair. The goal of independent
India, Nehru said, was to end "poverty and ignorance and disease and
inequality of opportunity."

It never surfaced completely--except, perhaps, for the brief border
war that China and India fought in 1962--but there was a rivalry of
sorts between these two have-nots and between their systems. Today, as
they prepare to celebrate India's first 50 years, Indian leaders have
been forced to recognize that, at almost every level except one--the
important domain of human rights and civil liberties--China has done
more to improve the lives of its people, including its poorest
citizens.

"I am ashamed," then-Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda told a business
group in New Delhi earlier this year. "We talk so much about
liberalization. But a Communist country like China can achieve so much
while we can't. This means something is wrong."

Similarly, Salman Haidar, India's foreign minister and former
ambassador to China, commented in a recent interview: "There is no
question that, in a straight-up comparison, China has done much better
than India. All the major indicators are better."

That two senior leaders, a national politician and a brilliant civil
servant, could so frankly and passionately criticize their country says
much about the differences between China and India, certainly in terms
of political openness and freedom of expression.

India's people are gloriously free to publicly say what they think
about virtually anything. And they do--boldly, constantly and
incessantly, producing a cacophony of political debate in this country.

China has little freedom of expression, particularly with regard to
political matters. Meetings of its rubber-stamp parliament, the
National People's Congress, are somber affairs with no public debate or
controversy.

Although Chinese leaders do not hesitate to refer to their nation's
poverty, their references are oblique; their remarks are meticulously
phrased so that communism--and the Chinese Communist Party--are
absolved of responsibility.

Behind the Indian leaders' outspoken remarks, however, is the huge
concern here about the growing gap in development between the world's
two most populous lands.

Mao's Brutal Reforms

Seeking to explain China's large and growing advantage over India in
education, health and general standard of living, scholars, diplomats
and economists come up with different theories. The most common is that
because of India's diversity--15 major languages, five major religions,
countless castes and sub-castes--it lacks the unity and community
needed for effective nationwide education and anti-poverty programs.

In an attempt to catch up with China and booming countries in
Southeast Asia, India has recently launched market reforms similar to
those introduced in China in the late 1970s and throughout the '80s by
the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The most important reforms
include lowering restrictive tariffs and creating incentives for
foreign investment.

But most unsettling to India is an increasing realization that China's
rapid advance is not due merely to economic steps.

Many experts now believe that China's ability to move ahead so far and
so fast is partly attributable to earlier, more brutal reforms--
particularly land reform measures--forced at gunpoint in the
totalitarian 1949-76 rule of Mao.

The Maoist era is primarily remembered for its terrible setbacks: the
1960-61 famine that followed Mao's abortive Great Leap Forward and the
1966-76 political reign of terror and persecution known as the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

But particularly in the early stages of Communist rule, in the 1950s,
the country benefited from the land redistribution, introduction of
compulsory universal education, adoption of simplified Chinese
characters that led to greater literacy, and the introduction of health
and welfare policies and other reforms that helped restore the
country's spirit and self-respect.

Although it is much more controversial today, the Communist crackdown
on religion, superstition, secret societies, triads and clans may also
have helped the country break the cycle of endemic poverty.

"China's relative advantage over India," argues Harvard economist
Amartya Sen, a native of India's West Bengal, "is a product of its pre-
reform [pre-1979] groundwork rather than its post-reform redirection."

For most of the past half a century, the standard of living in India
and China was about the same. In terms of infrastructure--rail
transport and roads--and an established civil service, India actually
started out considerably ahead of China. After independence, both
countries made halting progress.

But even as late as 1960, both had poor records in reducing
illiteracy, malnutrition and infant mortality rates. China was in the
midst of the world's last great famine, the terrible extent of which is
only now coming to light. In India in 1960, life expectancy at birth
was only 44; in China it was 47.

In their early years of independence, both countries were largely
dependent on foreign aid and expertise--China leaned on its
Communist "Big Brother," the Soviet Union; India relied on the British
Commonwealth and Western donor countries. China under Mao, however,
abruptly broke its ties with the Soviet Union in 1962, while India
remains a major recipient of Western foreign aid.

By the late 1970s, even before the economic reforms introduced by Deng
took effect, China began to surge ahead of India in almost every
measure of economic and social development.

Now, in the most recent Human Development Index of countries--based on
a combination of literacy, longevity and average income--the United
Nations Development Program gives China a rating of 60, near the top of
all developing countries. India gets a rating of just 44; in Asia, the
only countries ranked below India are Laos and Bangladesh.

India's 'Functional Anarchy'

Today, India is the world's largest democracy--a wildly chaotic land
of extremes, of clashing cultures and castes and of deep, engulfing
religiosity. It is also a land of problems, of wrenching poverty and
simmering ethnic hatreds. "Functional anarchy," U.S. Sen. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) called it while ambassador to New Delhi
during the Kennedy administration.

While the caste system and pervasive discrimination against women
greatly limit India's freedom, there are dramatic examples of its
resilient democracy.

In Kalahandi, a remote, arid district of Orissa, India's poorest
state, officials with the national Human Rights Commission reported
last year that at least 12 people had starved to death.

Investigating the death of Balamati Naik, 45, a widow who died in
Kalahandi's Bolangir district on June 6, 1996, the Human Rights
Commission team reported: "Deceased, a widow, fell sick and could not
earn her livelihood and died a slow death due to hunger. Son (7 years)
was evacuated to mission hospital in serious condition due to hunger."

At the same time that people were starving in Kalahandi, however,
local political officials reported a record turnout for local elections
in which the famine was only one of many campaign issues.

"There were starvation deaths, yet at the same time there were
genuinely competitive elections," said Manoranjan Mohanty, a Delhi
University scholar and Orissa native. "Starving people voted."

To Mohanty, this represents the Indian paradox: "There has been an
expansion of Indian democracy right down to the grass roots. . . .
Poverty and inequality coexist with a rising sense of right, increasing
consciousness."

China is the world's last great Communist authoritarian state. It is
ruled by a regime with blood on its hands. Its leaders are responsible
for terrible persecutions and purges, the subjugation of Tibet, a
military slaughter of civilians in 1989 and a man-made famine that
killed 23 million to 30 million people--more than double the estimated
toll of the Holocaust.

Yet China is also a land of progress and achievement, a country that
leads the world in economic growth and, as the new millennium
approaches, is on the verge on conquering the centuries-old blights of
poverty and illiteracy.

"India and China are the two most populated countries on Earth," said
Ding Haiqing, 76, a retired silkworm breeder who lives with his wife
and extended family in a large brick home in a prosperous area of
Jiangsu province. "At the beginning of the modern age, they were
somewhat equal. India was a colonial country. China was a semi-colonial
country. India took the capitalist road. China took the Communist road.

"From the facts," said Ding, smugly surveying his courtyard and
meticulously tended rose garden, "I can tell you that China chose the
right path from a poor and backward country to a comparatively advanced
country."

To say, as Ding suggested, that India chose the "capitalist road" is
misleading. Before the period of reforms, both countries espoused a
socialist model for their economies, although India's was designed with
democratic safeguards. It embraced the socialist-democratic model then
prevalet in post-World War II Europe.

China, which followed the Soviet model that lifted Russia from a big
but backward agrarian state to a global superpower before its 1991
collapse, granted total power to the Communist Party; Beijing continues
to crack down severely on any form of dissent.

But somehow the Chinese state, despite the limits on individual
freedom, has been more receptive to change and imported ideas. India,
even with its impressive democracy, was almost 20 years behind China in
giving up a discredited economic system based on a failed Soviet model.

"China has been described as a 'closed system with open minds,' "
commented Kito de Boer, a New Delhi-based consultant with McKinsey &
Co. "India is often described as an 'open system with closed minds.' "

Power Balance Imperiled

Four of every 10 people on Earth live in India or China. How the two
countries fare is sure to have enormous impact on the rest of the
world. The breakdown or failure of either place--given their
demographic weight--could create a wave of migration unlike any seen
before.

Great disparities in development in the two nations--boasting the
world's two largest armies--could disrupt the Asian balance of power.
Unchecked development threatens the world's environment.

Comparing the fortunes of the two Asian giants has long been a parlor
game. "Model for Asia--China or India?" asked a 1955 article in the
Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review magazine. "Millions in Asia
are watching closely the Indian and the Chinese prototypes of basic
change."

But the comparison has taken on new urgency as the world watches the
very different ways in which the two countries and their governments
meet the Malthusian challenges of overpopulation and underdevelopment.
India is on track to surpass China as the world's most populous country
sometime early in the next century.

"China is the only country in the world comparable with India in terms
of population," said Harvard economist Sen, one of a growing number of
scholars of the India-China question, "and when they began their modern
era, they had similar levels of impoverishment and distress.

"For me," Sen noted, "the most important thing is that they were so
very similar in the 1940s, so very similar in economic and social
development until the 1970s. That makes it very natural to ask how they
have progressed since then."

China's Progress

So far, at least, China has better met Nehru's challenge of
eliminating "poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of
opportunity."

Since 1960, for example, China has added more than 20 years to its
citizens' life expectancy. Chinese men live an average of 69 years,
Chinese women 71 years. Life expectancy in India, while up, averages 62
years.

In literacy, the differences are more pronounced. Despite a decade of
turmoil--the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when many schools were shut--
China has achieved an adult literacy rate of 81% of its population,
compared with 52% for India.

Meanwhile, China's young are moving close to the once seemingly
impossible goal of universal literacy. In China, only 3% of adolescent
boys and 8% of adolescent girls are illiterate. In India, more than a
quarter of adolescent boys and almost half of adolescent girls are
illiterate.

In almost all economic categories, China lopsidedly surpasses India.
In 1990-94, China's average annual growth of gross domestic product was
12.9%, compared with 3.8% for India. India's per capita GDP in 1994,
$320, was just 60% of China's $530.

India is losing the superiority it once had, dating from the British
raj, in railroads and roads. China just finished two rail lines--one
linking Beijing and Hong Kong, another tying Shanghai to the far
western Xinjiang region--and now matches India's total rail mileage.

China's cities--even in the poorest provinces--are booming with
construction and development. Haidar, India's top-ranking foreign
service official, recalled his shock when, while he was ambassador in
Beijing, China announced that, in just 10 months, it would rebuild a
major road ringing the capital and construct more than a dozen
overpasses.

"And then," he noted, "I watched them do exactly what they said they
would. . . . Imagine my dismay when I returned to Delhi and we had not
even finished the one fly-over [overpass] that was under construction
when I left."

Key to China's success, say many experts who have compared the
development of the two countries, are land reforms instituted shortly
after the Communists took power.

Jonathan D. Spence, a Yale University historian, has found that, in
the years just after the 1949 Communist victory, 40% of land in China's
south and central agricultural region was seized from landlords and
redistributed--benefiting about 60% of China's peasants.

Confrontations between peasants and landlords were bathed in blood. It
is estimated that one in every six landlord families suffered at least
one death. The toll in just one year--1950--is believed to have reached
1 million.

But the violent reforms resulted in much more equitable distribution
of China's most precious resource, its limited supply of arable land.

Land Reforms Eroding

There are signs that land reforms are now being eroded in parts of the
Chinese countryside. Chinese farmers are still banned from direct
land "ownership," but many have amassed relatively large holdings that
they manage and operate in a way virtually indistinguishable from
ownership.

Chen Xinghan, 63, was the seventh child in a peasant family in China's
Anhui province. When he was just 6 years old he went to work in a rich
landlord's household. He earned extra money by begging. He joined
Communist forces, became a "grass-roots" cadre and helped break up
large holdings in the Fengyang district where he still lives.

Now, he runs one of the largest private farms in the province--more
than 200 acres--and is one of the richest people in the area. He also
owns a brick factory and a rice processing plant. He employs 133
people, including 13 farmhands.

A member of the Communist Party, Chen is proud of his wealth,
attributing it to Deng's philosophy that "to get rich is glorious."

"I am a landlord," he said in a recent interview in one of his five
personal homes. "But I am a landlord who serves the peasants. I am not
a capitalist, but I want to lead all the peasants to get rich."

But for a few exceptions--notably agriculturally rich Punjab and
Communist-led West Bengal--land reform never came to India.

"In contrast with China," said Delhi University's Mohanty, "India's
developmental strategy did not ensure that the land belonged to the
tiller, so absentee-landlordism, sharecropping and concealed
landlordism are still the norm in most areas."

India's two most populous states--Uttar Pradesh and Bihar--are still
plagued by a near-feudal system of absentee landlords and tenant
farming.

"I know it is heretical," said Nick Bridge, a New Zealand diplomat who
served in Beijing and until recently was ambassador to India, "but I
think one of the main reasons that China has an advantage is that it
underwent a violent revolution. The Communists killed the landlords.
India still has them, and they are dragging the country down."

China, like the Soviet Union, launched a mostly disastrous program of
collective farming that reached a low in the 1958-61 Great Leap
Forward. In that program, instituted by Mao as an accelerated way to
communism, peasants were forced to join production brigades and eat in
communal kitchens.

The result was a breakdown in the food production system and the
famine that experts now believe killed up to 30 million. The communal
kitchens were abandoned in 1962. The collective farms lingered until
1979, when Deng initiated a "household contract system" that lets
peasants till their own land and sell their harvests on the open
market.

But the essential reforms--land redistribution--that occurred at the
time of the revolution remained intact. Once freed from the collective,
Chinese farmers prospered--quickly. Some centralized, communal aspects
of the system remain and help Chinese peasants organize and coordinate
efforts.

"China has made progress in areas where we have not," M. S.
Swaminathan, a renowned agronomist and an architect of India's "green
revolution" in agriculture, said in an interview at the Madras-based
Swaminathan Research Foundation. "Because of the very possibility of
social mobilization under a single political party, they have been able
to get better control of water and pest management.

"The Chinese," he said, "have an integrated approach to job creation
between the farm and off-farm employment which we have not had in this
country. The result in India has been the proliferation of urban slums
as landless poor people migrate to the big cities of Bombay and
Calcutta and Madras, living in utter squalor and deprivation."

China's population increase and agricultural modernization have also
produced surplus labor. An estimated 80 million to 100 million people--
the "floating population"--are internal migrants, manual laborers,
construction workers and curbside vendors in the major cities. But
several studies report that an additional 100 million of these people
were absorbed by outlying "township enterprises" that India has never
developed.

"The main reason that, economically speaking, China is doing so much
better than India," Mohanty said, "is the difference in the political
systems that resulted from the kinds of revolutions the two countries
weît through. I think the Chinese were forced to face the challenge
right from the beginning. From 1949 onward, they had to justify their
revolution by providing some basic economic needs, partly because they
were constantly under attack from the West.

"In India, we also had great values. But at the end of the freedom
struggle, there were great compromises. . . . The basic needs of the
people got postponed for the vast majority of people."

In fits and starts in ôhe past five years, India has begun to
institute market liberalization and reforms that China began in the
1980s.

Now, many foreign business analysts are optimistic about India's
potential. "We basically advised our clients that they need to be
[investing] in both China and Inäia," said Dominique Turcq, an analyst
with McKinsey & Co. who directed a huge 1995 study comparing the "two
That study, the most exhaustive economic comparison of the two markets
from an investment perspective, predicts that, "in the next decade,
both India and China will see sustainable growth."

Democracy Inhibits Growth

India's vibrant demoãracy, Turcq said in an interview in Paris, where
he is now based, in some ways inhibits the government's ability to spur
growth. A democratic government, for example, must pay closer attention
to inflation and respond to "strong, established lobbies."

But foreign investors who have worked in both places often find
India's civil society easier to understand and more dependable.

"Democracy puts limits on what you can do in brutalizing the economy,"
Turcq said. "But it does give you more stability. India will probably
never grow at 12% a year like China. But it wiìl have stability."

Other observers are not so sure. What the strictly business analyses
of India fail to take into account, they say, are growing divisions
among castes, religions and economic classes--the haves and the have-
nots.

China's ability to convert quickly to a market economy can be
attributed in part to the country's attention to the most basic social
needs. So while Mao's party may have been seeking to reach a perfect
Communist state--by instituting universal education and public health
care and improving the status of women--it also laid the groundwork for
a market economy.

"The force of China's market economy rests on the solid foundations of
social changes that occurred earlier," said economist Sen. "India
cannot simply jump onto that bandwagon without paying attention to the
enabling social changes--in education, health care and land reforms--
that made the market function in the way it has in China."

Meanwhile, a working measure of success for the two titans may lie in
the question posed by former U.S. diplomat Jay Taylor in his 1987
book, "The Dragon and the Wild Goose," which compares the
nations: "Would you rather be the poorest man in China or in India?"

Rone Tempest, The Times' Beijing Bureau chief since 1993 and New Delhi
Bureau chief from 1984 to 1988, reported these stories in India and
China.

Rani Lakshmibai

Damn. That makes sense. The land reforms is a major reason that allows China to accelerate growth. And I wondered why nearly 15 years after beginning economic reforms India still can't maintain 8 or 9 % growth rate. Like China.

This is not a problem that can be solved easily, is it? What can you do? Make all the landowners in UP and other places turn over their land to the poor at gun point?

Literacy, Health care, and all these other issues, how are we gonna solve them?


This article has seriously depressed me, it seems like India is doomed to lag behind China for ever. And fall victim to its containment policy.

oneman28

Not only the land.

In Mao's time, China's heavey industry and infrastructure got great development.
Deng paid more attention to the light industry which makes the GDP growth so fast.

For example, India had 55000 km of railroad when it was independent from BT in 1947. China had around 22000KM but only a half was operational, another half was damaged or destroyed in the long time wars. When Mao died in 1976, China had around 50000KM railroad already. Both India and China have around 70000 KM of railroad today.

For Iron and Steel industry, China's production increased from around half million tons in 1949 to more than 31 illion tons when Mao died in 1976. Today, India produces around 35 million tons. India has very good iron ore even today.

Also Mao did not left any internal or external debt when he died in 1976.

In Mao's time, CHina had much more achivement. I just can not list all of them.

Leader

I'll help you out.

The death of 20 million people in forced labor camps between 1949 and 1956

The death of 20 to 30 million as a result of Mao's decision to create agricultural communes.

The death of at least 10 million people of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao was directly responsible.

The wrongful imprisonment and torture of 134 million people.

And let's not forget the genius idea to take a million Chinese farm laborers and have them man six hundred thousand backyard furnaces to create very poor quality steal.

__________________

oneman28

That only proves that you are so ignorant about Chinese history and the successful propaganda of the western media. Fewer and fewer Chinese believe these data and the cause of the tragedies happened during Mao's time after China is opened up.

Also none of your data is correct.

-{SpoonmaN}-

You mean to tell me that all of the tens of thousands of Chinese Australians who fled China because of just those events are lying, or are they simply imagining it all? Seriously this nationalism crap has to stop, and people need to accept that no one's perfect, indeed EVERY country on Earth is far from it.

ZFBoxcar

Leader, the backyard furances did not create poor quality steel, they didn't make any steel at all. They made iron slag. Following this disaster, Mao's lackeys, not wanting to disappoint the boss, had the peasants destroy their own steel farm tools so they could present steel to Mao. This caused the deaths of further millions since they could not farm for a while.

Asim Aquil

offtopic.

-{SpoonmaN}-

No, simply addressing the sugar coating of the real process of the PRC's eceonomic development by that article.

oneman28

When CCP took power in 1949. It did not control the all of the China. A lot of Nationalism Party's troops were still active in the vast western area. All the people killed for land rights and those troops could be amount to 2 million. That happened between 1949 -1956

For the Great Leap in 1958 - 1961. There were natural disaster. There were a lot of starvation. For example, an article has some numbers for the lose in the production in one area. It produced 2.9 billion KG food in 1958, but only around 1 billion KG in 1959. During that time, China even could not produce enough food in normal years, let alone the sharp decrease. You can imagine the disaster. the article estimated that the Great Leap movement caused the 10% of this lose. This is a fair estimation. Some people simply denying the existing disaster and only think the politicians should be responsible for that.

I know how the number of 20-30 milion comes. It assumes that the birth rates were the same as normal years, and the population data were totally unrenaible for those years. It even did not consider the low birth rate and high death rate during the disaster years. Russia's population decreased by 6 million in recent years because of the economical difficulties after communist lost its power in that country. There was no big natural disasters in Russia since 1991.

Agricultural communes existed before 1958. It functioned well before 1958. Only in the great leap, some leaders boasted the production unreasonably. Another leader Liu Shaoqi (who died during cultural revolution due to the cancer, he was a political loser in China too) and even Deng Xiaoping should hold the responsible for those. Mao was acturally against the boastings (a lot of his articles can prove that). CCP made a selected works of Liu after the cultural revolution, none of Liu's works or speeches during 1959 and 1960 were selected. He was a very important leader during that time. On average, 4 of his articles should be slected for each year. Deng Xiaoping who was a politicle allance of Liu wanted to take the credits from Mao and put all the errors on Mao's side after mao's death. Deng's reform will be rejudged. At least he took a lot of credits from Mao.

During the cultural revolution, alot of people was surpressed for the political reasons. But very few were killed. Even Liu Shaoqi died from his cancer. Marshall Peng died from his illness. Both died at their 70s. The 10 million life lose in the cultural revolution is my first time to see. I don't think the person who posted can find a reliable resourse to justify his statement.

During the cultural revolution, China had about 700 million population, do you believe 134 million were put in prison? This number is also my first time to hear. Of course only the stupid believe those numbers.

I mentioned a lot of Deng Xiaoping. But no matter what, he is still great for his reform. But he took a lot of credits from Mao's achievement. More and more Chinese are talking about the negative side of the reform now. For example: Corruption, even and fair development, pollutions, education system, public health system.....

It is off the topic.

oneman28

the backyard furances only existed during 1958-1961. We called it Great Leap. Chinese economy recovered since 1962. No more backyard furances after that. Keep learning if you don't know chinese history.

-{SpoonmaN}-

I do it's part of the compulsory Asian history course at my school. I guess the fact that they don't even teach American history unless it's connected to the Cold War does say something about the changes taking place on the continent. And dude you can't escpape the fact that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster, cause Mao had no grounding in economics. This is why autocracies don't work, because no one person can know how to deal with everything. Never the less, he did do a lot to modernise China, but everything he accomplished could have been done without so many people dying in the process.

Leader

Just a little balance.

Leader

The economy recovered between 1962 - 1965 because Mao was no longer in full control of the CCP. In 1965, Mao began the Cultural Revolution, which allowed him to drive from power economic pragmatists like Deng Xiaopeng and Liu Shao-chi.

Leader

So we're not counting the 50 million people sent to force labor camps of which 20 million died. (Source: Margolin, "China," p. 464 and Hongda Harry Wu, Laogai, the Chinese Gulag, trans. Ted Slingerland)

Unfortunately for you someone who was there thinks your argument is BS.

Many of those lives could have been saved if the CCP admitted it's incompetence and accepted foreign food aid, which was offered by the US and others, or stopped grain exports to the USSR.

Assuming deviation from the excepted pattern in order to justify your argument is illogical. If you have proof or at least evidence that the birth rate was lower, present it. Otherwise, your argument amounts to pure speculation.

Economic difficulties are not the main reason for the decrease in the Russian population. Like most of Europe the cause is cultural.

They were not organized in full force until 1958.

You have evidence of so kind?

It's hard to see how leaders demanding higher production quotas results in farmers producing less food.

It's been my experience that the writings of communist dictators make poor sources of information.

While being tortured along with his wife.