What kind of economy are we creating?

[hifiguy]

24. There couldn't really be a Mao dynasty

because (1) because his surviving children were daughters; and (2) he never designated any successor.

Like Stalin, he was a paranoid and engaged in periodic purges, the best known of which was the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, which saw Deng Xiaoping exiled to a collective farm. How Chou En-lai survived as an unpurged relative pragmatist was something of a miracle. Many purged former higher-ups, like Deng, managed to survive the Cultural Revolution, bided their time and moved when Mao died. Virtually everyone had been alienated by Mao's last wife, Jiang Xing and her protege Lin Biao, his successor Hua Guofeng was a cipher, and the pragmatists, led by Deng, removed the remaining Mao clique from power in due course. The rest, as they say, is history, and Deng-inspired technocrats have controlled the country since his death.

The current leaders of China are a nasty bit of work, but look relatively lamb-like compared to the brutality of Mao, what with his mass starvations and purges that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese.

The Kims have gotten by because there have been sons to carry on the dynasty - a strangely Confucian tradition in a communist country. The Kims combine the worst of Mao and Stalin into something that is wholly their own and, thankfully, not exportable.