"Although it has become unfashionable to recall the accomplishments of Mao’s time, it remains the case that the Maoist regime made immense progress in bringing about China’s modern industrial transformation, and it did so under adverse internal and external conditions. Without the industrial revolution of the Mao era, the economic reformers who rose to prominence in the post-Mao era would have had little to reform. Of the Chinese people, Mao’s industrial revolution demanded hard labor and great sacrifices, as had been the case in the industrialization of Japan and Russia in earlier times. Popular consumption and living standards suffered as the Communist state appropriated ever larger shares of the surplus to finance the expansion of the modern industrial plant. The state, simply put, exploited the people it ruled, especially the peasantry in order to build a heavy industrial base and to support the growing bureaucracy that presided over it. But it is not the case, as some of the more zealous champions of the market have suggested, that the Chinese people did not materially benefit during the years of Maoist industrialization. To be sure, China’s sharply rising national income did not translate itself into corresponding increases in income for the working population, whose labor was responsible for the rise. Some of the increase was absorbed by a rapidly growing population, partly the result of the ineffectiveness of belatedly implemented birth control policies. However, most of the surplus flowed into state coffers (and from there to the modern industrial sector and its bureaucracy), leaving only enough for meager increases in popular income over the last two decades of the Maoist regime. While the income of state employees, including regular factory workers, rose significantly during the late Mao period, the income of peasants, who made up 75 percent of the laboring population, increased little, if at all, after 1957. Yet among gains not easy to quantify in economic calculations, but vital for measuring popular welfare, one must note the vast expansion of schools and educational opportunities during the Mao era, the transformation of a largely illiterate population into a mostly literate one, and the building of a relatively comprehensive health care system where none existed before. The near doubling of average life expectancy over the quarter-century of Mao’s rule – from an average of thirty-five in pre-1949 China to sixty-five in the mid-1970s – offers dramatic statistical evidence for the material and social gains that the Communist Revolution brought to the great majority of the Chinese people. Upon completing his monumental history of the Soviet Union, the great English historian E. H. Carr warned: “The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements.” Carr’s words deserve to be pondered by students of modern Chinese history as well as Russian history, for revolutions do not easily lend themselves to balanced appraisals. Great social upheavals typically arouse great and unattainable expectations, and when those high hopes are dashed long periods of disillusionment and cynicism inevitably follow, while the actual historical achievements are ignored or forgotten. It usually takes several generations, far removed from the political and ideological battles of the revolutionary epoch, to bring the historical picture back into focus. It is the blots on the Maoist record, especially the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, that are now most deeply imprinted on our political and historical consciousness. That these adventures were failures colossal in scope, and that they took an enormous human toll, cannot and should not be forgotten. But future historians, without ignoring the failures and the crimes, will surely record the Maoist era in the history of the People’s Republic (however else they may judge it) as one of the great modernizing epochs in world history, and one that brought great social and human benefits to the Chinese people."