ABSTRACT
Apart from their other characteristics, China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. China began the century with a weak and corrupt dynasty on the verge of collapse and beset by European imperialism. Between the extremes of a very traditional, authoritarian dynasty and arbitrary, totalitarian rule, the Chinese people have in one region or another gone through multiple governance. After the dynasty fell in 1911, China was governed by an ineffective and disunited republican government. Indeed, from October 1949 to 1987, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) probably killed more than 35,200,000 of its own subjects. On this sacrifice of over 35,200,000 souls for a better society, consider the words of Lao Baixing, a communist cadre who had lectured the anthropologist Steven Mosher, then doing research on peasant life in his village, on the positive accomplishments of the revolution.
