Comment by MaxPock
4 hours ago
Fun fact;In 1992 ,he advised Chinese leaders to focus on new energy vehicles as they would never catch up on ice. Looks like his counsel was taken as we can see the results today.
4 hours ago
Fun fact;In 1992 ,he advised Chinese leaders to focus on new energy vehicles as they would never catch up on ice. Looks like his counsel was taken as we can see the results today.
Also fun fact, he advised Mao on agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, using rough estimates of photosynthetic efficiency to calculate potential crop yields. Those estimates were far removed from reality and indirectly contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, while other countries were benefiting from the success of the Green Revolution.
He didn't advise Mao directly. He published his "rough estimate" in China Youth Daily on June 16, 1958 as 《粮食亩产量会有多少？》. It's possible, though unconfirmed, that Mao (or his secretary) read this article and was influenced. But yeah, the math was bad and off by an order of magnitude. Even geniuses can't be right all the time and I guess he was quite irresponsible for publishing a hand-wavy back-of-the-envelope estimate like that.
Qian gave a talk about agriculture at the 6th Supreme State Conference in 1956, Mao directly talked to Qian about his article in 1958 '你在青年报上写的那篇文章我看了，陆定一同志很热心，到处帮你介绍。你在那个时候敢于说四万斤的数字，不错啊。你是学力学的，学力学而谈农业，你又是个农学家。', while later Qian admitted it was theoretically only and he miscalculated, he probably did it out of modesty and he didn't say shit about his impact on tens of millions of death whatsoever. In fact, Mao's secretary at the time was Li Rui, who was a pragmatist and quite liberal during his lifetime. He questioned Mao's sanity, and Mao just blamed Qian.
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This is probably just him trying to survive Mao's insanity
Central planning and heterogeneous large scale distributed agriculture don't mix.
That seems like an oversimplification of what happened to Soviet Russia and China under Mao.
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Central planning and agriculture don't mix.