Not the guy you replied to, but as someone who still has family in China, I don't think the PRC would have survived, not just because of its status as a pariah state under siege, but because Chinese people would not have taken it. Certainly Mao's model of economic development could have worked, and it might have resulted in a more equitable but slower developing economy, but I don't think there was the patience for that after everything they'd been through. For context, my great-grandparents' generation lived through the Xinhai revolution, the establishment of the ROC, the warlord era, and the sino-japanese war. My grandparents' generation went through the sino-japanese war, the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, and the GLF and cultural revolution. My parents' generation lived through the greatest era of peace and prosperity in the last 300 years of Chinese history. If you told Chinese people in the 1970s "you'll have to suffer through this another century but by then surely your great grandkids will have communism" they would have had a counterrevolution on the spot.
I don't know to what extent this is true, but I've been told that the peasants in the countryside were begining to recreate capitalist relations on their own because the Maoist model wasn't working for them. As in, they weren't seeing the economic benefits of their work to feed the industrialization in the cities.
If this was widespread, I don't see any way the Maoist model could have continued.
Not the guy you replied to, but as someone who still has family in China, I don't think the PRC would have survived, not just because of its status as a pariah state under siege, but because Chinese people would not have taken it. Certainly Mao's model of economic development could have worked, and it might have resulted in a more equitable but slower developing economy, but I don't think there was the patience for that after everything they'd been through. For context, my great-grandparents' generation lived through the Xinhai revolution, the establishment of the ROC, the warlord era, and the sino-japanese war. My grandparents' generation went through the sino-japanese war, the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, and the GLF and cultural revolution. My parents' generation lived through the greatest era of peace and prosperity in the last 300 years of Chinese history. If you told Chinese people in the 1970s "you'll have to suffer through this another century but by then surely your great grandkids will have communism" they would have had a counterrevolution on the spot.
I don't know to what extent this is true, but I've been told that the peasants in the countryside were begining to recreate capitalist relations on their own because the Maoist model wasn't working for them. As in, they weren't seeing the economic benefits of their work to feed the industrialization in the cities.
If this was widespread, I don't see any way the Maoist model could have continued.