China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation

China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation

In 1954, Mao Zedong said, ‘We cannot deny that we are still unable to produce motor cars. We are still very far away from being industrialised’. Mao was speaking to an audience of Chinese industrialists and merchants at a time when the country was desperately poor, its resources stretched by decades of Japanese invasion, civil war with the nationalist Kuomintang, and ongoing US aggression in Korea, where China had intervened in support of the fo…