Before the country’s post-Mao modernization began in 1979, there were next to no tractors and such in the Chinese countryside. Nor was there much of anything in the realm of artificial fertilizers and the like.* Instead, the rural population had been politically, economically, spiritually, and nutritionally gutted by the Cultural Revolution, which was, in essence, a full national purge of anyone who did anything in any way aside from what matched up with whatever twisted thought was running through Mao’s brain at the time. The point is that the population was basically a crushed peasantry,
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