Comment by hyruo

The easiest issue to explain is the Taiwan question. In 1949, Taiwan stripped China of all its gold reserves and its entire elite class, leaving the Chinese mainland with nothing but a shambles. Furthermore, following the Korean War in 1950, the United States backed Taiwan in imposing a comprehensive blockade on China's coastline; this plunged China into a state of total hostility with the U.S.and, by extension, with the entire Western bloc. By the later stages of the Cold War, this situation had become even more dire: Khrushchev threatened to launch a "surgical" nuclear strike against China, while Eisenhower devised a strike plan involving 870 nuclear warheads. Here was an agrarian nation facing simultaneous nuclear threats from two major superpowers; under such circumstances, any discussion of economic development was nothing short of a luxury.