Where the Khmer Rouge is residing
From the Khmer Rouge perspective, the country was free of foreign economic domination for the first time in its 2,000-year history. By mobilizing the people into work brigades organized in a military fashion, the Khmer Rouge hoped to unleash the masses' productive forces. There was an "Angkorian" component to economic policy. That ancient kingdom had grown rich and powerful because it controlled extensive irrigation systems that produced surpluses of rice.
Agriculture in modern Cambodia depended, for the most part,
on seasonal rains. By building a nationwide system of irrigation canals, dams,
and reservoirs, the leadership believed it would be possible to produce rice on
a year-round basis.
Although the Khmer Rouge implemented an "agriculture
first" policy in order to achieve self-sufficiency, they were not, as some
observers have argued, "back-to-nature" primitivists. Although the aftermath of the 1970-75 war resulted
in cities being destroyed and idling most industry, small contingents of
workers were allowed to return to the urban areas to reopen some plants. Like
their Chinese counterparts, the Cambodian communists had great faith in the
inventive power and the technical aptitude of the masses, and they constantly
published reports of peasants' adapting old mechanical parts to new usage. Much
as the Chinese had attempted unsuccessfully to build a new steel industry based
on backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge wanted to
move industry to the countryside.
No comments:
Post a Comment