Well, what kind of mess did the Communists take over in 1949? The Kuomintang took everything that it could to Taiwan. Personally, I took along 500 books. The Kuomintang took away all the gold in the national vault. At the time, the gold was valued at 300 million American dollars. Today, that does not mean much. But at that time, it was the sum total of all the money that China had...
...When the Kuomintang left, they took everything that they could and left a barren China behind. They cleaned out the national vault. They blew up all the bridges that they could. They took away everything that they could take. But they left behind three million bad elements to cause trouble. The bandits and the Kuomintang spies were left behind on the mainland. This caused the Communists a lot of stress in trying to manage poverty as well as the security problems.
...Finally, 1949 came. The People's Republic of China was established. Poverty was our biggest threat. There was a joke at the time. When our relationship with Soviet Russia was still good, there was a joke about the relationshop between Mao Zedong and the Soviet Russian ruler Nikita Khruschev. Mao sent a telegram to Khruschev: "Give us food. We are poor. We have no food. Give us bread." Khruschev replied to Mao: "Comrade Mao, there is no food. You will have to tighten your belts." Chairman Mao's second telegram to Khruschev said: "Please send the belts over."