Reply #1: Many years ago I heard a discussion concerning

[Igel]

the USSR and China.

It said that governments tended to focus on their power base, and offered this as a criterion for analyzing their structure and motives.

The USSR's power base was proletarian. It treated the farmers and rural residents like complete and total crap. Starving them was preferable to having factor workers experience malnutrition because the factor workers supported the regime. It tried to apply factor methods to the countryside, and did it in a characteristically robber-baron fashion that made perfect sense to the city-dwelling fools.

Mao took the opposite route for a while--his peasant revolution focused on the countryside, on the nongmin, the peasants. It was only later when he recanted this bit of lunacy, but not before utterly contaminating a minor player that the North Vietnamese had supported in return for his allowing them to use the territory they allowed him to control: Pol Pot. Deng, I believe it was, opted for the reverse model. After all, by then the powerbase had significantly shifted in the citified party.

In each case, the government decided that it didn't need the support of the slighted group; in fact, since each group considered itself superior morally and ethically, and therefore more important than the other group, dissing the minority was a popular cause. It usually is (even if the minority isn't really all that minor).

We see this in US politics. Fortunately it's traditionally been far more muted, as most people remembered their rural roots. I think that's changing. It's already changed, to a large extent, in Western Europe (and had previously changed under Stalin in Eastern Europe).