Did the maoist government indirectly benefit china by purging out all rich families?

I got this from video by a libertarian Spanish-Chinese businessman. He claimed that, while mao-era policies impoverished China, he purged the rich. This meant that once liberalization happened, unlike the rest of the third world, there were no oligarchies holding the country back. This theory is congruent with politics-based explanations of economic growth like those given by the book Why Nations Fail.