New Book on the Chinese Famine

[The Vegan Marxist]

I really don't know how to take this book. It does point out facts of lying about the amount of harvest available & also how weather was extremely bad as well, in which led to the famine. Though, there's many other factors he's apparently added onto this event, which I find myself unsure about. What's everyone's thoughts:


http://web.mac.com/dikotter/Dikotter/Famine_2_files/shapeimage_1.png

Mao’s Great Famine
by Frank Dikötter

Key Arguments

1. The famine did not last three years, as is often thought, but at least four years, starting in early 1958 and ending by late 1962.

2. The book uses a wealth of archival evidence to capture how and why decisions that led to the famine were taken at the top and how these decisions affected the lives of ordinary people on the ground.

3. The book shows how people of all walks of life had to hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state in order to survive, including resorting to armed rebellion and assaults on granaries or trains.

4. China went on an international shopping spree in 1958. As the bills were coming in, Zhou Enlai, with the support of his colleagues and the backing of the Chairman, relentlessly pressed the countryside into fulfilling ever greater procurements in order to meet foreign commitments.

5. The idea that the state mistakenly took too much grain from the countryside because it assumed that the harvest was much larger than it was is largely a myth – at most partially true for the autumn of 1958 only. In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death. At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated 25 March 1959, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case. At the meeting he announced that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.'

6. The book is the first to use a whole range of archives to come up with an estimate of at least 45 million premature deaths, instead of the usual estimate of 30 to 32 million based on official population statistics.

7. By a very rough approximation, between 6 and 8 per cent of these victims, or 2 to 3 million people, were buried alive, tortured or beaten to death.

8. Many of the victims did not die because there was no grain available in the villages, instead they were deliberately and selectively deprived of food by local cadres because they were relatively rich, dragged their feet, spoke out, or simply were not liked, for whatever reason, by whoever wielded the canteen ladle.

9. Many people vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work and hence unable to earn their keep; they were considered to be expendable by the state.

10. Not only Mao, but also other senior leaders were willing to condone the deaths of millions of people in the Great Leap Forward. In 1962, having lost about ten million people in Sichuan, provincial leader Li Jingquan compared the Great Leap Forward to the Long March in which only one in ten had made it to the end: 'We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone'.

11. In the midst of famine China sharply increased the amount of free economic aid and interest-free or low-interest loans to other countries. China also shipped grain for free to allied countries.

12. Up to 30 or 40 per cent of all housing was turned into rubble, as homes were pulled down to make fertiliser, to build canteens, to relocate villagers, to straighten roads, to make place for a better future beckoning ahead or simply to punish their occupants.

13. A prolonged and intense attack on nature claimed up to 50 per cent of all trees in some provinces, while dams and canals, built by hundreds of millions of farmers at great human and economic cost, were for the greatest part rendered useless or even dangerous, resulting in land slides, river silting, soil salinisation and devastating inundations.

14. Detailed studies conducted at the time show that deforestation, soil erosion, water loss as well as grandiose irrigation schemes severely disturbed the ecological balance, worsening the impact of inundations and droughts described by the leadership as 'natural catastrophes'.

http://web.mac.com/dikotter/Dikotter/Famine_2.html

[WeAreReborn]

I really don't know how to take this book. It does point out facts of lying about the amount of harvest available & also how weather was extremely bad as well, in which led to the famine. Though, there's many other factors he's apparently added onto this event, which I find myself unsure about. What's everyone's thoughts:



http://web.mac.com/dikotter/Dikotter/Famine_2.html
It is really hard to say what is true or not as none of us experienced it. Although at first glance it does seem somewhat biased and I'm sure some facts are in fact over-exaggerated. Yet, I'm sure the majority of the facts are right on and not just speculation and propaganda. It looks interesting though, I think I will check it out and decide for myself.

[KC]

That little synopsis sounds pretty accurate.

[RadioRaheem84]

Were not famines an ordinary occurrence in pre-revolutionary China?

Have there been any famines since the GLF?

[Barry Lyndon]

If what this book says is true, it could overturn my positive view of Mao. These are truly horrendous allegations.

[DaringMehring]

If what this book says is true, it could overturn my positive view of Mao. These are truly horrendous allegations.

You should evaluate not a person but a particular aspect of a person, or a person in a particular context. Ie, not say either Mao is good or Mao is bad or Mao is neutral, but "Mao was a good insurrectionist" or "Late Mao made many errors" or "Mao had a flawed conception of the road to socialism" or some other specific critiques or praises.

[The Vegan Marxist]

I really want to hear responses from the more known Maoists on this forum, such as Saorsa, Red Cat, Scarletghoul, etc. What are your thoughts on this? I've already let Ely known about the book, & apparently he's ordered a copy of it to give it a read.

[Apoi_Viitor]

Were not famines an ordinary occurrence in pre-revolutionary China?

Have there been any famines since the GLF?

Slightly. There was always a large degree of deaths by starvation within China, with spikes during various years:


1800-1900 - At least 45 Million
1906-1910 - 10 million
1920 - Half a Million
1929 - 3 million
1936 - 5 million
1943 - 1 million

However, the Great Leap Forward sort of stands as an outlier - with its estimated 15 - 35 million deaths, its kind of hard to believe the notion, that Maoist Policy can escape even a large degree of blame, for its role in bringing forth the crisis.

Also, no, there haven't been any famines in China post GLF.

[Apoi_Viitor]

If what this book says is true, it could overturn my positive view of Mao. These are truly horrendous allegations.

During the midst of the famine, Mao made a decree in which he "accused peasants of hiding grain", all while dismissing and discounting the reports he was receiving of mass starvation. After a letter submitted to him from the Pu Hu Commune requested an investigation into the frequent "accounts of party officials savagely beating peasants", Mao responded, by telling the Local Leader, to "not be too hard on comrades who made slight mistakes"...

But I find it surprising many in RevLeft appear to be just hearing of these facts, the book Hungry Ghosts, which I find excellent, has been out for at least 12 years now...

[Kiev Communard]

Slightly. There was always a large degree of deaths by starvation within China, with spikes during various years:


1800-1900 - At least 45 Million
1906-1910 - 10 million
1920 - Half a Million
1929 - 3 million
1936 - 5 million
1943 - 1 million

However, the Great Leap Forward sort of stands as an outlier - with its estimated 15 - 35 million deaths, its kind of hard to believe the notion, that Maoist Policy can escape even a large degree of blame, for its role in bringing forth the crisis.

Also, no, there haven't been any famines in China post GLF.

CPC leadership was definitely responsible for the excesses of "Great Leap Forward", but I doubt that the idea that "Mao deliberately orchestrated the famine" is rather accurate. Besides, some scholars doubt the impossibly high death tolls attributed to "Great Leap Forward" - http://monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm

[Tavarisch_Mike]

Yeah, TGLF combinned with some natural dissasters and no opposition, did make a hughe famine, nothing new there. This events are always used by borgeousie to make them look like if they where planned, i didnt see so much new things that you havnt heard of before, in the 14 things that where presented above.

Whats not heard of so often is that when the famine breaked out, for the first time in the history of China, they tried to stop it. You have to remmeber that it wasnt easy trying to build socialism in such a hughe country as China, at the time of the famine theive just started theire industrialization and since then they havnt had any more famines, this was the end of it in the countrys 2500 year old history.

The nobel lauerates Amartya Sen (thats often used in borgeous propaganda) have said that the chinesse planned economy was much more adapted to its circumstancess and to fill the peoples needs. The only country that you can compare Chinas development with is India, check that out.

15-35 million!? You see there is a hughe difference betwen 15 million and 35 million, its more than the doubble amount. How did they count to come to this? And how many of those who might have died didnt and can tell us about it today?

[KC]

During the midst of the famine, Mao made a decree in which he "accused peasants of hiding grain", all while dismissing and discounting the reports he was receiving of mass starvation. After a letter submitted to him from the Pu Hu Commune requested an investigation into the frequent "accounts of party officials savagely beating peasants", Mao responded, by telling the Local Leader, to "not be too hard on comrades who made slight mistakes"...

But I find it surprising many in RevLeft appear to be just hearing of these facts, the book Hungry Ghosts, which I find excellent, has been out for at least 12 years now...

Same thing happened in the ussr

[Myrdal]

Chomsky used Amartya's conclusions to criticize the black book of communism

The example stands as a dramatic "criminal indictment" of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen's India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had "similarities that were quite striking" when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. "But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India" (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame," 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

[RED DAVE]

Now the Maoists are climbing on board to try to soften it up. The fact is that the Maoists, through their policies, were responsible for the bulk of the deaths. Even the lowest figure, 15 million, is horrendous.

The entire country should have been mobilized to save people's lives. This was not done.

Remember how savagely and rightly we criticized Bush and Co. for Katrina where about 2,000 people died.

RED DAVE

[RedStarOverChina]

According to estimations by John Leighton Stuart (US ambassador to KMT China), 3-7 million Chinese people die every year of hunger alone in China before 1949.

A almost equally deadly issue was disease and total lack of healthcare in the country side. 2 of the 6 siblings of my grandfather died in infancy in pre-1949 China. On my grandmother's side it's even more attrocious---More than half her siblings died young. Towards the end of the KMT rule, more perished due to disease because they were living in a slum that makes the one in Mumbai look like a luxury hotel.

So yeah, the "Great Leap Forward" was the single most catastrophic screw up under the CCP. But it's far from the worst catastrophe in modern Chinese history.

Famine was the status quo in China. That's why Truman was geniunely impressed when the CCP temporarily suceeded in providing and distributing food to the Chinese population after taking power in 1949.

[Soviet dude]

Frank Dikötter is a ridiculous anti-communist who writes book praising Chiang-kai-Shek, defends Japanese and British imperialism in China, and thinks the Opium War didn't hurt China all that much, among other things. Don't believe a word this right-wing liar says about anything. He admits to using images of pre-revolution famine in China on his book cover and other shit for propaganda effect, something his fellow anti-communists even find disgusting:

http://jonestream.blogspot.com/2010/10/did-dikotter-misrepresent-famine-image.html

He openly praises the fraudulent work of people like Jung Chang. Frank is just your typical anti-communist piece of shit, who is allowed to get away with saying anything because it is anti-communist.

It says a lot about the supposed "radicals" here that immediately side with any and all reactionaries against communism, i.e. RED Dave.

[RED DAVE]

It says a lot about the supposed "radicals" here that immediately side with any and all reactionaries against communism, i.e. RED Dave.All mouth and no facts as usual.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1900374&postcount=107

RED DAVE

[Barry Lyndon]

All mouth and no facts as usual.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1900374&postcount=107

RED DAVE

I do think Soviet Dude can be an irritating troll(especially on a previous thread about Iran), but he seems to be right about this issue.

The fraudulent photograph on the cover of the book alone throws everything about this guy's scholarship into question.

[KC]

Does it really matter what's on the cover? Seriously?

[Barry Lyndon]

Does it really matter what's on the cover? Seriously?

I think a book becomes questionable when even its cover is based on a falsehood, yes.

[RadioRaheem84]

Obviously the cover matters. There is falsehood before you even open the book!

[Apoi_Viitor]

15-35 million!? You see there is a hughe difference betwen 15 million and 35 million, its more than the doubble amount. How did they count to come to this? And how many of those who might have died didnt and can tell us about it today?

It's based upon various population census' that occurred before and after The Great Leap Forward, however the data is not that accurate, which is why you see the 15-35 million figure...


The nobel lauerates Amartya Sen (thats often used in borgeous propaganda) have said that the chinesse planned economy was much more adapted to its circumstancess and to fill the peoples needs. The only country that you can compare Chinas development with is India, check that out.

Well yes, China's widespread nationalization has elevated their standard of living far above their Indian counterparts... But I was critiquing the policies of The Great Leap Forward, not China's State-Sector (which, despite the failures of The Great Leap Forward, has been fairly successful economically).


CPC leadership was definitely responsible for the excesses of "Great Leap Forward", but I doubt that the idea that "Mao deliberately orchestrated the famine" is rather accurate. Besides, some scholars doubt the impossibly high death tolls attributed to "Great Leap Forward"

I wasn't blaming Mao for 'deliberately orchestrating' the Famine, I was blaming him for refusing to acknowledge the famine while it was occurring.

[Barry Lyndon]

Also, if there was such a massive famine being deliberately implemented though terror, why was there no rebellion on the part of the peasants? China has a long history of peasant revolts, usually occuring in reaction to hunger. Why didn't the peasants rise up against such abuse, and moreover, why did so many remain so loyal to Mao, and still do to this day?
It makes no sense. You can't just 'cover up' the deaths of 1/13th of the population of China and/or brainwash all the victims into forgetting it ever happened.

[Apoi_Viitor]

I think a book becomes questionable when even its cover is based on a falsehood, yes.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

Well, I don't actually think Mao's Great Famine seems like a very scholarly work...But there are a great number of decent works on The Great Leap Forward, such as http://links.org.au/node/1004

[Tavarisch_Mike]

@broadcastingsilence; Ok comrade, but i still think that the numbers are highly suspicious, what ive heard is that the population numbers, at the time, wasnt to accurate, wich is used by right-wingers to count in people who might never existed(!)

Speaking of Mao in the book "Mao the unknown truth" (wich got big attention when it was released, as all history books who likes to portrait anything socialist in a bad way.) the authors claimed that Mao was carried in a chair during the whole Long march. The lies about chinesse history doesnt seem to have any limmits.

[RadioRaheem84]

This book is about as scholarly as anything put by the David Horowitz clan.

[Apoi_Viitor]

@broadcastingsilence; Ok comrade, but i still think that the numbers are highly suspicious, what ive heard is that the population numbers, at the time, wasnt to accurate, wich is used by right-wingers to count in people who might never existed(!)

There's an article I've read which argues that, its titled Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy by Wim F. Wertheim. It used to be available online, but I can't seem to find it anywhere... Anyways, while the population census' are probably very unreliable, there's still a good array of Chinese State Documents, which speak of a historic famine occurring. However, judging by the relative successes of Chinese collectivization before and after The Great Leap Forward, I think we can attribute the disaster not to collectivization itself, but to the poor management and policies enacted during The Great Leap Forward.

[theEastisRed]

Dikötter's recently released book 'Mao's great famine', has on its cover the picture of an orphan begging:

Google "mispresenting a famine image"

Obviously the reader will assume that the picture is one taken from the GLF famine of 1958 to 1961.

But this is clearly not the case. The picture is actually taken from a Life Magazine photo of a 1946 famine in China, during the rule of Chiang Kaishek (a regime, by the way which Dikotter highly praises - not surprising I suppose given the fact he is bankrolled by the Chiang Chingkuo foundation).

Google "famine stalks china 1946"


A blogger pointed this out to the renowned genocide scholar Adam Jones (an anti-communist)

Jones noted the following: "Beyond the misrepresentation, may I also suggest that the very extensive airbrushing, replacement/grafting of background, colourization and so on of the original image is curiously reminiscent of communist practice under Mao and Stalin"

Jones also takes the bloggers point that there is no way that Dikötter was unaware that the photo was not from the GLF. As the blogger says "Dikötter himself says there are no famine images from the Great Leap. It is unbelievable that he would then find the image on the cover of the book to be uninteresting and would not have inquired into its provenance - as it would have been a major discovery on the part of the publisher if it really was a Great Leap image."

Dikötter's attitude of course is "any starving asian will do".

[theEastisRed]

Incredibly on Dikotter's website, he posts a video about the Great Leap Forward. Again he uses images which are clearly not from the Great Leap Forward. This is not a mistake or a simple oversight on Dikotter's part. Dikotter himself has said that there are no non-propaganda images from the period that he has come across. So any images of the famine would have immediately drawn his attention. Dikotter knows full well the famine images on both the cover of his book, and the video he appears in are bs, and come from a famine during the time of KMT rule - an era Dikotter has termed 'the age of openness'. Bit of irony to that.

[theEastisRed]

The fact is that weather conditions during the GLF period were the worst in an entire century - with long periods of both drought, and flooding. These natural disasters of course were compounded with all the other failures of the CCP at the time, which we are all too aware of and which hardly need repeating here.

The recently released book Famine: A Short History by Cormac Ó Gráda discusses the part played by adverse climatic conditions well. This aspect of course, is downplayed by Dikotter.

[The Vegan Marxist]

The starving child picture of the UK version of the book is most certainly troublesome, especially with the lack of relevance to what took place during the GLF famine. But what about the US version of "Mao's Great Famine"? Anyone have anything to say about its cover?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ccPQ6V0fL._SS500_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802777686/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288188912&sr=1-1

[Reznov]

If what this book says is true, it could overturn my positive view of Mao. These are truly horrendous allegations.

Let me guess, its because he isn't European, isn't it!

[theEastisRed]

The cover of the hardback edition is taken in Guangzhou, I think it purports to be mainland Chinese being returned to Guangdong from Hong Kong. The image does not really suggest a lot, apart from the fact that the people obviously don't want to be sent back.

All my older relatives are from rural Guangdong (my family is mainly of a KMT(Nationalist) background), and would you believe it, they all survived the revolution. In fact my grandfather's (an anticommunist landlord who was an avid reader of Taiwan's Free China Review) house in a village near Dongguan is still there and my uncles, all overseas, still have title to the house --the house (not demolished as Dikotter would have you believe) where my father was brought up before he left in the early 1950s.

[theEastisRed]

.wysiwyg { BACKGROUND: #f5f5ff; FONT: 13px verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000 } P { MARGIN: 0px } .inlineimg { VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle } The GLF was a complete disaster. But to imply that it was genocide, or done out of murderous intent is a complete distortion of the facts.



The horrendousness of the GLF has to be in the context of the time - life expectancy in China was only 33 in 1949. the revolution things quickly improved, and apart from the period of the GLF when death rates reverted to prerevolutionary levels, mortality dramatically during Mao's time.

In fact these Stanford researchers say "Official growth in Chinese life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 ranks among the most rapid in documented global history."
These researchers are in the process of validating the official data and also trying to identify those features which could be applied to other poor developing countries.

In fact by 1976, the year of Mao's death, China's life expectancy of 64.9, higher than what India's is today (63.7).

During Mao's time access to education was vastly improved for the rural community. My wife from rural Guandong still has her vaccination certificates from the time, and was educated to a level where she is completely numerate and literate. Whereas many women from SE Asia and S Asia of a similar age are completely illiterate.

[theEastisRed]

While archival evidence is certainly useful, I suspect that overemphasis on it could result in losing the view of the forest for the trees. Selective use of archival evidence could be used to completely give false impressions of any country in the world, all Western ones included.

If one went into the public security archives (police archives) in any Western country, and just listed them out - even Sweden could be painted to be a crime infested rathole.

And if recounted all of the lynchings in their full lurid detail that happened during Roosevelt's watch (Roosevelt did nothing to stop lynchings), we could paint Roosevelt to be a sadistic mass murderer as well. Or the genocide committed by American troops during the Filipino American war (under Franklin's distant relative Theodore).

China was (and still is in many parts) a feudal, backward country, where officials were often corrupt bullies. This was certainly the case under the Nationalists, but also of course would have been the case of many who joined the communist party. That some cadres may have committed horrendous deeds does not automatically point to Mao as approving of these excesses, let alone ordering them.

For example there is this book by Yang Xianhui's 'Woman from Shanghai" (recommended by Dikotter himself) is about the horrific conditions in a Gansu labour camp for 'rightists' during the GLF. However the conditions were due to local cadres. When the central government got wind of what was happening, they issued an immediate amnesty, closed the camp, and sent vehicles to fetch the prisoners, out of the camp.

[Saorsa]

I haven't read the book, and I'm not an expert on the Great Leap Forward. What I do know for sure is there is a very profitable industry for historians (legitimate or wannabe) who want to make a fast buck by telling lies about revolutionary China. Juan Chang is perhaps the most despicable example of this, but she's far from alone.

Nobody claims the GLF was a fantastic success. It clearly wasn't. But does the GLF invalidate the whole revolutionary process in China? Get some perspective people. China was always wracked by periodic famine. The country was incredibly vulnerable to it. The transformation of the Chinese countryside through socialist revolution put an end to that, and thankfully that's one achievement which has not been overturned by the Dengist counter-revolution.

A famine took place in an enormous country struggling to lift itself out of feudalism and the rubble of war. The response was different in different parts of the country. In some areas I'm sure the response was sub-standard, and in some areas I'm sure the famine provided an opportunity for scores to be settled as the social order broke down in the face of desperation and hunger.

But do any of you truly believe that Mao deliberately let the peasants starve as an act of realpolitik? Do you really think he sat around, knowing full well the details of what was happening, and let the people he had fought side by side with and dedicated his life to fighting for the liberation of, starve to death?

The peasants of China took Mao from trudging through the Tibetan steppes to proclaiming a People's Republic in Tienanmen Square. There was mutual love and respect there. Mao was not a goddamn monster, he was a revolutionary leader who played an important role in the struggle through which the Chinese people liberated themselves.

All those of you who seize every opportunity to take potshots at the legacy of the Chinese Revolution, shame on you. Considering that half of you defend Lenin and Trotsky's actions during the Russian Civil War, which also caused enormous famine and suffering, your hypocrisy couldn't be more apparent. As for the other half of you, remind me again how much destruction and suffering was caused by the Spanish Civil War? How many people died as Republican and Fascist forces fought throughout the country, catching innocent people in the crossfire?

Mao was the leader of the party. He lived and worked in Beijing. He was not a god, responsible for everything that ever happened in China and knowing in advance what his decisions would mean for China. He was a human being, flawed as we all are, who dedicated his life to building a new and better world where ordinary people have freedom, equality and power over their own lives.

That's the legacy of the Chinese Revolution, and Mao the man. It isn't a perfect legacy, but there are millions of people today who continue to uphold and defend it. No matter how much slander the bourgeois press pump out, I'm going to continue to be one of them.

[KurtFF8]

It is really hard to say what is true or not as none of us experienced it. Although at first glance it does seem somewhat biased and I'm sure some facts are in fact over-exaggerated. Yet, I'm sure the majority of the facts are right on and not just speculation and propaganda. It looks interesting though, I think I will check it out and decide for myself.

I'm sorry but your first sentence makes no sense. It hard to say because we didn't directly experience it? That means it's hard to take a stance on any historical account, or even contemporary political accounts that happen outside of our personal experience!

/nitpick

[Kléber]

I haven't read the book, and I'm not an expert on the Great Leap Forward. What I do know for sure is there is a very profitable industry for historians (legitimate or wannabe) who want to make a fast buck by telling lies about revolutionary China. Juan Chang is perhaps the most despicable example of this, but she's far from alone.
I am sick of hearing that anyone with a less than worshipful attitude toward Mao Zedong is in the same camp as Jung Chang. I haven't read this book, some of its claims are doubtful, but that is unfortunate because it leads people to think that the great famine of 1958-1962 was made up, which is a completely erroneous and embarrassing position to take.

I can't believe I have to state this but, the famine was not made up by Western propaganda. At the time it happened it was kept secret from people in non-famine-stricken areas but it is remembered throughout the countryside where people starved to death and today it is known about across China. 15+ million is the government's own figure. I believe the official Party explanation today for the cause of the famine is "30% natural, 70% political."


Nobody claims the GLF was a fantastic success. It clearly wasn't. The GLF was a catastrophic failure even if a few of its initiatives may have had some promise.


But does the GLF invalidate the whole revolutionary process in China?No one said it did. Stop trying to create a false identity between the policies and actions of the Mao clique and the process of revolution in China, something Mao failed to serve and even betrayed by disarming and crushing the radical leftists at the end of the GPCR in 1968, then teaming up with US imperialism in 1971.



Get some perspective people. China was always wracked by periodic famine. The country was incredibly vulnerable to it.No, flooded and parched fields were not a problem for the state during the "ten golden years." China had ceased to be wracked with famine for a decade because the CPC effectively solved the food crisis after 1949 by stabilizing the country and keeping a grain reserve that was used to relieve local food shortages. There was no mass starvation between the establishment of the PRC and the Great Leap famine. The famine could have easily been prevented by maintaining the grain reserve, which was emptied to pay off China's debts to the USSR when the Sino-Soviet split occurred. The split was largely over the GLF itself with the Soviets insisting that China abjure experimental strategies for national development. The famine could also have been mitigated or stopped if the people had political freedom to criticize the Party line from a socialist perspective at least.


A famine took place in an enormous country struggling to lift itself out of feudalism and the rubble of war.The famine took place as bad agricultural conditions combined with a series of disastrous experimental economic programs. Farmers only partially harvested their crops or abandoned entire harvests in order to work in party-directed mass construction projects. There was widespread encouragement to use experimental Lysenkoist methods like close planting and deep planting, which failed and ruined entire harvests. Farmers were encouraged to hand in their metal cooking wares to be smelted into steel, and all future eating was to be done in collective dining halls - which became places of collective starvation. Local agricultural work units were being radically restructured, and political campaigns encouraged local party organizations to compete with one another which led to lying about how much grain was being produced. Finally the clincher was that grain reserves were emptied for an expensive show of defiance to the "Khrushchev revisionists."


The response was different in different parts of the country. In some areas I'm sure the response was sub-standard, and in some areas I'm sure the famine provided an opportunity for scores to be settled as the social order broke down in the face of desperation and hunger.There was no real "response" at first because every party branch across the country was competing with the other ones to send back inflated reports of 500% increases in grain and steel yield, and Mao's central party did not realize what was going on. The famine was worst in the provinces where local leaders had been most zealous in implementing Mao's radical experimental policies, had assigned too many farmers away from their harvests to engage in mass projects. Those provinces with more cautious leaderships weathered the bad years and patted themselves on the back for not trusting Mao. As a whole, the CPC turned to the right as a result of the GLF's costly failure, and the GPCR was an attempt by the Maoist "center" to regain control of the party years later.


But do any of you truly believe that Mao deliberately let the peasants starve as an act of realpolitik? Do you really think he sat around, knowing full well the details of what was happening, and let the people he had fought side by side with and dedicated his life to fighting for the liberation of, starve to death?Your appeal to emotion is deeply flawed, you totally ignore the fact that Mao and the Party leaders had become "fish out of water" as state bureaucrats who no longer had close links with the farmer masses, whose old comrades from the years of blood and fire could scarcely even find them in the cities if they wanted to. But no, it was not that simple. Mao's policies were responsible for the famine, not because he was evil or a "monster" but because the internal and international contradictions faced by the CPC bureaucracy which he led forced him to act according to the dialectics of Stalinism, not as he perhaps would once have liked to do things as an honest young revolutionary. Emoting about his iconic rockstar appeal is really useless for the purposes of political analysis.

The key thing to understanding why Mao kept at it is that the GLF policies were actually initially successful, and some of them might have worked if they had been implemented at a moderate pace. Also, Mao's reasoning for the GLF was not out of some insane trip like "We must build hundreds of earthen dams!" it was a rational understanding that China would forever be pushed around by other powers unless the state found some way to use its most abundant resource (human labor) as a shortcut to bypass the West. Standard party slogans in the GLF took the form of "Surpass [commodity] production of [UK/US/USSR] in [15/10/5 years]!" Some of the successes were illusory; impressive figures of backyard steel production hid the fact that the steel being made across rural China was of poor quality and next to useless for industrial purposes. Other successes were real; when agricultural work units were combined into larger and larger amalgamations, the results were initially more and more productivity, but eventually these units got too large, plagued by bureaucratism and fed in to the overreporting wind.

When the GLF began to fail, Mao's clique did not immediately realize there was a problem. The Party had become a lot less democratic after the abortive opening of the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign turned into the ugly purges of leftist intellectuals known as the 1957 Anti-"Rightist" Campaign. Few people still had the nerve to even bring up the fact that people were starving and those who did were purged for wrecking the GLF. In the areas where experimental policies had been most aggressively implemented, it was political suicide for leaders to admit the failure of their policies, let alone be honest about the low grain yields caused by Lysenkoist planting methods and too much time spent on infrastructure projects instead of harvesting crops. It was not so easy for the central leadership, either, to admit that problems were happening because in doing so Mao would open up himself to attack from the right wing of the party. Thus, the party leadership decided to gamble on the GLF succeeding until it had to be discontinued and China had to start importing grain. It was later claimed by Maoists that the GLF was "sabotaged" by "Dengists" but this is ridiculous, Mao sabotaged his own GLF.


The peasants of China took Mao from trudging through the Tibetan steppes to proclaiming a People's Republic in Tienanmen Square. There was mutual love and respect there. Mao was not a goddamn monster, he was a revolutionary leader who played an important role in the struggle through which the Chinese people liberated themselves.

All those of you who seize every opportunity to take potshots at the legacy of the Chinese Revolution, shame on you.Please. Peng Dehuai was purged during the famine for bringing up the fact that people were starving and calling Mao out the failure of his policies. Are you saying that General Peng was a traitor who took potshots at the legacy of the Chinese Revolution?


Considering that half of you defend Lenin and Trotsky's actions during the Russian Civil War, which also caused enormous famine and suffering, your hypocrisy couldn't be more apparent. As for the other half of you, remind me again how much destruction and suffering was caused by the Spanish Civil War? How many people died as Republican and Fascist forces fought throughout the country, catching innocent people in the crossfire? If anyone were blaming Mao for famine deaths that occurred during the Chinese Civil War then you would have a point. But the Great Leap famine happened in peacetime after the PRC had stabilized the economy, progressively improved living standards for 10 straight years, and made starvation a thing of the past. Being largely or mostly due to political policies, the great famine of 1958-62 could be better compared to the Soviet famine of 1932-3 resulting from collectivization, notwithstanding that collectivization in the PRC was relatively bloodless.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

I think a book becomes questionable when even its cover is based on a falsehood, yes.

Perhaps he felt it better summarized the events in his book than any avaiable at the time?

[RadioRaheem84]

A little too much anti-Mao rhetoric from Kleber. Sorry comrade, he wasn't a saint but that doesn't mean that the GLF was that monstrous and that much of a colosal failure.


Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao’s supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era.8

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm

This article was already cited but after reading it, it put many things to rest.

[penguinfoot]

A little too much anti-Mao rhetoric from Kleber. Sorry comrade, he wasn't a saint but that doesn't mean that the GLF was that monstrous and that much of a colosal failure.



http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm

This article was already cited but after reading it, it put many things to rest.

That quote says nothing about the GLF, it is concerned with the Mao period as a whole. One of the emergency measures that the government took in response to the famine was to encourage urban residents to move to the countryside in order to raise food production, to the point where targets were set for the proportion of the urban population that cadres in cities were expected to convince to move. As you would expect this meant that the urban population and the industrial growth rate both fell, so you can hardly say that the GLF as advantageous from the viewpoint of encouraging industrial production, or according to any other economic indicator for that matter.

[Kléber]

A little too much anti-Mao rhetoric from Kleber. Sorry comrade, he wasn't a saint but that doesn't mean that the GLF was that monstrous and that much of a colosal failure.
Later in my post I pointed out some initial successes of the GLF and specifically said Mao was not a "monster."


Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao’s supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era.8
I noted previously that the first, "ten golden years" of the PRC government saw steadily increasing standards of living and an end to famine.

1952-1976 is virtually the entire Mao period, whereas the GLF was only from 1958-1961. The industrial development that occurred over those whole 25 years was mostly done along orthodox Soviet lines; the radical experimental methods of the GLF were only used for a short period and mostly in certain areas. Some hardline Maoists would actually consider 1952-58 and 1961-66 to have been "Rightist," "Dengist" or "Liuist" periods where the right wing of the party was dominant and operated according to the theory of the productive forces.

Once the Chinese bureaucracy used the Soviet model to industrialize, they did not hand power over the industry to the workers; instead they privatized the economy and became private capitalists. Just as fish emerged from the water, evolved into amphibians, then developed lungs and lost their gills becoming land-dwelling organisms, the revolutionary leaders lost their links with the people as they assumed power, became privileged bureaucrats, then developed into outright capitalists. Mao's particular style of faction-fighting was no cure for bureaucratic revisionism. Political independence for the working class was needed then as it is now to challenge and overthrow the phony communist bureaucrats of the CPC who gag and exploit workers.

[Wei1917]

The three most hostile (ie anti-mao) writers, most widely quoted for GLF forward deaths are Frank Dikotter, Yang Jisheng, and Jung Chang.

Whether Dikotter, Yang, or Chang, they claim, or imply, 24/1000 deaths per year over the period of the GLF.

But the kicker is this:

In the next four biggest Asian countries, all comparable to China in terms of proportion of percentage population rural, low levels of industrialisation, low levels of GDP, are India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (east pakistan at the time).

The 1960 mortalities for these four countries were 23.52, 22.57, 23.14, 24.56 respectively. tinyurl dot com/2crqsxx

So you can see.

China's mortality during the GLF (24/1000 deaths per year), claimed by the most hostile sources, was virtually the same as the next four big asian nations.

That is. China's mortality during the GLF was TYPICAL of Asian countries at the time.

Relative to the standard of India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh (East Pakistan) at the time, the GLF had practically speaking, ZERO deaths.

[Wei1917]

So if China's mortality during the GLF was the same as other large Asian countries during the same period, how are these massive tens of millions of famine deaths arrived at?

This is what anti-communist writers do.

Dikotter, Chang, Yang Jisheng, and the Blackbook of Communism, assign a very low 'normal' mortality for the year 1957. They use the figure of 1% deaths per year for 1957. Anything above this is an 'excess' death ---killed by Mao.

Problem is this. 1% was the mortality rate of most countries in the advanced, industrialised West at the time.

As mentioned in my previous post, mortality typical of Asian countries at the time was 2.4 to 2.5%.

So these anti-communist writers should actually be praising the communists for reducing mortality from 38/1000 (Judith Bannister) in 1949, to 10/1000 in 1957.

Because if true, this would mean the communists in the years 1949 to 1957 would have carried out the most stunning stupendous reduction mortality in all of human history!

After all other Asian countries during the 1950s could only manage to reduce mortality from about 28 or 30/1000 in the late 1940s to 20 to 25/1000 in 1960.


So do these anti-communists writers give credit to Mao for saving what would be tens of millions of lives before the GLF? Of course not.

They instead use a low 1957 mortality (actually implausibly low) in order to maximise their excess deaths calculations. Even though actual mortality during the GLF, even by their very own numbers, was no higher than that of the next four biggest asian countries. Just incredibly dishonest.

[Wei1917]

Here is what Jung Chang says:

death rates in the four years 1958-61 were 1.20 per cent, 1.45 per cent, 4.34 per cent and 2.83 per cent, respectively. The average death rate in the three years immediately before and after the famine was 1.03 per cent–1957: 1.08 per cent, 1962: 1 per cent and 1963: 1 per cent. The death rates over and above this average could only have been caused by starvation and overwork during the famine.
—–
– Jung Chang, MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY, p. 438.

Chang's averaged mortality for 1958 to 1961 is thus: (1.2 + 1.45 + 4.34 + 2.83) / 4 = 2.46%

Assuming a mean population of 660 million over the period, Chang then assumes 10/1000 (1%) as 'normal' mortality.

So (2.46% - 1%) * 4 years * 660 million = 38.5 million.

//////////////////////////////////////////////

Dikotter also uses 1% as 'normal' mortality (in fact in his book Dikotter incredibly claims the period 1954 to 1957 had 1% mortality per year!!)

Dikotter holds the GLF began early 1958 and ended late 1962, ie almost 5 years, killing 45 million, ie 45/5 or 9 million excess deaths per year.

Assumign 660 million average population at the time:

1000 x 9 / 660 = 13.6/1000 excess deaths each year of the GLF.

That is a total of 23.6 / 1000 excess deaths per year during the GLF.

So by Dikotter's own numbers, China's mortality during the GLF was virtually the same as India's, Indonesia's, Pakistan's, and Bangladesh's (East Pakistan).

Note that Dikotter's overall mortality he claims, was gleaned from governmen archives - with 50% added for underreporting. So the actual overall mortality is likely lower than that reported by Dikotter

///////////////////////////////////////

Yang Jisheng (author of Mubei or tombstone) does similar to the aforementioned writers. He assumes 10.47/1000 'normal' mortality.

The Blackbook of communism uses 11/1000 for 1957 (the same as France, Britain, the US at the time - which even discounting for differences in age structure between the developed and developing worlds - less pronounced at the time - is ludicrous).

[mosfeld]

Joseph Ball, everybody's favorites GLF expert, wrote some initial comments (http://www.maoists.org/dikotterbook.htm) concerning this book. The first bullshit from this books starts at the front cover, with a picture of a pre-PRC child begging for food made to look as if it was from the GLF.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/mambots/content/multithumb/thumbs/350.0.1.0.16777215.0.stories.large.2010.11.19.maos _great_famine_the_history_of_chinas_most_devastati ng_catastrophe_1958_62.jpg

[pranabjyoti]

Nothing unusual, basically most of the books regarding "Stalin Era" and GLF are basically same in quality. Not very surprising to me. I WANT TO ADD THAT EVEN AFTER 64 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE, THE DEATH OF RATE OF INDIA IS SOMETHING CLOSE TO CHINA DURING GLF.
Actually I am also curious about the sources of information regarding the death rates in China from 1957 to 1961. In India, the population counting has been done on every 10 years period. So, all the birth and death rate and other data regarding population can be got on an average of 10 years. I want to know whether the population counting in china has been done on every year. Only in that case, such accurate data regarding the death rate can be achieved.

[Ms. Max]

Someone could use the same methods used in this book to show that during the USA dust bowl and depression "FDR killed millions". Its a piece of crap. That being said, there were still serious errors during the great leap forward that did result in deaths. But not the absurd numbers in this book.

[DaringMehring]

I am not a Maoist or a Stalinist -- but the bourgeois propagandists are full of shit when it comes to the supposed mass deaths under these leaders.

Plenty of people died for bad reasons under Mao & Stalin, but these bourgeois schmucks inflate the numbers ten or twenty times without batting an eye.

I will argue all day about the shortcomings of Mao/Stalin and how they could be avoided in the future, but the perspective of the bourgeois isn't based on reality nor does it aim to find a real critique of their politics. It is the equivalent of shouting with fingers in ears "murder murder murder!" no matter what. No matter how peace-loving and respectful of human rights a socialist might be, they will always call him a blood-soaked dictator.

Also, despite the bourgeois attempt to paint them as equivalent examples of socialist slaughter, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the GLF, and the GPCR are all significantly different from each other.

[pranabjyoti]

I am not a Maoist or a Stalinist -- but the bourgeois propagandists are full of shit when it comes to the supposed mass deaths under these leaders.

Plenty of people died for bad reasons under Mao & Stalin, but these bourgeois schmucks inflate the numbers ten or twenty times without batting an eye.

I will argue all day about the shortcomings of Mao/Stalin and how they could be avoided in the future, but the perspective of the bourgeois isn't based on reality nor does it aim to find a real critique of their politics. It is the equivalent of shouting with fingers in ears "murder murder murder!" no matter what. No matter how peace-loving and respectful of human rights a socialist might be, they will always call him a blood-soaked dictator.

Also, despite the bourgeois attempt to paint them as equivalent examples of socialist slaughter, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the GLF, and the GPCR are all significantly different from each other.
I want to add one point. The main reason behind the comparatively higher rate of deaths during the era of those leaders was basically either imperialist attack/sabotage or embargo. That tradition is still continuing with countries like Cuba, DPRK.