The Great Leap Forward:Death Toll?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

How many people died during this time? Contemporary bourgeois sources say 30 million and above.Is this true? Or a lie?

Thanks.

[Gorilla]

This article from Monthly Review is a little too apologist to be really trustworthy, but provides a starting point for further investigation:

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

Keep in mind that what is being discussed is excess mortality. Which could include cases where able-bodied people literally up and starved to death, but also cases where old, young or infirm people died of something else that they wouldn't have died from were it not for stressed conditions. So, when reactionaries line up the GLF numbers against the Holocaust, it's comparing apples to oranges.

MIM used to cite a statistic where the death rate in China during the famine years was the exact same as India during 'non-famine' years. I don't know if that is true or not, or where they got it from.

[Marxach-Léinínach]

Quite a bit less than the standard estimate, from "The Battle For China's Past":

The famine death toll

The Great Leap Forward has to be the most disastrous period of the
Mao era for rural Chinese. However, for Chang and Halliday to pick
the highest number of estimates of famine death and to state that Mao
had murdered these people is sensationalism beyond the common
sense of decency. There are a number of points here in relation to the
famine death toll. Scholars have made different estimates, ranging
from 10 to 30 million deaths. These are estimates for many reasons.
One is that there were no reliable demographic censuses to make
possible an accurate figure. Second, it is hard to know whether some
casualties during the Great Leap Forward were deaths by hunger or
premature deaths due to hardship. Third, some estimates try to assess
the ‘missing’ population on the basis of normal death and birth rates
and therefore may have included millions of those who might not have
been born. In the words of Patnaik:

Some scholars have used a very dubious method of arriving at
grossly unrealistic and inflated ‘famine deaths’ during this
period (1959–61) by taking account not only of the higher crude
death rate (which is a legitimate measure) but also counting the
‘missing millions’ as a result of the lower birth rate, as part of
the toll. There is a great deal of difference between people who
are already there, dying prematurely due to a sharp decline in
nutritional status, and people not being born at all. The former
can enter the statistics of famine deaths according to any
sensible definition of famine, but people who are not born at all
are obviously in no position to die whether prematurely or
otherwise.
(Patnaik 2004)

Fourth, nowadays natural disasters such as floods and droughts are not
considered a factor for the famine during the period. But in Barmé (2007)
an eyewitness account testifies that in 1960 there was the worst flood
disaster in century in his area and ‘The water came right up to our kang.
... The hunger was too great. It was hell. The natural disasters added to
the effect, and that’s the truth.’
If Chang and Halliday’s 38 million toll is correct that means one in
twenty Chinese died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward,
something that could not be hidden away no matter how hard the
authorities tried. It is also worth noting that in the village case studies
that I know of, no death toll due to famine during the Great Leap
Forward is reported. These studies include Gao 1999a, Seybolt 1996,
Endicott (1989) and Hinton (1983). The two villages studied by Seybolt
and Endicott were in two of the worst-hit provinces, Sichuan and Henan.
The final point related to the famine issue is the nature of responsi-
bility. Mao should certainly be held primarily responsible for the
consequences of the Great Leap Forward. First he should be held
responsible for initiating the movement by criticizing Zhou Enlai,
Deng Zihui and other more cautious leaders before the Great Leap
Forward started. Second Mao was mainly responsible for the quick
and dramatic collectivization around the winter of 1957 and spring of
1958. The sudden change of organization from co-ops to big collective
communes meant that no adequate supervision and monitoring
system could be implemented to manage grain production. This orga-
nizational failure undoubtedly had detrimental consequences in grain
production. Eventually there was a food shortage everywhere in China
and disastrous famine in some areas. But to identify Mao as the person
responsible for a policy disaster is not the same as to say Mao was the
murderer of so many people. Who is supposed to be the murderer of
the millions of Russians whose life expectancy has been shortened by
ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
From this perspective, it can be convincingly argued that the Great
Leap Forward was a disastrously failed trial of a different model of
development that embraced local enterprise and decentralized
industry, a work force that could be both industrial and agricultural,
and a community that was not solely urban or rural. In fact, some of
these ideas were followed up during the late 1960s and early 1970s
when township and village enterprises that had started during the
Great Leap Forward were encouraged to consolidate and develop
further. The issue of how to make the rural population part of an inte-
grated development still faces China today. According to Wen (2005),
even with the present rapid rate of industrialization and urbanization
there will still be 800 million people living in rural China by 2050.
Therefore, I would like to argue that the Great Leap Forward idea was
not some kind of madness, but theoretically guided rationality.

[Tomhet]

At least 250 Million, Mao killed a few million with his own hands...

[Chimurenga.]

The general 'death toll' is a lie, yes.

Along with all the other resources in here (especially Mobo Gao's book The Battle For Chinas Past) I would check out this article by Dongping Han, http://www.monthlyreview.org/091214dongping.php

Here is a review from the China Study Group on a new book called "Mao's Great Famine": http://chinastudygroup.net/2011/03/o-grada-review-of-dikotter/

These may also be helpful:

http://chinastudygroup.net/2009/10/the-production-of-death-in-chinese-proportions-read-this-article-by-utsa-patnaik-on-the-great-leap-forward-famine/

http://chinastudygroup.net/2003/09/on-measuring-famine-deaths-different-criteria-for-socialism-and-capitalism/

[Rafiq]

Could be nothing larger than the yearly famines in Pre Maoist China.

I deeply appose Mao as a reactionary, but any sensible person would know that the Change from pre 1949 china to Mao's China was a fucking miracle.

[JerryBiscoTrey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGRuKqvU7o&feature=channel_video_title

[Apoi_Viitor]

MIM used to cite a statistic where the death rate in China during the famine years was the exact same as India during 'non-famine' years. I don't know if that is true or not, or where they got it from.

Kind of. Noam Chomsky said that every eight years India goes through a great leap forward (and that's if you accept the 30 million figure).

Also, there was a Russian who claimed that America had an 8 mil excess death toll during the great depression... of course the great depression isn't "genocide".

[Apoi_Viitor]

Could be nothing larger than the yearly famines in Pre Maoist China.

I deeply appose Mao as a reactionary, but any sensible person would know that the Change from pre 1949 china to Mao's China was a fucking miracle.

Agreed. Life expectancy doubled under Mao's era.

[Revolutionair]

Critics have argued that capitalist countries could be held responsible for a similar number of deaths. Noam Chomsky, for example, writes that Amartya Sen in the early 1980s estimated the excess of mortality in India over China due to the latter's "relatively equitable distribution of medical resources" at close to 4 million a year. Chomsky therefore argues that, "suppos[ing] we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of ... Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Argument_that_the_book _is_one-sided

[Sir Comradical]

"Scholars have made different estimates, ranging from 10 to 30 million deaths. These are estimates for many reasons. One is that there were no reliable demographic censuses to make possible an accurate figure. Second, it is hard to know whether some casualties during the Great Leap Forward were deaths by hunger or premature deaths due to hardship. Third, some estimates try to assess the ‘missing’ population on the basis of normal death and birth rates and therefore may have included millions of those who might not have been born. In the words of Patnaik:

Some scholars have used a very dubious method of arriving at grossly unrealistic and inflated ‘famine deaths’ during this period (1959–61) by taking account not only of the higher crude death rate (which is a legitimate measure) but also counting the ‘missing millions’ as a result of the lower birth rate, as part of the toll. There is a great deal of difference between people who are already there, dying prematurely due to a sharp decline in nutritional status, and people not being born at all. The former can enter the statistics of famine deaths according to any sensible definition of famine, but people who are not born at all are obviously in no position to die whether prematurely or otherwise. (Patnaik 2004)" - 'Battle for China's Past', Mobo Gao

I'm not saying the GLF wasn't somewhat disastrous, but its worst effects are exaggerated by rabid anti-communists in the west.

[Amphictyonis]

Capitalism is suppose to be the system which produces mass industry/industrial society. Socialism/Anarchism/communism is the system which takes capitalism's industry and applies it in a more humane fashion. Trying to both develope industry and facilitate a command economy at the same time is, well, not going to work out. Anytime anywhere. China should have let (and eventually did) a sort of capitalism take hold. China is NOW ready to actually go socialist. Some people suggest China is actually planning on doing this- in the sense that they see future goals as sometimes taking 1000 years. They play chess while many people are playing checkers. I can't say for sure if China went capitalist so as to ensure future success with socialism though, it's a topic I need to pay more attention to.

[Jose Gracchus]

Whatever the statisticians spit out, the jist is: way too fucking high for virtually no fucking gain. Unlike the propagandists, this doesn't apply to overall social gains throughout the Mao Era, however. I think Michael Albert put it best when it was not a terrible proposal for moving socialistic development forward, but the 'human center' was not prepared for such radical transitions and it was poorly implemented. It was not a deliberate kill-fest, in any sense of the word.

[PhoenixAsh]

As a side note....the burgeoisie line is to compare the deaths of different dictators to establish which was was worse. Most notably the comparisson refers back to the holocaust as the standard for evil.

They make claims along the line of: Stalin killed 56 million people and Hitler only 6 million. Blabla

Besides the fact that WWII cost 79 million people their lives through war, repression or immediate targetted destruction....and the holocaust can not be seen as a seperate event. The argument itself is a load of shit.

[Amphictyonis]

Ya, also, in reality, industrialization under capitalism sure did cost many lives- especially in America.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Ya, also, in reality, industrialization under capitalism sure did cost many lives- especially in America.

Is there any detailed statistics involving the death toll due to American industrialization?

[Amphictyonis]

Is there any detailed statistics involving the death toll due to American industrialization?

Add the Native American death toll with the African slave death toll (which set the stage for industrialization) atop of all the work related deaths (mostly immigrant workers) during the beginning of the industrialization process and we're talking at least 50 million and thats being extremely conservative. This is just off the top of my head and is in no way meant to be accurate. Look it up :)

[Sixiang]

At least 250 Million, Mao killed a few million with his own hands...

After eating a few babies with Stalin on a date, of course.

[Ms. Max]

Another good source, although it duplicates some of the above info, is the Ray Lotta's Set the Record Straight Project at thisiscommunism.org

[Rusty Shackleford]

all these death tolls that were supposedly caused by communism are ridiculous.

now, i wont disagree that famines had existed, but i will disagree with them coming into existence out of communism.

famines were common in Russia before the revolution, and a few happened afterward. to say the famine in the 30s was a politically motivated and racist, communism inspired, famine is idiotic and historically revisionist.

a famine happened in the 90s in korea. is it the fault of the government or a loss of trade partners and an embargo?

[chegitz guevara]

famines were common in Russia before the revolution, and a few happened afterward. to say the famine in the 30s was a politically motivated and racist, communism inspired, famine is idiotic and historically revisionist.

In the era of industrialized agriculture, all famines are human generated. The problem in both the USSR in the 1930s and in the GLC, was not the drop in food production. It was how the authorities responded to it, which was abominably.

Russia/the USSR suffers a serious drought about once every ten years. They had two famines. Once, immediately following the Civil War, when society was still completely disrupted, and once during collectivization, when again, society was completely disrupted. They still have devastating droughts, but they haven't had a famine since.

In the GLC, the famine was caused by simply insane "socialist" farming practices and the refusal of the bureaucracy to admit the harvest failure (as China had had bumper crops the year before, masking the deleterious effects of Mao's farming "genius").

In the case of China, we'll never know what the true death toll was. There is a demographic hole of twenty million people, but aside from the previously mentioned number of people not being born, there is also the possibility that it was invented in order to discredit Mao and give credit to the Deng counter-revolution.

In the Soviet Union, the Soviet archives have revealed that 3.3 million people died during the Great Famine. Most of them were Russian, ethnically, not Ukrainian, btw.

[Wei1917]

Well let us consider what people mean by excess deaths. Remember excess deaths are measured relative to the mortality of 1957. So the lower you assume for 1957 mortality, the higher your excess deaths.

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).

[prince capone]

i highly doubt 30 million people died or anywhere near that number. everyone should read William Hintons book "Through a Glass Darkly" and he breaks down the numbers very persuasively.