Originally posted by
[email protected] 3 2003, 04:08 PM
I disagree with the so called communist dictators such as Stalin and Mao, however I am not so against Mao as I used to be. I used to actually belive the 60 million figure flung around about him. However when I asked a capitaloist about that figure and the evidence behind it, he came up with some bullshit about killing sparrows deliberatly to starve all the people... it kind of conviced me it was all bullshit.
CM did explain it to me when we met, but I have forgotten what he said, would some one care to re-explain that one to me.
Is it the sparrows idea you want me to explain?
Well, very simply, they killed a number of pests to increase grain production. One of these was sparrows which eat seeds. I do not know if there was any famine resulting, however I have heard that they reversed the policy because killing sparrows broke a link in the food chain and the insects sparrows eat attack crops.
It is a lie to claim that he did it to starve people or 'for fun'. 60 million seems strange also ( a tenth of their population back then). No one knows how many died from famines, I have heard numbers from 2 million to 60 million. But under the Koumintang you can be assured that there were many terrible famines. I have a reasonable knowledge of the economic policies of the CPC and Mao Zedong, and none of them seem illogical or seem to hold any intent to cause famine.
It is often said that 30 million people died in the Great Leap Forward, and that afterwards 2 million died in the GPCR. Many other bourgeois historians claim that only 400,000 died in the GPCR. Harrison E. Salisbury syas that 5-10 million died in the Great Leap Forward, as opposed to 30 million. HES is by no means a communist, an therefore if you were to trust any historian I would say him, particularly because he has been able to interview many high-level Chinese officials and such. He also says around 400,000 died in the GPCR. But occasionally you see the outlandish suggestion of 65 million. I have heard suggestions of 20 million dying in the GPCR, as you can see, the difference between all these estimates really shows how unreliable information is. In fact 'In Honan Province during the famine of 1942 to 1943, Nationalist officials took grain by force from the starving peasants to sell for their own profit, and officials in a neighboring province refused to release their store of grain because of a "delicate local balance of power."4 Quite likely the Nationalists overall were responsible for 1,750,000 to 2,500,000 famine deaths.' In 1934-5 in an almost indentical situation, 1 million civilians starved. In all It is suggested, by bourgeois historians that up to 19 million died under the KMT from starvation.
It does little good to believe any of these estimates, as an American University states: 'Since 1949 the Chinese communists killed from 5,999,000 to 102,671,000 people' That is an extremely large margin.
This is from an American, bourgeois historian:
By R.J. Rummel
New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1991.
II. THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
8. The People's Republic of China: Overview
9. 8,427,000 Victims: The Totalization Period
10.7,474,000 Victims: Collectivization and "The Great Leap Forward"
11. 10,729,000 Victims: The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period
12. 7,731,000 Victims: The "Cultural Revolution"
13. 874,000 Victims: Liberalization
This amounts to 35,235,000. Not 60 million at all, but figures like this are disputed very much.