Have today’s 20- and 30-year-olds become the amnesic generation? Who has made them forget? By what means were they made to forget? Are we members of the older generation who still remember the past responsible for the younger generation’s amnesia?

The amnesia I’m talking about is the act of deleting memories rather than merely a natural process of forgetting. Forgetting can result from the passage of time. The act of deleting memories, however, is about actively winnowing out people’s memories of the present and the past.

In China, memory deletion is turning the younger generation into selective-memory automatons. Memories of history and the present, yesterday and today are all going through this uniform process of deletion and are being lost without trace.

I used to assume history and memory would always triumph over temporary aberrations and return to their rightful place. It now appears the opposite is true. In today’s China, amnesia trumps memory. Lies are surpassing the truth. Fabrications have become the logical link to fill historical gaps. Even memories of events that have only just taken place are being discarded at a dazzling pace, with barely intelligible fragments all that remain for people to hold on to.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, June 4th, PRC history
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Artist: BrickWeave

New Internet regulations, announced by state media in the final days of 2012, threaten to stifle the vibrant world of the Chinese netizenry. The regulations, which include required real-name registration for all Internet users, were announced in a December 18 People’s Daily editorial, which was in turn covered by CCTV’s primetime news show, News Simulcast (新闻联播 Xīnwén Liánbō). Twisting the CCTV report, BrickWeave casts disgraced politician Lei Zhengfu as the News Simulcast anchor in the mock segment “Netizens Call for Legislation to Protect Online Information.” Ordinary people have exposed corrupt officials like Lei through Weibo, forcing the authorities to do more firing and apologizing than they could have imagined before microblogging began.

Artist: Simon

“Don’t… don’t! I just want to write a weibo…” What exactly does real-name registration mean for Chinese Internet users? Officials say people will still be able to use nicknames online, but that offers little protection from identity theft. South Korea provides a sobering example of who mosts benefits from an online real-name registration system. The ninja inspectors going through this man’s pockets could be government regulators–or cyber-criminals.

Artist: Tango

Be careful what you wish for. A netizen-turned-puppet asks for a little freedom, but the very tool which could liberate him is used to control him instead.

Artist: Yuanzi

In “Getting Rich Through Hard Work” (劳动致富), ordinary men fish for their fair share–but the official, sitting on his throne at the tip of the iceberg, has cast his lines with something else in mind. The online public boiled with rage last year at the luxury watches, designer suits, and Italian cars sported by officials at all levels of the government food chain. Bo Xilai’s humble US$1600 monthly salary was apparently more than enough to send his son to Harrow and Oxford. “Watch Brother” was identified wearing at least 11 different watches in various photos. Guangzhou official Cai Bin was caught owning 21 houses, 20 more than the legal limit. The list goes on.

Artist: Fenzi

This menacing Pinocchio is not ashamed of the florid lie sprouting from his nose. Like a propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward, it glorifies a bounty that never existed. Retired journalist Yang Jisheng has just published Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, the fruit of 20 years of research about the horrors of the Great Famine of 1960-1962. In Foreign Policy, Murong Xuecun writes that the crucial debate in China today is not how the famine happened, but whether it happened at all. He references Frank Dikötter’s landmark book Mao’s Great Famine, which estimates “‘at least’ 45 million premature deaths.” But, says Murong, “the people who spoke the truth are all dead.” Dikötter also examines the country’s collective amnesia in Foreign Policy.

Artist: Padme

What does the New Year have in store for China? Will the Party hold the country together, or will an explosive situation of its own making finally burst forth? The first controversy of 2013 has already charged ahead, as Southern Weekly’s editorial calling on China to uphold its constitution was torn to shreds by the censors. Some people like Eric X. Li may argue that the “China model” offers an alternative success story to democratization, but as China’s economy slows and middle-class discontent grows, it’s clear the whole story has yet to be told.

Browse CDT Chinese’s cartoon collection on Google+.

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Post tags: Drawing the News, famine, Frank Dikötter, great leap forward, history, Internet censorship, Internet regulation, lei zhengfu, Murong Xuecun, News Simulcast, official corruption, political cartoons, political humor, real name registration, Yang Jisheng
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A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

[…] Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

[…] The death toll is staggering. “The most officials have admitted is 20 million,” he says, but he puts the total at 36 million. It is “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki … and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” he writes. Many think even this is a conservative figure: in his acclaimed book Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter estimates that the toll reached at least 45 million.

At Foreign Policy, Dikötter describes the almost total absence from available archives of any photographic record of the famine:

I read through thousands of documents: secret reports from the Public Security Bureaus, detailed minutes of top party meetings, investigations into cases of mass murder, inquiries compiled by special teams tasked with determining the extent of the catastrophe, secret opinion surveys, and letters of complaint written by ordinary citizens. Some were neatly written in longhand, others typed out on flimsy, yellowing paper. Some were excruciating to read, for instance, a report written by an investigation team noting the case of a boy in a Hunan village who had been caught stealing a handful of grain. A local Communist Party cadre forced his father to bury the boy alive. The father died of grief a few days later.

[…] For four years, I studied Mao’s famine, and only once have I seen a visual illustration of its awfulness. In 2009, I visited a historian in a drab concrete building in the suburbs of Beijing. He, too, had been working on the history of the Great Leap Forward, burrowing in archives for more than a decade and obsessively documenting the starvation that had decimated the region of his birth, a county barely 100 miles north of Mao’s hometown in Hunan. Stacks of photocopied archival material bulged out of filing cabinets in his sparse office. I asked him whether he had ever seen a photograph of the famine. He frowned and reluctantly pulled out a folder with a reproduction of the only picture he had discovered. It came from the files of the party committee in his home county and was from a police investigation into a case of cannibalism. The small, fading picture showed a young man standing against a brick wall, peering straight into the camera, seemingly emotionless. By his feet stood a large pot containing the parts of a young boy, his head and limbs severed from his body.

Another visual record of the period has survived, however. A slideshow of Great Leap Forward-era propaganda posters at Foreign Policy shows smiling farmers and bumper harvests. These images helped preserve the illusion that Yang Jisheng himself laboured under for many years: that starvation was local, and deaths were isolated tragedies, rather than part of a wider catastrophe of the government’s making.

Foreign Policy also hosts an article, translated by Martin Merz, in which Murong Xuecun angrily discusses present day arguments over the causes, extent and reality of the famine, and the government’s continued efforts to control the narrative. He writes scathingly about Chinese youth’s supposedly unquestioning acceptance of official information, and blames the Party’s stifling influence for this, the polarised recent debate over the famine, and other evils (“in which case he’s in for a nasty shock if he ever leaves China“, as Jamie K commented at Blood and Treasure).

For some 40 years, official publications in China have called the Great Famine of 1959-1962 “the three years of natural disasters.” But no one seems to know exactly what these disasters were: Floods? Drought? Earthquakes? Landslides? Hail storms or locust plagues? No one has the answer, and no one is brave enough to stand up and demand an answer from the government — because the official pronouncement of “natural disaster” is sufficiently intimidating to close all mouths.

Motivated by the desire to be “responsible to history and the truth,” a phrase churned out ad nauseam in China’s mass media, official accounts over the last 10 years have become more circumspect, employing the more neutral term “the three years of difficulties,” which seems to cover both the natural and manmade. This approach obviates the need to examine contributing factors and that Mao and other leaders caused the famine.

[…] The memories of those who experienced the famine are fading away. The current generation, like their parents, were force-fed state CCTV newscasts and party mouthpiece People’s Daily reports, but also fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers. Of course they now find it difficult to imagine that people once starved to death. And so they ask: If they didn’t have rice, why didn’t they eat meat?

While stories of the disaster may seem far-fetched to the young, older generations’ memories of the famine might actually be fuelling China’s ballooning childhood obesity problem. From Debra Bruno at The Washington Post:

Although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.

Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72 percent of mothers of overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.

Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.

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Post tags: censorship, famine, great leap forward, historical record, history, Murong Xuecun, obesity, photography, propaganda posters, Yang Jisheng
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Having lost the ability to speak the truth, we will tell many lies. What’s even more frightening is that in addition to lies we have invented a new kind of speech: ghost-talk. Lies are just meant to deceive others: our village produces 20,000 jin per acre. But ghost-talk is meant to hurt, to consume: all our country’s villages must produce 20,000 jin per acre. Anyone who doesn’t comply will be killed, no matter what their rank. When speaking the truth will cost you your life, no one is willing to speak the truth. When telling a lie was rewarded with promotions and wealth, this country became the Kingdom of Lies. This process continues uninterrupted to this very day, and it hasn’t yet reached completion. For example, our railways are the fastest in the world, then accidents happen, or “the Chinese people’s restoration is 62% complete,” and then we discover more than 62% of officials are corrupt….to give you another example, if you want to speak a little truth, there will be a group of people who come out of the woodwork and say, “What makes you qualified to say that so many people died during the Great Famine? Did someone in your family die? Did you see Lin Shao tortured with your own eyes? Were you there at that very moment? If you weren’t there, stop spreading rumors.” They seem to not believe that there is a such thing as records in this world, or documentaries, or people who have testified to these events. According to their logic, Jews could not have died in gas chambers at the hands of Nazis, because you didn’t see it with your own eyes. They can’t even prove they are their parents’ children, because they didn’t see it with their own eyes.

Li has written frequently about the concept of lies and truth-telling in China, notably in relation to natural and manmade disasters such as the collapse of a bridge in Harbin:

…The greatest truth in this place is that we know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying, and we also know that they actually know that we know that they are lying…so we don’t care about the truth anymore, we just care about the way they put on their show of “truth,” and only the complete compilation of all of these performances is enough to count as the whole truth.

Read more by and about Li Chengpeng via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, Li Chengpeng, truth
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As an adult, Yang used his credentials as a reporter for the state Xinhua news agency to cajole and beg his way into provincial archives. He started gathering information on the famine in the mid-90s, and began the project in earnest in 1998.

He worked undercover for a decade at immense personal risk, pretending to research official grain and rural policies, in order to put together the first detailed account of the great famine from Chinese government sources.

From his research, Yang estimates that 36 million died during the famine. Most deaths were caused by starvation, but the figure also includes killing during ideological campaigns. Some Western scholars have put the toll as high as 45 million.

Unbearable hunger made people behave in inhuman ways. Even government records reported cases where people ate human flesh from dead bodies.

In the New York Times, Yang explains his motivation for taking the risk of publishing the book:

As a journalist and a scholar of contemporary history, I felt a duty to find out how the Great Famine happened and why. Starting in the 1990s, I visited more than a dozen provinces, interviewed over a hundred witnesses, and collected thousands of documents. Since the Great Famine was a forbidden topic, I could get access to archives only under the pretext of “researching agricultural policies” or “studying the food issue.”

Communist leaders established a vast system of slavery in the name of liberating mankind. It was promoted as the “road to paradise,” but in fact it was a road to perdition.

I intended my book to be a memorial to the 36 million victims, but also a literal tombstone, anticipating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian political system that caused the Great Famine. I was mindful of the risks in this endeavor: if something happens to me because I tried to preserve a truthful memory, then let the book stand as my tombstone, too.

Read an excerpt of “Tombstone” via NPR. See also a review of the book by Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books, as well as more about Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward, via CDT.

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Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, PRC history, transparency, Yang Jisheng
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Yang’s travails in piecing together the book are part of its lore. As a reporter for the government’s Xinhua news agency, he had been a blindly loyal Party member. The turning point was the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” That made him determined to write the history of the Great Famine, which had touched him directly: he had watched his father die in front of him, at the time thinking it was an isolated tragedy and only later realizing that tens of millions had also died.

[…] His main point is to prove that the Party, from the village chief up to Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on but was too warped by ideology to change course until tens of millions had died. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the book is a cry of outrage from a victim. Yang vowed to erect for his father an everlasting tombstone, one that would not crumble or fall with time, and he did so with this book.

[… E]arlier this year a national newspaper ran a multipage supplement on the famine—an unprecedented recognition of this disaster. When I asked an editor at a leading Party newspaper why this was, he had a one-word answer: “Tombstone.”

It would be simplistic to say Tombstone alone has set off this rethinking of Chinese history. Instead, like any great book it is part of something bigger, in this case a desire by many Chinese people to reconsider their society’s future by clarifying its past.

See also Michael Fathers’ review at The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Popoff’s at The Boston Globe, and more on Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese history, famine, great leap forward, Henan, Mao Zedong, PRC history, Xinyang, Yang Jisheng
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For the general reader, “Mao’s Great Famine” is unlikely to be bettered. “Tombstone” is something quite different, a condensed, yet magisterial 600-page edition of a densely detailed, two-volume Chinese-language account by Yang Jisheng, a retired Chinese journalist and Communist Party member.

[...] As a teenager in 1959, Mr. Yang watched his father die of starvation. Years later, while working in a senior editorial post at Xinhua, China’s state-controlled news agency, he began his own search for the truth behind the famine. The author spent 20 years tracking down survivors across China and using his authority as a respected Communist cadre to access provincial archives. It was, in part, expiation for his shame in not questioning his father’s death.

[...] Mr. Yang concludes that Mao Zedong knew early on that his policies of extracting extortionate levels of foodstuffs from an impoverished countryside were killing millions. He uncovers the “arrest plans” and the quotas given to the police and militia for each province in dealing with those accused of speaking out against the Great Leap Forward and the regime. It was as if the quotas were political production targets. In 1958 Anhui province, a center of the famine, was given an “arrest quota” from the central government of 45,000 people. Officials surpassed the quota with 101,000 arrests. Many of those arrested died of starvation in labor camps.

See more on Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward via CDT.

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Post tags: Chinese history, famine, great leap forward, PRC history, Yang Jisheng
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In Qiaotou district, in Sichuan Province, “An old lady named Luo Wenxiu was the first to start consuming human flesh,” investigators wrote. “After an entire family of seven had died, Luo dug up the body of the 3-year-old girl, Ma Fahui. She sliced up the girl’s flesh and spiced it with chili peppers before steaming and eating it.” The report, dated Feb. 9 of that year, is one of more than 100 astonishing documents collected by the historian Zhou Xun in a new book about Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, published by Yale University Press.

[…] Ms. Zhou and a growing number of Chinese — and some Western — scholars believe the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s campaign of breakneck industrialization and agricultural collectivization, resulted in the deaths of perhaps 45 million people, mostly in the countryside. People died from a combination of starvation, overwork and violence in the quest for a perfect Communist society.

[…] To document that, Ms. Zhou spent four years, starting in 2006, visiting dozens of county and provincial archives, some under military guard. Access was easier during the first two years of her research, a legacy, she believes, of the rule of former President Jiang Zemin. Still, she often gained access only through informal contacts, she said, declining to be more specific. In all, she photocopied, photographed or transcribed about 1,000 documents. (Ms. Zhou also conducted more than 100 interviews with survivors, to be published by Yale in a separate book.)

Besides the appalling scale of deaths, Ms. Zhou believes that another legacy of the famine is the long-lasting impact it had on the spirit of Chinese society. Also from Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times:

“I do believe it created a kind of long-lasting impact in the sense that, O.K., human beings are selfish, you can say that in general. But the use of violence, it really reached its height during the famine period and I believe that was the background behind the Cultural Revolution” that began just four years later, in 1966, killing many more.

Hopelessness and selfishness inform Chinese society to this day, she said.

“I very much feel that coming from this, what people have in China is a sense of hopelessness,” she said. “That to survive, the only way is to do it yourself.”

Unable to look to the state to provide a safe environment, “you take things for yourself. It’s the only possible means to survive,” she said.

For more coverage of the Great Famine, see The Great Leap From Myth to History, via CDT.

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Post tags: Chinese history, famine, food, great leap forward, Jiang Zemin, PRC history
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The team documented the tragedy in Sichuan in detail, but by the time they submitted the report the political winds had shifted back in Mao’s favor. The report was spiked and as of today the only evidence of its existence is the manuscript copy of his section of the report retained by Xiao Feng, who is now 93 years old. It confirms the death toll of 12 million – 17% of the province’s total population.

For his pains, Liao was the target of a vendetta by the Sichuan provincial government. He was accused of participating in an anti-party clique and spent the next two decades in various labor and detention facilities until he was completely rehabilitated in 1982. Punning on the slogan, “A year (of great leap) is equivalent to 20 years (of ordinary development)”, Liao quipped that “3 hours (of reporting to Yang on the Great Leap Forward) worked out to 20 years (of incarceration).”

Lee’s piece also mentions this Global Times article from May, in which the English-language “voice of combative nationalism” also helps to debunk some of the national myths about “natural disasters” between 1959 and 1961, and mentions the desire to accurately document this period while its graying survivors are still around:

According to the History of the Communist Party of China, during the Great Leap Forward, iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement, and many farmers were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron production workforce. The production of agriculture and light industry production dropped sharply.

In 1959, China also experienced the most severe drought in its recent history, the book said. It claims that combined with foreign affairs, especially the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union, food shortages became serious.

Yang Jisheng, a journalist and author, wrote in his book Tombstone that the famine could fully be blamed on political errors. According to experts from the China Meteorological Administration, no severe weather calamities occurred between 1958 and 1962, he wrote.

Also see prior CDT coverage of the Great Leap Forward and projects to historically document it.

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Post tags: censorship, Chinese history, famine, Global Times, great leap forward, Southern People Weekly
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Armed with video cameras, Mr Wu’s researchers have already travelled to 50 villages in 10 provinces across China.

So far they have collected more than 600 memories from the famine, the result of a disastrous political campaign launched by Mao Zedong.

The Great Leap Forward was supposed to propel China into a new age of communism and plenty – but it failed spectacularly.

Agriculture was disrupted as private property was abolished and people were forced into supposedly self-sufficient communes.

Interviews for this new project reveal that even though the famine happened a long time ago – between late 1958 and 1962 – memories are still sharp.

Read more about the Great Leap Forward via CDT, including efforts by Chinese historian Yang Jisheng and Dutch historian Frank Dikötter to document this period of history.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: famine, great leap forward, Mao Zedong, PRC history
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Today’s “rising China,” which from the outside can seem to exude strength and confidence, inwardly lives with an unsure view of itself. People sense, even if they do not want to talk about it, that their country’s current system is grounded partly in fraud, cannot be relied upon to treat people fairly, and might not hold up. Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid-off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party. The socialist slogans that the government touts are widely seen as mere panoply that covers a lawless crony capitalism in which officials themselves are primary players. This incongruity has been in place for many years and no longer fools anyone. People take it as normal, but that very normality makes cynicism the public ideology. Many people turn to materialism—whether in property or investment—in search of value, but often cannot feel secure there, either; even if they gain a bit of wealth, they do not know when it might disappear or be wrested away.

One stopgap that top leaders have used has been to stoke national pride. They have staged an Olympics and a World’s Fair. They arrange to broadcast throughout China that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf” who would “split the motherland.” Such tactics have had some success. Chauvinist sentiment, especially among the upwardly mobile urban young, is easy to provoke, and is sometimes loudly expressed.

Yet in quieter settings, Chinese people continue to make decisions that reflect their lack of confidence in China’s future. Farmers from Fujian province still pay “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York. Of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study, only about 25–30 percent return to live in China (and of these, some keep foreign passports tucked away). Even leaders of the Communist Party send their children—and large amounts of their money—to places like Vancouver and Los Angeles.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China's rise, Ding Zilin, famine, Liu Xiaobo, perry link, Yang Jisheng
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Ian Johnson: I wondered when reading Tombstone why officials didn’t destroy the files. Why did they preserve all this evidence?

Yang Jisheng: Destroying files isn’t up to one person. As long as a file or document has made it into the archives you can’t so easily destroy it. Before it is in the archives, it can be destroyed, but afterwards, only a directive from a high-ranking official can cause it to be destroyed. I found that on the Great Famine the documentation is basically is intact—how many people died of hunger, cannibalism, the grain situation; all of this was recorded and still exists.

How many files did you end up amassing?

I consulted twelve provincial archives and the central archives. On average I copied 300 folders per archive, so I have over 3,600 folders of information. They fill up my apartment and some are in the countryside at a friend’s house for safekeeping.

As a Xinhua reporter did you have more latitude to explore the archives?

When I started I didn’t say I was writing about the Great Famine. I said I wanted to understand the history of China’s rural economic policies and grain policy. If I had said I was researching the Great Famine, for sure they wouldn’t have let me look in the archives. There were some documents that were marked “restricted” (“kongzhi” in Chinese)—for example, anything related to public security or the military. But then I asked friends for help and we got signatures of provincial party officials and it was okay.

Read more about Yang Jisheng and the Great Famine via CDT.

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Post tags: famine, great leap forward, PRC history, Yang Jisheng
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Though less detailed than Yang’s opus, Dikötter certainly gives a credible explanation of how the famine came about. This was a command economy, and central planning simply did not work. It was insisted that grain (rice, wheat or corn), which under the circumstances was barely if at all profitable, be grown almost everywhere. Many farmers would have preferred to raise more lucrative vegetables, or edible oils, sugarcane, melons, and tobacco. By foolish political decree, not only did everyone have to grow grain, but it had to be close-cropped on deeply ploughed land. The resulting crop failures drove people to eat seed, meaning that there would be no way to plant the following year’s crop. This included cotton seeds, which are poisonous; some people died from them. Cotton came to be in such short supply that many had little or nothing to wear. Dikötter writes, “Throughout the country those who died of starvation often did so naked, even in the middle of winter” (p. 141).

Ever increasing percentages of the harvests were confiscated and sent to Beijing, often leaving the farmers and town residents to starve. Under the management of Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來), it was ensured that there was generally sufficient grain to feed the largest cities, with enough left over to earn foreign exchange. The people who actually produced the food just didn’t matter.

The general view of the famine (largely shared by this reviewer) is that the vast majority of starvation deaths were the unintended result of erroneous policies. Dikötter is harsher. For him, the evidence demonstrates that “coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and that the famine resulted at least in part from victims being “deliberately deprived of food and starved to death” (p. x-xi).

Certainly there were many cases of such, but it seems probable that the vast majority of deaths resulted from what we might describe as malignant neglect. The quotation at the top shows that Mao Zedong was fully aware of the famine. Regarding its cause, however, he was in a state of denial — as is the Party still.

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Post tags: book reviews, famine, great leap forward, Mao Zedong, PRC history
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From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China, traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia.

The party records were usually housed on the local party committee premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty, yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.

Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.

But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.

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As historians have only begun to detail, Mao Zedong’s economic policies from 1958 to 1962 subjected his people to what we know now was the world’s most devastating famine. “The death toll stands at a minimum of forty-five million excess deaths,” according to Frank Dikötter, of the University of Hong Kong, author of “Mao’s Great Famine,” which uses newly opened archives and original interviews to detail the calamity in calm, if unavoidably grisly, detail. (Out in the U.K., scheduled for the U.S. later this month.)

Among the stories of cannibalism and people eating mud, there is also the grand narrative: Why? The answer lies in Mao’s misguided ambition to overtake Britain in the output of iron, steel, and other products in just fifteen years, which triggered a political mania of coercion and deprivation, as people struggled to fulfill unachievable goals. I have often marvelled at the scale of the catastrophe not only because of what it reminds us about the perils of demagoguery, but also for how recent it all was. The vividness of that memory—the sheer determination of today’s Chinese adults to leave behind the deprivation of their parents and grandparents—is an extraordinarily powerful engine, and it helps us understand the drive behind China’s headlong rush into the age of consumption.

Which leads us to the other notable book of the moment: “Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Are Changing a Nation.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, famine, great leap forward, obesity
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall