In America and the rest of the West, most people believe that Mao was a monster worse that Adolf Hitler or Stalin and is responsible for killing at least 30 million people during what is known as China’s Great Famine.
In fact, many Chinese also believe that millions died of starvation during The Great Famine (1958 – 1961) due to Mao’s demanding production goals during China’s Great Leap Forward.
Until recently, I also believed this without doubt since that is all I have ever heard.
The details that may have caused this famine are not common knowledge and no attempt by the Western media has been made to reveal them.
However, after discovering what happened in China and the world during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, what was once a certainty (at least to me) is now a mystery and possibly another hoax equal to the hoax that Tibet was never part of China before 1950 and there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which Wiki Leaks recently proved wrong.
No mention of drought, floods and severe weather that cut crop yields, and the number of deaths quoted in the video cannot be supported with evidence. Evidence that does exist supports half the number.
Why Mao may have become scapegoat or victim of a hoax is worth examining.
The reason I say this is because in 1949 when Mao came to power, life expectancy in China was about 35, and then in 1960 life expectancy improved to about 60 or almost double what it had been in 1949, while the population of China increased by 19.5% with child mortality rates improving dramatically.
If Mao’s policies were responsible for these improvements in life expectancy and population growth, how could he also be the monster responsible for causing a famine that may have killed millions?
If a famine did occur, my research revealed that other factors may have contributed to the deaths and all but one of those factors did not deliberately cause people to die of starvation.
After learning of these other factors and completing the puzzle, it is obvious (at least to me) that Mao and the Communist Party did not order the deaths of 15 to 70 million people (the numbers quoted in the West vary widely because different people have made different claims without valid evidence to support those claims. There is evidence that supports the lower number.).
Before I started researching this post, I believed that Mao’s agricultural reform policies were mostly responsible for the famine, and then I learned that drought and severe weather also played a role in the famine.
Continued on September 1, 2011 in China’s Great Famine (1958 – 1961) Fact or Fiction – Part 2
Recommended reading on this topic for those who seek the unblemished truth: From the Monthly Review, Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball
From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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“Either way, as I mentioned earlier, you have your opinion and are entitled to such (the joy of living in a free country)”
Mr Chopsticks, with this kind of answer u really show were u stand…just talking about bias, prejudice and the usual meaningless “free country” self-righteousness. U’d be surprised by the array of different opinions and way of thinking u could find in China (on this and other issues), but it’s clear u prefer to stick to ur own limited vision. Sometimes, other than reading, it’s also better to go “on the field” and check directly on the place.
Mr. Lofthouse,
This will be my last post on this topic. To date, you have posted sources from your own blog, Wikipedia (which cannot be considered a serious source for any researcher – even the children in the local elementary school have been told they cannot use it as a source for their own research papers!) and a single article by an otherwise relatively unknown author with a self-proclaimed bias toward socialism and therefore a clearly defined bias (James Ball) in a Marxist magazine (as stated in your preferred Wikipedia) which clearly cannot be considered an independent, peer-reviewed source. Otherwise, you have offered no other proof or evidence of your claims that Mao was not primarily responsible for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward.
This is not to say that everything you have stated is wrong or that there may indeed be other causes (surely a drought can lead to a famine), but you have, in my opinion, provided insufficient evidence to date to support your theory. Further, by tossing about irrelevant issues such as US imperialism (seriously?!), US embargoes, stories from one Western source on Cixi and how errors in that regard must therefore taint all other Western sources on Mao and some theory on how Mao’s failures (oh, wait, those weren’t his failures, they were the fault of drought and poor management by his underlings) were a likely cause for his subsequent paranoia that led to the Cultural Revolution (oh, wait, that was Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four’s fault!), you have only created a further sense of a conspiracy theory that only serves to denigrate any logical argument you might wish to make on Mao’s very slight responsibility for the Great Leap Forward.
Perhaps you would be well served by reading Li Zhisui’s biography of Mao along with a few others that have been printed in recent years (including Mao – A Life, by Philip Short, among others) to get a better picture of Mao and see that the actions he took were his and that he was responsible not only for some of the good that followed his seizure of power (such as the greater quality of life you spoke of earlier) but also for disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (among others). You may find that those were clear evidence of his actions and policies that he had formulated during his early years as he rose through the ranks to become the Supreme Leader. Or you may simply ignore them as inconvenient facts that do not support your theories and therefore discard them as such.
Either way, as I mentioned earlier, you have your opinion and are entitled to such (the joy of living in a free country) but an opinion does not equal truth without evidence and facts to back it up.
“If Mao’s policies were responsible for these improvements in life expectancy and population growth, how could he also be the monster responsible for causing a famine that may have killed millions?” – This is not a tautology. To claim that he was responsible for one does not mean that he could therefore not have been responsible for the other. To rephrase another way, it would be the same as arguing that Ted Bundy was considered to be a nice, polite young man by his friends, family and neighbors, so how could he have possibly been a serial killer? And no, I am not trying to compare Mao and Ted Bundy, I am offering you the same logic you tried with your sentence to demonstrate how it does not work.
And no, Mao did not order the deaths of 15-70 million people. He ordered policies that resulted in their deaths – and when informed of their deaths by Peng Dehuai, had him punished and continued with those same policies.
And I’ll stop here. Forgive my long responses but I was hoping to learn more from an alternative point of view that would help to create a larger picture of that time and I feel I have not received that. Perhaps you will have more in your subsequent posts on the subject.
Chopstick says, “You have posted sources from your own blog”
Yes, because those other posts on my Blog usually provide links to other sources. However, every source may have a bias with a political agenda. Unless you are there as a primary source, as a journalist, you must rely on what you find from mostly secondary sources.
As a journalist, once you start to question witnesses, you will quickly find out that five witnesses may have five different perspectives on the same event. Even the Gospels written by the twelve disciples (the apostles) of Jesus Christ do not agree on everything He said or did, which is why the New Testament is mostly from four of the twelve.
As for using Wiki, prove that the information quoted is wrong. Not all of Wiki is wrong. Follow the trail of links provided by the citations if you want to challenge this information. If you are unwilling to do that, then your argument is baseless that Wiki is a useless source just because grade school teachers won’t allow students to use it since it would be too easy.
In fact, if I was still teaching, I might tell my students they may find sources at Wiki by using the citations with links provided and then click on the link to the source. After you arrive at the linked source through the citation, I would say, read it and see if it supports what Wiki said, which is a way to see if Wiki offers valid information or not.
My Blog is not a peer review journal so using such an argument to discredit my opinion is baseless.
Since there are only opinions on this subject, there is no way to prove who is correct. What I offer is another opinion with a few facts to support it. Since when is any media source, other than peer-reviewed journals, required to province citations for every opinion?
I’m a journalist—not a scholar and the media such as CNN, Fox, The New York Times, The London Times, offer citations to what they report. Reporters gather information from a variety of sources and are fortunate if they speak to primary sources at all.
I suggest you read “Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload” by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/01/140118092/as-media-lines-blur-everyone-must-be-an-editor
The first question you have to ask is, ‘Where am I? Am I listening to a propagandist? Is this a news show? Is it an opinion show? What land am I in?’ … Because journalism itself is no longer this homogeneous product.
My goal is to get people to think and learn more. You cannot do that by agreeing with the majority opinion on a topic. When I get an idea and research it, I’m looking for the minority opinion and that is usually the opinion I take.
One reason I’m so skeptical of most of what I hear in the West about anything to do with China is because of primary sources revealing the lies that are considered truth by many in the West. By reading Robert Hart’s journals, I discovered that he did not share the same opinion of the Dowager Empress, who was demonized in the Western media near the end of the 19th century, and from Hart I learned that Tibet was considered party of China. Then I learned from another primary source published in the October 1912 National Geographic magazine that Tibet was part of Tibet.
Since then, I’m skeptical of any Western claim of Communist China and the more I learn, the more skeptical I become.
You have a right to your “opinion” too and you may select which opinions you believe to support your opinion.
Some advice, stick to your peer reviewed journals. I suspect the only time you agree with what you read in the media is when it agrees with you and then there is no reason to question the evidence or sourced quoted.
Mr Chopsticks, u keep on repeating a baseless assumption, which is that someone would have stated that Mao’s policies have “NOTHING” to do with the events..which NOONE have, so..what are you talking about?
Again, even if is it not possible to have complete informations (and you offered no substantial proofs that the “chinese government” hides those facts…), inventing, distorting or simply casually writing numbers here and there is not an acceptable scholar method. Not having complete datas (and governments, wherever in the world, US included, are known to HIDE facts, for various reasons) is no excuse for dishonesty, one-sidedness presented as scholar research.
Peer-reviewed (and the authority of peer-reviews, especially when most of the scholars have studied on the same “biased” accounts we are talking about, is flimsy at best) …yes, but if it is peer-reviewed only by western scholars, it’s hardly a guarantee for reliability in cases like this. And it is not “news” (having had my share of it) that some academic circles can be very very self-referential and heavily conservative in their views, sometimes (scholars are not all devoted to the research of “truth”, many of them are also devoted to maintaining the “authority” and “power” in the field and their own circle)
In those decades population, life-expectancy, literacy, economy and standard of living all have undeniably grown (practically starting from complete scratch, considering China’s situation in 1949)..so other than a poet and a good military commander, as you say, it is probable that, with all his errors, Mao seems to have done something right also politically.
Just wondering if you will be discussing the most recent book on this topic “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank dikotter. You can read a short review here, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/05/maos-great-famine-dikotter-review.
Seems like the most authoritative account, since he uses documents from Chinese archives to back up his claims that 45 million people died, Mao knew that it was bad as it was happening, and that yes, there was a famine.
I think perhaps you should try to clarify whether this series is focused on if there was a famine, or if Mao was responsible for it.
Tom,
Anyone may juggle numbers or any information or research any way they want to come up with numbers such as 45 million. An “expat in China” sent a link to an interesting and very long and revealing piece in the Monthly Review that raises many questions (I copied the link here). This piece also uses much evidence to support what it has to say but appears much more balanced and raises many questions.
http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
In reality, there is so much to pick from on this topic, that what one decides to believe actually has to do with personal biases and we may never know the “real” truth.
However, after reading the piece in the Monthly Review it is obvious that any claims that come from outside of China are suspect.
As for “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank dikotter, a few years after Sterling Seagrave published “Dragon Lady” revealing the lies behind her demonization in the West (mainly in the London Times) about the time of the Boxer Rebellion, another book came out about The Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi using all the old claims that Seagrave had revealed were lies. Seagrave even mentions that these lies will always be considered bedrock resarch informatoin by many that will never excpet the facts he revealed in his “Dragon Lady”. Even China using the Western lies about the Dowager Empress in their school history textbooks.
Lead Paragraph:
Over the last 25 years the reputation of Mao Zedong has been seriously undermined by ever more extreme estimates of the numbers of deaths he was supposedly responsible for. In his lifetime, Mao Zedong was hugely respected for the way that his socialist policies improved the welfare of the Chinese people, slashing the level of poverty and hunger in China and providing free health care and education. Mao’s theories also gave great inspiration to those fighting imperialism around the world. It is probably this factor that explains a great deal of the hostility towards him from the Right. This is a tendency that is likely to grow more acute with the apparent growth in strength of Maoist movements in India and Nepal in recent years, as well as the continuing influence of Maoist movements in other parts of the world.
Conclusion:
The approach of modern writers to the Great Leap Forward is absurdly one-sided. They are unable to grasp the relationship between its failures and successes. They can only grasp that serious problems occurred during the years 1959-1961. They cannot grasp that the work that was done in these years also laid the groundwork for the continuing overall success of Chinese socialism in improving the lives of its people. They fail to seriously consider evidence that indicates that most of the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap Forward were due to natural disasters not policy errors. Besides, the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap Forward have to be set against the Chinese people’s success in preventing many other deaths throughout the Maoist period. Improvements in life expectancy saved the lives of many millions.
We must also consider what would have happened if there had been no Leap and no adoption of the policies of self-reliance once the breach with the Soviet Union occurred. China was too poor to allow its agricultural and industrial development to stagnate simply because the Soviets were refusing to help. This is not an argument that things might not have been done better. Perhaps with better planning, less over-optimism and more care some deaths might have been avoided. This is a difficult question. It is hard to pass judgement what others did in difficult circumstances many years ago.
Of course it is also important that we do learn from the mistakes of the past to avoid them in the future. We should note that Mao to criticized himself for errors made during this period. But this self-criticism should in no way be allowed to give ammunition to those who insist on the truth of ridiculous figures for the numbers that died in this time. Hopefully, there will come a time when a sensible debate about the issues will take place.
If India’s rate of improvement in life expectancy had been as great as China’s after 1949, then millions of deaths could have been prevented. Even Mao’s critics acknowledge this. Perhaps this means that we should accuse Nehru and those who came after him of being “worse than Hitler” for adopting non-Maoist policies that “led to the deaths of millions.” Or perhaps this would be a childish and fatuous way of assessing India’s post-independence history. As foolish as the charges that have been leveled against Mao for the last 25 years, maybe.
To this point, the only evidence you have offered for your assertions that Mao was not a monster (which is not a point I nor anyone else here had made in opposition to your opinion) is your own blog entries and Wikipedia – neither of which are considered to be valid, peer-reviewed research entities (no offense intended to your blog). Another commenter has offered an editorial (which is also not a source of true research investigative journalism) by someone whose bio indicates he is a political activist with interest in socialist economies – and having read through a good part of his article, he also offers little in the way of substantive evidence and proof of his opinions. I do not think that anyone would dispute that there may have also been drought and other natural disasters (and I use that term loosely here) that might have contributed in some small part to the tens of millions of lives lost during the Great Leap Forward but to assert that those events, and not Mao’s policies, are the main factor behind the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is almost being deliberately obtuse to history, facts and common sense. China has suffered (like many other countries throughout the world) through natural disasters and droughts throughout its history but at no other time did tens of millions die as a result. Is it just a coincidence that the large numbers of death occurred during the Great Leap Forward?! And that Mao admitted to some small mistakes AFTER the failure had been acknowledged was no more than political gamesmanship in order to combat his perceived political enemies (at that time, Peng Dehuai – who told Mao of the disaster two years before he finally admitted to it himself – being the most prominent among them).
You also make reference to the “real” truth. The real truth can only come from the Chinese government which has chosen to hide those facts and make them unavailable to researchers – so perhaps before you criticize Western research, you should examine why they may not have all of the information you deem to be the “real” reasons behind the catastrophe and consider why a dictatorial government would choose to hide those “facts”.
Finally, you continue to bring up points that are barely tangential to your original argument to support a conspiracy against the truth of Mao’s culpability in the Great Leap Forward. Mao certainly had his good points (he was a great military commander and an excellent poet) but he clearly had his faults – which included no good understanding of economics nor a willingness to admit fault unless forced to do so for political convenience. It is ok to admit that he had both good and bad and not imply he was a monster but to imply he had little to do with the Great Leap Forward and the disaster it became is to ignore the facts. You are entitled to your opinion but if you wish to assert a new point of view, you need to provide additional proof.
Mr. Chopstick says, “China has suffered (like many other countries throughout the world) through natural disasters and droughts throughout its history but at no other time did tens of millions die as a result. Is it just a coincidence that the large numbers of death occurred during the Great Leap Forward?!”
WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As for no disasters and droughts through history causing this much loss of life, think again. Although I use Wiki as a source, that does not mean those facts are invalid. Usually, posts on Wiki that may be invalid have a warning that citations (links to the source material) are missing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
And when citations are needed, there is a notation saying so and at times there are boxed warnings at the beginning of a post when the material is questionable.
The following are three famines that killed 10 million or more and they have citations.
1769-1773 — The Bengal Famine where 10 million are listed as dead.
1784 – 1784 — Another famine in India where 11 million are listed as dead.
Four famines (combined as one since they were close together during the rule of the Qing Dynasty) in China from 1810 to 1849 where 45 million are listed as dead.
Who may be responsible for the 21 million deaths (or was it genocide?) from famine in India during the 18th century? We know it isn’t Mao.
Answer (look at the dates): The Anglo-French conflicts that began in the 1750s ended in 1763 with a British ascendancy in the southeast and most significantly in Bengal. There the local ruler actually took the Company’s Calcutta settlement in 1756, only to be driven out of it by British troops under Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey in the following year enabled a new British satellite ruler to be installed. British influence quickly gave way to outright rule over Bengal, formally conceded to Clive in 1765 by the still symbolically important, if militarily impotent, Mughal emperor.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/east_india_01.shtml
Other than claims from the West based on guesswork from flimsy evidence, where is your evidence/proof that tens of millions died during The Great Leap Forward?
To discover well researched answers, I suggest reading what Joseph Ball wrote for the Monthly Review. It’s rather long with more than 50 cited sources.
http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
Ball writes, “Official Chinese sources, released after Mao’s death, suggest that 16.5 million people died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures were released during an ideological campaign by the government of Deng Xiaoping against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, there seems to be no way of independently, authenticating these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and preserved for twenty years before being released to the general public. American researchers managed to increase this figure to around 30 million by combining the Chinese evidence with extrapolations of their own from China’s censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: the Unknown Story reported 70 million killed by Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap Forward.”
“Those who have provided qualitative evidence, such as eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker in his famous account of the period Hungry Ghosts, have not provided enough accompanying evidence to authenticate these accounts. Important documentary evidence quoted by Chang and Halliday concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented in a demonstrably misleading way.”
“Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime Mao that millions died during the Great Leap Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to blame for the deaths that did occur during the Great Leap Forward period.”
Joseph Ball presents much evidence and logic that is compelling.
“The fact is that in 1960, the Party stopped that five-year plan more than two years early, imported food to feed the people to stop the deaths from starvation and broke up the huge communes sending the farmers back to their villages—evidence by itself that they admitted the failure of the Great Leap Forward even if they didn’t say it publicly, which isn’t the Chinese way.
But, there will always be people that will refuse to see Mao any other way but as a monster because if Mao was a monster it makes it easier to demonize the Communist Party and ignore all of the good things they have done for China such as increasing the lifespan dramatically, increasing literacy, reducing poverty more than any nation on the earth, allowing Chinese to travel the world as tourists (about fifty million annually now), and growing a highly educated middle and upper middle class without all the slogans of The Cultural Revolution.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, kudos mr. Lofthouse!
Chopstick, you’d better REread what I wrote…cause evidently u didn’t understand it.
I never said you are inflexible, but I said, and I confirm it, that ur answer was needlessly aggressive, undeniably prejudiced, and rigid in that you didn’t even wait for the other parts of Mr. Lofthouse explanation to attack him (accusing him to just report the usual “party line” without giving any possible credit to the counterpart, only testify EVEN MORE ur rigidity and prejudiced. The “party line”, as u call it, is often much detailed and more correct of many “outside (mostly politically tainted) reconstructions”, as the Tiananmen hoax clearly shows once more. To “analyze” and write the history of a country/culture/society completely dismissing as propaganda etc the official voice of that country/culture/society is the worst possible way to approach the events, and the result cannot but be biased at best, false at worst). History can be, and often is, a political tool, and it’s not the first time it is used by one part (the west in this case) to tarnish or blacken the image of the “adversary” (communism in China in this case). Roman emperor Nero is one example of this, his image throughout the centuries has been blackened and completely tarnished by later christian historians..it’s only recently that scholars have started to restore a little of truth about him (and it is pretty different from what have been passed down till our times)
NOBODY said Mao had no responsibility in what happened (as u seem to have understood somehow from what was written…another symptom of ur prejudice and aggressivity that cloud ur judgment), the actual explanation was much more nuanced.
There is plenty of materials and datas that prove this (but as with every thing one must have an open mind to accept it), and given the fact Mr. Lofthouse has already started to illustrate them, there’s no need for me or others now to write another essay on this, in case, if there’ll be something to fill in or add later, there will be time to do it. For now I can’t but confirm what Mr. Lofthouse wrote in his first part (we still mantain a certain level of disagreement on the Cultural Revolution, but that is 🙂
To find the “monster” is easy, simple and satisfying, but in the end just false….The world, and reality, almost never work this way (usually the “truth”, if it can ever be achieved, turns out to be much more nuanced, complex and multifaceted than what we originally may think)
Alessandro,
We could also look at China to find another example to add to Nero — Sterling Seagraves’s nonfiction book on The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, who was smeared by a reporter for the London Times working in China.
When Seagrave was researching for http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Lady-Legend-Empress-China/dp/0679733698/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314920781&sr=1-1, he discovered the reporter’s original journals and read the man’s gloating admission of how he demonized her and got away with it. The details are in Sterling’s book.
In fact, today, the history (school) textbooks in China use what was written about the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi in the London Times, and she is demonized there too. I heard Seagrave mention in an interview that the Party was upset with him after his book came out and put his American passport on a watch list so he couldn’t enter China again.
However, Sterling Seagrave corrects her image in his scholarly and well-researched work.
I am glad you mentioned the Cultural Revolution. I had an interesting conversation this morning with an individual that knows China and its history very well and she said that Mao’s failure with The Great Leap Forward and having that five-year plan cut short by the Party due to its failure may (she didn’t use “may”) have triggered the paranoia and distrust of others that launched the Cultural Revolution. Mao felt that since he had failed with the Great Leap Forward that others in the Party may try to replace him so he acted first and got rid of anyone he felt might be a threat.
Terry Chen is right. The evidence shows that, Mao may have been paranoid, and I wrote about that in “Mao and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” at http://wp.me/pN4pY-2he and “Waking the Unconscious Demon Within”, which may explain why Mao made some of the poor decisions he made later in life at http://wp.me/pN4pY-2jA.
However, when I decided to write this series on China’s (latest) Great Famine (1959-1961), I approached it with an open mind as I have attempted to do while writing all the posts for this Blog. I also understand that there will be individuals and groups that will refuse to except anything but the truths they believe. I’ve also written about that topic in “The Danger of False Truths” at http://wp.me/pN4pY-2ex
My university BA degree is in journalism and I taught an award winning (international, national and regional awards) journalism class for a number of years.
As a journalist, I was trained not to accept anything at face value—especially unsubstantiated opinions that are stated as if they are the truth such as the post I wrote about the recent rail accident in China.
High Speed Rail Tragedy in China Reveals Small Minds in the West
It seems that many of the truths that we live with today are not totally accurate and over time these exaggerated myths have become politically correct. Hitler once said something to the affect that if you told a lie enough it would become the truth. In the United States, this is the philosophy of a powerful political group known as the neo-conservatives. The foundation of their movement is the “noble lie”, which means they have the right to lie if it achieves their noble purposes and what they consider noble is the goals of their group.
In fact, there was news recently, which has nothing to do with China, about a new discovery that the U.S. was involved in some rather horrible experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s with syphilis. If the U.S. government is capable of doing things like this and this is not the only time the U.S. has done experiments on people (other types of questionable experiments have been done on sterilizing African-Americans, trying out unproven drugs on prison inmates, gassing people in New York subway system to see how a toxin or virus might spread, radiation exposure on American military personal, etc), and we are supposed to believe whatever we hear about a country that U.S. wanted to collapse politically so the Communist Party would be replaced by the KMT dictatorship in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, who was no angel either since he was a brutal dictator his entire adult life after Sun Yat-sen died as we discover from just one incident (and there were others), which was the 1/28 Massacre in Taiwan (http://wp.me/pN4pY-ET ), which is much worse than what didn’t happen in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, and then we have the fact that the Dali Lama was in the pay of the CIA for years and the Dalai Lama admitted this to a U.S. Congressional hearing.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/29/us-usa-guatemala-syphilis-idUSTRE77S3L120110829
I suspect that when Mao first was told about the famine and the starvations, he didn’t want to believe that the goals he had set for The Great Leap Forward had failed due to the droughts and floods, which is why the Party leadership stepped in and stopped that five year plan early and found help from Canada and Australia to feed China’s people so no more would die from starvation. The evidence points to the fact that because of the bumper crops in 1958 and the inflated reports of crop yields, he believed that his goals were going to succeed and facing the truth that they were failing in 1959 and 1969 (we will probably never know exactly when he was first told what was really happening since reports were being falsified form the local level early on), that he just couldn’t accept failure. I suspect at first Mao thought he was being lied to but eventually the evidence was too much to ignore especially when high-ranking party members from Beijing must have gone to the provinces where the deaths took place and saw for themselves.
The fact is that in 1960, the Party stopped that five-year plan more than two years early, imported food to feed the people to stop the deaths from starvation and broke up the huge communes sending the farmers back to their villages—evidence by itself that they admitted the failure of the Great Leap Forward even if they didn’t say it publicly, which isn’t the Chinese way.
But, there will always be people that will refuse to see Mao any other way but as a monster because if Mao was a monster it makes it easier to demonize the Communist Party and ignore all of the good things they have done for China such as increasing the lifespan dramatically, increasing literacy, reducing poverty more than any nation on the earth, allowing Chinese to travel the world as tourists (about fifty million annually now), and growing a highly educated middle and upper middle class without all the slogans of The Cultural Revolution.
All of this success in China scares democracy advocates that firmly believe capitalism can only work in a multi-party democracy that advocates total freedom of religion and speech and of the media. Well, it’s not total freedom. There are limits to freedom of speech even in the US when it comes to the workplace and school.
If China succeeds without being a multi-party democracy and with limited freedom of religion and political expression that makes those claims of success in the West a lie.
Mao did not know how to run a country and he was overly paranoid, but many westerners seem to think that it was his intention to kill tens of millions of people. With such a biased attitude, they will never be able to accept anything good that is said about Mao. Such people stubbornly believe that they already know the truth and will never acvept any other explanations, however logical the explanations may be.
Chopstik, with a rigid and prejudiced view you won’t ever find what “really” happened (mostly cause, if you think you already have a nice “truth” in your pocket, and your are satisfied with it, you really have no interest in looking and searching deeper for facts). You’re aggressive attitude shows that you don’t want the truth, you do not want to analyze and understand…you just want a “monster” to blame, cause is MUCH MUCH easier than take all the factors involved and weigh them carefully.
Dismissing everything the counterpart (in this case, party officials or politicians in general, or anyone says anything that doesn’t agree with your ideas) says as lies, deception or whatever, is the worst possible way to approach any kind of analysis….
Alessandro, without devolving into a flame war, you’ve only stated that I’m too biased to wish to learn more about how Mao isn’t responsible for the disaster that was the Great Leap Forward and provided no evidence to back up what has been shown in this post. If you have evidence of the “truth” you proclaim (Mao’s not responsible?), then feel free to provide it and we can have a rational discussion on the subject. If not, you would be better served by not suggesting that I am inflexible on my views of the subject.
You wanted evidence:
To dispel ignorance—recommended reading on this topic for those who seek the unblemished facts: From the Monthly Review, Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball
http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor
Click to access 57906_1.pdf
In addition, Amartya Sen, the world’s leading poverty scholar and Nobel Laureate in economics, gave a direct comparison between famine in China and famine in India. Sen was quoted as saying, “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).
Sure, you can argue that drought and severe weather played a part in the famine of that time period (and I’ve heard this from Party hacks before), but that does not correlate to the unsubstantiated insinuation you make that Mao’s policies were not the main factor behind the famine (and there is an abundance of evidence both in the West and from unofficial Chinese sources that corroborate that). Further, using your own previous posts as your validation of your point only comes across as self-serving and disingenuous at best, downright deceitful at worst.
Note from Blog host: To dispel ignorance—recommended reading on this topic for those who seek the unblemished facts: From the Monthly Review, Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball
http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor
Click to access 57906_1.pdf
In addition, Amartya Sen, the world’s leading poverty scholar and Nobel Laureate in economics, gave a direct comparison between famine in China and famine in India. Sen was quoted as saying, “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).
Chopstik,
You have decided what you want to believe without weighing all the factors that led to the famine. There are also three more parts to this series so all of the evidence isn’t in yet–one post for each element of the tragedy.
Mao’s policies were part of the problem but there was drought and floods and the record of that global weather pattern exists in addition to the fact that China has a history of droughts and famines.
In fact, the issue is more complex than just blaming Mao’s bad policies and the fact that crop yields were exaggerated so Mao ordered rice to be exported to other countries causing a worse shortage, which led to starvation in some rural provinces that were hit hardest by the drought and/or floods.
The sources you quote from the West has no evidence of the exact number of dead. It is all guesswork and exaggeration. Moreover, just who are these “unofficial Chinese” sources. Anyone may say anything and Mao had his enemies.
Since there is no way to know all the facts, we must take what evidence exists.
Mao’s policies played a role in the tragedy.
Drought and floods led to crop losses.
Lack of communication and lies kept the Party in Beijing form knowing all that was going on until it was too late but not late enough to keep it from getting worse. Mainland Chinese has always been decentralized, which means the provincial governments have a lot of say of what happens in the provinces.
What this post does is point out that the loss of life during the failed Great Leap Forward was due to a mixture of circumstances and was not the same as Hitler sends people to concentration camps to die or Stalin deliberately starving people by the millions.
The Great Leap Forward started out looking like a success, and then into the second year, Party members at the provincial level and the farmers deliberate hid the truth until it could not be hidden any longer and then the Party in the third year of a five year plan stopped the Great Leap Forward early and imported wheat from Canada and Australia to save lives.
I find it interesting that you ignored the “complete US embargo” of China at the time and you said nothing about the fact that the US was not on the list of countries that supplied food to China.
What you have are rumor, exaggerations and circumstantial evidence to convict Mao, and this is what you build your case on. In a court of law, you must have evidence that is not circumstantial and built on rumors.
Who is being disingenuous and downright deceitful? Mao is guilty of making bad decisions. If you want real guilt of Mao’s crimes, what he stated during the Cultural Revolution provides compelling evidence of that but not during the Great Leap Forward and the famine that took place during that five year plan, which was cut short after three once the Party in Beijing was made aware of it.
Mr. Lofthouse,
Thank you for your reply to my comment. As I tried to point out to Alessandro earlier, my point of view on the subject is neither inflexible nor “complete” and I await any evidence you have to the contrary. My concern is that you have not really provided any yet and are simply regurgitating official Party lines that deflect blame away from Mao so as not to tarnish his reputation. I eagerly await the other three posts you reference are prepared for this series to see what proof you have to back up your claims.
Further, I offered no evidence of my own – I think the volume of research that already exists stands on its own and does not require my additional input on the subject. Part of the problem that I fear you face in making your argument is that the last bit of evidence that is not yet available is from the Chinese government itself – evidence that I doubt will see the light of day so long as the government maintains power as it seems likely that it does not reflect at all well on Mao. It is this lack of transparency that has created what seems to you to be an anti-Mao attitude toward his actions during this period in time. I do not dispute that there were droughts or other conditions that may have led to some of the famine but to argue that Mao’s policies and those of the government under him were not the most culpable is, at this point and without very significant direct evidence to the contrary, simply not very compelling.
Finally, I’m not sure what point you are trying to make about the “complete US embargo” to China but I suspect it is a reference to find US culpability in that catastrophe. Again, I hope you can offer some very serious and objective proof in that regard if that is indeed your point, otherwise you have simply thrown out a red herring in the hope of distracting people from the facts that are in evidence and only contributing more to the level of a conspiracy theory.
I am not going to argue with you; I only want you to put forward valid, objective arguments that support your assertion that Mao is not to be held accountable for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward if you want anyone to take your argument seriously.