More than one book has examined this topic from a scholarly perspective (instead of inflammatory unsubstantiated and inflated claims), but Mao’s Western critics have mostly ignored this work.
In China: Land of Famine (published in 1926 by the American Geographical Society) by Walter H. Mallory , we have a book that casts doubt on the inflammatory claims, which have been popularized in the West about the post-1949 Mao era. Mallory offers another perspective for understanding what really may have happened during Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
Then from Stanford University Press, in the Economic Cold War by Shu Guang Zhang (August 2002), “the author argues that while the immediate effects (of the complete American embargo of China) may be meager or nil, the indirect and long-term effects may be considerable; in the case he reexamines, the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Anti-Rightist campaign (The Cultural Revolution) were in part prompted by the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.”
In other words, if the West had been supportive of China by lifting the complete embargo after the Korean conflict (1950 – 1953), these events may never have taken place.
Once all the facts are taken into consideration and weighed without bias and emotional baggage, there is only one conclusion to reach regarding the editors of “Eating Bitterness” and the authors of “Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine“, “Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China” and “Mao’s Great Famine“.
These books are frauds supporting a hoax.
It is also a fact that there are millions of people with closed minds that will refuse to accept this verdict that if Mao was guilty of anything, he was guilty of distrust and/or incompetence and not murder — at least not the deaths from the famine that took place during the Great Leap Forward in China: Land of Famines.
If you have watched the nine videos embedded with this series, ask yourself, who is guilty of starvation murder today? That “old” friend of mine I mentioned in Part 1 is against abortion and believes we should trust in God in all things, which is based on this “old” friend’s interpretation of the Bible.
World Hunger.org reports, “Poor nutrition plays a role in at least half of the 10.9 million child deaths each year, which is more than five million deaths.” This means every three to nine years, the number of children (not counting adults) that die from hunger in the world equals the 15 to 45 million that Mao’s critics claim died of starvation in China during the Great Leap Forward (the actual number may be closer to three million).
In fact, between 13 and 18 million men, women and children die of starvation each year, which is one person every three and a half seconds.
Nevertheless, World Hunger.org says, “The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.”
Ask yourself, will God feed the thousands that starve in the world daily, while 75% of Americans are overweight and 25% are obese.
Meanwhile, a few well-fed authors are writing books that perpetuate a hoax about Mao, who has been dead for 35 years, so who will they blame next? Maybe they should look in a mirror.
Return to Mao’s ‘alleged’ Guilt in the Land of Famines – Part 7 or start with Part 1
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
______________
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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The other thing that people ignore is that under Mao population doubled. No one doubts this. Absolute no one and it is easily verifiable.
The rate of population increase under Mao was the highest in the history of China. But was this because women were having more babies? No. They had about 6 or 7 in the 1950, and this dropped to about 3 by the time of Mao’s death.
So why did the population explode? There can be only one answer: A massive decline in mortality under Mao, simply unprecedented in world history:
As this paper says:
“The need for population control in China was
based not only on the formerly high fecundity of Chinese
women, but also the rapid fall in the crude death rate that
accompanied the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). “
Click to access JGH2-11_A6_Hipgrave.pdf
Its common sense:
Before the revolution, they did not have a one-child policy. Women were having 6 or 7 children. Yet the population growth rate was only 0.3% in the century before 1949 (equating to about a 35% rise in the population from 1850 to 1949). Yet in the 27 years of Mao’s reign the population doubled. Now of course this trend happened all over the world because of modern medicine. But China’s performance was exceptional:
from the same article:
“China’s population, for the most part, became relatively healthy compared to residents in nations at a similar stage of development during the first 30 years of the PRC, and certainly much healthier that it was in 1949. By 1980, life expectancy in low-income China (67 years) exceeded that of most nations of similar gross domestic product per capita by seven years (as estimated in 1984), and indeed exceeded that of many middle-income nations (3). Although with some exceptions the health of China’s population depends now largely on control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the foundation of China’s population health, particularly the amazing growth in life expentancy from an estimated 32 years in 1949, depended almost entirely on CDC.”
Clearly there is a massive disconnect between what is going on among serious academics and what is out there in the mainstream media by charlatans such as Dikotter,
In fact there is not one study out there which denies the huge gains in life expectancy under Mao –the man now villified as the worst mass murderer in human history.
Good points. I agree.
A just released Stanford study, written by some of the world’s pre-eminent health and demography scholars says this:
“China’s position reflects the rapidity of its demographic transition since the early 1970s and its achievement of relatively high levels of health despite low per capita income by the end of the Mao era (Banister 1987; Wang 2011). Indeed, despite the higher death rates associated with the Great Leap Famine of 1959-1961, China’s growth in life expectancy from 35~40 in 1949 to 65.5 in 1980 ranks as the most rapid sustained increase in documented global history. These earlier health improvements and growth of the working-age population contributed to China’s unprecedented economic growth for the past quarter century. Wang and Mason (2008) estimate that between 1982 and 2000, about 15 percent of China’s rapid growth in output per capita stemmed from the demographic dividend (Bloom and Williamson [1998] estimate that one-quarter to one-third of the growth rates in the “East Asian miracle” stemmed from the demographic dividend.) Although the pace of mortality decline in China has slowed, it continues: Chinese life expectancy increased between 1990 and 2010 from 69.9 to 76.8 for women and from 66.9 to 72.5 for men.”
From an academic paper authored by:
Karen Eggleston, Director of the Stanford Asia Health Policy Program and Center Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University.
Victor R. Fuchs, Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Economics and of Health Research and Policy, and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute of Economic Policy and Research, Stanford University
Click to access AHPPwp_29.pdf
The Maoist era thus saw one of the most dramatic declines in mortality in human history, possibly saving up to 100 million lives compared to the performance of other developing non-socialist countries (Amartya Sen and Noam Chomsky).. This was in spite of the tragedy of the GLF. But even during the period of the GLF, conditions were still better than before 1949, and rather typical of other developing countries of the time.
Yet still the Western media runs the lie that Mao is the greatest mass murderer of all time. When perhaps he is the political figure who enacted policies which saved more lives than any other in history.
True, the mass media in the West keeps repeating the same lies that Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time while ignoring all of the other facts. These claims focus on what they want the people in the West to believe and ignore many other academic reports based on the same sketchy evidence supplied by the CCP (isn’t that ironic) that clearly shows there is no evidence that Mao ordered the deaths that were caused by starvation after the drought and famine that is credited to the Great Leap Forward.
In addition, there is no mention of the fact that China historically has had droughts and famines that caused the loss of life annually for more than two thousand years of recorded history. These facts are ignored completely.
In fact, the Western media does not inform that at the same time the US had a complete embargo on China and refused to supply wheat to help alleviate the suffering and starvation from famine in China. It is a fact, that the CCP asked for help and Canada and France broke with America’s complete embargo of China to supply wheat to China to end the suffering and deaths from starvation. France even acted as a middleman, bought American wheat, and then sent it to China.
There is even evidence that this was the US plan—to cause great unrest in China through mass starvation to motivate the suffering people to rise up and replace the CCP (violently) with a Taiwan style republic, which was ruled by a brutal dictator-for-life at the time called Chiang Kai-shek, a man most of the Chinese did not trust.
It is interesting to note from the height charts in the article, that in spite of a cut back during the GLF (the worst period in the history of the PRC), people born during this period were still taller on average than those born before 1949.
The statistics used by Morgan are telling. The maximum death rate during the GLF was in 1960 (around 25 per thousand). As a reviewer of Dikotter’s MGF book says, look up the mortalities of other developing countries of the time. They are typically between 20 and 27 per thousand.
So was the GLF a huge disaster? Yes. But a disaster in the context of the overall superior performance of the Maoist era in reducing mortality and raising life expectancy. Compared to the rest of the developing world, the GLF was a ‘neutral’ event.
Let me tell you about a worse disaster than the GLF and it is still going on. In India, about 6,000 children die of starvation daily and this has been going on unchanged since 1947 when India became the world’s most populated (dysfunctional) democracy. If you do the math, that adds up to more than 142 million children dead of starvation in India over the last 65 years and that does not count the adults that also died of starvation.
We do not hear much about that in the Western media. Instead, the Western Media annually reminds us of the GLF and Tiananmen Square, which was another manufactured hoax.
The truth is that we learn only what the major media wants the people to know. Is this censorship from the so-called free press?
Another paper of interest which I haven’t yet read in the fullest.
Click to access Morgan.pdf
Aussie in China,
Thank you. When I have time, I’ll add this link to the others on the Recommended List.
However, the MCB’s of the world have already made up their minds and will discount any evidence–no matter how compelling or well supported–that does not match their opinions. Posts such as this one are not written to change the minds of the MCBs of the world but to provide a forum for people that have open minds and are willing to weigh all the evidence and opinions before forming a personal belief–people that think for themselves as individuals instead of mob think.
I found this part of Morgan’s conclusion telling…,
Stephen L MORGAN
The University of Melbourne
Click to access Morgan.pdf
Famine in China after 1949 cannot be explained singularly by simple appeal to the
failure of weather or FAD or government policy, but by a complex interaction of all
of these elements. It is not plausible to argue, as Becker (1996) does, that Mao and the
CCP leadership sought to kill the population, say in the manner analogous to that of
Stalin in the 1920-30s. Mao’s “crimes” may be judged severely by history, perhaps as
the delusions of a visionary (for the “vision thing” was certainly a powerful driver of
the policy of the period), but it does not seem reasonable to argue that his actions
were, in a premeditated sense, deliberately murderous.