The loss of life during China’s last Great Famine—in the West and especially the United States—has been blamed on Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, but finding blame on a famine in China isn’t that easy when you know the history of droughts and famines in that country.
It’s no secret that many in the United States think that Mao was a monster worse that Adolf Hitler or Stalin, and that Mao was responsible for killing 30 to 60 million people during what is known as China’s Great Famine.
Until recently, I also believed this because that’s all I have ever heard through the U.S. media—the details that may have caused this famine are not common knowledge, and it appears that no attempt by the Western media has ever 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.
There’s 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. In fact, evidence that does exist supports far fewer deaths. Everything else is based on guessing.
I think discovering why Mao might be a victim of this hoax is worth examining, because in 1949 when Mao came to power, life expectancy in China was age 35, but by 1960 life expectancy had improved to age 60, while the population of China had 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 killed millions?
My research revealed that other factors might 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 20 to 70 million mostly rural peasant in remote areas of China, and the numbers quoted in the West vary widely because different people have made different claims without valid evidence to support those claims. However, there is evidence that supports the lower number. In fact, the actual number of Chinese who starved is probably much lower than what is commonly believed in the United States.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
Twenty-six years after the alleged 1989 Tiananmen Square incident—and three Chinese Presidents later: Jiang Zemin (1993-2003), Hu Jintao (2003-2013), and now Xi Jinping (2013 – )—the U.S. media continues to annually remind the world of what might have happened.
I’ve heard from several Chinese American friends (now US citizens), who lived in China in 1989, that the student leaders behind the Tiananmen Square protest/massacre (April 14 – June 4, 1989) were supported by the CIA, and I asked myself if this was another conspiracy theory.
However, my curiosity was stirred, so I spent hours hunting the internet for clues that this might be true, and I discovered several coincidences that raised an eyebrow.
The U.S. Ambassador in China at the time, James Lilley (April 20, 1989 to 1991), was a former CIA operative who worked in Asia and helped insert CIA agents into China. President H. W. Bush (1989-1993) served as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing (1974 – 1976), who then went to serve as Director of the CIA (1976 – 1977).
Why did President H. W. Bush replace Winston Lord as ambassador to China (1985-1989) during the early days of the Tiananmen Square incident with a former CIA agent? After all, Lord spoke some Chinese and was a key figure in the restoration of relations between the US and China in 1972. Wasn’t he the best man for the job during a crisis like this one?
I returned to my friends and asked, “How do you know the CIA helped the student leaders of the protest?”
“It’s obvious,” was the answer. The reason, my friends explained, was the fact that it was very difficult, almost impossible, for anyone in China to get a visa to visit the United States before the 21st century. Yet most of the young student leaders of the Tiananmen Square incident left China quickly after the event and prospered in the West without any obvious difficulty. In addition, after these student leaders came to the West, many were successful and became wealthy.
I returned to my investigation to verify these claims. Let’s Welcome Chinese Tourists was one piece I read from The Washington Post documenting how difficult it was to get a visa back then to visit the United States from China. I read another piece in The Chicago Tribune on the same subject. And my wife told me her brother and two sisters were denied visas to the U.S.
After more sleuthing, I learned that Wang Dan, one of the principal student organizers of the Tiananmen incident, went to jail because he stayed in China when most of the other student leaders fled. Today, Wang lives in the West and cannot go back. Two others went to Harvard and a third went to Yale. Where did they get the money—it’s expensive to attend these private universities?
How about the other leaders who fled to the West? Time Magazine reported, “Some have reincarnated themselves as Internet entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, or in one case, as a chaplain for the U.S. military in Iraq. Several have been back to China to investigate potential business opportunities.”
Official figures of the dead during the incident ranged from 200 to 300. At the Chinese State Council press conference on June 6, spokesman Yuan Mu said that “preliminary tallies” by the government showed that about 300 civilians and soldiers died, including 23 students from universities in Beijing, along with a number of people he described as “ruffians”. Yuan also said some 5,000 soldiers and police along with 2,000 civilians were wounded. On June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing reported to the Politburo that the government’s confirmed death toll was 241, including 218 civilians (of which 36 were students), 10 PLA soldiers and 13 People’s Armed Police, along with 7,000 wounded.
Chinese government officials have long asserted that no one died in the Square itself in the early morning hours of June 4, during the ‘hold-out’ of the last batch of students in the south of the Square. Initially foreign media reports of a “massacre” on the Square were prevalent, though later journalists acknowledged that most of the deaths occurred outside of the Square in western Beijing.
Several people who were situated around the square that night, including Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post, and Richard Roth, CBS correspondent, reported that while they heard sporadic gunfire, they could not find enough evidence to suggest that a massacre took place on the Square itself.
If the U.S. media annually reminds the world of the alleged Tiananmen Square massacre, why don’t they also remind us of another massacre that took place in Taiwan in 1947 where about 30,000 Taiwanese citizens were slaughtered during the2-28 Massacre by troops of America’s ally Chang Kai-shek?
Can anyone explain why the deaths of a few hundred Chinese in Communist China in 1989 are more important than the slaughter of 30,000 civilians in 1947 by an American ally?
Thanks to a comment, I learned about another slaughter of citizens demanding democracy that took place in South Korea in 1980.
_______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
In this post there will be a few questions I’m going to answer, but leave others for you—if you want to leave a comment.
First, the dictionary definition for Communism: a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.
What about the definition of socialism—after all, capitalists hate both communism and socialism? Socialism means a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
How many of the 1.3+ billion people in China belong to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? There are 86.7 million members in the CCP and most if not all of the millionaires and billionaires in China are invited to join the CCP after they get rich and are screened, and many of the members who are not millionaires or billionaires have secure jobs, responsibility, power and earn money legally or illegally, but taking money illegally might be dangerous. The CCP aggressively prosecutes white collar crooks if they catch them and sends some to prison and executes a few—white collar crime is not a safe profession in China. In fact, CBS reported that “82,533 Communist Party members had been investigated. Some lost their jobs; others kicked out of the Communist Party … And no one, no matter how high-ranking, appears safe.”
With 6.7% of the population belonging to the CCP that means 93.3% are not Communists—they just live in a country where actual ownership of everything belongs to the collective and/or the state. You don’t buy property in China. In urban China, you lease it and you can sell the lease to someone else, but in most of rural China the land is owned jointly by the people and the state. There is no rent, no mortgage and no property tax. You also can’t sell the house you live or the land you farm. Rural Chinese might not earn much money, but they also don’t get evicted by the bank for missing mortgage payments.
There are essentially two kinds of land ownership in China, state ownership and collective ownership. Rural land, or housing land and the household contract farmland, is collectively owned. Farmers are part of the collective community and have property rights to their land, but with restrictions. – China.org.cn
In addition, in the last 30 years, China is responsible for 90% of global poverty reduction. Since the start of the far-reaching economic reforms in the late 1970s, growth has fueled a remarkable increase in per capita income and a decline in the poverty rate from 85% in 1981 to 6.1% below the poverty line in 2014.
At no stage over the past 30 years has the CCP relinquished control of the “commanding heights” or “levers” of the Chinese economy: agricultural pricing, heavy industry, power and energy, transport, communications, foreign trade, and finance (state banks). – Marxism-Leninism Today
China now boasts 350 million middle-class citizens (more than the entire U.S. population). In addition, China has 2 million millionaires and ranks second only to the U.S. in terms of billionaires. Some 100 million Chinese traveled outside their country this year, and spent an astounding $7,500 per person, per trip, the highest in the world. – The Middle Class: China’s Game-Changing Demographics
For the United States, keep in mind that capitalism does not equal democracy. Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. But a democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives—but these days it sure doesn’t feel like it is working that way.
It is possible for a democracy and socialism to exist in the same country.Those countries are called social democracies. In fact, three of the happiest countries in the world are social democracies: Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands. The 10 most socialist countries in the world are: China, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand and Belgium.
There are more than 316.1 million Americans, and how many are successful capitalists? CNN reports that there are 9.63 million millionaires (3% of the population), and 492 billionaires (0.00015% of the population).
Is it possible that in the U.S. the 3.00015% or the 0.00015% want to rule over the remaining 96.99% like the 6.7% does in China for the 93.3%—something to think about? Are some of these U.S. millionaires and billionaires envious of the CCP’s power?
The U.S. has a poverty rate of almost 15%, and poverty has been increasing in recent years. There is also a 2nd poverty rate in the US, and it’s called Extreme Poverty. In fact, in 1900, before the Progressive era launched by President Teddy Roosevelt to make life better for most Americans, 40% of Americans lived in poverty and less than 7% graduated from high school.
Using a World Bank definition, “extreme poverty” is surviving on less than $2 per day, per person, each month. The National Poverty Center finds that 1.65 million American households (not people but families) live in “extreme poverty,” and these households include 3.55 million children.
America has protection for freedom of speech, but China doesn’t. However, the U.S.—even with freedom of speech—has the largest prison population on the planet (2.2+ million), more than China (1.7+ million) that has the second largest prison population, but more than four times the population of the United States.
To compare it another way—the United States has 707 prisoners per 100,000 versus China with 124 per 100,000 behind bars—think about it.
What about cracking down on white collar crime in the United States like China is doing? The New York Times reports, “In Financial Crises, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” And The New York Times asks, “It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?”
For all the problems the U.S. has, I don’t plan to move to China, because the air is cleaner where I live in the United States—but if the Koch brothers and Standard Oil have their way that could change. I also prefer shopping at Costco, Trader Joes, Whole Foods and farmers’ markets for organic fruits and vegetables—although a few U.S. corporations are lobbying to ruin that too.
_______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
Although the Communist Chinese government has made it illegal to spit on those statues for public health reasons, hundreds defy the law on a daily basis, and continue to insult those traitors while honoring Yue Fei.
There is another moral hero from China’s history. During the Three Kingdoms era (220-265 A.D.) after the fall of the Han Dynasty, there was a period of civil war. Out of this era came the story of Guan Yu, who was another moral model of loyalty and righteousness.
Guan Yu lived almost eighteen hundred years ago, but it is easy to find carvings and statues of him in China. In fact, I have several hand carved in wood, and here are two of them.
It doesn’t matter if one is a member of the Communist Party, because role models like Yue Fei and Guan Yu still play an important part in how many Chinese behave and what they think. Anyone in China holding a position of power is measured against men like Yue Fei and Guan Yu.
To help gain a better understanding of what honor means to the Chinese, here’s a link to a piece published in theLos Angeles Times.
Continued in Part 3 on February 12, 2015, or start with Part 1
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
We visited General Yue Fei’s tomb in Hangzhou, and hundreds of Chinese tourists were there. It was early October 2008. This was our third trip to the city in a decade, and I was watching people spitting on the kneeling, life sized metal statues of men dead for more than eight centuries. Those metal effigies with their hands tied behind their backs had been traitors.
It may be difficult to understand what honor means to most of the Chinese if one isn’t Chinese. One way to possibly understand the importance of this concept is to examine two of China’s historical heroes.
General Yue Fei died on January 27, 1142. He was a famous Chinese patriot and military general who fought for the Southern Song Dynasty against the Jurchen armies of the Jin Dynasty.
Several jealous Song ministers lied to the emperor saying that Yue Fei was planning to kill him and take over. The emperor believed these lies and had General Yue Fei executed. When the truth came out, Yue Fei became a model for loyalty in Chinese culture. By spitting on those statues of those ministers who lied, the Chinese honor Yue Fei’s memory.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 