BOOKS
THE HUNGRY YEARS
New perspectives on Chairman Mao’s Great Famine.
BY PANKAJ MISHRADECEMBER 10, 2012
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ABSTRACT: BOOK review of two books on Mao Zedong and the Great Famine. The Great Famine of 1958-62 is thought to have taken more than thirty million lives, and perhaps as many as forty-five million. Two new books offer fresh evidence to describe the stubborn delusions and cruelties of Mao Zedong, who believed that, among other things, hundreds of millions of Chinese making steel in their back-yard furnaces could surpass the industrial production of Western countries. “Tombstone,” by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is the first major Chinese account of the causes and consequences of the famine. “Mao: The Real Story,” by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine (Simon & Schuster), draws on Russian archives to show, more clearly than before, that this tale of folly was not without precedent in the twentieth century. “Mao” reveals that the Chinese Communist Party was deeply dependent on Soviet money, expertise, and ideological guidance. As Pantsov and Levine point out, “Mao had no concrete plans for the Great Leap Forward.” A hundred absurd schemes now flowered. Ill-conceived projects took peasants away from the fields, causing a steep decline in agricultural productivity. The subject of the famine remains taboo in China. In “Tombstone,” Mao emerges as patriotic but megalomaniacal, crudely vindictive, and utterly inept. Yang is deeply ambivalent about the prospects for democracy in China.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/12/10/121210crbo_books_mishra#ixzz2EEyvFsql
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