Coreia do Norte = Somalia? Nao! Muito pior...

Na Somália, pelo menos existem microempresários da pirataria, que podem se lançar em atividades privadas de alto rendimento, evitando assim a miséria geral da população.
Na Coreia do Norte, esse tipo de atividade de alto risco, totalmente capitalista, não é sequer permitida. Acho que os habitantes desse imenso campo de concentração que é a Coreia do Norte estão pior do que os somalis...

It's official: Dingo did take that baby

Shanghai Daily, June 13, 2012

Millions of North Korean children are not getting the food, medicine or health care they need to develop physically or mentally, leaving many stunted and malnourished, the United Nations said yesterday.

Nearly a third of children under age five show signs of stunting, particularly in rural areas, and chronic diarrhea due to a lack of clean water, sanitation and electricity has become the leading cause of death among children. 

Hospitals are spotless but bare; few have running water or power, and drugs and medicine are in short supply, the UN said in a detailed update on the humanitarian situation in North Korea.

"I've seen babies ... who should have been sitting up who were not sitting up, and can hardly hold a baby bottle," said Jerome Sauvage, the UN's Pyongyang-based resident coordinator for North Korea.

The UN has called for US$198 million in donations this year - mostly to help feed the hungry. 

Last month, North Korea's premier, Choe Yong Rim, urged farmers to do their part to alleviate food shortages, according to a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Worries of another drought have been raised by a reported shortfall of rain this spring, which will likely lead to a reduced harvest. 

"I have been working at the farm for more than 30 years, but I have never experienced this kind of severe drought," An Song Min, a farmer at the Tokhae Cooperative Farm in the Nampho area, said as he stood in parched fields where the dirt crumbled through his fingers.

North Korea does not produce enough food to feed its 24 million people, and relies on limited purchases of food from other countries as well as outside donations to make up the shortfall. 

About 16 million North Koreans - two-thirds of the country - depend on government rations, the UN report said. There are no signs the government will undertake the long-term structural reforms needed to spur economic growth, it said.

The land in the mountainous north is largely unsuitable for farming, and deforestation and outmoded agricultural techniques - as well as limited fuel and electricity - mean farms are vulnerable to natural disasters, including flooding, drought and harsh, cold winters, the UN report said. Provinces in the southern "cereal bowl" produce most of the country's grains, but the food does not always reach the far northeast. 

A crop assessment last October indicated that 3 million people would need outside food help this year.

Sauvage noted that North Korea, proud of its free health care system, runs spotlessly clean hospitals but with limited facilities. "The proportion of doctors to households is very high," Sauvage said. "Unfortunately, there's not a lot in the doctor's toolkit."

Livro: inferno dantesco, na Coreia do Norte

A Coreia do Norte é, possivelmente, o regime mais repressivo que tenha existido na face da terra, superando largamente os horrores do gulag soviético e dos campos de reeducação maoístas. Só perde, talvez, para os "campos de extermínio" do Kmer Vermelho no Camboja, mas apenas porque este matou mais gente num curto espaço de tempo, ou seja, em doses concentradas, mas a Coreia do Norte ainda assim ganha nas estatísticas de sofrimento humano e de mortes por fome e por violência política.
Que o Brasil se tenha empenhado em manter relações com tal regime, e que o governo tenha fornecido alimentos para o governo norte-coreano -- que serve para alimentar os vinculados ao próprio governo -- apenas testemunha, mais uma vez, sobre as opções dos companheiros no poder, e suas simpatias por todo regime repressivo (desde que anti-americano) e supostamente socialista.
Abaixo um relato sobre um caso extraordinário: um "subhumano", nascido em campo de concentração, consegue escapar do inferno terrível que é aquele país, para testemunhar livremente, e sobretudo comer fartamente...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
Addendum: o livro existe em edição brasileira, como me comunicou um leitor, a quem agradeço:

FUGA DO CAMPO 14

Autor: HARDEN, BLAINE; Editora: INTRINSECA; ISBN: 8580571650; ISBN-13: 9788580571653; Edição: 1ª; Ano de Lançamento: 2012; Número de páginas: 232; Sinopse: Shin Dong-hyuk nasceu e cresceu no Campo 14, um dos imensos complexos destinados a presos políticos da Coreia do Norte. Seus residentes estão condenados a trabalhar até 15 horas por dia, sofrendo fome e frio, sujeitos a uma rotina de violências sumárias - aos 13 anos, Shin assistiu à execução da mãe e do irmão mais velho por tentarem escapar. De lá, ninguém foge. Existe apenas uma exceção. Determinado a descobrir como é a vida do outro lado da cerca eletrificada, Shin supera todo tipo de dificuldade e consegue deixar a Coreia do Norte. Mas as marcas do passado ainda estão em seu corpo e assombram sua mente, pois durante muitos anos ele guardou um terrível segredo. Em 'Fuga do Campo 14', o jornalista Blaine Harden procura lançar luz sobre uma realidade considerada sinistra, e busca acompanhar a jornada de Shin rumo à liberdade

DANIEL J. FLYNN

Escape from Hunger

A North Korean survivor story

The City Journal, 25 May 2012

Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden (Viking, 224 pp., $26.95)

Explaining why socialism failed to gain traction in the United States, German academic Werner Sombart famously noted: “All socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” Fat and happy aren’t the ingredients for a socialist revolution. A century after Sombart’s observation, Shin Dong-Hyuk shows why starving and miserable aren’t the ingredients for keeping the people in a people’s republic: all socialist dystopias come to nothing on tree bark and barbecued rat. Shin’s amazing tale, inspired by the most basic human drive—hunger—is told by veteran journalist Blaine Harden in Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.

Shin is the only person born into a North Korean political prison to escape to the West. Only he can explain what it’s like to be a lifer in the Hermit Kingdom’s gulag. A victim of Kim Il Sung’s practice of inflicting the sins of the father upon the sons (and grandsons), Shin knew only the harsh existence of the work camps. Incarcerated from birth, he remained wholly ignorant of God, money, and the outside world until contact with a cosmopolitan North Korean unleashed his imagination. This man told him about China and Europe, but what really got Shin’s attention was his description of foreign dishes. As Harden writes: “Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat.”

That’s a meal that camp-dwellers went without, except on the occasions when they captured a rat. When prisoners stole a pig, they devoured it raw, lest the aroma alert their overseers. “Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage, and cabbage soup,” Harden writes. “Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.”

An outsider’s perspective can’t help but see the food itself as punishment. Inmates picked undigested corn kernels from cow dung to eat. They warded off hunger by regurgitating their meals to eat again. They dined on sand, dirt, trees, and whatever else they could find. They risked their lives to fill their stomachs. Shin tells of a six-year-old classmate discovered with corn in her pockets. The teacher beat her to death in front of the class with a pointer. An official rule at Camp 14 instructed: “Anyone who steals or conceals any foodstuffs will be shot immediately.”

Hunger pangs are the catalyst for a pivotal moment in the book. Discovering his mother and brother eating a secret meal without him prompts a spiteful teenage Shin to reveal their conversation about escape to camp authorities. “I want a guarantee of more food,” he tells his guard-confessor. Instead, interrogators chain-hoist him by the wrists and ankles and ignite a fire beneath his sagging back. Today, a charred back testifies to the truth of Shin’s story, as do a finger sliced off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine and limbs bowed from overwork.

Regaled by descriptions of Chinese, German, and Russian delectables, Shin lets his appetite make up his mind. He would someday taste that food. “He did not thirst for freedom or political rights,” Harden writes. “He was merely hungry for meat.” On January 2, 2005, while performing forestry work on the camp’s perimeter at dusk, Shin and an accomplice made their long-planned break. His coconspirator’s electrocution on a security fence provided insulation and conducted some of the voltage away from Shin, who escaped with mere burns. He ran for two hours until he reached a barn, where he found corn, clothes, and cover. He bummed his way through North Korea and bribed his way into China.

Accustomed to the regimented life of the camps, Shin marveled at the freedom of North Koreans on the outside. Even more astonishing was China, where he listened to a radio, ate three meals of meat a day, traded a concrete floor for a mattress, and worked for pay without supervision. Shin gained asylum in South Korea by rushing into its embassy in China with the encouragement of a journalist. In the South—occupying the same peninsula as the North, yet free and prosperous where the North was repressive and impoverished—the culture shock continued. Eventually, Shin moved to the United States. Adjusting to American life continues to be difficult, though the dining is good. Harden tells of a surprise birthday party thrown for the refugee at a TGI Friday’s. “I was very moved,” Shin tells the author. “Shin was passionate about food and did his best talking in Korean and Mexican restaurants” in Southern California, Harden writes.

Shin’s adventure might have better fit the West’s conception of heroism had he struggled to free his people rather than feed himself. But it’s typically ordinary desires that lead to extraordinary heroism. An inmate jonesing for a hamburger may strike outsiders as insignificant—just as a seamstress refusing to yield a seat on the bus or a fruit vendor balking at bureaucratic harassment once did. These seemingly trivial indignities, however, sparked momentous uprisings. Perhaps it’s too early to say what the results will be of Shin’s escape.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America.

Fome na abundancia agricola - The New York Times

GRAY MATTER
A Taste Test for Hunger
By ROBERT JENSEN and NOLAN MILLER
The New Yorj Times, July 9, 2011

CONSIDER this paradox: according to conventional wisdom, hunger is supposed to decline as a country’s wealth increases. Yet in China and India, hunger appears to be growing even as incomes increase at phenomenal rates.

There are a few possible explanations: unequal distribution of wealth, inefficient or indifferent governments and aid agencies, and recent increases in world food prices. While these factors may play a role, at least part of the answer may be much simpler: we are measuring hunger incorrectly.

Suppose you want to figure out if someone has enough to eat. The standard approach is to compare the number of calories eaten to the number needed, with “need” defined by a statistical average across a population. In effect, policy makers tell people whether they are hungry based on whether the amount of calories they take in conforms to some externally imposed standard.

Of course, very few people actually conform to a statistical average. So what if, instead, you looked not just at how many calories people consumed, but at the food they chose to eat?

The best way to do this, we’ve found, is to start with a baseline, namely the share of calories people get from the cheapest foods available to them: typically staples like rice, wheat or cassava. We call this the “staple calorie share.” We measure how many calories people get from these low-cost foods and how much they get from more expensive foods like meat. The greater the share of calories they receive from the former, the hungrier they are.

The rationale behind this approach is straightforward. We are all familiar with the unpleasant sensations associated with hunger. These are the body’s way of telling us that we need more calories. Once those needs are largely met, people will switch to more flavorful, but more expensive, foods.

Imagine you are a poor consumer in a developing country. You have very little money in your pocket, not enough to afford all the calories you need. And suppose you have only two foods to choose from, rice and meat. Rice is cheap and has a lot of calories, but you prefer the taste of meat. If you spent all your money on meat, you would get too few calories. You might do this every so often, but usually you would spend almost all of your money on rice; when faced with true hunger, taste is a luxury you can’t afford.

But suppose you had a bit more money. You would probably add some meat to your diet, because now you can afford to do so while still getting the calories you need. You might even like meat so much that you start to switch away from rice even if you haven’t quite met your complete calorie needs, as long as you aren’t too far below.

Now think about the two approaches to measuring hunger. Researchers taking the standard approach would add up all the calories in the rice and meat you ate and declare you hungry if that total was less than your caloric need, regardless of the choices you made.

In the staple-calorie-share approach, however, they would look at the first case and say that since you were choosing to get almost all of your calories from rice, you must not be getting enough to eat; otherwise you would have switched to meat. But looking at the second case, they would say that since you are now eating some meat, you must be getting enough or nearly enough calories; otherwise, discomfort would cause you to seek more calories via rice. Thus, the decline in the share of calories from rice reveals that the person has had enough to eat.

In principle, both approaches can tell you who is hungry and who is not. So, why look at staple calorie share?

With the standard approach, you need to know how many calories the person has taken in and how many the person needs. But that need varies widely based on age, sex, activity level and dozens of other factors. Though some of the factors affecting calorie needs are measurable, many are not.

Moreover, it’s hard to know how many calories a person is actually getting, since health factors, including the widespread incidence of diarrhea, often mean that only a fraction of calories eaten are absorbed by the body.

The staple-calorie-share approach eliminates both problems. Your choice of foods reveals whether you have enough calories. Staple-calorie-share “need” is less variable across people; though one person may need more calories than another, they will both begin to switch away from staple foods when their needs are met. And your body isn’t fooled by how many calories you put into your mouth; the physical sensation of hunger is regulated by the amount of calories you actually absorb.

The staple-calorie-share method can give us a radically different view of who is hungry and who is not. The standard approach reveals that in China, the fraction of people consuming fewer than 2,100 calories increased to 67 percent from 53 percent between 1991 and 2001. However, the fraction who appeared hungry, as measured by staple-calorie share (using a threshold of 80 percent of calories consumed through staples), declined to 32 percent from 49 percent.

Thus, instead of 150 million more hungry people in China, there were actually almost 200 million fewer. Rising incomes have indeed made people better off; however, they have used their increased purchasing power to buy better-tasting foods, and nonfood items, rather than to increase calories.

None of this is to say that hunger is not a critical issue: no matter how you measure it, hundreds of millions of people around the world aren’t getting enough to eat. But aid money is a scarce resource, and policy makers have to decide whether it is best spent on food aid or other forms of vital assistance, like health care. Adopting a more nuanced and accurate measurement of hunger would be a big help in making those lifesaving decisions.

Robert Jensen is an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nolan Miller is a professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 10, 2011, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Taste Test for Hunger.

A maior mortandade da Historia: o Grande Salto (para Tras) de Mao Tse-tung

A edição deste domingo, 10/07.2011, do jornal The Times (de Londres), que pertence à rede de mídia do milionário Rupert Murdoch (o mesmo que era dono do jornal News of the World, fechado no mesmo dia, depois de 168 anos de existência, por fraudes jornalísticas e crimes comuns, aliás objeto de extensa matéria na mesma edição do Times), traz uma boa resenha deste livro do historiador Frank Dikotter, sobre o "grande salto para a frente" de Mao Tse-tung, vasto programa delirante de transformação rápida, econômica e social, da República Popular da China, e que teria causado, segundo ele, 45 milhões de mortos.
Infelizmente não é possível transcrever a resenha ou o excerto do livro do Times.
Comentaristas e resenhistas no site da Amazon criticaram a cifra -- como transcrevo abaixo--, segundo eles exagerada. Mas mesmo reduzindo em um terço os números de Dikotter, ainda assim se trata da maior mortandade induzida pela mão do homem (de um único homem, conhecida em toda a história. Nem Stalin - que no entanto pode ter sido responsável por quase 20 milhões de mortos, excluida a IIGM -- ou Hitler -- que pode ter mandado matar entre 5 e 7 milhões de pessoas -- excluindo, sempre, as vítimas de combates na IIGM -- conseguiram chegar perto desses números extraordinários.
A mortandade foi tão descomunal que, temeroso de uma revolta no Partido Comunista se os números começassem a ser revelados mais amplamente, Mao deu início logo em seguida à revolução cultural, para desviar a atenção e afastar seus inimigos no Partido, entre eles Deng Xiao-ping. Foram, talvez, mais 2 ou 3 milhões de mortos durante esses quatro anos adicionais de loucuras, que simplesmente destruíram as universidades chinesas e toda e qualquer vida organizada no país, ou o que tinha restado, depois de mais de dez anos de experimentos demenciais.
O relato é simplesmente alucinante e dispensa adjetivos.
Os marxistas, e outros inimigos do capitalismo, ainda não estão prontos para reconhecer esses crimes como crimes contra a humanidade, dizendo que se trata apenas de "erros" cometidos ao longo do processo de construção do socialismo.
Quando vejo um partido unir as palavras "socialismo" e "liberdade", como se isso fosse possível, penso logo: ou é muita ingenuidade, ou se trata de uma ignorância abissal, ou então é simplesmente desonestidade intelectual.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Frank Dikotter:
Mao's Great Famine: The History Of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011)
ISBN/Cat.No: 9781408810033
ISBN-10: 1408810034
Description: An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine. Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2011

Amaozon Books:
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Paperback)

An impressive story about incredible suffering. Mao's Great Leap Forward was a nightmare. The (slave)labour, repression, cadre brutality and especially the famine resulted in - according to the detailed research in Chinese archives and extrapolated educated guesses of this author - a minimum of 45 million deaths above average. And all this in only four years! Although other reviewers have attacked the way that Mr. Dikötter reaches the number of 45 Million, this is no reason not to buy this book. In the end, this is more about the compelling stories of the suffering behind the 'numbers game'.

Editorial Reviews:
'The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read' Jung Chang 'Mao's Great Famine' is a gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve, that tells the gripping story of the manmade famine that killed 45 million people from the dictator and his henchmen down to the villages of rural China' Simon Sebag Montefiore --Review

Product Description
Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era. Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting and magnificently detailed book chronicles an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented. Dikotter shows that instead of lifting the country among the world's superpowers and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous - step in the opposite direction. He demonstrates, as nobody has before, that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikotter at last gives voice to the dead and disenfranchised. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly written, this magisterial, groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Great Leap into a Nightmare, May 28, 2011
By M. T. J. Vrenken (The Netherlands)
This review is from: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Paperback)
An impressive story about incredible suffering. Mao's Great Leap Forward was a nightmare. The (slave)labour, repression, cadre brutality and especially the famine resulted in - according to the detailed research in Chinese archives and extrapolated educated guesses of this author - a minimum of 45 million deaths above average. And all this in only four years! Although other reviewers have attacked the way that Mr. Dikötter reaches the number of 45 Million, this is no reason not to buy this book. In the end, this is more about the compelling stories of the suffering behind the 'numbers game'.

Shonky scholarship, March 29, 2011
By W Y Lu (Hong Kong)
This review is from: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Paperback)
Dikotter's book is little more than a collection of anectdotes of atrocities - which one would no doubt find if one went to the archives of any public security bureau of any country in the world. There is absolutely no evidence the atrocities Dikotter mentions (if true), were ordered from the top. In fact quite the opposite - they were often uncovered, even by Dikotter's own admission, by investigatory teams sent out by the central authorities. The tone of the book is perhaps set by the picture on this edition of the book - the starving boy is from a famine in 1946 - 12 years before the GLF, and 3 years before Mao came to power.

But lets look at Dikotter's most ludicrous claim: 45 million 'murdered' by Mao - a 'fact' trumpeted on Dikotter's website as a 'key finding'.

But how does Dikotter reach this figure? The calculation is very simple.
'Excess' deaths are calculated by counting all the deaths that happen in one year, and subtracting them from a mortality the researcher assumes would have been the case had the GLF not happened.
Dikotter adopts a 'normal' crude mortality of 10/1000 per year or 1%. Deaths above this are counted as excess deaths.
From the archives Dikotter obtains reported mortality, increases these by 50% to allow for under-reporting in order to get an averaged annual mortality of around 27.3/1000 during the GLF.
Thus to arrive at his final grand total of people 'murdered' by Mao: ((27.3 - 10) / 1000) x 650 million x 4 years = 45 million 'excess' deaths.

Two huge problems with this.
Firstly a crude mortality of 27.3/1000 in the late 50s & early 60s was in fact quite typical for developing countries. India's and Indonesia's was 23 and 24/1000 respectively. And China's mortality in in 1949, just 8 years the GLF, was 38/1000 (refer Judith Banister), in Hong Kong in the 1930s 32/1000, Russia before the revolution 31/1000, and India just before independence around 28/1000.
Thus the crude mortality rate during the GLF, according to Dikotter, was significantly better than the 38/1000 in 1949, and practically the same as that of India in the final year of British rule.
Thus to say, based on Dikotter's very own figures, that the GLF was China's, or even the world's, 'greatest ever catastrophe' is completely ludicrous.

Here is the other problem.

Dikotter's adoption of a very low 'normal' mortality of 10/1000 is simply implausible. Of course Dikotter assumes this figure in order to maximise his 'excess' deaths calculation.

But note that 10/1000 was the mortality rate of the US, Great Britain, and France at the time.

Even discounting for the difference in age structure between China's population and that of the West, 10/1000 is simply unbelievable. After all the crude mortality of India and Indonesia at the time was around 23 or 24/1000 - well over twice what Dikotter claims for China!

So if Dikotter accepts a 10/1000 mortality rate for 1957, then he will have to accept that the communists reduced mortality from 38/1000 to 10/1000 during first eight years of rule, thereby saving tens of millions of lives. If this was truly the case, it would have been the most dramatic, incredible reduction in mortality in human history.

So the catch-22 is this. If one assumes a very low death rate to max out GLF excess deaths, then Mao must also get credit for having achieved, for most of the time he was in charge, very low levels of mortality. Go the other way and GLF excess deaths are minimised and perhaps almost eliminated.

To wrap up: Dikotter gets his 45 million by (a) inflating actual death rates, over reported figures in the archives, by 50%, and (b) assuming a ridiculously low 'normal' death rate (the same as the West) - even though China throughout the 1950s was one of the most wretchedly poor countries on earth.

Leap mortality lower than British Raj & pre-1949 China. Same as India, Indonesia, Pakistan in 1960, April 3, 2011
By M Chen
This review is from: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Paperback)
China's mortality during the GLF was the same as India's, Pakistan's, and Indonesia's at the time. Dikotter's figures imply this. Consider the following:

* Dikotter adopts 10/1000 as a 'normal' yearly death rate for China, and claims this as the figure for China just before the leap in 1957. Deaths above this are regarded as 'excess' deaths.
* 10/1000 was the mortality in advanced industrialised West in 1960.
* But mortality for the other big Asian countries in 1960: India 24/1000, Indonesia 23/1000, Pakistan 23/1000
* Dikotter says GLF started early 1958, ended late 1962. ie nearly 5 years, and killed 45 million. This means 9 million excess deaths per year. Adopting 660 million as China's population - the approx average excess mortality over these 5 years is 1000 x 9 mil/660 mil = 13.6 or say 14/1000.
* Total annual mortality during GLF is thus 10/1000 + 14/1000 = 24/1000
* Thus based on Dikotter's figures mortality during the GLF was practically the same as that of India, Indonesia, and Pakistan (after China the most populous Asian nations).
* Dikotter's mortality rate during the GLF was much less than the 1949 figure (24 < 38/1000)
* Dikotter's mortality rate during the GLF was less than that of India's at end of British rule (24 < 28/1000)

Dikotter's claims imply China reduced mortality from 38 /1000 in 1949 to 10/1000 in 1957. If true, this would have been a stunning achievement, considering India only reduced mortality from 28 to 23/1000, and Indonesia 26 to 23/1000 over more or less the same period. In fact India and Indonesia had not reduced down to 10/1000, even by 1980.

This of course would make Mao a great saver of lives - even with the elevated mortality seen during the GLF (which was not particularly high for the time). Is this what Dikotter intends to say? If not, his own claims inescapably imply it.

MORTALITY DATA:
1949:
China: 38/1000 (Bannister)
India: 28/1000
Indonesia: 26/1000

1957:
China: 10/1000 (claimed by Dikotter: lower than the UK and France in 1960!)

1958 to 1962 (averaged over 5 years - Dikotter claims GLF from early 1958 to late 1962):
China: 23.8/1000

1960:
India: 24/1000
Indonesia: 23/1000
South Korea: 13.5/1000
UK: 11.5/1000
France:11.4/1000
US: 9.5/1000

1970:
India: 17.6/1000
Indonesia: 17/1000

1980:
India: 12.9/1000
Indonesia: 12.15/1000