China: morreram 36 ou "so" 10 milhoes sob o maoismo delirante?

Os números, em si, são estarrecedores. Mas tem gente que acha que matar só 10 milhões é pouca coisa...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Scholars Fight a Milder Version of Mao’s Calamities

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

Yang Jisheng, a historian whose research has been attacked, called the denials of widespread famine more than half a century ago a disturbing symptom of present-day political anxieties.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

The New York Times: October 16, 2013

HONG KONG — The famine that gripped China from 1958 to 1962 is widely judged to be the deadliest in recorded history, killing 20 to 30 million people or more, and is one of the defining calamities of Mao Zedong’s rule. Ever since, the party has shrouded that disaster in censorship and euphemisms, seeking to maintain an aura of reverence around the founding leader of the Communist state.

But with the approach of celebrations of the 120th anniversary Mao’s birth on Dec. 26, some of his supporters and party polemicists are stepping beyond the longstanding official reticence about the famine to argue for their own, much milder version of the disaster and to assail historians who disagree.

They deny that tens of millions died in the famine — it was at most a few million, some of them say — and they accuse scholars who support higher estimates of fanning anti-party sentiment.

“The big rumor that 30 million people starved to death in the three years of hardship,” said a headline in September in The Global Times, an influential party-run tabloid. It accompanied a commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, who has won publicity for his claim that at most 2.5 million people died of “nutritional fatalities” during the Great Leap Forward. He argues that bigger estimates are an illusion based on flawed statistics.

Mr. Sun asserts that most of the apparent deaths were a mirage of chaotic statistics: people moved from villages and were presumed dead, because they failed to register in their new homes.

A new book, “Someone Must Finally Speak the Truth,” has become a touchstone for supporters of Mao, who deny that the famine killed tens of millions. The author, Yang Songlin, a retired official, maintains that at most four million “abnormal fatalities” occurred during the famine. That was indeed a tragedy, he acknowledges, but one for which he mostly blames bad weather, not bad policies. He and other like-minded revisionists accuse rival researchers of inflating the magnitude of the famine to discredit Mao and the party.

“Some people think they have an opportunity, that as long as they can prove that tens of millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward, then the Communist Party, the ruling party, will never be able to clear itself,” Mr. Yang said by telephone from his home in Zhengzhou, a city in central China.

China’s leaders have not publicly commented on the controversy. But Mao’s reputation remains important for a party that continues to stake its claims to power on its revolutionary origins, even as it has cast aside the remnants of his revolutionary policies. And Xi Jinping, the party leader installed in November, has been especially avid in defending that legacy, even though his family suffered more under Mao than did the families of his recent predecessors.

The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, when the party leadership embraced Mao’s ambitions to rapidly industrialize China by mobilizing labor in a fervent campaign and merging farming cooperatives into vast — and, in theory, more productive — people’s communes.

The rush to build factories, communes and communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist plenty began to falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged down production.

By 1959, food shortages began to grip the countryside, magnified by the amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand over to the state to feed swelling cities, and starvation spread. Officials who voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful conformism that ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe finally forced Mao to abandon them.

Beginning in the early 1980s, restrictions on studying the famine began to ease. Historians gained limited access to archives, and sets of census and other population data gradually became available, allowing researchers to build a more detailed, albeit still incomplete, understanding of what happened.

Some scholars have concluded that about 17 million people died, while other counts go as high as 45 million, reflecting varied assumptions about the death rate in normal times as well as other uncertainties, including how much official statistics undercounted deaths during the famine years.

“Scholars disagree, but whether their estimate is somewhat higher or lower, that doesn’t affect the fact that the Great Leap Forward created a massive disaster,” Lin Yunhui, a retired party historian at the National Defense University in Beijing who has spent much of his career studying Mao’s time, said by telephone. “My own estimate is that there were about 30 million abnormal deaths.”

Few if any mainstream historians place any credence in the revisionists’ claims, but they express alarm that the party, which in recent decades has tolerated more open research into the period, seems to be encouraging a retreat into deceptive orthodoxies.

“I’ve long been maligned and attacked for my research, but now there are these people who basically deny that there was ever a mass famine,” Yang Jisheng, 72, a historian and former Xinhua News Agency journalist in Beijing who has been the main target of the attacks, said by telephone. He is not related to Yang Songlin.

“Tombstone,” Yang Jisheng’s landmark study of the Great Leap famine — published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008 and in a modified, abridged English-language edition in 2012 — is banned in mainland China but has been read widely there through smuggled and bootlegged copies.

Mr. Yang estimates that 36 million people died because of brutality and food shortages caused by the Great Leap Forward. He called the denials of widespread famine more than half a century ago a disturbing symptom of present-day political anxieties.

“To defend the ruling status of the Communist Party, they must deny that tens of millions died of starvation,” Mr. Yang said. “There’s a sense of social crisis in the party leadership, and protecting its status has become more urgent, and so it’s become even more necessary to avoid confronting the truth about the past.”

Mr. Xi is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a colleague of Mao who was purged in 1962 and endured 16 years of imprisonment and political ignominy.

Mr. Xi’s handling of the past, however, is driven by political imperatives, not family memories, said Edward Friedman, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was an editor of the English version of Mr. Yang’s book “Tombstone.”

Mr. Xi told officials in January that they should not belittle or doubt Mao’s achievements. He has repeatedly cited the collapse of the Soviet Union as a warning of the costs of political laxity.

He approved a directive issued in April that identified seven main ideological threats to party rule, including “historical nihilism” — defined as attempts to “negate the legitimacy of the long-term rule of the Chinese Communist Party” by maligning the party’s record.

“They need their great leader to be pure,” said Mr. Friedman. “They need to have a vision of the past that’s worth being nostalgic about.”

Tirania maoista: o maior desastre da historia

De fato, nunca antes, na história humana registrada, alguém, uma guerra, ou qualquer outro acidente ou catástrofe natural, tinha conseguido eliminar tanta gente, em doses tão concentradas, em tão alta proporção, nos quatro anos em que durou, quanto o "Grande Salto Para a Frente" do tirano Mao Tse-tung. Ele conseguiu superar Stalin, a Primeira e a Segunda Guerra mundiais, matando 450 vezes nais gente do que as bombas de Hiroshima e Nagasaki.
Este é o tirano ainda cultuado pelo Partido Comunista Chinês, pelos seus companheiros do Brasil, assim como ele era o "queridinho" do maior idiota que o Brasil já teve, o arquiteto stalinista que acaba de morrer.
Bem, só sobraram quatro ou cinco stalinistas no mundo, e pelo menos um deles ainda está no Brasil, embora condenado a poucos meses de prisão...

Unnatural Disaster

‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng

Keystone via Getty Images

A rice field in what is now Guangdong Province, 1958.

By JONATHAN MIRSKY

The New York Times Review of Books, December 7, 2012

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”

TOMBSTONE

The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

By Yang Jisheng

Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian

629 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

Related

• Times Topic: Mao Zedong

There are good earlier studies of the famine and one excellent recent one, “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but Yang’s is significant because he lives in China and is boldly unsparing. Mao’s rule, he writes, “became a secular theocracy. . . . Divergence from Mao’s views was heresy. . . . Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of totalitarianism.” This political system, he argues, “caused the degeneration of the national character of the Chinese people.”

Yang, who was born in 1940, is a well-known veteran journalist and a Communist Party member. Before I quote the following sentence, remember that a huge portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the main gate into Beijing’s Forbidden City and can be seen from every corner of Tiananmen Square, where his embalmed body lies in an elaborate mausoleum. Despite this continued public veneration, Yang looks squarely at the real chairman: “In power, Mao became immersed in China’s traditional monarchal culture and Lenin and Stalin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ . . . When Mao was provided with a list of slogans for his approval, he personally added one: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao.’ ” Two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Ian Johnson, Yang remarked that he views the famine “as part of the totalitarian system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao.”

From the early 1990s, Yang writes, he began combing normally closed official archives containing confidential reports of the ravages of the famine, and reading accounts of the official killing of protesters. He found references to cannibalism and interviewed men and women who survived by eating human flesh.

Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and “greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists, “outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang.

The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang’s narrative relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province. A lush region, it was “the economic engine of the province,” with a population in 1958 of 8.5 million. Mao’s policies had driven the peasants from their individual small holdings; working communally, they were now forced to yield almost everything to the state, either to feed the cities or — crazily — to increase exports. The peasants were allotted enough grain for just a few months. In Xinyang alone, Yang calculates, over a million people died.

Mao had pronounced that the family, in the new order of collective farming and eating, was no longer necessary. Liu Shaoqi, reliably sycophantic, agreed: “The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will be eliminated.” Grain production plummeted, the communal kitchens collapsed. As yields dived, Zhou Enlai and other leaders, “the falcons and hounds of evil,” as Yang describes them, assured Mao that agricultural production had in fact soared. Mao himself proclaimed that under the new dispensation yields could be exponentially higher. “Tell the peasants to resume eating chaff and herbs for half the year,” he said, “and after some hardship for one or two or three years things will turn around.”

A journalist reporting on Xinyang at the time saw the desperation of ordinary people. Years later, he told Yang that he had witnessed a Party secretary — during the famine, cadres were well fed — treating his guests to a local delicacy. But he knew what happened to people who recorded the truth, so he said nothing: “How could I dare to write an internal reference report?” Indeed. Liu Shaoqi confronted Mao, who remembered all slights, and during the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a traitor and an enemy agent. Expelled from the Party, he died alone, uncared for, anonymous.

Of course, “Tombstone” has been banned in China, but in 2008 it was published in Hong Kong in two mighty volumes. Pirated texts and Internet summaries soon slipped over the border. This English version, although substantial, is roughly half the size of the original. Its eloquent translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, say their aim, like the author’s, is to “present the tragedy in all its horror” and to render Yang’s searching analysis in a manner that is both accessible to general readers and informative for specialists. There is much in this readable “Tombstone” I needed to know.

Yang writes that one reason for the book’s title is to establish a memorial for the uncle who raised him like a son and starved to death in 1959. At the time a devout believer in the Party and ignorant of the extent of what was going on in the country at large, Yang felt that everything, no matter how difficult, was part of China’s battle for a new socialist order. Discovering official secrets during his work as a young journalist, he began to lose his faith. His real “awakening,” however, came after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” This is brave talk. Words and phrases associated with “Tiananmen” remain blocked on China’s Internet.

Nowadays, Yang asserts, “rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end.” He hopes “Tombstone” will help banish the “historical amnesia imposed by those in power” and spur his countrymen to “renounce man-made calamity, darkness and evil.” While guardedly hopeful about the rise of democracy, Yang is ultimately a realist. Despite China’s economic and social transformation, this courageous man concludes, “the political system remains unchanged.” “Tombstone” doesn’t directly challenge China’s current regime, nor is its author part of an organized movement. And so, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Yang Jisheng is not serving a long prison sentence. But he has driven a stake through the hearts of Mao Zedong and the party he helped found.

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in China.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 9, 2012, on page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Unnatural Disaster.

Relato do Horror: o grande salto para tras da China, e o canibalismo

LETTER FROM CHINA

A Great Leap Into the Abyss

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

The New York Times, September 5, 2012

BEIJING — The document, written by Communist Party investigators as famine raged in China in 1961, reads almost like a cookbook.

In Qiaotou district, in Sichuan Province, “An old lady named Luo Wenxiu was the first to start consuming human flesh,” investigators wrote. “After an entire family of seven had died, Luo dug up the body of the 3-year-old girl, Ma Fahui. She sliced up the girl’s flesh and spiced it with chili peppers before steaming and eating it.” The report, dated Feb. 9 of that year, is one of more than 100 astonishing documents collected by the historian Zhou Xun in a new book about Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, published by Yale University Press.

In another, an investigator recounted how the body of a 5-year-old Sichuan boy provided “four separate meals” for his mother, who strangled him with a towel first. “Such shocking and disturbing incidents are by no means unique,” the investigator, Wang Deming, wrote in the report dated Jan. 27.

Unlike the horrors of the Soviet gulag or the Holocaust, what happened in China during the Great Leap Forward has received little attention from the larger world, “even though it is one of the worst catastrophes in twentieth-century history,” writes Ms. Zhou, an assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, in the introduction to “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962.”

“In China itself, the famine is a dark episode, one that is not discussed or officially recognized,” she writes.

And while there have been other recent books — notably “Tombstone” by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, and “Mao’s Great Famine” by the Dutch historian Frank Dikötter — what distinguishes Ms. Zhou’s is that it simply presents documents of the time, from sources that include reports by central and local officials, party investigation teams, minutes of official meetings, citizens’ letters and reports of the police investigations into theft, murder and cannibalism.

Just as the mass murder of Poles by the Soviet secret police in Katyn in 1940 was confirmed with the revelation of the original execution orders signed by Stalin, she hopes that by showing original documents from the famine, readers will learn that “what took place is really beyond any doubt,” despite the Chinese government’s 50-year silence.

Ms. Zhou and a growing number of Chinese — and some Western — scholars believe the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s campaign of breakneck industrialization and agricultural collectivization, resulted in the deaths of perhaps 45 million people, mostly in the countryside. People died from a combination of starvation, overwork and violence in the quest for a perfect Communist society.

To document that, Ms. Zhou spent four years, starting in 2006, visiting dozens of county and provincial archives, some under military guard. Access was easier during the first two years of her research, a legacy, she believes, of the rule of former President Jiang Zemin. Still, she often gained access only through informal contacts, she said, declining to be more specific. In all, she photocopied, photographed or transcribed about 1,000 documents. (Ms. Zhou also conducted more than 100 interviews with survivors, to be published by Yale in a separate book.)

The reports portray a society where abuse of power was commonplace and the death toll from starvation or violence exceeded 50 percent of the population in some areas. An elaborate vocabulary of violence developed: In Hunan, investigators from the provincial party committee found that in 11 communes in Liling County, 120 people were beaten during meetings that inaugurated a political campaign, with 20 seriously wounded or dying. “More than twenty types of torture were employed, most of them extremely dangerous,” including hanging people up like pigs to be slaughtered, investigators wrote. To “double cook” meant repeated beatings. “Tie up firewood” was to beat a bound victim. “White up and black down” referred to hauling a naked person onto a stage and beating him until he was discolored.

Everywhere, people starved, as collectivization led to reduced output, the government requisitioned grain and people were forced to eat in communal canteens where rations were controlled by the people in charge. Orphans in homes in Fushun, Sichuan Province, ate dead rats out of toilets, the provincial Bureau of Civil Affairs reported in May 1962. People howled for food, ate mud — and eventually each other.

Other stories are disturbing in different ways, such as the hundreds of women forced to work topless alongside topless men in Wugang County in Hunan Province in order, ostensibly, to increase production. “Since the day we came out of our mother’s wombs, we had never felt so humiliated,” Du Laojiu and Zhou Laochun were quoted as saying in a report officials from the county supervision committee, dated Dec. 18, 1958.

Now, archives are shutting down again, Ms. Zhou says, with previously accessible documents sometimes even removed from catalogs, perhaps during the recent digitalization ordered by the State Archives Bureau. History is being silenced anew, she said by telephone.

“They are weeding out a lot of things,” said Ms. Zhou.

Why?

“In China this kind of thing happens regularly,” she said. The authorities “loosen it up a bit,” then they close down again.

“In a way it’s fear, it’s deliberate, so people don’t know what is going on,” she said. “You constantly worry, so you do self-censor, because you don’t really know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I think it’s terror, basically. It creates a kind of terror.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

O maior tirano da humanidade: Mao Tse-tung

Este post é dedicado a um leitor, obviamente anônimo, que acha que o ex-Partido Comunista da finada União Soviética era de "esquerda". 
Uau! Ele chama partidos totalitários, e reacionários, como sendo de "esquerda". Não havia nada mais conservador, reacionário, arcaico, e anti-esquerda do que o PCUS. Ele era a favor do imobilismo desde Stalin, pelo menos, ou seja, durante setenta anos. Como pode ser de esquerda um partido conservador e imobilista?
Mao Tsé-tung era outro reacionário, embora anárquico. Certamente não era de esquerda. Era apenas... maoista. Ele foi, provavelmente, o homem que mais matou outros homens (e mulheres e crianças), muito mais que Stalin e bem mais do que Hitler.
Foi um dos grandes tiranos da história humana conhecida, como se pode constatar pelo texto abaixo.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

GRANDE FOME NA CHINA DE MAO

Sábado, 25 de agosto de 2012

:: Maria João Marques

                        Como, para mim, denunciar os crimes do comunismo é sempre uma atividade meritória e prazenteira, aqui vos deixo uma sugestão de leitura: Mao's Great Famine de Frank Dikotter.

            Quase acabado de sair do prelo, faz uso de muitas fontes originais, sobretudo guardadas nas sedes partidárias estaduais (as centrais estão ainda vedadas a olhos curiosos), para nos dar um retrato já muito aprofundado desse movimento de radical coletivização da agricultura (sempre um grande desígnio comunista) chamado Grande Salto A Frente que inevitavelmente (e como sucede com todos os movimentos de coletivização da agricultura) matou de fome, pelo menos, 45 milhões de chineses (números de Dikotter).

            Apesar do tema pesado, o livro está bem escrito e permite uma leitura fluída. E, sendo um livro de história de um acadêmico renomado, é também uma viagem ao absurdo e não se consegue ler sem esboçar uns tantos sorrisos de incredulidade. A adoção de métodos agrícolas não científicos, mas ideológicos (porque as adotadas pelos camponeses e testadas pelo tempo eram ‘métodos direitistas’ indignos de um país socialista) que levaram a uma quebra importante na produção agrícola.                                                                                                           As fundições nas traseiras que permitiriam que a China produzisse mais aço do que a Grã-Bretanha em quinze anos (e, depois, em três ou quatro), que consumiu todos os produtos metálicos das zonas rurais, incluindo as ferramentas agrícolas (oops!), desviou milhões de camponeses dos trabalhos nos campos para as fundições e que terminou com quebra abrupta na produção agrícola e produziu toneladas de aço de má qualidade não usável. As colossais obras de irrigação feitas às pressas e em locais errados que findaram abandonadas ou com efeitos contrários aos inicialmente planeados, com destaque para a barragem que iria tirar o lodo ao Rio Amarelo, mas que levou a que o lodo fosse duplicado.  Um regime comunista, a usar os camponeses como trabalho escravo (sem comida, sem horas de descanso, sem acomodações adequadas ao clima, sem cuidados médicos, com espancamentos, com humilhações públicas…) nas obras de irrigação, nas comunas agrícolas ou nas fundições, acabou matando, por esta via, milhões de camponeses.

                        As sucessivas rodadas de expurgos, que puniram, sobretudo os quadros do PCC (Partido Comunista Chinês), que tentavam proteger as populações dos efeitos das políticas do “Grande Salto A Frente” e aqueles que denunciavam a existência de fome generalizada, quando o topo do politiburo do PCC considerava a situação “excelente” e as mortes ocorridas ‘uma lição de valor’, destacando-se o expurgado ministro da defesa Peng Dehuai (que morreria, ainda como castigo por ter falado verdade em 1959, durante a revolução cultural).

            A proteção da imagem internacional da China, doando toneladas de alimentos a países como a Albânia enquanto nos campos a fome matava a eito vinha sempre em decorrência das “sábias” citações de Mao Tsé Tung, ora questionando sobre que destino daria aos excedentes que o GSF produziria, ora exortando os camponeses chineses (famintos) a tornarem-se vegetarianos para que se pudesse exportar a carne chinesa, ora afirmando que “mais valia que metade da população morresse para que a outra metade tivesse a sua porção de comida”.

            Os elaborados esquemas que levaram à criação de um complexo mercado de sucessivas trocas diretas, etc., etc., etc.. E, claro, as mortes. Está tudo no livro de Dikotter, que recomendo vivamente. 

Título e Texto: Maria João Marques, O Insurgente

Mao’s Great Famine

                        “Between 1958 and 1962, China lived through tragedy on an epic scale. The “Great Leap Forward” – conceived by Mao so that China could drive industrial output ahead of Great Britain and achieve autonomy from the might of the neighboring USSR – led to a catastrophic famine resulting in the death of between 36 and 55 million people.

            “Three years of natural disasters”: it is in these terms that the Chinese Communist Party today justifies this terrible outcome. But the tragedy was masked by an official lie, because while China was starving to death, the grain stores were full.

            Based on previously unheard testimony by survivors, rare archive footage, secret documents and interviews with the leading historians on this catastrophe, this film provides, for the first time, an insight into the folly of the “Great Leap Forward”.

            It examines the mechanisms and political decisions that led to famine, stripping away the incredible secrecy surrounding the campaign, and exposing the lie which continues even today as to who was responsible, and the true human cost”.