Mao's Great Famine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mao's
Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, is a
2010 book by professor and historian Frank Dikötter about the Great Chinese Famine of
1958–1962.
Based on four
years of research in recently opened Chinese provincial, county, and city
archives,[1][2] the book constructs what Andrew
J. Nathan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University writing
in Foreign Affairs,
describes as "the most detailed account yet"[3] of the experiences of the
Chinese people during the famine, which occurred under the Communist regime of Mao Zedong. The book supports an estimate of
"at least" 45 million premature deaths in China during the famine
years.[4] Dikötter characterises the
Great Famine as "The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the
worst anywhere."[4].
The book won
the Samuel Johnson Prize in
2011, beating five other works on the short list,[5] for being what the judges
characterised as "stunningly original and hugely important".[6] The ₤20,000 award is
the largest in the UK for a non-fiction book.[7]
Background
Dikötter is
Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong
Kong, where he teaches courses on both Mao and the Great Chinese
Famine,[8] and Professor of the Modern
History of China from the School
of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
The author's research behind the book was funded by, in the UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Arts
and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic
and Social Research Council, and in Hong Kong, the Research Grants
Council and the Chiang
Ching-kuo Foundation.[9]
The first
chapter of the book, entitled "The Pursuit of Utopia", explains how
the Chinese Communist Party's Great Leap Forward program,
intended to achieve the rapid modernization of Chinese industry and
agriculture, instead led to the catastrophe of the famine. According to one
reviewer, the chapter summarizes:
… Mao's
hubristic and utterly impractical plans for remaking China in the image of
communist paradise. These include mass mobilization fueled by revolutionary
ardor alone, the expropriation of personal property and housing to be replaced
by People's Communes, the centralized distribution of food, plans to leapfrog
Britain in 15 years and outdo Stalin by "walking on two legs” (referring
to development of both agriculture and industry), and regimenting and militarizing
the entire society.[1]
The following
chapters detail the attempt to reach these goals and the consequences of the
failures to do so.[1] Dikötter was one of only a few
historians granted access to the relevant Chinese archives.[5]
Key arguments of the book
On a website
providing exposure for the book, Dikötter detailed his key arguments. First, he
states that the famine lasted at least four years (early 1958 to late 1962),
not the three sometimes stated. And after researching large volumes of Chinese
archives, Dikötter concluded that decisions coming from the top officials of
the Chinese government at Beijing were the direct cause of the famine.
Beijing
government officials, including Zhou Enlai and Mao, increased the food
procurement quota from the countryside to pay for international imports.
According to Dikötter, "In most cases the party knew very well that it was
starving its own people to death." Mao was quoted as saying in Shanghai in 1959: “When there is not
enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people
die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
In their
attempts to survive, Chinese people resorted to hiding, stealing, cheating,
pilfering, foraging, smuggling, tricking, manipulating or otherwise outwitting
the government. There were reports of armed assaults on granaries or trains.
Overall, Dikötter estimates that there were 45 million premature deaths, not 30
million as previously estimated. Some two to three million of these were victims
of political repression, beaten or tortured to death or summarily executed for
political reasons, often for the slightest infraction.
Because local
communist cadres were in charge of food distribution, they were able to
withhold food from anyone of whom they disapproved. Old, sick and weak
individuals were often regarded as unproductive and hence expendable. Apart
from Mao, Dikkötter accuses several other members of the top party leadership
of doing nothing about the famine. While famine was ravaging the country, free
food was still being exported to allies, as well as economic aid and
interest-free or low-interest loans.
In addition to
the human suffering, some 30 to 40 percent of all rural housing was demolished
in village relocations, for building roads and infrastructure, or sometimes as
punishment for political opponents. Up to 50 percent of trees were cut down in
some provinces, as the rural ecological system was
ruined.[10][4]
Responses to the book
Mao's Great
Famine has elicited a number of responses (here presented
in alphabetical order by author):
Jasper Becker, author of Hungry
Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, praises the book as a
"brilliant work, backed by painstaking research . . . The archive material
gathered by Dikötter . . . confirms that far from being ignorant or misled
about the famine, the Chinese leadership were kept informed about it all the
time."[11]
Jung Chang, author of Mao: The Unknown
Story, called the book: "The most authoritative and
comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A
must-read."[12]
Jonathan Fenby, author of the Penguin
History of Modern China and China Director at the research service,
Trusted Sources, praised Dikötter's "masterly book" and states that
his "painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too
credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people."[2]
Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar said
the book is "Pathbreaking... a first-class piece of research... [Mao] will
be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made
human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured. Dikötter’s
book will have done much to put him there."[13]
Historian and
journalist Ben Macintyre, one
of the judges for the Samuel Johnson Prize,
said Mao's Great Famine was a "meticulous account of a
brutal manmade calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to
understand the history of the 20th century."[7] He also said that the book
"could have been overwritten, but part of what makes it work so well is it
is written with quiet fury. He doesn't overstate his case because he doesn't
need to. Its very strength lies in its depth of scholarship, lightly
worn."[6]
Writer Brenda Maddox, another of the judges for the
prize, said "this book changed my life - I think differently about the
20th century than I did before. Why didn't I know about this?"[6]
Jonathan
Mirsky, a historian and journalist specializing in Asian affairs,
said Dikötter's book "is for now the best and last word on Mao's greatest
horror. Frank Dikötter has put everyone in the field of Chinese studies in his
debt, together with anyone else interested in the real China. Sooner or later
the Chinese, too, will praise his name." He also writes that "In
terms of Mao's reputation this book leaves the Chairman for dead, as a monster
in the same league as Hitler and Stalin - and that is without considering the
years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when hundreds of thousands more
Chinese died."[14]
The Indian
essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra,
writing in The New Yorker,
offered qualified praise for the book, stating that the "narrative line is
plausible". However he stated that Dikötter is "generally dismissive
of facts that could blunt his story’s sharp edge", and thought that
Dikötter’s "comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust
and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade".[15]
Cormac Ó Gráda, a
leading scholar of famine, and professor of economics at University
College Dublin, criticised the book describing it as reading
"more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained
analytic argument". Ó Gráda further goes on to describe the book as
"weak on context and unreliable with data" and that it failed to note
that "many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese
history during the previous century or so". Dikötter is also taken to task
for his use of an unrealistic low 'normal' mortality rate of 1 percent in order
to maximise his death count. Ó Gráda says 10 per thousand adopted by Dikötter
is "implausibly low". Ó Gráda goes on to say that "The crude
death rate in China in the wake of the revolution was probably about 25 per
thousand. It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it
within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here
(p. 331). Had they done so, they would have “saved” over 30 million lives in
the interim! One can hardly have it both ways."[16] Ó Gráda criticises Dikötter's
"breathless prose style – replete with expressions like 'plummeted,'
'rocketed,' 'beaten to a pulp,' 'beaten black and blue,' 'frenzy,' 'ceaseless,'
'frenzied witch-hunt'" which he said were more "reminiscent of the
tabloid press than the standard academic monograph".[16]
Orville Schell, former Dean of the Graduate
School of Journalism at the University
of California, Berkeley, praised Dikötter's research in Chinese
archives, which enabled him to unveil "the shroud on this period of
monumental, man-made catastrophe" and document how Mao's "impetuosity
was the demise of tens of millions of ordinary Chinese who perished
unnecessarily in this spasm of revolutionary extremism."[12]
Simon
Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red
Tsar, called the book "a gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal
court of Mao."[12]
George
Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin called
the book "excellent", and wrote that "Dikötter’s study is not
the first to describe these events. Nonetheless, few Western intellectuals are
aware of the scale of these atrocities, and they have had almost no impact on
popular consciousness. This is part of the more general problem of the neglect
of communist crimes. But Chinese communist atrocities are little-known even by
comparison to those inflicted by communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, possibly because the Chinese are more culturally distant from Westerners
than are Eastern Europeans or the German victims of the Berlin Wall.
Ironically, the Wall (one of communism’s relatively smaller crimes) is vastly
better known than the Great Leap Forward — the largest mass murder in all of
world history. Hopefully, Dikötter’s important work will help change
that."[17]
Steven Yearley, Professor of the Sociology
of Scientific Knowledge at the University of
Edinburgh, notes that the book "stands out" from other
works on the famine "on account of its basis in recently opened archives
and in the countless compelling details which are provided to clarify the interlocking
themes of the text."[18]
Misrepresentation of famine image on book cover
Adam Jones,
political science and genocide studies professor at UBC Okanagan, criticised Bloomsbury Publishing and
Dikötter for using a cover photograph on their editions of the book of a
starving child that was actually from a Lifemagazine depiction of a 1946 Chinese
famine, well before the events described in the book took place. [19]
Jones places
most of the blame on Bloomsbury, stating that "Most book covers are
designed by the publisher, often using stock images, rather than by the
author," but also accepted a blogger's point that it was unlikely that
Dikötter would have been unaware of the deception, because in an interview
with Newsweek magazine, Dikötter had
stated that, to his knowledge, no 'non-propaganda' images from the Great Leap
Forward had ever been found.[20] The Walker & Company edition of the book
has a different cover, which incorporates a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to
Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China.[20]
References:
1.
^ a b c Robertson, Matthew (21
November 2010). "Mao's Utopia a Medley of Death and Destruction". The Epoch Times.
2.
^ a b Fenby, Jonathan (5 September 2010). "Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter". The Guardian (London).
3.
^ Nathan, Andrew J. (3 November 2010). "Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most
Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962". Foreign Affairs.
4.
^ a b c Dikötter, Frank (15
December 15 2010). "Mao's Great Leap to Famine". International
Herald Tribune.
5.
^ a b "Mao's Great Famine wins Samuel Johnson Prize". BBC News. 6 July 2011.
6.
^ a b c d Flood, Alison (6 July
2011). "Samuel Johnson prize won by 'hugely important' study
of Mao". The Guardian.
7.
^ a b "Mao's Great Famine' Wins Nonfiction Prize". Associated Press. ABC News. 6 July 2011.
10.
^ Dikötter, Frank (20 October 2010). "Cover interview of October 20, 2010".
Rorotoko.com. Retrieved 21 November 2010.
12.
^ a b c "Frank Dikötter: Advance Praise and Synopsis".
Frank Dikötter Home Page. Retrieved 22 November 2010.
13.
^ MacFarquhar, Roderick (20
January 2011). "The Worst Man-Made Catastrophe, Ever". The New York
Review of Books.
16.
^ a b Ó Gráda, Cormac (15 March
2011). "Great Leap into Famine? – Ó Gráda’s review of Dikötter
book". China Study Group.
17.
^ Somin, Ilya (17 December 2010). "Frank Dikötter on Mao’s Mass Murders". The Volokh Conspiracy.
18.
^ Yearley, Steven (15
January 2011). "Book Review: Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine". Food
Security 3 (1): 113–115.doi:10.1007/s12571-010-0110-3.
20.
^ a b Fish, Issac Stone (26
September 2010). "Greeting Misery With Violence". Newsweek.
External links:
§ Mao's Great Famine (Complete)Historian Frank
Dikötter recounts the horrific cost of China's "Great Leap Forward"
between 1958 and 1962. Asia Society,
October 13, 2010. (Video)
§ Jeff Kingston. Mao's famine was no dinner party.The Japan Times, 3 October 2010
§ Arifa Akbar. Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'The Independent. Friday, 17 September 2010
§ Peter Duffy. The
Monster. The New Republic. 27 October 2010.
§ Bhupesh Bhandari. Mao, the grim reaper. Business Standard. 6 November 2010.
