No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions. Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million.
Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died.
Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities. Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine. He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
The Cultural Revolution—the ten-year period — of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel — , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. As horrific as it sounds, i suspect that a nuclear bomb on Berlin would have killed , people but caused Germany to surrender right away, thus saving many German lives.
I know, it is gruesome to count dead bodies like this; but, again, i didn't start that war, Germany and Japan started it. Most historians believe that it was the atomic bomb that convinced Japan to surrender, and it was the second one: after the first one, there were still members of the Japanese cabinet who were opposed to surrender the cabinet had to be unanimous in order for the emperor to surrender.
The dissenters who wanted to continue the war even tried a coup to overthrow the emperor rather than obey the order to surrender. After the first bomb, Nishina head of the Japanese nuclear program was asked if it were possible that the USA could build another atomic bomb within six months: obviously the people who asked him the question were not going to surrender unless a second bomb was possible.
Koichi Kido, advisor to emperor Hirohito, said: "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war. It is also estimated that throughout Japan-occupied Asia about , civilians were dying every month of disease, hunger, etc : if the atomic bombs helped Japan surrender even just six months earlier, that saved the lives of one million Indonesians, Indochinese, Philipinos, Chinese, etc.
Notable dissenting voices were the two most powerful USA generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, who both felt that the atomic bombs were unnecessary to finish Japan. People die in wars. During the previous world-war, millions died of everything from guns to chemical weapons. The fact that a more or less efficient weapon is used to fight a war does not constitute genocide, per se.
It is not the weapon, but the intent. Churchill's and Truman's intent was to end the war, not to exterminate the peoples which they could have done easily, had they wanted to. In fact, i think that Churchill and Truman are exemplary of how to treat a defeated enemy: instead of annihilating the enemies, they helped Germany and Japan to rebuild themselves and become stronger and wealthier than they had been before the war. It may have been the first time in history. Furthermore, we know that Werner Heisenberg in Germany and Yoshio Nishina in Japan were working on an atomic bomb: what if they had had the time to complete one?
Heisenberg in Germany had failed to correctly calculate the critical mass of uranium required to sustain a chain reaction, but Nishina in Japan had just done that in It was a matter of time before German and Japanese scientists would find out the right recipe. Thus the first bomb saved a lot of lives, probably millions of lives not just Japanese lives, but lives of all the nations that were being massacred by the Japanese. Last but not least, the USA dropped , leaflets on Hiroshima and other cities two days earlier, warning of the impending destruction of the city.
It is certainly debatable, instead, if the second atomic bomb was necessary. The USA only waited three days to see the effect of the first atomic bomb and of its leaflets. Today sitting in our living rooms we can calmly debate this issue forever. Of course, it was a different kind of decision for the man sitting in the White House in the middle of a world war that had been raging for four years.
I've been asked why i blame the USA only for part of the civilian deaths in Vietnam while i blame the Soviet Union for all of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Even today many in Vietnam think that the aggressor was North Vietnam, not the USA, at least at the beginning, whereas everybody in Afghanistan blames the Soviet Union for that invasion.
When the Soviet Union withdrew, almost no Afghan followed them, whereas, when the USA withdrew, about eight million Vietnamese left with them and about three million ran away from Vietnam in the following decades risking their lives the "boat people".
There are documented large-scale atrocities by the North Vietnamese against their own population read the Black Book of Communism while i haven't seen evidence of any large-scale atrocity by the Afghan fighters against their own population 4. The USA never tried to invade the northern part of Vietnam: it simply fought the Vietcong that wanted to annex south Vietnam to north Vietnam if you read the history of the country, north and south Vietnam have fought wars for more than 1, years: go to the Timeline of Indochina and look for Annam and Champa.
Germany and Japan had attacked their neighbors and killed millions of them - carpet bombing German and Japanese cities was a way to protect those millions of people from further massacres.
In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge. State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off.
One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.
The year-old writer who grew up in Beijing was sent to the countryside for the decade of the Cultural Revolution to work on farms and in mining. So he and his wife, anthropologist Bei Ming, set off for Guangxi province to interview villagers and officials in six counties. Deng Jifang had fled his village as a young boy after his brother and father, who belonged to the hated landlord class, were killed by the government in the s.
They carried him in a bamboo cage back to Sixiao, where the villagers beat him and poked him with hot iron rods until he passed out. It was a symbol of loyalty to the party. Because of not having full access to government documents, Zheng was never able to give an accurate number of how many people were cannibalized. He did, however, get full access to the archives of Wuxuan county, where 64 people were eaten in There, 56 hearts and livers and 13 sets of genitals were eaten. Seven people were disemboweled while still alive.
Cannibalism was practiced in ancient times because some believed human blood held medicinal powers. During the Great Famine, it occurred in matters of life or death.
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