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Looking back on the Great Leap Forward
- discreteevent 10y agoThe book "Wild Swans" (written a good while ago) gives a very good insight into what it was like for a young person to grow up in this madhouse.
- daltonlp 10y agoGood recommendation. A few more books worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_M... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_China_Blues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_China_Blues https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118690.This_Kind_of_War https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118690.This_Kind_of_War It may not be possible to fully understand China's 20th century struggles, but it's a fascinating subject.
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoIf we're recommending books, there's "Music, Food and Love: A Memoir" by Guo Yue (whose name means "Little leap forward"). He grew up in the hutongs of Beijing, when food and traditional music were pretty much the only subjects you could talk about freely, he therefore became a musician and chef. In fact he requested the position of flautist when he was forced to join the Red Army, a remarkable request, only more remarkable because they made the position for him. Every chapter of his life is defined by the smells and flavours of the food at that time, and so each chapter ends with those recipies so you can experience it yourself. He now owns a restaurant in London where he hosts 16 course banquets of his food, serenading the diners with his flute music. He's a lovely guy and his memoir, and food is the closest I'll ever get to having a real feel for that time.
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- clw8 10y agoAnd the survivors still put portraits of him in their living rooms.
- mc32 10y agoMaybe it's a kind of large scale Stockholm syndrome. On the other hand, it was countryside Chinese vs City or intellectual Chinese (Han, specifically) so there isn't an ethnicity vs ethnicity aspect to it, which probably makes it less troublesome in people's minds.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoAre you saying the rural folk were more anti Mao than city dwellers?
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- mr_spothawk 10y ago"Han"? Does that exist?
- wodenokoto 10y agoYes, it does.
- ci5er 10y agoWhat does that question mean? If you were to refer to an ethnically Chinese person in Taiwan as "Chinese", they might get irate pretty quickly if they though you were mixing up the ROC with the PRC. And then they'd let you know that they prefer "Han" as an ethnicity marker separate from national identity. Or, that's how my limited experience has gone...
- jhedwards 10y agoThis is an interesting point. My wife is Chinese and she explained this to me: people like her grandfather are thankful for Mao while they acknowledge his failures. The reason is simple: before Mao there was a long period of Chaos, and before that the Qing dynasty was an extremely oppressive government. Without going into too many details, the peasants were being screwed for hundreds of years. Because of Mao's efforts China became a unified country. Sure, there were decades of terror and famine the severity of which are astonishing, but they were relatively brief historicaly speaking and the people were just happy that China was "theirs". Moreover, the government was stable enough that the people who came after Mao were able to improve things, which didn't always happen historically. It's not a great comparison but a similar thing happened with the Ming dynasty. If I recall correctly, the Ming emperor was terribly brutal, but people were so thankful that it wasn't the mongolians that they didn't care.
- douche 10y agoMao is quite possibly the most murderous, irrational dictator of all time. The communists party of China has more blood on their hands than the German Nazi party.
- serge2k 10y agoYou counting the war deaths?
- ceejayoz 10y agoProbably. Wiki estimates WWII deaths at 50-80 million, and Mao's deaths at 40-70. Given Japan's role in WWII, it's pretty likely Mao has a higher raw death count than just the deaths caused by the Nazi side of the war.
- serge2k 10y agoWow.
- douche 10y agoWhen you subtract the casualties attributed to the Japanese out of the WW2 numbers, Mao appears to come out well ahead http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm
- sverige 10y agoEstimates of Stalin's body count range from 14 million to 70 million, so he's at least a close second. And Pol Pot might hold the record for rate of mass killing, wiping out over 2 million people in six weeks. Some people scoff when I ridicule them for saying "Communism has never been tried." No, the communists have never been tried - in a court of law.
- justratsinacoat 10y agoHonestly, the sort of True Believer who classifies Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, etc, as all "true Scotsman" communism isn't worth talking to about communism anyway. Rare is the person who is willing to describe some randomly selected totalitarian dictatorship as a "capitalist" regime.
- jerryhuang100 10y agoI found most horror stories retold here are very familiar to what I heard throughout the school years way back in Taiwan.
- laretluval 10y agoAnd now you're hearing them from another member of the same team in the Cold War.
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- pastProlog 10y agoThis talks about 1958, 9 years after the CPC took over China. During that less then a decade, recovering from Japanese occupation and civil war, the US air force was bombing north of the Yalu river in China, further destabilizing things. There was bad weather in these years. Yet no one says there was a genocide in the 1942-1943 famine, or the 1936 famine, or 1928-1930 famine, or 1920-1921 famine, or the famine from a decade before that. This was the last major crop failure in China. From the early 1960s until now, the modernization undertaken (which is railed against in the article) ended this cycle of famines. If the last crop failure in the late 1950s was a "genocide", then were the previous famines under the emperor and such genocides as well? What about 1847 in Ireland when the English government purposefully starved people to death, exporting food while people starved. The western corporate media attitude toward that seems to be it was all the weather and disease, whereas the first and last CPC crop failure in China was 100% government's fault, genocide and other nonsense. Of course political winds blow to and fro. If Mao was a "genocidal tyrant", why did the US side with him in the 1970s, have Taiwan kicked out of the UNSC etc.? Then winds shift again and Mao is back to being a "genocidal tyrant". Orwell was part of this western establishment, but his comments in 1984 about the "facts" and propaganda changing from white to black to white again as political winds shift seem apt. It's a joke how white upper middle class people in such a genocidal country as England and the US, where young black men are being murdered in the street every day by policemen, raise their bloody hands and pontificate about countries around the world.
- mattnewton 10y agoThe pot and the kettle can both be black - no amount of "whataboutism" makes this less terrible.
- pastProlog 10y agoThe article itself is whataboutism. Prescient today is black men being murdered in the US by US police, the bloodshed happening in Honduras due to US military aid and such. Also if this so-called "genocide" is so "terrible" as you say, why did the US force Taiwan out of the UNSC in the 1970s and the PRC onto it? It's a strange dynamic to shake hands with someone, empower them, then decades later shake your head in moral indignation because of some propaganda that you had been announcing before the big handshake. The US is built on a land stolen from a people killed by genocide, it's a laugh to see Americans raised their hand and calling a crop failure in China a genocide (yet not calling previous crop failures in China genocides, pre-PRC, not calling famines in Ireland or India under English rule genocides etc.)
- ythl 10y agoI like the part where they killed all the sparrows and triggered huge famines when insects started devouring crops unchecked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
- pastProlog 10y agoYes, the PRC has been run so incompetently by the standing committee of the Politburo of the CPC it has become by some measures the largest economy in the world. How about when they were so eager to increase production that they failed to prevent wind erosion, causing massive crop failure, starvation, and I guess that means its OK to call it a genocide? Oh yaa, that was in the USA, 19 years before this happened. Where are the article on the Dust Bowl GENOCIDE ? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl )
- mattnewton 10y agoThe american government never claimed control over people's decision to farm that land. Certainly never did by force. Also, I've said it elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: No amount of whataboutism changes what happened here.
- flomble 10y agoYes, since Mao's death and the complete reversal of his economic policies and embracing of capitalism by Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy, the economy of China has rapidly developed. There is a reason this article lays the blame for the senseless waste of life at Mao's feet and not the CCP leadership as a whole. Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology?
- pastProlog 10y ago> embracing of capitalism Zhao Ziyang embraced capitalism, and he was arrested after the June 4th incident. Capitalism run by the communist party of China? Also, Mao and Zhou Enlai are who made peace with the USA, not Deng Xiaoping. > Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy Mao and Deng had a falling out in the mid to late 1960s, but Mao empowered Deng again in 1974. Deng Xiaoping called himself a communist, not a capitalist. He did say it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. If China was a capitalist system, it would be more like Japan or South Korea or the US or Western Europe. Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically. If you don't know what that means, then you don't know what communism is, and you wouldn't be able to tell if Deng was a communist or not. Actually Mao was accused by people to his left of abandoning communism due to his interpretation of the theory of productive forces (as well as the role of peasantry and proletariat etc.) Deng just expanded on that.
- force_reboot 10y agoMost of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism. I'm not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China's population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can't really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events. Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.
- zubat 10y agoIt's certainly true that China massively changed its land use policy following the PRC's formation. What I think is most interesting to consider, though, is whether the collectivization process had the same catalyzing action as enclosure in pre-industrial Britain. In both cases villages were pushed from a subsistence-driven existence towards top-down control, trade, and an uprooting of labor that could subsequently move to cities and work in factories. China's development into a modern industrial country may well have been premised on the massive application of violence of the early PRC era. This prompted me to Google for "enclosure vs collectivization" which brought up this interesting-looking article on the topic [0]. [0] http://praxeology.net/SEK3-AQ-3.htm http://praxeology.net/SEK3-AQ-3.htm
- Animats 10y agoChina has far less arable land per capita than most large countries.[1] There's not much slack for major screwups in agriculture. This has been a major driving factor in China's history. China had six famines in the 20th century, and a long history of them before that. The Great Leap Forward was the last and worst one. [1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC
- rye_bother 10y agoGolly, the comments on this article are pretty shrill. Some part of me might almost wonder if it were a politburo astroturf team...
- MichaelMoser123 10y agothe 'great leap forward' was a result of the policy of forcing all the peasants into big collective farms (aka collectivization); it has been a tragedy in all former communist countries that adopted this policy (Poland didn't adopt it). In the Soviet Union it led to the famine of 1932-1933; this one killed seven millions. Now the collective farms were supposed to press money out of agriculture, money that was needed for developing heavy industry; they did that, but it cost millions of lives, In China they also had strange notions of backyard steel furnaces in agricultural communes and the four pests campaign. In Russia they had the great terror - but that came later than collectivization.
- jerryhuang100 10y ago> communism was still much better than what came before. hahahaha another apologist is trying to say that communism in the great leap forward with deaths of 45M+ people is somehow much better than the sino-japanese war (1937-1945), the so-called "what came before (communism)", with 32M combined military and civilian casualties, by citing a source who's never being part of the great leap forward by leaving the communism china early. give me a break.
- dang 10y agoA comment that begins "hahahaha another apologist" is a bad comment for HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Especially on inflammatory and divisive subjects. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12195604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12195604 and marked it off-topic.
- jerryhuang100 10y agothat's because the previous commentator posted something against the known human history (read: wikipedia) from a unverified, biased source, and with a hn comment history of misogyny, antisemitic and racial comments, sir. i would rather show my frustration this way rather than other explicit words. sorry for the inconvenience.
- jokoon 10y ago> ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ Funny that I still hear and read people who see things that way in the modern west: "if you don't contribute, you deserve nothing from society". Welfare still seems to be taboo for some voters. I prefer to view the Great Leap Forward as a tragedy, rather than a genocide or mao murdering people like it's a plain open intent. I mean if I align myself with the definition of genocide and wikipedia's article, am I so wrong? To me, the moment you starts saying "this was bad, this was worse", you take sides, and I don't think it's objective enough when you deal with a country that is so far away from the west. I think chinese leaders were eager to not see their oldest civilization falter (at least it was their political belief), so they chose to make huge sacrifices, meaning cracking down on remote rural places that were anti state. Pointing fingers and comparing the number of people dying with the soviets or hitler, and dismissing the context seems a little easy, and will be perceived as taking sides.
- peter303 10y agoHalf of China population is under 30 and only known the good times of plenty. The original revolution, the cultural revolution,,etc are as about remote as the US revolutionary war and civil war to US citizens.
- fma 10y agoMore recently applicable, racial segregation and women's rights.