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Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead
- oezaxs 14y agoI want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.
- tjaerv 14y agohttp://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962-ebook/dp/B008MWNEXI http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962-ebo...
- danso 14y agoI bought the ebook a few days ago, almost obsessed with detail though I suppose that was the author's intent. It has a very poignant opening, with the author describing e lengths to which his parents cared for him, and how long it took for him to realize how Mao's policies led to his father's death. In many ways, it reads like a non fictional 1984
- tjaerv 14y ago"Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster."
- fleitz 14y agoAsk your government what happend during the dustbowl years and what lifted the people out of starvation... Ask them whether people starved to death because of crop failures or the agricultural policy of the new deal... then try to figure out why crops would be burned while people starved.
- danso 14y agoGovernment offices are closed today because of Thanksgiving, so what's the answer? In the book "Tombstone" (the book by the author in the OP), the author reiterates the claim that no democracy has ever suffered from a major famine, but are you asserting an equivalency? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great-shame.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great-shame... > The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has ever occurred in a democracy.
- pebb 14y agoPretty much all famine are caused by government policies.
- baltcode 14y agoIf you read Amartya Sen's work on the Bengali famine, it is clear that imperialist democratic countries can cause famines in their colonies.
- berntb 14y agoAccording to Wikipedia, it seems to be a perfect storm of incompetence, weather and (understandable) preoccupation with WW II. Also, your reference doesn't fare to good there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
- fleitz 14y agoI believe the potato famine would count as a famine occurring in a democracy.
- anthonyb 14y agoIreland under UK rule was hardly a democracy.
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- andybak 14y agoAlso worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".
- tokenadult 14y agoAlso worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts". Yes. http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/0805056688 http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/08...
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoKind of a wake-up call for me. In the west we'll have some incident where a few people were killed, say the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, and there'll be books, movies, TV specials, and so forth. In other countries you lose 36 million people -- six times the size of the holocaust in WWII -- and you're not supposed to even ask any questions about it. We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.
- ams6110 14y agoWe truly do have a lot to be thankful for. And a lot to stay mindful of ... lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.
- fleitz 14y agoThey have great leaps forward, we have wars on drugs. They aren't allowed to know when their troops fire on civilians in Tienamen square, we aren't allow to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country. They have celebrated massacres too... We might write books about St Valentines but many fewer are written about the trail of tears, mainly because St Valentines serves a political purpose where as the trail of tears does not. It's all "five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains"
- derleth 14y agoHm. If the US and China are morally the same, why are there so few Americans moving to China? I mean, they shouldn't be able to tell the difference in styles of government, am I right?
- paulgb 14y agoMoving isn't just a moral decision. You don't see many people moving to Antarctica, either. It's not because they're immoral down there.
- fleitz 14y agoIf the Chinese can gain supremacy of world affairs while paying people more than Americans pay you will see the same flow from America to China. Certainly at this point in time by most objective measures America is more free, but it is heading in a direction of less free as China heads in a direction of more free. I believe that both trajectories will accelerate in the coming years for purely economic reasons, as America's fiscal position declines it will head towards more restrictive policies while the fiscal boon to China's populace causes more liberal policies to be explored. Like most organizations the Communist Party in China is more interested in preserving itself than whether a particular policy may be ideologically pure communism.
- AdelsonVLandis 14y agoThe BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s? I guess they're too busy digging up the Chinese..."commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British"...China had famines for thousands of years, including in the 20th century before the communists took over. The one they mention is their last one. The unusual thing is not the 1961 famine but that there have been no famines in China for a half century. Because the communists smashing the Four Olds and industrializing the country and kicking out the foreign imperialists got the country on track. Of course the British ignore the famines they cause, and dig up so-called famines by their former imperial conquests. China would not have had to industrialize so quickly if England was not threatening China from Hong Kong and so forth. That does not count of course. Thankfully, anti-imperialists are crashing into the US/UK all the time now, showing those hubris-filled imperialists who live by the sword shall feel the sword coming from the other end as well.
- danso 14y ago1. The author profiled by the BBC is not an agent of the BBC. 2. The author asserts that the Chinese famine is unique in that it occurred despite the lack of pressure from natural disasters. The Irish potato famine was exacerbated by the blight. 3. The estimate for the Chinese famine is 36 million dead and dwarfs the death toll of the previous Chinese famines. The potato famine death toll was about 1 million.
- morsch 14y agoFWIW and from what I can tell, that is 1 million out of a total Irish population of 6 million at the time (1845, Wolfram Alpha), versus 36 million out of a total population of 682 million (1960, W.A.). So in 1 in 6 vs 1 in 20. So one could argue that the Great Famine was a much more widespread (factor 100 population), but less severe (factor 1/3 mortality) catastrophe. Disregarding all other factors such as causation. The "baseline" mortality due to starvation may also have been different in both instances. Of course such number games are both cynical and insufficient to deal with the subject (e.g. your point 2). I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Dikötter's 2010 work Mao's Great Famine, seems like a very similar book with very similar conclusions.
- tjaerv 14y agoA related work is the The Black Book of Communism: http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp/0674076087 http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp... "Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. [...] As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."
- Volpe 14y agoJust like Nuclear Power != chernobyl Stalinism != Communism
- joeycfan 14y agoWhen I was in high-school in the 70s I was taught that Maoism was the best thing of all time and that the whole world would be Maoist someday.