Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20410424

by tjaerv • 14 years ago

114 61 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

oezaxs• 14 years ago

I want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.

tjaerv3• 14 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962-ebo...

danso3• 14 years ago

I 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

tjaerv3• 14 years ago

"Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster."

fleitz4• 14 years ago

Ask 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.

danso3• 14 years ago

Government 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...

> 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.

andybak2• 14 years ago

Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".

Yes.

http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/08...

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

Kind 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• 14 years ago

We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.

And a lot to stay mindful of ... lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.

fleitz4• 14 years ago

They 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"

derleth3• 14 years ago

Hm. 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?

miked• 14 years ago

>> we aren't allow to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country.

Except that most of the Entitled Class, from academia to journalists to Hollywood, has made an minor industry out of supporting totalitarian apologists such as yourself. A prominent example: the New York Times has refused to return the Pulitzer awarded to its pro-Stalinist reporter Walter Duranty, who lied so thoroughly about the Ukranian famine of the 1930's.

Sometimes this apologizing is done directly (as above and as with the fawning support for the late Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm), but more often through moral equivalence arguments such as yours.

My wife barely survived the Great Leap Forward. She spent years of her childhood hungry, only to come to this country and read people like you. Unlike you, she's very clear on the difference between Chinese Socialism and America's (semi-)free system.

olalonde4• 14 years ago

I think it's time to take off your tinfoil hat. There's an order of magnitude difference between how transparent the Chinese and US governments are.

> They have great leaps forward, we have wars on drugs.

In China, you pretty much automatically get the death penalty for trafficking drugs.

> we aren't allow to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country.

Those things are openly reported in the news although I'm sure there are some cover ups by individual soldiers.

naner• 14 years ago

There's still a lot of sugar-coating in the US. Obviously we are nowhere near as a bad as China in this regard, but the US isn't utopia of truth. In school we are not taught that Christopher Columbus was a moron, tyrant, and slave trader nor did we cover the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. History texts in US schools tend to focus on things that portray the US in a favorable light.

schuke• 14 years ago

Yes you do. When I first studied US history in the UK, I was surprised to learn that a massacre can involve as few as five people. (Boston Massacre) In Chinese, massacre is translated as "tusha", and is most frequently used with Nanking, where 200k+ people were killed. Still the Japanese standard was too low for us. Then I learned the word 'genocide' which I thought at first is on the Chinese level of massacre. However upon some more reflection it becomes obvious that Chinese killing Chinese in the name of making the starved live better doesn't fit into 'genocide' as well. Perhaps our deeds need a brand new name. After all, no one had seen this since the dawn of men.

AdelsonVLandis• 14 years ago

The 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.

danso3• 14 years ago

1. 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• 14 years ago

FWIW 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.

btilly• 14 years ago

Note that the Irish famine was so severe only because the English accepted Malthus' theory that human populations would expand to the carrying capacity of the land and then die back in famines. Therefore intervening would just lay the groundwork for a larger, later, famine.

Nobody at the time had come to terms with the fact that improvements in agriculture had massively increased the carrying capacity of the land. Whether we eventually are forced into famine or manage to curb populations before that point is still uncertain. But there is no question that the English could have intervened, stopped most of the casualties, and there would not have been a quick recurrence of the famine.

ximeng• 14 years ago

The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s?

Don't worry, they've discovered it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...

derleth3• 14 years ago

> Don't worry, they've discovered it.

Oh. No. Don't you get it: The Western World is exactly the same as the Far East, exactly the same as Africa, and so on. For every Great Leap Forwards there's a Holocaust, for every Congolese war there's an English Civil War, and so on, and so forth, tit for tat, with absolutely no difference at all between Winston Churchill and Mao Zedong. Exactly the same. Otherwise, it's just racist.

guscost• 14 years ago

I'll just leave this here:

http://io9.com/5927112/chinas-worst-self+inflicted-disaster-...

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Wait, the BBC caused the famine in Ireland in 1840s, nearly 100 years before they were officially founded?

EliRivers• 14 years ago

"The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s?"

Oh look, the BBC already did and you didn't even bother to check (although how the BBC caused it is a mystery to me, given that the BBC is a Broadcasting company formed in 1922 and the potato famine happened during the previous century).

Such self-righteousness that assumes wrong-doing without even checking. It's the worst kind of ideology; to not even care enough about the truth to check. If reality conflicts with political opinion, it's not opinion that's wrong; it's reality that's at fault.

This is just the first google hit, but the list of BBC pages covering it goes on and on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...

easytiger• 14 years ago

What the hell are you talking about

tjaerv3• 14 years ago

A related work is the The Black Book of Communism:

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."

Volpe5• 14 years ago

Just like Nuclear Power != chernobyl

Stalinism != Communism

Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

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