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    Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
    Unavailable
    Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
    Unavailable
    Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
    Ebook638 pages11 hours

    Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

    By Frank Dikötter

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

    'A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore

    'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre

    'A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal

    Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
    Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.

    Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 6, 2010
    ISBN9781408814444
    Unavailable
    Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
    Author

    Frank Dikötter

    Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His books have changed the way historians view China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his award-winning People's Trilogy documenting the lives of ordinary people under Mao. He is married and lives in Hong Kong.

    Read more from Frank Dikötter

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    Reviews for Mao's Great Famine

    4/5

    17 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Well, this pretty well establishes Mao Ze Dong’s place in history as the greatest mass murderer ever.
    • 5/5
      Complete, well organized account of an almost unknown disaster. The strength of the book is the first half that explains how Mao created the disaster.
    • 4/5
      I long refrained from picking up this book, not certain whether I could stomach the tales of horror and suffering. More than 45 million Chinese people died between 1958 and 1962, solely due to the mad superpower dreams of an uncaring dictator. This is a good account of one of the 20th century's largest human-induced catastrophes (ranking eleventh in Steven Pinker's historical atrocities rating).The truly grizzly narrative thankfully only starts in part four. The first three parts of the book offer an introduction to how and why Mao pushed his country into this hasty and wasteful change. China had long been a Soviet client which supplied it with capital and technology. Mao wanted to break out of the Soviet embrace while continuing to develop China towards superpower status. As a measure to regain independence, China started to pay for Soviet technology with food. As China did not have a surplus of food, these exports deliberately triggered famine for millions of Chinese. A second source of hunger was the shift from agriculture to heavy industry. Lacking (foreign) experts, China started to build up an inefficient heavy industry that destroyed the environment and interrupted the Chinese food supply. The Chinese peasants, living in collective communes, were under the total control of the party bullies who controlled access to food. The level of violence willingly even eagerly inflicted on neighbors is a shocking testament to homo homini lupus, Chinese-style.The perverse benchmarking of the party apparatchiks, fudging the numbers and hiding the truth, escalated and prolonged the disaster. The fault, however, rests with Mao who deliberately refused to listen and care. As Jung Chang argues, when the party finally forced him to stop, he designed the Cultural Revolution to punish them for their intervention. The suffering and death, as told in parts four to six, makes for an uncomfortable read as society's weakest suffered the most (part five: children, women, the elderly). Even the Soviets who knew about inflicting pain were shocked by the Chinese brutality and indifference to the plight of others. A truly dark chapter of human history that deserves wider acknowledgment.
    • 3/5
      Provides insight into Mao's life, with lots of background Chinese history
    • 4/5
      There are two main things to realize, going into Dikötter's work: the first is that, despite the title, this is actually a book on the Great Leap Forward, though the famine of '59-'61 is the most visible part of it. The second is that this is not a pleasant book.Thanks to access to previously unavailable provincial archives — the central archive in Beijing still remains closed to all but the most politically trusted of researchers — Dikötter has constructed a well-written narrative that covers the full scope of the GLF, as well as putting the decisions into the context, both internationally and locally, of the time.It also, due to previously unknown reports and documents, permits him to document the whole horrors of the period. Some, such as China continuing to export grain to the USSR despite famine conditions at home, were well known. Others, such as the extensive coverage of state violence that, if not always officially sanctioned was at least never condoned, were perhaps less so. (Dikötter's estimate of 45 million preventable deaths over the entire period includes 2.5 million killed by beatings, punishment starvations, being buried alive, &c..)Though the prose flows well, it's not a light read, and as the full weight of the horrors builds up, page upon page, it can be difficult to want to continue. In the end though, it's certainly a worthwhile piece of scholarship, even if it might not be a pleasant one.
    • 4/5
      This book has some amazing sources and makes a horrific story sound even more horrific, but still fascinating. It tries to link the bureaucratic decisions from Beijing to local decisions made by cadres and individual decisions made by Chinese citizens. He argues that the Great Leap Forward was not just a bureaucratic overreach. It was aided and abetted by bullying cadres and by a near psychopathic Mao. Individual citizens were learning to game the system to survive, but in doing so they made the overall crisis worse. This is the most comprehensive work on the Great Leap Forward I have read. It isn't an easy read because Dikotter has so much information, but it is convincing. And it fits in the recent trend of revising the image of Mao from a brutal dictator to a criminally inhumane monster that might actually have been worse than US propaganda about him suggested at the time.I recommend this book for specialist in China or political scientists/economists interested in a totalitarian state trying to exercise its authority. But it might be a bit much for the average reader.
    • 5/5
      Every man woman and grown up child should read this book.
      This is a searing harrowing history of the innumerable sufferings brought on by the Famine caused by Chairman Mao's 'Great Leap Forward..
      The Sufferings of China cannot be quantified. One day when the Party Archives are open then we will know, but until then we have this and other books that courageously dare to write a detailed History of what happened.
      The extreme value of History is seen in this Book as it details the unimaginable sufferings of the Chinese people. The Great Hall of the People, Communism, Socialism, central planning mocking the values it espouses to carry.
      The people never recieved the Justice they are so due: Let History Judge and any of the Per perpetrators living recieve the punishment of which they are so worthy.
    • 4/5
      Methodical but informative.
    • 2/5
      Perhaps not a bad book, but poorly read in my audio edition. Russian and German dictatorships seem mohave been more dramatic, more colourful, better stories. Perhaps that is me trivialising things. Overwhelming impression of humourless vacuousness of Communist proceedings, as if charmless children had takeover the nursery. Huge suffering is brought about by naive ideas, interpersonal bickering and blindness to reality. Six thousand years of high civilisation out the window.
    • 5/5
      I found this book fascinating though I was appalled by it contents. Hitherto my knowledge of China under Chairman Mao had been very sketchy, and references to the Great Leap Forward conveyed very little.As a consequence of misguided policies, flawed implementation, endemic corruption and a hefty sprinkling of sheer evil maybe as many as 45 million people died in China between 1958 and 1962.. Frank Dikotter’s impressive book achieves the rare double of being incredibly informative (and clearly exhaustively researched) yet still very readable. Well, I say “readable” but perhaps that is not the correct term. I don’t mean any reflection on Dikotter’s prose – he is always lucid and compelling. However, I found much of his subject matter so ghastly that at times I felt I had to break off for a while. The catalogue of incompetence seems almost endless, and I felt myself moved to anger throughout the whole book. Not only did Mao’s regime do stupid things, they seemed impervious to precedent and would continually repeat the same errors, only to find the same dreadful results.Colossal irrigations schemes were tried, but all failed owing to a lack of understand of basic hydrography. There were constant campaigns to boost steel production but these just fell apart, and export orders went unfulfilled. The collectivisation of farming failed completely, with grain yield figures being falsified at every level. There was the world’s greatest ever campaign of destruction of property as hundreds of thousands of rural houses were destroyed so that the mud bricks of which they were constructed could be used as fertiliser. Sadly no-one had stopped to consider where the people thus rendered homeless might subsequently live. Many now homeless peasants were reduced to eating the thatch of their former homes as all other food disappeared. Another campaign was waged to deter sparrows and other birds who were thought of as endangering harvests because they might eat grain. Unfortunately the removal of the bird population led to swarms of the various insects that they did actually live off, with dire effects on the arable crops. Yet while millions starved at home, China continued to sell grain overseas or even, in many instances, to give it away as humanitarian aid.Fascinating and enlightening, yet also wholly gruesome.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant account. Horrible reading it.
    • 4/5
      This is goddamn terrifying.

      The short narrative of the Great Leap Forward is that Mao enacted a series of policies from 1958-1962 which fostered crash industrial development on the Stalinist model. This led to communal farms, sale of all agricultural products, importing heavy machinery, and increasingly farfetched schemes such as 'backyard furnaces' to increase steel output, a 'pest-hunting campaign' which led millions of citizens chasing sparrows instead of planting crops, and the close-planting of crops to increase production - which as any farmer knows, leads to too many crops taking nutrients from the soil and a decrease in output.

      All of these agricultural and industrial schemes contributed only to a part of the catastrophe. With the lack of food, civil society began to break down. Theft, violence, heavy-handed repression by local party cadres, black markets, massed refugees to Hong Kong, cannibalism, prison camps, executions for stealing food, and so forth. It is less a famine than a democide, a forced repression of the rural population at the expense of the cities, who lived on half rations and worked in filthy half-built polluting factories, to fulfill some mad dream, supported by a propaganda apparatus which sold 'The Big Lie'.


      Propaganda promised fairy tales. Instead the Chinese people received nightmares.

      A disaster on this sheer scale is incomprehensible. I should be feeling horror. Instead it is incomprehension. 18 million dead at the least, 70 million at the most. Just numbers. I can't imagine it. How.
    • 4/5
      The Great Famine in China during the Great Leap Forward was one of the greatest man-made natural disasters in all history, with countless millions dying by official negligence and starvation.

      Frank Dikötter has had access to formally-closed archives on the Chinese mainland and for the first time chronicles what happened in the higher echelons of the Chinese government during the time in which ultimately forty-five million people died.

      Along with :Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine by Yang Jisheng which catalogues the sheer humanity of this disaster, Dikötter's book helps bring together the experience of ordinary people and the governmental policies that led to the famine in a way that forces us to re-assess modern Chinese history and most importantly the role of Mao Zedong.

      1 person found this helpful