Gather Maos Great Famine: The History Of Chinas Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 Executed By Frank Dikötter Expressed As File
view on this book can be summed up by what Han Dongping said about it in "Remembering Socialist China,":
"Frank Dikötter, the author of Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, won theSamuel Johnson Prize for NonFiction, Britain's most prestigious book award for nonfiction.
It is also rumoured that he received amillion scholarship for writing his book, But one of my friends in Malaysia alerted me that the front cover of his book used a picture from Life magazine of, This friend wrote to Dikötter about this, Dikötter answered saying that he used the picture of the famine ofin China because he could not find any pictures of the Great Leap Forward famine.
Such is the academic honesty of antiMao scholars in the West, Because they could not find any authentic pictures, they resort to fake pictures, And yet they are able to get away with such dishonesty,
Frank Dikötter also claimed that he had documents to prove that Chairman Mao was willing to starve half of the Chinese people to death so that the other half could have more than enough to eat.
My friend challenged him to produce the document, Dikötter said that he had an agreement with the source of the document not to show the document to anybody, But under pressure, he agreed to let my friend in Hong Kong to see the document, It turned out that the document was a speech by Chairman Mao at a meeting discussing the investment planned in industrial projects, China had planned to launch over one thousand industrial projects in, Chairman Mao said in the speech that he would rather cut the number of investment projects by half so the Government would have enough money to quickly complete the remaining half of the projects.
But Dikötter interpreted Chairman Maos words to mean that he was willing to starve half the Chinese population in order that the other half have more than enough to eat.
Dikötter claimed that he was a China specialist, I wonder if he was able to read and understand Chinese text, or he was in fact a linguistic genius who could read into the Chinese language something that was not there in the first place.
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sitelink rupeindia. orghan. html This is one of those occasions when I almost wish the God i believed in was the vicious judgemental harsh one that some fundamentalists of all flavours seem to look to.
This was brilliantly written but a really difficult wading through the horror and disgusting callousness of the Chinese regime at the time of the Great Leap Forward.
As I type this I went and found my copy of Billy Bragg's album 'Workers' playtime ' cos I wanted to check and yep lo and behold he has the image of happy communist chinese folk sitting around well nourished and smiling and one of the songs is ' Waiting for the great leap foward '.
. . Billy hold your head in shame, This appaling destruction of, at a conservative estimate,milion people in four year fromcame about as a direct result of Mao and his fellow leaders' crass stupidity coupled with violence, hypocrisy and inability to ackowledge the wisdom of centuries.
As i read the account it made me more and more horrified as you see men and women totally unaware of their interconnection with nature, society or history grabbing hold of a vision and riding roughshod over any opposition.
Agriculture collectivised to such an extent that farmers and their experience are disregarded and theory trumps any kind of knowledge, Society and indeed any familial loyalty is collectivised and attempts to defend and protect the voiceless and vulnerable is punished and decried as ' rightist ' or counterrevolutionary.
The truly astounding thing was how totally uncaring the leaders were and tragically this did not just mean the main leaders in power but those under them down in a foul cascade throughout every level.
The knock on effect of the need to save face at the highest point in government when confronted with leaders of other governments cascades down through the need to shine before superiors at the lower ambitious levels down to the lowest local brute who just enjoyed exercising power
untrammeled by any form of human kindness.
The Great Leap Forward destroyed the countryside and its very sensitively balanced situation in which poverty was never far away prior to Mao but his inability to trust the wisdom of farmers, the imposition of ridiculous theories of agriculture, his removal of so many of the land workers to build dams and irrigation systems which were unthought through, badly designed, incorrectly placed and never maintained made the failure of crops and the death of so many inevitable.
Added to that the desire, at all costs, to keep this failure secret meant China continued to export even when millions of its own people starved,
As I read I kept asking myself, how can such blind cruelty go ahead The over arching sadness is the realization that once we put ideologies before people, once I allow my dogma to deaden me to the effects it has this sort of monstrous catastrophe happens again and again.
Did Mao and his cronies genuinely believe that a few deaths were worth the sacrifice, Cannon fodder as it were for this Great Leap Forward,
This is an extraordinariy harrowing book, all the more so because it is to an extremely major extent wholly manmade, I am pleased i have read it but still regret that the God I believe in will be far more merciful to Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Ke Qingshi then I would be to them or indeed they were to their own people "The executioner always kills twice, the second time through silence.
" Elie Wiesel
This is the least compelling volume of Frank Dikotter's recent trilogy on the years of communist rule in China from, These three works are undoubtably required reading if you are interested in the period and are limited to English as I am, This book notably won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Award for best nonfiction writing in, Many of its more entertaining parts are excerpted from "The Private Life of Chairman Mao", a fascinating memoir written by Mao's personal doctor,
Dikotter is a modern historian in the sense that he employs pseudo scientific methods of statistics and economics in his research and writing, He dives deep into provincial archives and conducts local interviews that result in stark conclusions about the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt to boost factory and farm output during'.
He claims thatmillion dead starved by collective farming gone awry, This isn't original or controversial see "Tombstone" by Yang or "Hungry Ghosts" by Becker,
It is certainly an important and professional work of history but it is hindered by two problems, in my mind, The first is that Dikotter, while correct about the abject failure of Mao's plan, can see only evil in its goals, His misguided efforts at agricultural and industrial reform become cynical exercises in political infighting and power consolidation, Attempts to address poverty and underdevelopment, tragically flawed, were made merely to seize wealth and overthrow social order which seems a bit of an overreach,
Paradoxically perhaps Mao's dream to achieve communism may have been an altruistic one, Did Mao plan to kill his own people This is inevitably a moral question that must be asked, The answer for Dikotter is that Mao saw mass death as collateral damage in his struggle to fulfill Marxist destiny, This follows a trend in recent histories of Mao as a monster on the scale of Hitler or Stalin, Although similar in numbers of fatalities, in aims the comparisons are less apt,
The second problem is the book is not that engaging unless you can become easily absorbed by superficially presented statistics and economic data, Any account of the twentieth century's greatest manmade disaster would be incomplete without these but should also explore the historical context in a more comprehensive way, In this regard Dikotter adopts a reductionist approach where all is due to Mao,
The people primarily play a role as the victims of Mao's paranoid delusions goaded by the stick and the ladle, Although seen as unprincipled slackers and saboteurs they are also cunning and cruel ideologues, however argument demands, Ironically they are accused again of the same fabricated crimes once obtained by forced confessions and now culled from the archives of a discredited totalitarian state, The answer must lie in between,
The question of how a nation ofmillion came under the command of a purported madman is left largely unresolved, The answer might be found in desperation to transcend war and poverty rather than cowering before coercion and conformity, It is worth noting that the other two volumes on the Communist Revolution ''and particularly the Cultural Revolution ''offer more insightful looks at their respective periods.
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