Great Chinese Famine

one plausible reading of MGF’s narrative chapters is that it took a long time for the leadership in Beijing to grasp the scale of the catastrophe at its height.

Mao’s private physician, repeatedly invoked by Dikötter as a reliable witness (p. 346), ‘doubted that [Mao] really knew’ what was happening

we are told that Mao was ‘visibly shaken’ when presented with graphic reports of famine from Xinyang in Henan province in late October 1960

None of this absolves Mao from responsibility for the policies that caused the greatest famine ever. But reckless miscalculation and culpable ignorance are not quite the same as deliberately or knowingly starving millions

The role of the weather in 1959-61 remains contested.

Y. Y. Kueh found that droughts and flooding accounted for the bulk of the shortfalls in 1960 and 1961, although he also insisted ‘even without natural disasters, the agricultural depression was inevitable’

Frank Dikötter’s Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most

It is hardly surprising, then, that MGF’s brief account (pp. 324-34) of the famine’s death toll arrives at a figure far beyond the range of between 18 million and 32.5 million proposed hitherto by specialist demographers

Much hinges on what ‘normal’ mortality rates are assumed, since the archives do not distinguish between normal and crisis mortality.

It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here

Its epicenter was Xinyang County, where one in eight people died from the famine.

Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of China’s totalitarian Communist system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.

Yang conservatively estimates that 36 million people died of unnatural causes, mostly due to starvation but also government-instigated torture and murder of those who opposed the Communist Party’s maniacal economic plans that caused the catastrophe.

It was mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and of the struggle against “Right opportunism” together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961

which caused serious losses to our country and people.

Yang estimates that 36 million people died of starvation and other causes during the famine, even as grain exports continued.

Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that 20 million to 30 million people died.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961.