Frank Dikotter - Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2012
- Frank Dikotter discusses his book, "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958--1962," presented by Harvard Book Store. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikotter's chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives had long been restricted. More lectures at forum-network.org
This talk took place on October 8, 2010.
My great-grandfather was humiliated by CPC officers and hung himself in 1950s. His son, later my grandfather, merely escaped the fate of being starved to death in the famine. He doesn't seem to like talking about these stories of past, which as he described, as I quote here, "extremely heart-breaking and painful". These historical archives & academic works are of great values both as witnesses of atrocities and as a reminder for future generations. 🙏🙏🙏 Thanks Professor!
I could not have successfully graduated without this book and Frank's talks about the book. My Chinese history module was tough. Thanks, Frank!
Chen Yun got it right when he was asked to sum up Mao Zedong.
"Had he died in 1956. His achievements would have made him immortal.
Had he died in 1966. He still would have been a great man but flawed.
But he died in 1976. Alas what can one say!"
Nah you know nothing about Mao. Read 红太阳是怎样升起的。
@@arandomchinese6706 how about you suggest something that English speakers can actually access?
@@AWOL401 The english translation is called "How the Red Sun Rose"
@@arandomchinese6706 You know nothing about the rest of the party members
My 3 sister's and me born between 1958 to 1962. It's good to be alive
That was one of the only periods in human history where the death rate exceeded the birth rate. You my friend are very lucky and strong, godspeed to you and your family.
God continue to bless you...
Gp
Thanks for uploading this video. This is a very important subject, it should have more views.
Hopes we get to see a documentary moviee just like we have bios of hitlar stalins
As fascinating as it is, few topics are as depressing as this one. Fair play to Frank for replicating Maos haircut. I'm very tempted to buy this book once I've finished 'Afghansty'.
this book is *blowing my fucking mind*
That dumb haircut lMao 🤣🤣🤣
Another point that was touched upon was the fact that most of iron pots and metal tools had ended up in the crude blast furnaces the Mao Zedong has insisted on so that China can vastly increase its "steel" production.
It would be legendary book. It's great achievement in modern China history research. -- From South Korea.
when will you guys build a memorial for Kwangju victims? fxxk Chung Dookwung, he's an asshxxx
The research boggles the mind and the scholarship is fabulous.
I knew that the Great Leap Forward was a huge blunder... I didn’t expect it to be the worst man-made disaster in history.
The Soviet Famine of Winter 1932-33 killed 7 million people out of circa 160 million people or 4.3%. Mao‘s Great Leap Forward lasted 3 years and cost 45 million lives out of 660 million, or about 7% of the entire population.
So the Great Leap Forward was more horrifying than the Soviet Famine both in numbers and per capita.
Sadly it wasn’t the last Socialist famine....Cambodia 1978, North Korea 1995-1998, both of whom are more horrific than the USSR‘s and China‘s on a per capita basis.
Yes it was akin to the Holdomor. They, collective peasant farmers, were trapped in impossible situations.
Ugh, I think it's absolutely impossible for us, in developed countries, can understand. They ate freaking MUD out of delirious desperation for relief which led to agonizing their deaths.
@@helenhoward5346 Yes... as I said, it made the Soviet famine look like child's play. It lasted longer, murdered more people both in numbers and per capita.
Reliable statistical comparisons become even more difficult (than they already are) when one expands the time-frame to the horrors both that led to and happened after these specific periods.
It's nice to see this here to counter all the horribly unsourced pro-Maoist rhetoric on TH-cam.
It is a quite urgent task for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to locate 45 million Chinese victims and their bereaved families of the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, and apologize and compensate them officially. CCP also has to express remorse over victims who were slaughtered and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Otherwise CCP is not in a position to blame Japan for the Rape of Nanking in 1937 and other wrongdoings which Imperial Japan was responsible. And, of course, CCP should stop persecuting human right activists and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Uiguar immediately.
exactly. In fact, they will have no credibility whatsoever until they aknowledge their mistakes. This is the way of the world!
Haha. Yes, Master Xi will help you do this as his father was also part of that Great Leap as well. Now this is guaranteed! ;)
have you noticed that the Party never acknowledges any mistake? it seems to it that doing that will undermine its foundation to rule the country.
It is wrong for China to have done this, and horrifying if the extent asserted in the video is correct. However what happened in Nanking is still wrong and horrible. It's good to consider both events when thinking about history, not to loose sight of important events just because another bigger event happened.
Thank you for your work professor. To everyone studying this awful subject, I can also recommend Yang Jisheng’s book Tombstone, documenting the Great Famine.
great explanation 👍
utterly fascinating. thank you
Ironically a lot of food get's wasted in China today.
The curse of abandoning the great leap forward.
Psychological retribution of the collective memory of starvation.
From 28:52, more precise 30:40:
The beauty is that despite the persecution thousands of cadres speak up.
As a German I asked myself half my life how the crimes during WW2 were possible. I finally came up with one sentence:"Good people don't kill bad people."
When the Einsatzgruppen started their killings with logistical support from the Wehrmacht it may have been enough if only a few soldiers had to throw grenades into the officers mess.
Americans are always criticised for the Vietnam War. But I come to the opposite conclusion. The people in power had to back off. There was too much fragging.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
The Americans have an own word for it. We Germans don't.
Speaking up isn't beautiful. It's stupid. In such events killing is beautiful.
The movie "Platoon" is highly recommended.
Obedience seem to be drilled in the German culture.
wish the questions of the audience hadn't been cut out.
Thanks Frank for this ~ at night they know before sleep. . . and wonder
Genuinely surprising how little people have written on this subject.
With the college campuses controlled by hardcore, progressive-Marxists its nearly impossible to publish. I attended a junior college in Houston, Texas in the mid 90's and 2/3 of the professors I had were admitted leftist-Socialist-Marxists of one stripe or another.
@@michaekwstewart Actually, Frank Dikotter outlines why at 2:15 - The CPC is still in power in China today as well as a lack of documentation. Makes more sense than a broad generalisation.
This is how I ended up in Hong Kong as a baby.
I read his book. Amazing author.
this video has helped a lot thamks, I am doing mao for as level history and our school has given us horrendous textbooks
Get Ready for Round 2
Of the dozen professors I had in college, post-1991 fall of Soviet Communism, 2/3 were openly confessed Marxists and this is at a tiny junior college in Texas ( of all places ). One, a grey-bearded, overweight 60's professor who referred to himself as a "post-modern atheist-feminist Communist" taught English but lectured us on Maoist philosophy ( pure as the driven snow ) against the great stygian horror, capitalism, despite all evidence to the contrary. As a Cold War veteran I could never quite wrap my head around just WHY these college professors were Communists since the 20th century death toll from Mao, Stalin and Ho Chi Mihn totals some 100,000,000 human beings. All questions asked about the evils of Communism were met with the standard "... thats all right-wing nonsense" or "thats Republican propaganda" and debate promptly cut off. Props to Dikotter for his bravery in publishing the ghastly horrors of Mao .... and behind the bamboo curtain no less ( ! ) ... as a professor at the University of Hong Kong.
Thomas Sowell is a very good source if you want to understand why academics so often behave in this way .
Socialists like your professor are communists who prefer capitalism.
Great researcher, Thank you for posting and very courageaous doing all this work in Hongkong ! Never had problems with the authorities in place....a certain PCC?
But why wasn't the food distributed? Why weren't there systems in place to ensure it could be transported?
Great book
A great book on Mao which includes extensive materials about the Great Famine is Jung Chang's "Mao - The Unknown Story"
Jung's "Wild Swans" is good. Her book on Mao is nothing more than a personal vendetta to revenge his (Mao) treatment of her father, a former Shichuan governor, himself a cruel despote) but has nothing to do with accurate biography.
I can not agree with you more. She is actually part of the privileged. She actually relied on her prerogative to flee to UK. Without her family background, she could hardly have access to higher education , let alone participating in an exchange program to uk. Her tirade of Mao is more biased than loyal to the reality.
@@mariusvanandel3945 That is somewhat unfair. Sure there is that aspect to it. But it does bring a great deal of additional information into the public domain.
I am studying this subject. So much delusion from so many people. Prople STILL defend this monster. Excellsnt, realistic viewing. It's disgusting that China doesn't acknowledge this and spits on the memories of the dead. Just seeps it away like it never happened. Beijing should have a memorial, not a picture of an unwashed, blackened toothed fool who put no value on human life. Thank you sir. Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is an excellant work. Propaganda poster books are also an excellant visual to the insanity and lies.
Tell me which class do you support, the proletariat or the bourgeois?
Interesting
The children of Yemen are starving...
+ + +
Around 11:00 "The state is everything, the individual is nothing... ".
This slogan was propagated by Giovani Gentile, the father of Fascism. He was appointed Minister of Education by Mussolini.
You have to wonder if collectivization was really just a way of getting rid of minority populations that were viewed as undesirable to Mao. If Mao already knew about the Ukraine and Stalin (Holodomor) is it possible that he did it to secure a better position for the Han tribe within China? Killing people this way can be blamed on collectivization, not racial supremacy.
Interesting idea, but the facts don't match. Mao came from Hunan, an extremely Han area, and his province and people were among the worst victims of famine...places like Anhui, etc. likewise were areas where 90% or more of the victims were Han Chinese...no, rediculously unachievable demands from above placed on subordinates, who then lied to "overfulfill" their quotas for the top, coupled with the forced mass evacuation of the fields during harvest time in order to focus on making useless "steel" in primative backyard furnaces...all of this combined to make the Perfect Storm that was the GLF.
There is not much evidence that Stalin was out to kill Ukrainians as such. When the scale of the disaster became clear, Stalin repeatedly cut the grain requisition quotas. Of course this was less than not enough as the affected area needed food RELIEF not reduced quotas. The result was over four million dead.
@@Meade556 Well, the famine did do away with the Ukrainian independence movement.
This from wiki - "Since the 1980s there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement" (Yang, Jisheng, Edward Friedman, Jian Guo, and Stacy Mosher. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Print. p. 452-3)
I believe it is wonderful that the Industrial Revolution in farming has made wide-scale famine due to natural causes largely needless. Governements, as demonstrated here, can hurt people bad, including starving them to death brutishly. What I want to know is if there is a better way to starve if you are doomed to such a fate. Is there some mud that doesn't cause constipation? Are there other substances that can be eaten or swallowed that will relieve the hunger sensation without providing any nutrition at all? Is there a way to avoid the most painful illnesses associated with starvation that will likely be the cause of death in the end?
>
I'm afraid you are optimistic. Environmentalists have a new "Great Famine" planned as part of their climate change fantasy, and billions may prove to be the casualties of this extremism.
It would be ironic if the greatest mass killing in world history was the product of liberalism and environmentalism, but it might well prove to be the case.
One need only look at the face of Gretta Thunberg to see a leader of that great cause.
The great Sparrow campaign of 1958...
Covid-19...
Gp
Could I have Frank's email address?
Question arise why there were no high profile defectors between 1960 to 1965 ? Heard some left for Taiwan, some went to Hong kong and US.
45 Million people lost in 1958-62.
Why no Chinese dissident came forward living in West? Why no one in Singapore democracy enlightened us? How about Hongkongese? Bout any Taiwanese? Why it falls on Firang? Reason is simple. Most of the Chinese are either defensive or keep quiet. They have plenty excuses like I have parents there who can be jailed. Or many Chinese support Mao when they talk among themselves! This is my experience on US campuses.
中国高干和官媒对大规模饿死人的承认[编辑]
三年困难时期的饿死人数对于中国共产党的高级干部来说，是一个非常忌讳和回避掩盖的话题。虽然饥荒期间，中国政府一直采取封锁消息的策略，并至今未能明确公布死亡人数和人民遭受饥荒的惨状，但其政治敏感度亦随时间的推移而逐渐消退；而且针对来自香港台湾和世界的各种质疑和谴责声音，中共领导人在毛泽东死后亦转变曾经一贯坚持的完全否认态度，进行了各种反思和回应：
时任中共中央主席的毛泽东1958年11月20日在武昌会议上说：“除特殊外，还是要睡一点觉。现在要减轻任务。”明年的生产指标要降下来，不能总是压得人透不过气来，否则，“我看搞起来，中国非死一半人不可。不死一半也要死三分之一或者十分之一，死五千万人。广西死了人（注：指广西饿死550人的事情），陈漫远不是撤了吗？死五千万人你们的职不撤，至少我的职要撤，头也成问题。”他指着安徽省委第一书记曾希圣说：“安徽要搞那么多（吗）？你搞多了也可以，但以不死人为原则。”[61]
时任国家主席、中共中央副主席刘少奇1962年7月对毛泽东说：“饿死这么多人，历史要写上你我的，人相食，要上书的！”[62]
曾任中共中央总书记的赵紫阳说：“我们党是从来不认错的，实在说不过去了，就找替罪羊，将错误都推到他们身上，如林彪，四人帮。找不到替罪羊就说是自然灾害，如五十年代末六十年代初的大饥荒，饿死几千万人，纯粹是党的路线方针政策错误。”“特别是三年困难时期，农村饿死几千万人，工人阶级没能给予（农民）有效的救助，自己吃商品粮，有副食供应，有布票，保证了最基本的生活需要。”[63]
请写明引用来源 Please provide the source of your quotation
brilliant work Frank - what i find hard too grasp is that when one lives in china over time and talks too all types of persons - its easy too see that in the national psyche its really been heavily influenced from the great famine - peoples focus, the way that peoples morals are well considered low (thast to say) people just care for no1. but its in the past or is it ? CCP has too admit this too people and get on with it instead of passing the blame - majority of people here have no ability to think for themselves its sad
Hehehe, the period of time you mentioned as so called famine, look at the population of China between 1954 to1979, you can see there hardly any reduction of population at all. The growth of population keep growing and these population statistic were avialable if anyone care to find the truth.
The other reason, at the time of so called famine, Mao was removed from the government by Liu and Teng but only retained as Chairman, a figurehead. That is why Mao launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to get his authority back.
No Westerners Chima expert bother to investgate into these background.
@@peterhsieh6597 😂
I tell my kids when they were young, they don't get to eat until after they put away their toys. Jokes aside, this is a very sad heartbreaking period for China, intentional famines are the most evil thing to do.
came to see if albert fish wasnt lying
I have learned more from TH-cam in the last few years than I learned from 4 years at University and I went to a good University and graduated. I am currently also learning Mandarin and Japanese but I like to take a break with these lectures. I would like to study mathematics and physics but I have to draw the line somewhere. I am at the end of my time and there is so much to learn. I want to live again. I want to make different choices - read more and travel more. I want to marry a woman who is much more intelligent that I could ever be and who has raven black hair and creamy skin and eyes like almond moons. I want to be born in Japan. I want to stand on Mount Fuji and swim in the inland sea. Heaven fucked me.
JoachimderZweite your words moved me. Solidarity with you, mate. What advice would you give to a 29 year old lad?
Yeah... buddy...gp
I fyou spent half as much time being grateful for your life instead of whining about regrets, I'm sure you'd be much happier
Good enough, these times will not come again, the young chinese today could not even believe the curent Chinese authorities...They have internet and they travel abroad...Lets hope they will never go throught what their parents have been through...Today, Europe is of huge concern regarding an increasing pauperism that is growing scary...Your view on this subject..as a European?
There is very little to stop the CP from doing it again if it so suits them. As the books reveal; plenty of people revolted against the CP after the so called Liberration, but they just went ahead and killed them all. If someone was shot innocent it was considered better than the chance of letting anyone go. You think a few blogs can stand up to that? Students maybe ... or a whole city ...
ChinaReport.com Do you have citation to backup your assertions? Have you heard of the Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hasting mysteriously dying when his 2013 Mercedes blows up - conveniently I suppose - as he was to break a major story about the shady activities of the CIA director. Are you informed or just hateful?
Main land Chinese don't blame Mao! They blame US Stalin etc.
I wonder if he's going to cover the cannibalism of the dead that occured
He does.
Liu Shoaqi mentioned to Mao that "People write books about Canabalism you know!" Tragically this accurate observation was one of the reasons Mao embarked on the equally disastrous "Cultural Revolution" in which Liu Shoaqi was systematically abused along with millions of others until he died of Mao induced medical neglect in 1969.
Do you mean this one?
Uncounted Millions: Mass Death in Mao’s China
Repression’s Higher Toll
Daniel Southerland,
Washington Post,
July 17, 1994
Mao in the hell watching you
my only complaint is - can't Harvard afford a decent microphone!
It is important that videos like this counter the perverse pro-Mao videos.
Mao apologists are insulting the millions of victims of Mao Zedong
It should and does counter the pro-Mao fools... Even Mao had a very hard time keeping China together, just like his predecessors, like emperor Kangxi or QIanlong,etc...
and our intelligence!
Mao apologist over a billion Chinese among the world's best educated and knowledgeable people. But you have special intelligence and know they are all fools. OK on behalf of the billion or so Chinese thanks for the insult.
Nathan Hazlett Oh no, those poor KMT nationalists and Japanese fascists.
Cry me a river.
Shut up!!! You idiot!!!
People used as Human Ressources ? Not in America.
This singular failed government program forever disproves the false hope and horribly wicked idea that government economics is a good idea.
do china sold food to the wold in '58-'62 ?
china were in debt with the soviet union for the prefabricated Industries, all the food of china gone to the cities and to the Soviet Union (no food remained for farmers)
But still the cities were full of food.
World would have been better place if Mao live, Kissinger didn't go there! No covid19! No menace of mainland Chinese claiming half the world and South China Sea! Mao wanted it but was too weak . Backward technology!
Collectivation is stupid. I don't think anybody is advocating collectivation anywhere today. Dikotter describes the madness of the of the time but the context of the madness is not explained. China by 1958 was on a mass high, it had thrown out all foreign colonials who had oppressed China for the past 100 years. Land reform gave peasants land ownership for the first time in Chinese history. There was extreme hope and pride in what could be done. When Mao called for a Great Leap to catch up to British steel production the whole country - all 500 million + took up the cause. Madness and chaos resulted. Many people died not doubt about it but they died as a result of a good intentioned policy that was badly formulated and badly implemented that went massively wrong in no small part to the over exuberance of the cadres and people. Also the belief of Mao was constant revolution, break down the old order to build a new order and then to tear that down and so on. Many people died unnecessarily but they were not murdered. Was Mao afraid of the death of his people - No. Did Mao scheme for the death of millions - No.
if you will read the books you will see how the policies were intentioned to be not benevolent but murderous; unsurpassed in world history. The whole goal was to break down society and people to the very base. They were used as cattle, as slaves. Even cooperation was no guarantee for survival, the system brought out the worst out in the people, etc. Mao fucked everyone in the arse, down to his very last friend and yet they all cooperated in the massacre because the CP selects the worst elements and cultivates them.
ChinaReport.com What "books" are you referring to? "The whole goal was to break down society and people to the very base. They were used as cattle, as slaves. Even cooperation was no guarantee for survival, the system brought out the worst out in the people" Are you talking about USA or China? Sounds more like what happened in the US than Mao China. Serious scholarly works on Mao;s China do not support your position but serious scholarly works do support the notion of debasement of USA. Lookup up Carroll Quigley and Anthony Sutton for a start.
Power corrupts but absolute power, ideology and incompetence create these horrors on this massive scale.
"Collectivization is stupid.(1) I don't think anybody is advocating collectivization anywhere today.(2)"
1. Yes. Mises diagnosed the defect nearly 1oo years ago. Yang Jisheng refers to Mises' diagnosis in his __Tombstone__.
2. The $600 billion+ per year US K-12 education industry is the second-largest (after China) command economy left on Earth.
Possibly the stupidest comment I've ever read on any social media source since Sir Tim Berners-lee invented the web. Congratulations Sir you are the unequivocal winner. Your last few lines are comedy gold.
It is too late to bash China from any angle now in 2019, the world is wise enough to understand China better, of course, so much better than the haters.
You must be commenting from a Proxy because you don't even have the freedom to look at TH-cam in China.
he is a new generation of bots: "human bot"
Remember the covid 19 virus coming from a Wuhan Laboratory ?
The Great Leap Forward was clearly admitted by Mao as a big, big, big defeat on his part, and he did consent to be stripped of his political dignity by quite a different team. After a few years of self-criticism, he got back into saddle, this time more as a figure of worship than as a real politician (after all he was always a protestant preacher minus the Bible), so as to surf the Cultural Revolution, which despite its own horrors (it was a Civil War after all, that killed about the same percentage as the American Civil War had done) turned out to be a victory, onto famine among others. Mao could not have started and devised the CR : it was a social tsunami that was about to devastate everything independently of any political decision or doctrinal interpretation. He just saw it coming and surfed it.
The civil war ended in 1949. the cultural revolution began at the end of the fifties.
Moa saw the cultural revolution because he brought it about as a tool to stay in power.
ugh i hate tyrants.
22:35 Not surprising that a father steals from his daughter to let her die, in China girls were considered a liability anyway, so cultural neglect of women was notorious then (and still is, unfortunately)...
Good presentation, but a deeper cultural analysis is warranted. By the time of Mao's revolution, China was an extremely backward and socially stratified society. In 1950's, peasants were still considered as expendable slaves (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China).
Famines were, actually, a regular occurrence throughout Chinese history (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China), again due to high cultural disdain of nobility and landowners towards peasants who lacked any rights to better their plight.
Bengal famine .
With enormous respect to Professor Dikotter, it's not really clear that he understands what ideology is. And the inner workings of the Central Committee during these, on the surface, tumultuous years are a complete mystery to him. He also does not really understand the hugely complex way the different provinces of this vast country inter - operate, or not, as the case may be.
I mistakenly expected to be witnessing something like scholarship in this talk. If this clown's book is as grotesquely vague and unsubstantiated as this hand-waving talk, then I have better things to do.
You cannot expect him to give sources in a talk . If you want the sources read the book.
He brutalized and exposed your ideology.
@@billbogg3857 I do not need to hear recitation of footnotes. There is little said in this video that is even worthy of a footnote (comprende?). What would be nice is some modest attempt to provide a scholarly account of the actual evidence. This involves quantities, numbers, or at least some attempt at statistical prevalence, accompanied by some good-faith representation of uncertainty. Instead, we are presented with only a pathetic "History Channel" level of emotive pap and propaganda, accordingly geared toward idiots who don't know any better.
@@kakistocracyusa Only the Chinese government could give an accurate figure and they have not done so. As he explained he had to rely on local records and libraries. Central government records were closed to him. All numbers from all sources are based on estimates.
@@tincoffin I actually think there is credence to the scale of suffering being claimed - but his anecdotal tales of personal suffering provide zero scholarly substantiation by which I could support such a position. I'm looking for competent arguments by which I might support his position, relative to that of a naysayer. I don't see that he provides any such arguments.
The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饑荒, "three years of famine") was a period in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. The policies of ruler Mao Zedong contributed to the famine. Estimates of deaths due to starvation range in the tens of millions
How did Dikötter get access to documents that are out of reach for most Chinese citizens? Whatever the case, this makes the Soviet famine look like child’s play...
The Golodomor of the 1932-1933 the Great Leap Backward of 1959-62 the Khmer Rouge democide/famine of 1975-1979 and the North Korean famine 1995-1998.
There was a time and maybe still is in some cases when you could gain access to records held by the local communist party and other material in libraries. I think he says that he could not access records held by the central government.
I mean I definitely need a white guy to tell me what happened in China
Which Chinese historian do you suggest instead?
So you would refuse to read a "black guy" analyzing Nazi Germany? Or a "Chinese guy" writing on the Roman empire? So-called "anti-racism" at its finest.
Quiet.
It’s not about race. You can be any race interested in history (scholarly). Usually Caucasian’s read up and dig up history more than any race. Asians leave them buried and cover up tyranny.
To be frank, the Great Leap Forward was the single greatest thing to ever happen to the Chinese. FAMINES ARE NOT MANMADE; FAMINES DO NOT HAPPEN OUT OF PURE WILL.
You don't seem to be listening to this talk. There are both natural famines, not willed by any human being. There are also man made famines that are willed by humans for different reasons.
Mao and lenin hane it wrong you need to have
capitalism and then communism (Marx)
As someone with some basic routine in listening to university lectures and reading academic works, this lecture is some of the worst hot mess I have heared. I have read some Chinese history and I have tried to do some research into the Great Leap and the famine and other causes of death during that age. If one looks at statistics of deaths, fertility, infant mortality, population pyramids etc there is no doubt something extreme happened during these years and at the same time there is so much that doesn't make sense. Why was there no nation wide uprising? How can the government "hide" 30 million deaths that happened right among peoples' everyday lives?
I came here hoping for someone with a higher education than me explaining in a structured way how researchers have reached the number 30 or 45 million victims and how different people seem to come to different conclusions about the real number. I am disappointed. "I spent years in the archives and I estimate that it was 45 million" is not enough. It does not do.
And then comes some bizarre, emotional outpouring about rotten old houses being torn down and either ground into fertilizer or used for rebuilding other stuff, like who cares? How is this more important than explaining how you found out the number 45 million deaths? Is this guy even a trained statistician? How much does he know about demographics?
Had been this sloppy when I defended my c-thesis as I got a bachelors degree from the university of blumfluck nowhere I would not have passed. Makes me very disheartened about reading the book. Does anyone know if it gets any better? Can we get a team of people who are trained in this to go through his "material" and check what can actually be said about this? The worlds supposedly worst manmade distaster would be deserving of need some more systematic attention, I recon.
The book is faked from cover to cover. The front cover image, of a starving Chinese child, was taken in 1942. When asked why he did not use a picture from his 'great famine,' Dikotter replied that he could not find one. Duh!
Nobody starved to death after 1949, despite a crushing US grain embargo. For 25 years, Mao fed million-man armies on the march, under fire, and had no difficulty ensuring that everyone had something to eat every day. There were 'three difficult years,' as everyone acknowledged, and excess deaths due to malnutrition: more 60+ year-olds died in those years than should have. But life expectancy was 58 at the time, and such deaths were expected in a that famine-ridden land.
The 'Mao Killed Millions' meme was based on Dikotter's 'discovery,' of a famine that neither the CIA nor many prominent visitors to China saw any sign of.
More notable, perhaps, is that life expectancy was 37 when Mao took over and had doubled when he died. Nobody saved more lives as Mao.
There’s so much evidence that Mao’s starvation was REAL - you must be an insane lunatic. Thank God you are not in government or millions would spare no sympathy. Goto the doctor bro.
While this guy show himself as a know-it-all of chinese history, it is quite obvious that he has 0 understanding of the events took place in these ages, especially a regime that is against maoism came in power as known as Deng's reformist or revisionist government. Xi is not a great fan of Mao as he is more engaged in converting China into a world power, which means current authorities is against maos idea of internationalism. In fact in the images about great leap forward and cultural revolution uploaded to youtube show nothing but a vibrant, confident and striving society that has rise above the old ages of disgrace, working in its own very socialist order. West politicians don't like that inspiring fact as it would bring tragedy upon his appropriated wealth and power, so they blame Mao, the mentor of chinese people, that it is him who murdered millions that actually died because of poor land condition of china. Before Mao came into power china has experienced a civil war and the land is barren.
You obviously haven't read any honest work on the Great Leap Forward, or you are taking money from the CCP to spread widely-refuted lies. The only "images about great leap forward" (sic) which exist today are propaganda photos taken by the Communists. Mao's socialist policies of collectivization and central planning (supported by Zhou Enlai and most CCP cadres) made the lives of ordinary Chinese worse in every way, and led directly to the death of tens of millions of their people.
No.
Look at all the images of people dying of starvation you insane lunatic.