Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies. Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work. His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine.
He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
The Cultural Revolution—the ten-year period — of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel — , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao.
Equally scorned but extremely influential is the British-based author Jung Chang. After writing a bestselling memoir about her family the most popular in what now seems like an endless succession of imitators , she moved on to write, along with her husband, Jon Halliday, popular history, including a biography of Mao as monster.
Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.
We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom. New understandings of numbers, of course, are only a part of any comparison, and in themselves pose new questions of both quantity and quality.
It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in The pool of evil simply grows deeper. The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.
What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in , the Germans in , and the Soviets again in ? The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July , in which some 24, Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before.
The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have written in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other.
Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them.
Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Read Next. Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks. Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? This Issue March 10, Larry McMurtry. Garry Kasparov. The Bobby Fischer Defense. Freeman Dyson. How We Know. News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks. I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list.
Our Own Reichstag Fire Moment. What Ails America. Kirkus Reviews. John Ashbery. Jason Epstein. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had already annoyed Mao by criticizing Stalin, whom Mao regarded as one of the great figures of Communist history. If even Stalin could be purged, Mao could be challenged, too. This, along with his general impatience, spurred a series of increasingly reckless decisions that led to the worst famine in history. Until that moment, Mao had been first among equals, but moderates had often been able to rein him in.
As became the pattern of his reign, no one successfully stood up to him. People were to eat in canteens and share agricultural equipment, livestock, and production, with food allocated by the state. Local Party leaders were ordered to obey fanciful ideas for increasing crop yields, such as planting crops closer together. To meet their taxes, farmers were forced to send any grain they had to the state as if they were producing these insanely high yields.
Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a Party conference, he purged his enemies. Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. A wall showing the damage caused by an earthquake that occurred on May 12, in Sichuan province is decorated with portraits of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, in Beichuan County, Sichuan province, May 31, More than 68, people died in the quake and around 4. On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events. Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million.
Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities. Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao?
0コメント