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

I just finished reading the book "Mao's Great Famine". It brought back certain memories to me.

I am an ethnic Chinese lucky enough to be born and then grew up in Hong Kong, under the protection of the British Flag and not in China. If not I would either have been killed during the Great Leap Forward or have become a Red Guard and not been able to receive a proper education in the 1960s.

I was brought up by a maid who used to be a peasant in China and who escaped to Hong Kong at the time of the Great Leap Forward. She told me stories that at that time, many did not believe. She told me of the close cropping forced on the peasants by the Communist cadres. She told me how one night, the night before the village was to receive an inspector from the Central Government, the village party secretary forced all of them out into the field to pull up the saplings by about 1 inch so that the next day, the party secretary could tell the inspector all was well, the saplings were growing! She told me of the starvation. From rumors, I have also heard of cannibalism. Now all those were confirmed by Frank Dikotter's findings and reportage in that book.

The world should know of the horrors perpetrated by Mao, a man still honored by Communist China, a man whose body now lies preserved in that mausoleum in Beijing, a man whose legacy of mass murders put him in the same league as Stalin and Hitler, but managed to be honored officially by his own country as a great man and not vilified as a murderer. How did he do it?

I graduated from the Medical Faculty of Hong Kong University in the 1960s and later joined the Department of Medicine as a lecturer until i resigned and moved to Singapore in the 80s.

In 1967, I was the Secretary of the Hong Kong University Students' Union. That year was the year of the communists instigated riots in Hong Kong. We, the students, were a pretty apolitical lot in those days. We tried to keep our heads low and not say anything about the riots. Then one day, one of the communists newspaper, '''said they have received support from the HKU Students' Union. I was the secretary and I have never written that, nor has the President. That same evening, the Executive Committee divided into teams, went to all the hostels and took a poll. Something like 98% of the students polled were against the riots. That same evening, we issued a press release saying, "This morning, '' reported they have received from the HKUSU statement of support for the riots, the Executive Committee had never issued that statement and a poll of the students the same day showed 98% of the students polled were against it." The President received a letter with the picture of a coffin in it, and fake bombs were placed in the Students' Union premises. I learnt a lesson - in China, truth is what power says it is - the age old story from the time of the Warring Kingdom was still true, '''', (to point to a deer and says it is a horse).

Then in 1980, after the fall of the Gang of Four, China was trying to rehabilitate its doctors, many of whom were sent to the field as labourers. A team of lecturers from HKU was requested to go back to China and to give a series of lectures to those doctors. I was part of that team. We went to Guangzhou. One night, there was a knock on the door of our room in the Hotel. A man in his 60s stood there. He then told us he was a graduate from HKU Medical School, and in the 1950s, he heeded the call of Mao to overseas Chinese to go back to China and help the country. During the Cultural Revolution, he was branded a rightist and he and his family were sent to Tangshan to work as miners. During the earthquake of 1976, his whole family was killed. "I am a lonely man now", he said. He then requested us to put him in touch with HKU again. After that, he left the room and I accompanied him on his way out. Whilst in the corridor, and having ascertained there was no other person in the corridor, he put his hand around my shoulder, and whispered these words into my ear, "I am a member of the Communist Party, and I tell you, Communism is bad." He then quickly walked away.

The heinous deeds perpetrated by Mao should be widely known. I am so glad Frank Dikotter wrote that book which confirmed all my personal experience. Even though present day China seems to be a different beast compared with Mao's China, until they take that man's body out of the mausoleum, one still has questions regarding the trustworthiness of China - is Truth still defined by Power?

Mao's great famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe has got to be the best book so far on the devastating famine resulting from Mao's decision to launch the Great Leap Forward. I would even call it the ultimate work on this period, but feel that I must defer to Dikötter himself who says in an illuminating essay on the sources that many party documents are still available only to the most senior CCP members and expresses a hope that future historians "will be able to reveal the true scale of what happened on the basis of fully open archives." That said, this book sets a very high standard for any future studies to aspire to, and it will be the authoritative work on the period until the archives, if ever, are further opened.

Drawing on documentation in local and provincial archives only recently made available to historians thanks to new legislation, Dikötter does a great job of telling the history of the famine that, at what he says is a conservative estimate, took 45 million Chinese lives at a time when the national population stood at around 650 million - that's about seven percent of all Chinese at the time. In the final chapter, Dikötter gives a convincing explanation of how he arrives at this number.

The book is written in an easily accessible narrative style that keeps your attention. The narrative moves smoothly from micro detail to a grand bird's eye view of events, presenting the reader with a comprehensive picture and understanding. On the micro level, the author humanizes the horrors by giving the names of people who were beaten, tortured and murdered by cadres, explaining how they were beaten and by whom, and who were eaten by whom and whether they had been murdered or already were deceased and exhumed. Zooming out one step, we see the sheer numbers of victims, explanations of why violence was so prevalent and how cadres at each level were pressured by their superiors to use coercion/violence to reach the necessary output targets, how this forced politically motivated inflation of output numbers and the resulting implications, and how the pressure propagated all the way from Mao through the very top echelons in Zhongnanhai down to the level of each collective. Here we also see how the results of the famine changed both the human and the natural landscape, resulting in the annihilation of villages, deforestation and the disappearance of parts of the wildlife. Zooming out yet one further step, we are presented with the grand bird's eye view of events, putting the whole period in its greater context by explaining how the famine was related to the collectivization drive, the attempts to overtake Great Britain in 15 years in terms of steel production, the relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the national economy and international trade.

In short, this is an excellent study of the Great Leap Forward that both describes the horrors of the resulting famine and puts it in context rather than falling into the trap of only describing the horrors and sheer scale of the catastrophe. In addition, it also provides an illuminating insight into the workings of a totalitarian one-party dictatorship.

It is shocking that so little is known about the famine of the Great Leap Forward in the West. This book, which is carefully researched and gives all its sources as a responsible history should, shows that it was a crime comparable only with the Holocaust. That was worse in that it was a deliberate attempt to exterminate part of the population; Mao simply didn't care whether his subjects lived or died. On the whole, though, he clearly felt, and so did his enforcers, that it was better for innocent people to die than for "rightists" to live. The famine had many and avoidable causes - collectivisation, a drive for exports to pay for modern technology and the nuclear weapon programme, idiotic ideas from Central Authority which were supposed to supersede thousands of years' farming experience - but once things started to go bad the Party openly resorted to brutality as a way to keep people working. After all, forbidden to keep the products of their labours, they had little other incentive than the stick. They used it liberally, too: in ONE province SIXTY-SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE were beaten to death. That is just one tiny aspect of the cruelty this book lists. People were starved, they were deliberately worked to death, they were buried alive, children as young as eight were tortured...I had to keep taking breaks from the book because it was so upsetting. It is important to know how badly the Chinese people were treated, but having read it once I don't think I will be able to face reading it again.