Second post of the morning:
A little trip down memory lane:
Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'
By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
Friday, 17 September 2010
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the
greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented
access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a
Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was
enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the
economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the
worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962,
when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture,
brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or
beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of
the Second World War was 55 million.
Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives
since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating
period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international
resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the
three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian
communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.
Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it
was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce
fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr
Dikötter said.
His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating
Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been
"quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China,
there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully
catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the
provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the
rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a
faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience,
however minor, the punishments were huge.
State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a
child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were
forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine,
others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a
man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the
middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a
quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because
they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately
starved to death.
Mr Dikötter said that he was once again examining the Party's archives for
his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody
advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.
He said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities
of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13,000 opponents of the
new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks. "We know
the outline of what went on but I will be looking into precisely what
happened in this period, how it happened, and the human experiences behind
the history," he said.
Mr Dikötter, who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said while it was
difficult for any historian in China to write books that are critical of
Mao, he felt he could not collude with the "conspiracy of silence" in what
the Chinese rural community had suffered in recent history.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html 
