Reviews

Mao's Great Famine: The History Of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikötter

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endlessmidnight's review

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dark informative medium-paced

5.0

An excellent, dark gory book

lyoncoll's review

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challenging dark informative sad slow-paced

3.5

jedwards97's review

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challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

3.5

I found this to have an odd balance, some sections felt repetitive and overwhelming with vast spouts of statistics, whereas others were genuinely enthralling. Always well written and clearly well researched, I felt this dug deep in both the harrowing acts during The Great Leap Forward and the political aspirations of the communist party with (mostly) easily comprehensible information, even in the vile and incomprehensible acts against humanity.

lostinruins's review

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challenging dark informative sad slow-paced

4.0

Content Warnings

generalheff's review against another edition

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5.0

In Guangshan county, ground zero of the famine, they were met by quiet sobs of despair from famished survivors, huddled in the bitter cold among the rubble of their destroyed homes, surrounded by barren fields marked by graves. The hearths were stone cold, as everything from doors, windows and lintels to the straw roofs had been ripped out for fuel … one in four people in a local population of half a million had perished in Guangshan. Mass graves were dug. Ten infants, still breathing, had been thrown into frozen ground in Chengguan.

This quote, picked effectively at random from the hundreds like it in Frank Dikötter’s masterful work Mao’s Great Famine, speaks for itself. If you want a data-rich, statistically detailed yet always human-focussed, justifiably angry look at the least known tragedy of the twentieth century, this is it.

The book covers the disastrous attempt by the People’s Republic of China to exceed Britain in iron production within fifteen years and catapult itself into the ranks of advanced industrialised nations. This was to be achieved by a series of reforms, mostly involving mass mobilisation of the peasants in the countryside into various work schemes. These include the famous ‘backyard’ foundries that spewed out useless iron, to the less familiar: huge irrigation schemes; attempts at revolutionary farming methods, successful on tiny ‘sputnik fields’ but tragically failing on the countryside at large; or quixotic attempts to rid the country of pests, such as a sparrow purge that (as things always do in nature) led to a much more invasive species, the locust, descending on the fields.

In all of this, the Chinese government under Mao treated its people (especially in the countryside) indescribably badly. In recent years I’ve read a considerable bit about the Russian gulags, famed for their cruelty. Having read Dikötter’s book, I’d wager you’d be hard pressed to decide which was worse.

Hundreds of millions in the countryside were forced off their land, out of their homes and press-ganged into indentured servitude by the state in the name of the common good (indentured because many incurred huge debts trying to buy ultra-scarce food or basic necessities like cloth).

The lives of those who suffered in this way, far beyond anything George Orwell could envisage (writing his famous book, by great irony, in the year the communist party took over China), passes comprehension. I kept having to remind myself throughout: this was not the middle ages; these were not prisoners; this is not fiction; these were ordinary, very real people trying to live their lives and all within my mother’s lifetime.

The damning evidence against the party and the horrors of this book are virtually limitless. Not only were villagers conscripted and worked to death but they were roundly abused and treated like cattle. “Two out of three cadres in Chahua routinely resorted to corporal punishment, depriving villagers who were too weak to work of the right to eat.”. In another horrific section were hear how, in the drive to put more and more fertiliser on fields, everything was ripped down and used, including houses and everything in them. The dead were not spared this final indignity, as some ended up as food for the crops.

The thing that makes this book so impressive is not simply the attention drawn to these awful events and the sensitive way they are discussed. It is the shear challenge of getting the evidence at all. As then, as now, the Chinese government is in no hurry to acknowledge the full toll of the catastrophe, or open up its most secret archives that could tell the best possible picture. This book is a manifest labour of love by an author keen on getting to the truth and keener still on speaking that to the still powerful party that may never admit to what really happened.

Of those who were directly culpable, Dikötter pulls no punches. The author is always clear on the level of knowledge the upper echelons of the party had. Dikötter takes us into the words of Mao at the time to prove there is blood on his hands, pushing hard against the notion that the great famine was simply an unfortunate confluence of natural disasters, poor harvests and economic policy:

In Luliang some 13,000 were reported to have perished: thousands were also starving in Lunan, Luoping, Fuyuan, Shizong and other counties … Xie Fuzhi, the party boss in Yunnan … finally decided to report the losses to Mao in November 1958. The Chairman liked the report. Here, it seemed, was somebody the could rely on to tell him the truth. A year later Xie was promoted … As to the deaths, Mao considered them to be a ‘valuable lesson’.

As to the causes, we have Mao’s words for that too: “Bad people have seized power, causing beatings, deaths, grain shortages and hunger. The democratic revolution has not been completed, as feudal forces, full of hatred towards socialism, are stirring up trouble, sabotaging socialist productive forces.” As the author points out, Mao could not deny the extent of the disaster, but he could “blame the trouble on class enemies”.

When looking over my notes and a few quotes I scribbled down, I was struck by two from opposite ends of the book. The first gives a brilliant precis of the movement as a whole:

The Great Leap Forward was a military campaign fought for a communist paradise in which future plenty for all would largely compensate for the present suffering of a few. Every war had its casualties, some battles would inevitable be lost, and a few ferocious clashes might exact a tragic toll that could have been avoided … but the campaign had to press on.

At the end of the book, the author returns to the military theme in one of the few attempts I’ve seen to try and understand the tragedy from the minds of those who caused it. The deeply unsettling direct quote at the end gives a clear insight into how a system constructed around the supposed good of the many could result in killing 45 million of them instead.

These were not merely martial terms rhetorically deployed … All the leaders were military men … They had spent twenty years fighting a guerrilla war in extreme conditions of deprivation. They had coped with one extermination campaign after another unleashed by the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, and then managed to survive the onslaught of the Japanese army in the Second World War … The glorified violence and were inured to massive loss of life … In 1962, having lost millions of people in his province, Li Jingquan compared the Great Leap Forward to the Long March, in which only one in ten had made it to the end: ‘We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone.’