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From the Left Bank to the Australian parliament, many in the West chose to praise Mao's regime by dismissing evidence of the horror of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, writes Chris Berg and Sabine Wolff.
here's no longer an excuse for any illusions about the horrors of China under Mao Zedong.
Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, has taken advantage of new laws regarding the archiving of Chinese Communist Party records to produce a meticulous catalogue of the horror and tyranny of the early years of the Maoist regime.
His new book, Mao's Great Famine , does two things comprehensively: it provides a gruesome and impeccably sourced account of the Great Famine that accompanied the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward, and it attributes the ensuing destruction to Mao's particular brand of communism and rapid forced industrialisation. Stories of the hunger, fear, and brutality of the Maoist regime are interspersed with criticisms that cut to the core of communist ideology: the reader is left in no doubt that Mao was a paranoid tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions, but equally, one is forced to appreciate the importance of individual incentives and private property, and the disconnect between Maoist idealism and the realities of the human condition.
Mao's Great Famine is not particularly long, but it makes for challenging reading. The total number of excess deaths from Mao's famine is estimated at a minimum 45 million, with some scholars suggesting that in light of new evidence, the number of dead could be as high as 50-60 million. The figures, official and estimated, are shocking, but the great power of this book is in the stories of hunger, disease and violence taken from official records and occasionally, from survivors. By the time one reaches the second last chapter, on instances of cannibalism during the famine, a sort of intellectual and emotional exhaustion sets in.
Dikötter begins by characterising the Great Leap Forward as a direct consequence of Mao's paranoia and fears of inadequacy. Spurred on by a desire to outdo Khrushchev, and in the belief that China had...