A Winter Soldier's Tale - WARNING! some graphic video shots - disturbing

[Michael Tee]

<<China has delt with several famines during the Mao dynasty and from that ,near starvation would be an improvement.>>

China has been plagued with famine for thousands of years.  In 1944, four million Chinese died in a famine. 
The communists inherited chaos and have been whipping it into shape ever since.  Just not fast enough for plane's taste, apparently.  It's ridiculous to hold the communists responsible for famine when they are the ones, after all the others failed, who have finally licked it.  Partially through measures of population control, as XO has pointed out.  The accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party in bringing China to what will be the dominant country on this planet in less than 100 years are mind-boggling and unprecedented.  And Mao, BTY, did NOT found a dynasty.  The Party chooses its own leaders.

[Plane]

<<China has delt with several famines during the Mao dynasty and from that ,near starvation would be an improvement.>>

China has been plagued with famine for thousands of years.  In 1944, four million Chinese died in a famine. 
The communists inherited chaos and have been whipping it into shape ever since.  Just not fast enough for plane's taste, apparently.  It's ridiculous to hold the communists responsible for famine when they are the ones, after all the others failed, who have finally licked it.  Partially through measures of population control, as XO has pointed out.  The accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party in bringing China to what will be the dominant country on this planet in less than 100 years are mind-boggling and unprecedented.  And Mao, BTY, did NOT found a dynasty.  The Party chooses its own leaders.

The party is the dynasty.
It brooks no alternative , this is its worst fault.

So there was a famine during the war with Japan?

I understand that , but a worse famine than ever before in 59?

Mao presided over the worst famine in human history strictly because of mismanagement.

How on Earth can you suppose that an alternative system would have been worse than the worst that has ever been?


http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619

British Medical Association.

Forty years ago China was in the middle of the world's largest famine: between the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 some 30 million Chinese starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. The famine had overwhelmingly ideological causes, rating alongside the two world wars as a prime example of what Richard Rhodes labelled public manmade death, perhaps the most overlooked cause of 20th century mortality.1 Two generations later China, which has been rapidly modernising since the early 1980s, is economically successful and producing adequate amounts of food. Yet it has still not undertaken an open, critical examination of this unprecedented tragedy.

Summary points


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The largest famine in human history took place in China during 1959-61

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Although drought was a contributory factor, this was largely a manmade catastrophe for which Mao Zedong bears the greatest responsibility

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We will never know the precise number of casualties, but the best demographic reconstructions indicate about 30 million dead

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Two generations later China is yet to openly examine the causes and consequences of the famine

[Xavier_Onassis]

How on Earth can you suppose that an alternative system would have been worse than the worst that has ever been?

=======================================================================
Whether this was the worst famine ever is subject to debate.
You cannot compare it to a theoretical famine under a different regime that never existed.

China has managed to make the economy grow at around 10% annually for over a decade. No nation, Capitalist or Communist, has ever done this before in human history.

The Communist Party of China is not a dynasty. Not only does it appoint very different leaders than the ones that preceded them, it does not vest most of its authority in just one man, either.

Suppose China did have a democracy. The individual vote would count for a very, very small amount. There are 1.3 million Chinese, and one person just has one vote.

Your vote here in the US is nopt worth all that much, as you are still only one vote in a nation of 300,000,000.

On the other hand, if you are Costa Rican, you are one vote in a nation of 4,300,000.
Your vote counts 69 times more than an American's does, and 302 times more than that of one Chinese guy.

The US has had only 43 presidents, but Bolivia has had 80. Think about it.

Michael T's vote counts ten times any American's, because there are 10 times more Americans than Canadians.

[Plane]

How on Earth can you suppose that an alternative system would have been worse than the worst that has ever been?

=======================================================================
Whether this was the worst famine ever is subject to debate.
You cannot compare it to a theoretical famine under a different regime that never existed.

It is subject to debate?

Think about the worst famine in all human history being subject to debate.

In the US or most of the rest of the world this sort of secrecy is not possible .  That a huge event , so huge that it might be the worst that has ever been should be subject to debate is by itself a fact that demonstrates the extreme  evil of a closed society .

This much secrecy is not there to cover up stuff they are proud of. 


I have read reports that minimised the 59 -63 famine , claiming that the 13 million or so people that went missing was the result of an census error. This is an error something like  misplaceing Mexico City.






same link as before..http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619

The origins of the famine can be traced to Mao Zedong's decision, supported by the leadership of China's communist party, to launch the Great Leap Forward. This mass mobilisation of the country's huge population was to achieve in just a few years economic advances that took other nations many decades to accomplish.2 Mao, beholden to Stalinist ideology that stressed the key role of heavy industry, made steel production the centrepiece of this deluded effort. Instead of working in the fields, tens of millions of peasants were ordered to mine local deposits of iron ore and limestone, to cut trees for charcoal, to build simple clay furnaces, and to smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools. Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production, and newly formed agricultural communes planted less land to grain, which at that time was the source of more than 80% of China's food energy.3

At the same time, fabricated reports of record grain harvests were issued to demonstrate the superiority of communal farming. These gross exaggerations were then used to justify the expropriation of higher shares of grain for cities and the establishment of wasteful communal mess halls serving free meals.4 In reality, grain harvest plummeted (fig 1); and since supply and demand of food before 1958 were almost equal, by the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China's provinces.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Mao was a fool, and the Great Leap Forward was a neat slogan, perhaps, but it was actually a leap in the opposite direction.

Stalin deliberately provoked a famine in Ukraine in the 1920s that resulted in the starvation of the Kulaks. Maos Great Leap was due mostly to stupidity.

In any event, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party today has learned greatly from Maos many mistakes, and seem to understand industrial development in a Communist society thru Capitalist investment better than most capitalists do.

In any event, it is certainly unclear that Chiang would have done worse than Mao overall. Maos one talent seems to have been at winning the Revolution. He was not very good at much else after that.

[Plane]

Mao was a fool, and the Great Leap Forward was a neat slogan, perhaps, but it was actually a leap in the opposite direction.

Stalin deliberately provoked a famine in Ukraine in the 1920s that resulted in the starvation of the Kulaks. Maos Great Leap was due mostly to stupidity.

In any event, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party today has learned greatly from Maos many mistakes, and seem to understand industrial development in a Communist society thru Capitalist investment better than most capitalists do.

In any event, it is certainly unclear that Chiang would have done worse than Mao overall. Maos one talent seems to have been at winning the Revolution. He was not very good at much else after that.

I am gonna have to agree with you .

But I really hate it when that happens.

[Michael Tee]

I'd like to know if any organization or source other than the British Medical Association has ever certified to a famine taking 30 million lives during Mao's regime.  I would NOT buy evidence of such a massive event as that unless the evidence were a lot more broadly based.

If the Communist Party is a dynasty in China, so is the Republocrat Party in the U.S.A., with a lot more nepotism in it as well.   Whatever you want to call the CPC is much less important that what it has managed to accomplish.  Calling it a dynasty does not in the least detract from its awe-inspiring success to date.  The sleeping giant has finally awakened.

[Amianthus]

I'd like to know if any organization or source other than the British Medical Association has ever certified to a famine taking 30 million lives during Mao's regime.  I would NOT buy evidence of such a massive event as that unless the evidence were a lot more broadly based.

Here is a list of other sources.

The "official" total admitted to by the Chinese government is 20 million.

[Michael Tee]

<<The "official" total admitted to by the Chinese government is 20 million.>>

The source you linked to doesn't show any official admission by the Chinese government.  Besides I don't trust the Chinese government any more than I trust the U.S. government.  Why wouldn't they say things to blacken Mao's rep if they intend to deviate from Mao's path?

[Amianthus]

The source you linked to doesn't show any official admission by the Chinese government.

Li Chengrui, a former minister of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, estimated 22 million in 1998.

Li Chengrui(李成瑞): Population Change Caused by The Great Leap Movement, Demographic Study, No.1, 1998 pp. 97-111

[Michael Tee]

If Li was a former Minister when he published, it's not an official admission of anything, any more than Scott McClellan's confessions are official admissions of the Bush Administration.

[Plane]

I'd like to know if any organization or source other than the British Medical Association has ever certified to a famine taking 30 million lives during Mao's regime.  I would NOT buy evidence of such a massive event as that unless the evidence were a lot more broadly based.

If the Communist Party is a dynasty in China, so is the Republocrat Party in the U.S.A., with a lot more nepotism in it as well.   Whatever you want to call the CPC is much less important that what it has managed to accomplish.  Calling it a dynasty does not in the least detract from its awe-inspiring success to date.  The sleeping giant has finally awakened.

No one can prove anything.

If I were to assert that five million Americans died of hunger in 63 , or Frenchmen , or Japaneese I could easily be proven wrong.

China has facts like this wrapped up in secrecy , not what you do with facts that cause pride.

Many Chineese under twenty five have never heard of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

If you can edit it out , it didn't happen.

This government nor Mao's deserve to have the benefit of a doubt.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Whatever happened way back when, 40 years ago, it is history and will not be repeated. If it were important to the present situation, which it isn't, you and I, not being Chinese, could not vote even if the Chinese had elections, which they don't.

So what is the point?
Could it be you are wasting electrons needlessly?

[Amianthus]

If Li was a former Minister when he published, it's not an official admission of anything, any more than Scott McClellan's confessions are official admissions of the Bush Administration.

Nothing like reaching. He's a former Minister now, not when he published. He was still Minister in 2000, so unless he left prior to 1998 to publish, then went back to work there afterward, I'd say that his work is "official".

[Michael Tee]

<<China has facts like this wrapped up in secrecy , not what you do with facts that cause pride.>>

Oh.  Kinda like what America does with its floating prisons and outsourced torture programs, eh?  NOW I get it.