<<You have knoledge of someone more communist than Mao?
<<How did this person fare as a leader?>>
I don't think you understood the post you were responding to. What I was asking for was details of the alleged famine that Mao supposedly caused. It was sure as hell news to me.
Oh that;
T you often strike me as a well educated and well read person , that one of the biggest events of human suffering during the twentyeth century escaped your notice is unexpected.
Type a web search for Mao , China , starve and you get a few hundred thousand hits , of course this only proves that a lot of people are talking , but till now you have not heard of this?
http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/0805056688http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/famine/chinese-famine-of-1958-1961/Ironically, the Chinese Communists, led by Mao Tse-Tung, prevailed in the civil
war in part because they won the support of peasants by promising equitable
land redistribution and an end to famine. Instead, in 1958-61 the Communist
agricultural policies created the worst famine in human history.
To understand the cause of the Chinese famine, first the reader must look
back to the Soviet famine of 1931-3.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619Forty 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.
http://www.solopassion.com/node/2322In the late 50's as Chairman Mao Ze Dong solidified power in "Revolutionary China" he sought to increase the standing of China on the international scene. To do this, China had to sell it's primary domestic product; food. Of course in China most people producing food consumed the food they were producing. The communist party of China issued new orders and directives, every bit of food produced by the population would be 'given' to the government, who would then re-distribute it according to who needed it, or rather, according to what would benefit the oppressive rulers the most. Mao's ruling part of China began a campaign to become one of the world's largest agricultural exporters. Farmers were forced to hand over at gun point the food they were growing while they were starving. ...........In all, historians estimate, about 35 million Chinese peasants starved to death during this period in the absolute worst human famine to have ever occurred,.....
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htmSource List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm
Guinness Book of World Records:
Although nowadays they don't come right out and declare Mao to be the Top Dog in the Mass Killings category, earlier editions (such as 1978) did, and they cited sources which are similar, but not identical, to the Glaser & Possony sources:
On 7 Apr. 1969 the Soviet government radio reported that 26,300,000 people were killed in China, 1949-65.
In April 1971 the cabinet of the government of Taiwan reported 39,940,000 deaths for the years 1949-69.
The Walker Report (see below): between 32,2500,000 and 61,700,000.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47616A noted expert in calculating the number of deaths caused by authoritarian regimes says the late Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung's policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi Party founder Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.
R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science and a Nobel Peace Prize finalist who has published dozens of books chronicling so-called "democide," or death by government, said the new Chinese figure ? nearly double his previous estimate of about 38 million ? was based on what he believes was Mao's duplicity in China's great famine of 1958 to 1961.
I believed that Mao's policies were responsible for the famine, but he was misled about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies," Rummel said. "Therefore, I argued, this was not a democide."
But after further review of available data, he said he agreed with other researchers who had counted the famine figures as part of the regime's mass murder figures.
"They were right and I was wrong," he said.
Rummel said he was influenced to revise his figures upward after reading a pair of books, "Wild Swans: Two Daughters of China," by Jung Chang; and "Mao: the Unknown Story," which Jung wrote with her husband, Jon Halliday.
"From the biography of Mao, which I trust ? I can now say that yes, Mao's policies caused the famine. He knew about it from the beginning," Rummel said, adding Mao even "tried to take more food from the people to pay for his lust for international power, but was overruled by a meeting of 7,000 top Communist Party members."
"So, the famine was intentional. What was its human cost? I had estimated that 27 million Chinese starved to death or died from associated diseases. Others estimated the toll to be as high as 40 million. Chang and Halliday put it at 38 million and, given their sources, I will accept that," said Rummel. "I'm now convinced that Stalin exceeded Hitler in monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin."
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5055874/Mao-and-the-Australian-Maoists.htmlArticle Excerpt
IN DECEMBER 1993, to mark the centenary of the birth of Mao Tse-tung, the Melbourne Age commissioned an opinion piece from Albert Langer, who as a student activist in the 1960s had been the best-known public face of Maoism in Australia. Around the time Langer accepted the invitation, Western culture had been beset by a vogue for big, showpiece political apologies: Bill Clinton apologised for slaver, the Queen apologised for British imperialism, the Pope even apologised for the Crusades. But it never occurred to Langer to follow suit.
He wrote at a time when the populations of Eastern Europe had just revealed what they thought of their former communist rulers by throwing them all out of office, and when China was finally pulling itself out of poverty by developing a capitalist economy. Rather than the end of socialism, Langer portrayed this merely as its "low tide". It would inevitably be followed by another high tide like the one he enjoyed in his youth. The impasse into which the Left had fallen, he wrote, would not last forever. "As Mao points out," Langer declared, "there is an alternative--rebellion, straggle, the right for socialism ... Happy birthday Mao Tse-tung!"
When Mao's next major milestone, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, arrived in 1999 Australian Book Review commissioned another 1960s Maoist, Humphrey McQueen, to write its annual La Trobe University Essay. By this time, McQueen was less of an enthusiast than Langer. He had now, he said, lost all sympathy with the regime. But he still claimed the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was justified for attempting to bring backward rural China into the modern world, and he still considered Mao a great intellect. "Far from seeing Mao Tse-tung-Thought as sloganeering," McQueen wrote, "I knew how demanding his ideas could be."
When the review commissioned McQueen it could hardly have been unaware of the radical shift in Western opinion about the nature of Mao's regime. This was partly the result of Jung Chang's best-selling 1991 book Wild Swans." Three Daughters of China, which told the story of how her own once-dedicated Maoist family, and many others like it, had been humiliated, imprisoned and destroyed by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. When Jasper Becker's book Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine revealed in 1995 that Mao had caused between 30 and 40 million people to starve to death during the so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, the horror of the regime was there for all to see. But McQueen's reminiscences mentioned none of this.
It is unlikely that future Chinese anniversaries will be celebrated by anyone in the Australian media in the same way. Mao Tse-tung now stands revealed as the greatest mass murderer in human history. We now have plausible evidence that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people, a tally larger than that achieved by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined. In their new biography Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday attribute 38 million of these deaths to the great Chinese famine of 1958-61. Another 27 million were executed or worked to death between 1950 and 1976 in Mao's gulag of prisons and labour camps. During the initial nationwide campaign of terror to consolidate his regime from October 1950 to October 1951, Mao oversaw three million Chinese killed by execution, mob violence and suicide. A further three million suffered the same fate after 1966 at the hands of the Red Guards and other protagonists of the Cultural Revolution.
Although some of Mao's Australian sympathisers, such as Linda Jaivin writing in the Bulletin, have tried to nitpick Chang and Halliday's total of 70 million dead, their figure is, if anything, conservative. For instance, the 38 million death toll they attribute to the great famine is around the middle of the recorded range. Jasper Becker cited reliable Western demographers who argued at least 30 million died but he also quoted several Chinese estimates that each recorded a total of more than 40 million. One source was the senior Communist Party official Chen Yizi who in 1979 was appointed by Premier Zhao Ziyang to find out what really happened in 1958-61. Chen led a team of 200 officials who visited every province to examine internal party documents and records. His report put the total at between 43 and 46 million dead.
Moreover, Chang and Halliday reveal how much responsibility Mao had for this particular catastrophe. Becker had attributed the famine largely to the ideological folly of a failed experiment in collectivisation. Chang and Halliday produce new evidence to show it was more sinister than that. Mao's regime confiscated Chinese harvests during the Great Leap Forward so it could export food to communist-controlled Eastern Europe in exchange for armaments and political support. Food and money were also exported to support anti-colonial and communist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the first year of famine, 1958-59, China exported seven million tons of grain, enough to feed 38 million people. In 1960, a year in which 22 million Chinese died of starvation, China was the biggest international aid donor in terms of proportion of GNP in the world. Thanks to Chinese agricultural exports, East Germany was able to lift food rationing in 1958, and Albania in 1961.
In China at the same time a major food source for the urban population became the "food substitute" chlorella, a disgusting substance that grew in urine and contained a little protein. In the countryside, starving Chinese peasants were reduced to eating bark and compost and, in Anhui and Gansu provinces, to cannibalism. In Chinese cities in 1960, the maximum daily intake was 1200 calories, compared to the 1300-1700 calories a day fed to the inmates of Auschwitz.
The huge size of the Chinese population, around 600 million in 1960, gave Mao many more potential victims than were available to either Hitler or Stalin. What made Mao the greater monster was not just the sheer quantity of his killings. It was because so many of his victims came not only from his real and imagined enemies but from his own supporters. Chang and Halliday show that Mao built his political power out of a lifelong strategy that easily outdid even Stalin in waging murder and terror among his own Communist Party comrades.
MAO WAS NEVER the agrarian reformer his Western supporters claimed. He redistributed no land and liberated no peasants. His initial "red base" at Ruijin in Jiangxi province, southern China, had been achieved not by a revolutionary uprising of the masses but through military conquest by the Red Army, armed and funded by Moscow. His rule was identical to that of an occupying army, surviving by plundering the local population and killing anyone who resisted.
The system of control established at Ruijin from 1931-34 was introduced by Chou...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
