

Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead - tjaerv
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20410424

======
tjaerv
A related work is the The Black Book of Communism:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-
Repression/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-
Repression/dp/0674076087)

"Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs
recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual,
practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture,
famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it
amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze
the crimes of Communism over seventy years. [...] As the death toll mounts—as
many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7
million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and
why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it
quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting,
this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of
Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth
century."

~~~
Volpe
Just like Nuclear Power != chernobyl

Stalinism != Communism

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AdelsonVLandis
The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in
Ireland in the 1840s? I guess they're too busy digging up the
Chinese..."commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all
those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China
British"...China had famines for thousands of years, including in the 20th
century before the communists took over. The one they mention is their last
one. The unusual thing is not the 1961 famine but that there have been no
famines in China for a half century. Because the communists smashing the Four
Olds and industrializing the country and kicking out the foreign imperialists
got the country on track. Of course the British ignore the famines they cause,
and dig up so-called famines by their former imperial conquests. China would
not have had to industrialize so quickly if England was not threatening China
from Hong Kong and so forth. That does not count of course. Thankfully, anti-
imperialists are crashing into the US/UK all the time now, showing those
hubris-filled imperialists who live by the sword shall feel the sword coming
from the other end as well.

~~~
danso
1\. The author profiled by the BBC is not an agent of the BBC.

2\. The author asserts that the Chinese famine is unique in that it occurred
despite the lack of pressure from natural disasters. The Irish potato famine
was exacerbated by the blight.

3\. The estimate for the Chinese famine is 36 million dead and dwarfs the
death toll of the previous Chinese famines. The potato famine death toll was
about 1 million.

~~~
morsch
FWIW and from what I can tell, that is 1 million out of a total Irish
population of 6 million at the time (1845, Wolfram Alpha), versus 36 million
out of a total population of 682 million (1960, W.A.). So in 1 in 6 vs 1 in
20.

So one could argue that the Great Famine was a much more widespread (factor
100 population), but less severe (factor 1/3 mortality) catastrophe.
Disregarding all other factors such as causation. The "baseline" mortality due
to starvation may also have been different in both instances.

Of course such number games are both cynical and insufficient to deal with the
subject (e.g. your point 2).

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Dikötter's 2010 work _Mao's Great
Famine_ , seems like a very similar book with very similar conclusions.

~~~
lukeschlather
As long as we're playing number games, the combined population of Ireland and
the UK was 28 million in 1845 according to WA. If we're going to blame the UK,
we should probably include citizens of the UK in the tally. Really, it's hard
to make a direct comparison since it appears to me that we're trying to
compare a problem in a single province controlled by the UK and a general
problem across all of China. If Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and India
had all had huge famines in 1845 that might be a little more comparable to the
Chinese famine.

But as you say it's not incredibly instructive to look at it by the numbers.

~~~
anthonyb
You might want to read up on UK/Irish history before you call Ireland a
province of the UK.

~~~
anthonyb
Not sure why the downvotes, but it's true. Ireland was an occupied state, and
most of its food production went overseas to the UK. Including England in the
total population makes no sense.

~~~
lukeschlather
I was using province in the classical Roman sense. Ireland did not have self-
determination.

Removing England from the tallies would be like removing members of the
Chinese communist party from the population of China. You're basically making
the tacit assumption that the oppressors had no right to the food and
therefore the fact that they did not have a famine is irrelevant. There's an
interesting argument there, but you're not actually making it, you're just
manipulating the numbers to tell a specific story.

~~~
anthonyb
The whole of Europe had potato crop failures at the same time, but only
Ireland had famine. Imagine, in China's case that xighur had a famine while
the rest didn't. Now does it make sense to include the whole country in the
statistics?

You might as well include France in the stats too...

------
tjaerv
"Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61
was a natural disaster."

~~~
fleitz
Ask your government what happend during the dustbowl years and what lifted the
people out of starvation...

Ask them whether people starved to death because of crop failures or the
agricultural policy of the new deal... then try to figure out why crops would
be burned while people starved.

~~~
danso
Government offices are closed today because of Thanksgiving, so what's the
answer?

In the book "Tombstone" (the book by the author in the OP), the author
reiterates the claim that no democracy has ever suffered from a major famine,
but are you asserting an equivalency?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great-
shame...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great-
shame.html?_r=0)

> _The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could
> undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political
> legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was
> the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no
> major famine has ever occurred in a democracy._

~~~
fleitz
I believe the potato famine would count as a famine occurring in a democracy.

~~~
anthonyb
Ireland under UK rule was hardly a democracy.

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DanielBMarkham
Kind of a wake-up call for me. In the west we'll have some incident where a
few people were killed, say the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, and
there'll be books, movies, TV specials, and so forth.

In other countries you lose 36 million people -- six times the size of the
holocaust in WWII -- and you're not supposed to even ask any questions about
it.

We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.

~~~
fleitz
They have great leaps forward, we have wars on drugs. They aren't allowed to
know when their troops fire on civilians in Tienamen square, we aren't allow
to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country.

They have celebrated massacres too...

We might write books about St Valentines but many fewer are written about the
trail of tears, mainly because St Valentines serves a political purpose where
as the trail of tears does not.

It's all "five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains"

~~~
derleth
Hm. If the US and China are morally the same, why are there so few Americans
moving to China?

I mean, they shouldn't be able to tell the difference in styles of government,
am I right?

~~~
olalonde
I'm a Canadian who has moved to China. One of the reasons I decided to move
here was that everyday life feels more "free" in China (as long as you don't
get involved in politics). However, I would never argue that the Chinese
government is more transparent than any Western government and when it comes
to political freedom/freedom of press, there is no comparison possible.

On the other hand, I'd say that life in China is in many ways more compatible
with libertarian values then Canada/US. If you are socialist/communist
leaning, you probably won't like China.

Here's a related comment I posted a few days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766206>

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oezaxs
I want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.

~~~
tjaerv
[http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-
Famine-1958-1962-ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-
Famine-1958-1962-ebook/dp/B008MWNEXI)

~~~
danso
I bought the ebook a few days ago, almost obsessed with detail though I
suppose that was the author's intent. It has a very poignant opening, with the
author describing e lengths to which his parents cared for him, and how long
it took for him to realize how Mao's policies led to his father's death.

In many ways, it reads like a non fictional 1984

------
andybak
Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".

~~~
tokenadult
_Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts"._

Yes.

[http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-
Famine/dp/08...](http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-
Famine/dp/0805056688)

