The New Literature on China's Great Famine & the Great Leap Forward [黑金政治學02]

14 October 2014 [link youtube]


An overview of new publications including Tombstone [墓碑] by Yang Jisheng [楊繼繩], Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, and The Xinyang Incident [信阳事件] by Qiao Peihua [喬培華], with a rapid introduction to the general subject of the Great Famine & the Great Leap Forward.



Eisel Mazard, 2014.


Youtube Automatic Transcription

leap forward is roughly 50 years behind us,
publications and new research on the subject. of the history of China, and will very rapidly buzzword means (when we talk about "China's with an overview of the emerging literature. is to look at a specific example, in a specific scale of the nation as a whole. a small city in Henan province: it is not important, but it is especially well-researched, to have good archival evidence available in died in the great famine, about one eighth the Chinese government's own sources affirm with very little variation between the estimates. within the same prefecture, quoting archival original population of the commune was 36,691 them died […]." had a population of 45 persons, of whom 44 who went mad." Party] cadres…" (among them 231 cadres), with 558 dying while left permanently disabled, 14 driven to commit a staff of only 1,510 people were responsible one year's time. I'll just note that Guangshan is a long bicycle-ride both in the same prefecture, within Henan famine" (and not a natural disaster), what have discussed and documented the issue, but with the same example of Xinyang prefecture. had more than 500 million kilos of grain stored 1.45 billion kilos, some 2 billion kilos were no one would have starved. "The starving people saw storage silos full for the government to release grain and crying us!" to the grain depots." that created this catastrope of mass starvation specific production unit within the same county, due to lack of food, the production team leader should be lit in the homes of commune members, should leave the commune to escape starvation. "Of the brigade's 25 [Communist] party members, 555 died—490 by starvation, 55 by beatings, for 555 deaths, in the space of less than of this chapter of history has relied in large of what happened, exhumed from archives, and are dead. also imagine how the body-counts add up to contributed to more than 12,000 deaths in the total of more than one million deaths of the prefectures, and work with demographic with a minimum of 30 million deaths, with of 45 million. chapter of history at a small scale, the carnage little photographic evidence available, and images from unrelated famines, to try to provide although they show starving people in China, time (they should be treated as spurious). months of patient work sifting through mountains a single photograph of the catastrophe in of photographic evidence by telling me that cameras, as China was still a poor country. are replete with criminal investigations that the 1950s and 1960s -- mug shots of criminals, documenting land disputes between collective lacked for photographic equipment. "So what happened to the visual evidence of during the Cultural Revolution, probably destroyed one of these spurious photographs: the starving 1946 by George Silk. poverty and starvation prior to the Communist the sort of inconsistency that denialists of people who are in denial about the great or deny that it happened at all. ones, the only images you'll find from this never see starvation; and this was indeed forcibly starved to death, and facing extreme it. arrived at through archival sources, such total of 45 million, using a different methodology. between scholars, but no, actually, the contentions impolite (with disagreements between the two the famine use much lower numbers, but due respectable sources using estimates below number of years that are included in defining years of the famine will tend to speak of been colloquially known as "the three bitter reasons, defining the disaster in terms of from 1958 to 1962 (note that this does not that was considered to have ended in 1960). subject, you need to stop somewhere, but there famine period right up to 1965. you can see that it's not until 1965 that levels. use a shorter time-frame. Famine and the failures of the Great Leap in English, by a journalist living in Hong book inside China, it is clear that the mere and set new research projects in motion. tremendous emotional and intellectual impact, wanted to make excuses for Communism, partly also because it relied on eye-witness accounts, (rather than the type of smoking-gun evidence Becker's work were correct to do so; on the up many of his observations, but he lacked that later books would indeed provide. was the research of Qiao Peihua, focussed video: Xinyang prefecture. I cannot find any evidence that it was ever promised that it would be). work was already circulating in the year 2000, you'll find that it is cited and named as more recently than 2009. the sort of massive, documentary evidence we may say that Yang Jisheng's enormous two-volume to be taken seriously. have read the whole thing, this book has had some of the basic facts about this period vignettes along with hundreds and hundreds government's own archives. Yang Jisheng writes as an insider, as someone the Communist Party, and as someone who was this book just in the form of a summary or they're aware that a mountain of evidence epoch in the evaluation of 20th Century China's came out during the years when Yang's work translation). relatively easy to read, and relatively easy translated into English in 2012, it was reduced that came before, and the 2012 study by Zhou a different geographical focus: she worked end of a period of new archival sources inspiring source documents became available to researchers, described by Yang and others, who struggled archives. new studies, although struggles with government in some ways the least interesting of historical political interest primarily because of the English, because they contained original interviews these are also significant as studies of particular and each cluster of communes had significantly history. the subject, and introducing the new literature. now? Chinese propaganda slogan of studying the there's an impulse to memorialize and mourn of China's history is now being used to challenge a hopeless plea for accountability in a country and to call for an end to an era of totalitarianism in China.