[hnbad]

To elaborate on Soviet and Maoist "administrative failures": both governments heavily relied on central planning and thus transferred authority from individual farmers to the bureaucracy. This often meant bureaucrats would set export quotas based on calculations rather than merely exporting excess product and making decisions based on spreadsheets rather than relevant expertise.

From what I can gather, the unofficial story behind the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward seems to be that Chinese bureaucrats fell for exaggerated claims about farming techniques used in the Soviet Union and pivoted the farmers to using those techniques and set quotas based on the expected returns. When the results didn't match the calculations, nobody wanted to (likely, literally) bite the bullet so they tried to make good on the overpromised exports, starving the local populations.

Much like the Chernobyl incident, this was more of a case of bad judgement followed by a rigid chain of command playing chicken with a catastrophe to avoid taking responsibility for a comparably minor gaffe.

Of course the CCP didn't want its bureaucracy to appear incompetent and for the US it was more useful as anti-communist propaganda to frame it as mass murder than administrative failure, so neither side has been particularly honest about it in most "official" material until the end of the (first?) Cold War.

If you want to point out deliberate mass murders by China or the Soviet Union there were plenty of those (e.g. Mao killing the landlords) but in terms of scale they don't really compare.

EDIT: Also if you seriously want to count famines as mass murder, you won't like hearing about what the British did in India.

[rsj_hn]

> This often meant bureaucrats would set export quotas based on calculations rather than merely exporting excess product and making decisions based on spreadsheets rather than relevant expertise.

The official story is false. They knew what was happening -- they had agents in every village, who amazingly were always well fed. There were regular visits and inspections. Look, both the USSR and China had mass famines in the countryside, and it was for the same reason:

They wanted to rapidly industrialize which meant the creation of a large factory worker class in rapidly growing urban areas. This required a smaller and more productive agrarian class with surplus food being shipped to cities.

But rather than wait and let normal urbanization take its course, they simply transferred populations to the city and confiscated all the food that was needed to feed this class, letting a fraction - about 10% of the rural population - starve to death. The remaining farmers were forced to work harder to make up for their dead colleagues and this was accomplished via intimidation and near-slavery conditions. That is, at the end of the day, what forced agricultural collectivization was all about. It was to make up for the fact that a lot of the farmers would not be given food. And everyone understood what this was about.

It was intentional democide to free up mouths to eat in the cities, in order to achieve rapid industrialization.

[hnbad]

I find it weird that you trust the inspections to have been genuine when the bureaucracy was so infamous for corruption, shifting the blame and being guided by a culture of fear. It's also unsurprising that the bureaucrats in charge were better fed while the populace was starving: both the USSR and China only managed to replace the ruling class rather than abolish the class divide altogether, regardless of the at times drastic measures they attempted. The Soviet Union literally put former oligarchs back in charge because they "needed the expertise".

The Great Leap Forward was remarkably incompetent in many parts exactly due to the same circumstances I described: forcing ordinary citizens to produce shoddy steel in their backyards to meet quotas for example. You seem to give Mao and the mid-century CCP a lot more credit than they deserved.

[rsj_hn]

> I find it weird that you trust the inspections

Well, that's something for you to work out. China was great at monitoring the population. If there was a Christian missionary somewhere in those villages they would have been swiftly found (and they were). But you think 50 million people dying and Mao didn't know? Entire villages wiped off the map and no one noticed? Emaciated bodies walking around, children with distended bellies everywhere and it was a secret? Remember for every one that died, there are 100 more walking skeletons that didn't. No serious historian believes this:

Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward," Mao warned colleagues a year later. "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill."

And it was the exact same thing that happened in the USSR when they did the same rapid industrialization program and the same forced collectivization scheme, done for the same reason, in the 30s. Even up to similar proportions of the agricultural population dying. No one is claiming that the Soviets didn't know they were starving the countryside to enable rapid urbanization - they rode up with trucks and took all of the food from the farms, across the entire countryside. So, I don't understanding the apology for Mao here, we have logic, we have precedent, we have a documentary record, and we have his own speeches.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...