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by hnbad
1694 days ago
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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. |
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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...