Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

by Frank Dikötter

Overview

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize

An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China.

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802779281
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	287,250
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Frank Dikötter is chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Asia in 2006, he was professor of the modern history of China at the University of London. He has published ten books about the history of China, including Mao's Great Famine, which won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011, and The Tragedy of Liberation, which was short-listed for the George Orwell Prize. He lives in Hong Kong.
Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His books have changed the way historians view China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his award-winning People's Trilogy documenting the lives of ordinary people under Mao. He is married and lives in Hong Kong.

Read an Excerpt

MAO'S GREAT FAMINE

THE HISTORY OF CHINA'S MOST DEVASTATING CATASTROPHE, 1958-1962

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By FRANK DIKÖTTER

Walker & Co.

Copyright © 2010 Frank Dikotter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7768-3

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Preface

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. By unleashing China's greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would 'walk on two legs': the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all. In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism. People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party's every dictate. Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from MAO'S GREAT FAMINE by FRANK DIKÖTTER Copyright © 2010 by Frank Dikotter. Excerpted by permission of Walker & Co.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................ix
Chronology....................xvii
Map....................xxii
1. Two Rivals....................3
2. The Bidding Starts....................10
3. Purging the Ranks....................15
4. Bugle Call....................25
5. Launching Sputniks....................34
6. Let the Shelling Begin....................43
7. The People's Communes....................47
8. Steel Fever....................56
9. Warning Signs....................67
10. Shopping Spree....................73
11. Dizzy with Success....................84
12. The End of Truth....................90
13. Repression....................100
14. The Sino-Soviet Rift....................104
15. Capitalist Grain....................108
16. Finding a Way Out....................116
17. Agriculture....................127
18. Industry....................145
19. Trade....................155
20. Housing....................163
21. Nature....................174
22. Feasting through Famine....................191
23. Wheeling and Dealing....................197
24. On the Sly....................208
25. 'Dear Chairman Mao'....................215
26. Robbers and Rebels....................224
27. Exodus....................230
28. Children....................245
29. Women....................255
30. The Elderly....................263
31. Accidents....................269
32. Disease....................274
33. The Gulag....................287
34. Violence....................292
35. Sites of Horror....................306
36. Cannibalism....................320
37. The Final Tally....................324
Epilogue....................335
Acknowledgements....................339
An Essay on the Sources....................341
Select Bibliography....................349
Notes....................363
Index....................405

Editorial Reviews

Taking advantage of newly opened Party archives, Dikötter, a University of London historian who has specialized in modern China, presents a bleak, gruesomely detailed account of perhaps history's worst famine. A decade after assuming power, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, designed to quickly develop his impoverished nation, substituting mass action for planning and investment. A catastrophe followed. Forests were destroyed to feed 500,000 backyard blast furnaces that produced expensive but poor quality iron. Under miserable conditions, factory workers fulfilled hopelessly optimistic quotas with shoddy goods. Coerced into communes, millions of subsistence farmers neglected their fields to labor on poorly planned dams or irrigation projects; others demolished houses and barns to use as fertilizer. Falsifying figures, local officials proclaimed vast increases in food production. Shipping off the usual fraction of actual production for urban provisions and exports left little behind, so peasants starved; more than 40 million Chinese died. This is not a historical overview but an intensively researched litany of suffering, packed with statistics, grim anecdotes, and self-serving explanations by leaders responsible for the devastation. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read.” —Jung Chang, author of Mao: The Unknown Story

“Mao's Great Famine is a gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve, that tells the gripping story of the manmade famine that killed 45 million people, from the dictator and his henchmen down to the villages of rural China.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Despite Beijing's new openness over the past few decades, there are still whole parts of contemporary Chinese history that Party officials have managed to keep largely hidden from the scrutiny of the outside world. The 1959-60 Great Great Leap Forward, Mao's epic effort of revolutionary will power to force China's peasantry into socialism through the rapid communization of agriculture, is such a period. However, by managing to gain access to unplumbed regional Chinese archives and other new materials, Frank Dikotter has helped throw back the shroud on this period of monumental, man-made catastrophe. With both narrative vigor and scholarly rigor, Mao's Great Famine documents how Mao Zedong's impetuosity was not only the demise of many of his far more politically level-headed comrades-in-arms, but also of tens of millions of ordinary Chinese who perished unnecessarily in this spasm of revolutionary extremism.” —Orville Schell, Author and Director of the Center on US-China relations at the Asia Society

“A direct, hard-hitting study of China's Great Leap Forward in light of newly opened archival material … A horrifically eye-opening work of a dark period of Chinese history that desperately cries out for further examination.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An intensively researched litany of suffering, packed with statistics, grim anecdotes, and self-serving explanations by leaders responsible for the devastation.” —Publishers Weekly

“Dikotter has done a service to history and, when they are allowed to read it, to the Chinese themselves.” —Bloomberg

“This is an important work illustrating the dangers of one individual holding power to force millions to fulfill his personal fantasies.” —Booklist

“Uses newly opened archives and original interviews to detail the calamity in calm, if unavoidably grisly, detail.” —NewYorker.com

“Aided by newly released historical documents detailing the savage infighting and backstabbing of those in power and the extent of the nationwide damage, Dikötter has produced one of the best single-volume resources on the topic.” —Library Journal

“This emphasis on how party violence exacerbated the death toll sets Dikötter's book apart from other studies of the Great Leap Forward … Books like his may help force the atrocities, and the debate, back to the surface.” —Newsweek

“Dikötter tells the story with vivid new details…His relentlessly clinical, morally intense account of filth, disease, and hunger is both fascinating and numbing.” —Foreign Affairs

“In Mao's Great Famine, historian Frank Dikötter assembles a treasure chest of these historic facts, but more important, he strokes them together into a masterly and memorable story…ranks among the best documentation available on the Great Leap Forward.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Haunting… Dikötter succeeds in his dark task of cataloguing the awesome scale of [Mao's] crime.” —New Republic

“Groundbreaking… Dikötter found new evidence of the massive and spectacular violence.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune


“Frank Dikötter's thoroughly researched book will help ensure that the country's present-day insecurities do not allow this dark past to be forgotten entirely… His findings are astounding…"Mao's Great Famine" makes for very grim reading in parts. But the sheer volume of previously hidden facts allows a much clearer and more damning picture to emerge, making a critical contribution to Chinese history.” —Wall Street Journal

“A riveting and heartbreaking and illuminating read by an expert in the field…Mao's madness comes through on every page. A MUST READ.” —Travel Watch

“In terrifying detail, Dikotter elucidates the cult-like world of Maoism and the sycophancy of the Chairman’s inner circle…precise details of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution wouldn’t emerge until much later—and in the case of Dikotter’s book, which is the most detailed account published in English, a half century later…[a] masterpiece of historical investigation. ” —Commentary

“[A] tour of the follies, inefficiencies, and deceptions of Mao's commandeered economy…[a] vivid catalogue of horrors…Focussing relentlessly on Mao's character and motivations, Dikötter confirms the man's reputation as sadistic, cowardly, callous, and vindictive….[a] bold portrait.” —New Yorker

“[A] seminal and must-read book.” —Sify.com

“For those Chinese students who want a reliable and readable account of what really happened, my standard advice has been to read Hungry Ghosts, by the British journalist Jasper Becker.4 But Becker's work has now been largely superseded by the pathbreaking Mao's Great Famine by the social historian Frank Dikötter… This is a first-class piece of research…. [Mao] will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured. Dikötter's book will have done much to put him there.” —New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

Despite Beijing's new openness over the past few decades, there are still whole parts of contemporary Chinese history that Party officials have managed to keep largely hidden from the scrutiny of the outside world. The 1959-60 Great Leap Forward, Mao's epic effort of revolutionary will power to force China's peasantry into socialism through the rapid communization of agriculture, is such a period. However, by managing to gain access to unplumbed regional Chinese archives and other new materials, Frank Dikotter has helped throw back the shroud on this period of monumental, man-made catastrophe. With both narrative vigor and scholarly rigor, Mao's Great Famine documents how Mao Zedong's impetuosity was not only the demise of many of his far more politically level-headed comrades-in-arms, but also of tens of millions of ordinary Chinese who perished unnecessarily in this spasm of revolutionary extremism.

Author and Director of the Center on US-China rela Orville Schell

From 1958 to 1962, Mao Zedong oversaw a massive collectivization, announced to the world as his "Great Leap Forward," an attempt to push China, both agriculturally and industrially, into the 20th century. Instead Mao destroyed the lives of millions of Chinese, forcing them to work under inhuman conditions on "the people's" farms. A devastating famine that killed approximately 30 million resulted from poor planning, execution, and widespread corruption. When even Mao's closest colleagues began to point out this folly, Mao consolidated his power and continued down this road of devastation with the "Great Cultural Revolution" (1966–76). Dikötter (Sch. of Oriental & African Studies, Univ. of London; The Discourse of Race in Modern China) writes a compelling account of the Great Leap Forward. VERDICT Aided by newly released historical documents detailing the savage infighting and backstabbing of those in power and the extent of the nationwide damage, Dikötter has produced one of the best single-volume resources on the topic. Although a scholarly, heavily footnoted work, its flowing narrative—effectively a cautionary tale on the destructive powers of misguided ambition and blind hubris—reads well. Recommended for specialists as well as interested general readers.—Glenn Masuchika, Pennsylvania State University Lib., University Park

Library Journal