Mao's Great Famine
The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
'A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
'A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking advantage of newly opened Party archives, Dik tter, 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.
