Received Professor Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine yesterday, the first comprehensive scholarly work on the GLF since Jaspar Becker's Hungry Ghosts. Professor Dikotter estimates that 48,000,000 were killed. That is far higher than previous estimates, e.g. Chang and Halliday's 30,000,000. At numbers like that though, the mind (my mind anyway) has trouble comprehending.
The Chinese government has officially decreed the Cultural Revolution the greatest catastrophe to hit the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party since the founding of the People's Republic. The CR was the biggest hit the CCP ever took but it's not even close in comparison to what the GLF did to the Chinese people.
Nine hundred million of China's one billion four hundred million people are peasants. GLF misery was concentrated on that larger two-thirds. Chinese in the cities noticed some shortages of food but they didn't starve. And they had no idea what was happening in the countryside. Not even the leadership of the CCP knew. The GLF was Mao's creation and he would not hear of failure so only falsified reports on the catastrophe made their way to the Center. Marshal Peng Deuhai was the first to confront Mao over the GLF, at Lushan in 1959. Marshal Peng was purged. It was only in 1961 when leaders went to the countryside to check on conditions for themselves that the madness was stopped, by Liu Shaoqi. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962 Liu (in indirect Chinese terms) blamed Mao for the catastrophe. Mao seemingly stepped aside and President Liu became the day-to-day head of state. But Mao only seemed to step aside. In reality he was plotting his revenge on Liu and those who supported Liu. Mao's revenge was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Liu Shaoqi was its main and one of its first prominent targets.
The Cultural Revolution played out mainly in the cities of China. Scholarly access to CR history therefore is infinitely greater than is GLF history. The educated were among the CR's first victims. It is natural then that far more writing has been done on the CR than on the GLF. The educated can write, the peasants cannot. But the Cultural Revolution grew directly out of the Great Leap, the one inevitably following the other for Mao Zedong, and for China. It is for all of these reasons that Professor Dikotter's book is so important.
