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

We found 12 Reddit comments about Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

History
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Asian History
Chinese History
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
Walker Company
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12 Reddit comments about Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962:

u/emr1028 · 17 pointsr/politics

> America has done far more damage to the world than any communist.

Please educate yourself before you make such asinine statements. I highly recommend Frank Dikötter's work on the Great Leap Forward, it is the authoritative account of the worst mass murder in recorded history.

u/Johnnyallstar · 13 pointsr/guns

>When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

Chairman Mao

u/evolsdogdogho · 7 pointsr/samharris

When people talk about "genocide" in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China (PRC) (and I use quotation marks to distance myself from the debate of whether these atrocities were technically genocides, not to take a position in that debate), they generally refer to two types of state-driven killing: man-made famines and political violence.

For man-made famines, look into the Holodomer in the Soviet Union (http://www.holodomorct.org/) and the Great Leap Forward in the PRC (https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802779239/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495138467&sr=8-1&keywords=mao%27s+great+famine). For the political violence, learn about labor camps (gulags) in the Soviet Union (http://www.thegulag.org/content/gulag-introduction-3) and the Cultural Revolution in the PRC (https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Last-Revolution-Roderick-MacFarquhar/dp/0674027485/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495138553&sr=8-1&keywords=mao%27s+last+revolution).

Even after accounting for Western bias, it's completely fair to say that communism killed more people in the 20th century than Hitler did (I say this with the caveat that I am much more familiar with the case of China than of the Soviet Union). Here's my argument for why violent atrocities should be attributed as an inherent feature of Marxist thought after a fair amount of study of the PRC:

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx argues per his material dialecticism that persons are made by their relationship to the means of production and that all the suffering of the nineteenth century was due to changes in the relationship of society to the means of production by the creation of a new category of person: the bourgeoisie. Marx's solution to economic problems was both that 1) bourgeoise persons must be eliminated and that 2) the possibility of bourgeoise persons must be eliminated. The leaders of the Soviet Union and of the PRC took these arguments very seriously. The policies that led to the Holodomer famine and the the Great Leap Forward famines were the direct result of Communist leadership attempting to reformulate society in such away that the bourgeoise person becomes impossible. Political violence was intended to either eliminate or reform bourgeoise persons.

Communism and leftist thinking generally leads to violence because it places the sanctity of a set of ideas above the sanctity of life. These are foundational to Marxist thought and not much can be rescued from it without accepting an intellectual path that ultimately justifies innumerable forms of violence in pursuit of the end of violence.

u/iwouldnotdig · 5 pointsr/changemyview

>I've seen this claim a lot, "Communism killed 1xx Million people" on various right-wing plattforms or published by right-wing outlets.

I believe what you meant to say was "in all the serious scholarly work that's been done on the subject."

>And let's also asume that every country today operates under capitalism.

Why would you assume that?

>Under those conditions, preventable deaths in form of dying from hunger (around 8 million) dying of thirst (no decicive number, 1 million was the low end of estimations, so let's go with that) or dying of easily preventable diseases (Again, not a clear number can be found obviously, but the low-end was a couple of millions) should be applied to the current ruling system, just like famines in the USSR and China count towards the death toll of communism.

Well, not exactly. First, your number for modern famine deaths is wildly exagerated. And every modern famine has been the result not of capitalism, but of governments actively trying to starve certain groups of people, which certainly can't be blamed on capitalism. Second, that 100 million figure includes people actively starved to death by communist policies and deliberate murders. It does NOT include people who died from diseases that could have been cured had the people in those societies been wealthier. if you're going to measure people who died incidentally, then you have to include incidental deaths in communist systems as well, and since GDP per capita and life expectancy are strongly correlated, and communist countries substantially underperformed economically, that makes the communist toll even more enormous.

>There is more than enough food, water and medicine for all these deaths to be prevented, I wouldn't count these deaths if there was just not enough for everybody

Why not? A system that doesn't produce enough to feed everyone is a bad system.

>- These people don't have access to said thing because of the mechanics of capitalism (Which is to say: They don't have money to buy said things)

Again, this is not an accurate description of famines in modern times.

>And if you argue that way, than communism improved things too. If the death toll of one ideology is counted from begining to finish, why not the other one?

You should count both, of course, and then compare the two. ANd when you do that, communism comes off much, much worse.

u/IMjust · 5 pointsr/China

Indeed its old and comes from this book by F. Dikotter. The author did manage to access provincial CCP archives, the central one is closed still. After his book China is less into letting foreign researchers seek sensitive sources.
https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802779239

u/jotaroh · 2 pointsr/japan

>but the causes of the famine were very complex

Actually it was not that complex. Mao didn't care all that much about the peasants.

Frank Dikotter's book Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe lays it out pretty clearly.

For instance Mao continued the policy of international grain exports while he knew full well that there were millions starving.

Mao was quoted as saying in Shanghai in 1959: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

u/toryhistory · 1 pointr/changemyview

>we've empirically seen the ways socialist experiments have failed, and thus, we'd adapt our methodology.

But you haven't. You're promising more of the same, and failing in exactly the same way.

>this number is empirically false and goes off of broken assumptions in one book that has been proven, by historical analysis, to be entirely fabricated, more or less.

No, it certainly hasn't.

>t takes into account soviet war deaths, which were not caused by socialism, and also the fact that those war deaths lead to people not being born at all, which i don't think counts as a death.

It most certainly does not. Some estimates start by looking at those sorts of figures as a way of establishing demographic baselines in poorly documented societies, but none of them finish there and that is not where the 100 million figure comes from. You should really read arguments before you dismiss them.

>the overwhelming majority of socialists, give or take, like, two, do not want central planning.

As I said, there are only two options, central planning or markets, and you reject markets. On top of that, you cannot have collective ownership without collective decision making, and that means central planning.

u/Montana_Fish · 1 pointr/politics

how about this one

or this

or this that'll be fun for you to read..

u/WaywardChronicler · 1 pointr/pics

Sure but four urban workers and three farmers don't do much against a tank. It's also shockingly hard to coordinate a whole bunch of people like that, especially in a nation so censor-happy as China. I'm drawing off of half-remembered facts from Dikötter's book here, but I think a lot of what made the Great Famine so devastating is that the government forcefully isolated starving villages to prevent word of famine from spreading.

I don't know, I think the thought that the Chinese or the Koreans or whoever else can just rise up and start a fun democracy is romantic, but I don't think its feasible. Not because of culture, but just plain logistics.

u/Guybrush_Fandango · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Post may get buried, but hey!
I highly recommend reading Mao's Great Famine. By Frank Dikötter.
I lived in China for 11 years, and thought I was pretty aware of most of the crazy shit that went down during the Cultural Revolution.
This book proved me wrong. It was SO much crazier than I had thought.
It was the first (I believe) time that official party documents have been translated and released, and gives a great look at the inner workings of the party and how truly fucked it all was from the get-go.

u/spoofycrisp · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Well, he did get to live in extreme luxury and sleep with multitudes of young women who worshiped him while his country burned around him and the people blamed everyone but him for it. I honestly don't think he gave a shit about anything but himself.

A disgusting, acrid, evil human being he was, but he may well have been brilliant in his own way.

This book provides an excellent summary (backed by tons of data) of this and the thousands of other disastrous mistakes made by Mao and his personality cult, and details his hypocrisy as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802779239