Review of Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine
When Mao Tse-Tung was alive he was cast alternately as bandit, communist leader, ruthless dictator, elder statesman, and mass murderer. Since his death the characterization is less ambivalent: hedonistic despot, reckless utopian, unbridled monster. The change is anchored in the twists and turns of history. The unfettering of capitalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s manic opening to western capitalism has no interest in seeing Mao in shades of grey. He is part of the troika of twentieth century “Evil:” Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung.
Mao’s rap sheet encompasses two convulsive periods: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former is the evidently clinching event proving Mao’s personal culpability in the murder of tens of millions. So now we get the latest entry in the teeming “Mao is a monster” literature. Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962 is an examination of the Great Leap Forward period of rapid collectivization in the late 1950s early 60s, which coincided with a massive famine and the loss of life for many people. ..
...Dikötter is having his cake and eating it. At the very end of his book he throws out numbers 10 million higher than his introductory estimate and validates them by invoking “figures cited at internal meeting [s],” as if that makes them authoritative. At the same time he covers himself saying we will not know the actual story until the archives open up. He does not and cannot now know, yet he is saying he does.
All this foregoing criticism is not to say bad things did not take place in China in this period, that people died as a result, and that Mao bears no responsibility. They did and he does. That said — and this verdict will elicit a howl of outrage in certain quarters — these questions are not settled in any way. In this respect it is worth bearing in mind that common knowledge has held that “millions” were executed during the Great Purge in the Soviet Union and that “tens of millions” were executed during Stalin’s rule. Because the Soviet archives opened up in an unprecedented way in the early 1990s historian J. Arch Getty was able to access formerly secret records and show such figures as wildly inflated — things are more in the realm of hundreds of thousands executed during the Great Purge and on the level of 2 million deaths overall due to repression.[12] That revised figure does not diminish the horror – but facts do matter.
The totality of what happened during the Great Leap Forward needs to be understood without blinkers. To the degree reckless policy, instrumentalist design, and utopian voluntarism played a role in causing enormous human suffering it needs to be identified and rejected. Yet to the degree that a dynamic was set loose that went beyond the control of those sitting at the levers of power –including natural forces such as drought — those factors too need to be understood. With this there is a need for a respect for history. What China went through in the twentieth century —and there were hideous things long before the Great Leap — is of a piece with what much of the rest of the world had to undergo in striving for development and some degree of justice . We do not need another simple-minded screed justifying a priori verdicts and the status quo. We need to understand what happened in China because any effort to get to a different and better future requires it.
