Mao Zedong's famine

[ilaughatrightwingers]

Run time: 14:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGRuKqvU7o   Posted on YouTube: December 03, 2010 By YouTube Member: MaoistRebelNews2 Views on YouTube: 90   Posted on DU: December 03, 2010 By DU Member: ilaughatrightwingers Views on DU: 1337

 
Someone tell me how accurate this video is.

[HEyHEY]

1. I can't watch it... thanks to Mao personally. What's in it?

[Bucky]

9. approximately this:

This is what the Maoist guy looks like. My comments will appear in red.

1. "No one causes famines on purpose" and thus Mao couldn't have caused deaths deliberately "because doing so would make Mao look bad."

2. "So-called research" has "ridiculously wild numbers" because their estimates vary so widely

3. If they say "Mao caused the famine" how come they don't also say that other leaders (like the British in "Benegal" (sic) or the Irish Potato Famine) caused famines that happened under their leadership? No, those are accidents.

4. The British insisted on have potatoes exported from Ireland to England during the Blight b/c they had money (capital) and 125 million died in India b/c of capitalist development; the "greatest murder of all time"

5. Nicholas Kristoff is a big promoter of the lie that Mao caused starvation during the Cultural Revolution. But he can't be right because his book claims that it was capitalism that brought equality to women in China. But that's not an outright lie. It was the Cultural Revolution that brought equality.

6. Women got their equal rights under Mao (right to divorce, property rights, child custody etc). It wasn't the sweatshops & market forces that deserve credit.

7. Thus Kristoff is a proven liar.

8. "Let's look at context, which supporters of stateless capitalism ALWAYS ignore."

9. The changes brought by Mao were "absolutely necessary". There was one TINY famine under Mao. But they were very common in China before. They haven't happened since then & the Great Leap Forward.

10. There WERE capitalist factions under the commies in Mao's time (Deng Xiaoping & Liu (?) somebody) conflicting with Mao and Lin Bao(?). There was huge turmoil between Maoists & Rightists. Both supported collectivization in order to increase crop production and to educate the peasants (so it's not like there were Kulaks like in USSR going around burning crops).

11. Organizing the collective farms was done by the "Right wingers" in the Commie Party, so if the collectivization that Mao ordered caused starvation, it's not Mao's fault.

"Be an Eatie, not a Starvie: Come and join the Commie Party!" -- Buh Kie Dood

12. What ACTUALLY caused the starvation. Some people lied about production ("individualist action"). "Huge huge weather concerns" contributed. There was a split, leading to factions fighting w/in China, which "as a result of this, Mao was blamed even when he was out of the government.

13. At this time "he was still the Chairman of hte communist party, but he wasn't even running the country"

14. Before he was kicked out, Mao got Lin Bao(?) set up as leader of the PLA, "which would come to serve him later".

15. From 1962-66, Liu was running the gov't. Taht's when Mao led the people to criticize the gov't ("Bombard the Headquarters campaign and whatnot") under Liu Xiao Kwi(?) and "the people got together with the army and they kicked out the rightwingers"

16. When we look at the population charts, we may see 15 milion dead in 1960-1961.

<== screen cap from the actual video

17. The "Maoist International(?) warns that if we had no other data, that might be a good conclusion, BUT since the Deng Xiaoping regime gave us this birth & death rate data, we have to ask if maybe there just weren't enough births to keep up with the deaths"

Bucky asks, "Because thinking about Deng (or "Ding" as the vlogger calls him) causes a sperm count drop off?"

18. Both the Communist and "Boozhwar" medias agree that the Great Leap "caused such a political tumult and political dedication (sic) that we have every reason to believe that birth rates declined." Deng/Ding's data shows only in 1960 was there was loss of pop by deaths exceeding births. But this was only a 3 million drop, not 15 or 30 or 70 million like others came up.

19. More blah blah about data

20. Internal migration could also have an impact on the numbers. I'm not sure of the vlogger's point here. Doctrinaire people give me headaches. But Chinese officials may have drawn bad population inferences misled by internal movements & emigration.

21. Liu acknowledges about 30% of deaths were from natural disasters (not from starving)

22. No context or explanation is given by those saying Mao causes the famine about how those deaths "supposedly came about". It's mostly just twisting the statistics to prove what they want, which is part of the history of capitalism.

23. "I would just like to say these books are just outright lie"

24. There was also a flying leap forward 1968-71 from a completely Maoist line. This went off without a hitch. "I have tons of data to back up my points". "This is the real deal" and Mao's critic (Kristoff?) only cites one Guardian article like a cultist.

[RZM]

10. Hehe

Nice synopsis. It's funny to see people still passionately defending some of the 20th century's worst villains. They are getting harder and harder to find, though.

[Bucky]

12. On the other hand...

people supporting the second string bastards are all over the damn place

[Starry Messenger]

2. It looks pretty in line and accurate with things I have read.

Did you have a specific question about a section of it? I could hunt up some links if I knew what part you were interested in. Most of what we "know" about Communist countries tends to be filtered through right-wing think tanks, so it can be kind of weird to see this perspective. I know it was for me the first time I tried to unpack anti-Communist material.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

3. That's what I thought

Not sure if I'd trust propaganda from authoritarian states, but I sure as hell wouldn't trust anti-communist propaganda from pro-capitalist sources either.

I guess my overall question is, how accurate are his facts? He links to some sources at the bottom of the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGRuKqvU7o

[Starry Messenger]

7. Those links look like a good place to start.

I'm looking for an article I read last year specifically on China and Mao. A lot of the disinformation on the web right now is coming from the Jung Chang book on Mao. This book has a lot of sloppy researching and uses discredited sources and critics of the book have written about that. Ah, I think this is the article I had in mind. It's an academic socialist website from the West, so it is pro-leftist but looked fairly balanced to me.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm

The More Likely Truth About the Great Leap Forward

The idea that “Mao was responsible for genocide” has been used as a springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during Mao’s rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister, one of the most prominent advocates of the “massive death toll” hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in 1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many countries in Latin America 1. In 1981 she co-wrote an article where she described the People's Republic of China as a 'super-achiever' in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of communist rule in 1949 2. Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s when Mao’s rule came to an end. 3

To read many modern commentators on Mao’s China 4, you would get the impression that Mao’s agricultural and industrial policies led to absolute economic disaster. Even more restrained commentators, such as the economist Peter Nolan 5 claim that living standards did not rise in China, during the post-revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took power. Of course, increases in living standards are not the sole reason for increases in life expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that life expectancy could have increased so much during the Mao era with no increase in living standards.

For example, it is claimed by many who have studied figures released by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death that per capita grain production did not increase at all during the Mao period. 6 But how is it possible to reconcile such statistics with the figures on life expectancy that the same authors quote? Besides which these figures are contradicted by other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director of Policy and Law in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, in the post-Mao era, gives a very different view of China’s overall agricultural performance during the period before Deng’s “reforms.” It is true that he writes that agricultural production decreased in five years between 1949-1978 due to “natural calamities and mistakes in the work.” However he states that during 1949-1978 the per hectare yield of land sown with food crops increased by 145.9% and total food production rose 169.6%. During this period China’s population grew by 77.7%. On these figures, China’s per capita food production grew from 204 kilograms to 328 kilograms in the period in question.7

Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao’s supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era.8

It's a nice long article, so I can only snip a bit. Take a look and tell me what you think! :)

[RZM]

4. Oh dear . . .

'Much of what we know about Communist countries tends to be filtered through right-wing think tanks' . . . That statement demonstrates ignorance of the current state of historical research and the worldwide scholarly community. I'm not very familiar with the historiography of Communist countries outside of Central and Eastern Europe, but rest assured, the work on that part of the world is robust and growing better everyday now that so many documents have been made available to researchers. Most of it is produced by scholars who are in no way connected with right wing think tanks -- many of the best historians in this field are in fact are left of center academics and even those who ARE unabashedly right wing have produced excellent works that are respected by scholars of all political affiliations.

If you're interested, you could start with Yale's 'Annals of Communism' series, which is a collection of primary materials that historians have translated, annotated, and organized into numerous thematic volumes. The list of secondary works in English based on analysis of materials from the archives of the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc states is already far more than any one person could read only 20 years after the Soviet collapse. There's plenty more in French, German, and various other languages as well. There's also the enormous body of work that dates from before the Soviet collapse, which although not usually based on archival materials, is still valuable.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

5. I could say the same

"I'm not very familiar with the historiography of Communist countries outside of Central and Eastern Europe,..."

So you've already established that you're not an expert on the topic.

Like I said, I wouldn't trust propaganda from those states, but is capitalist propaganda with a pro-business, pro-market bias any more trustworthy? Who are the major publishing companies publishing anti-communist books? Are they not corporate-run?

[RZM]

6. The poster I replied to simply said 'Communist countries'

And the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc states fit that definition. I imagine there are plenty of good works about China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc., although the key difference is of course that sensitive materials are still not available to most researchers in those places. In Russia the situation has gradually worsened in the Putin/United Russia era as some Soviet materials have come back under lock and key, though a lot of stuff got out back when the Russian government was more lenient about who looked at what.

While bias is inherent whenever anyone does history, most respected scholars produce works that are neither pro nor anti-Communist. Most historians are simply seeking the facts and interpreting them the best they know how. If a work comes off as anti-Communist, it's often because the primary sources present a picture that is not flattering to a particular regime or figure. Those old Cold War ideological battles are pretty much old news at this point -- most scholars have moved beyond them. Historians still argue, but the key debates have gone in different directions.

As far as publishing, I don't think that publishing houses have much interest in promoting a particular ideological tenor in works about 20th century Communist regimes . . . why would they? It's no skin off of their back if a particular scholar argues this or that, so long as it's not obviously bogus (and even a lot of that gets published). A good deal of historical scholarship is published through academic presses -- often the run will be very limited and geared toward libraries, with individual works carrying a price tag of $80 or more, ensuring that almost nobody in the general reading public will buy it.

[pam4water]

8. The estimates of famine change because China did not the have the

record keeping systems were are used to these day. There were not birth certificates and death certificates at a City Halls like we have in the USA. And after the fact the government tried to cover up the problem. China still tried to cover up it's problems today with censorship.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge cause a famine in Cambodia, so there are documented man made famines. The slow motion Famine in North Korea is also man made but has more complicated roots. If you let crops rot in the fields while making the people who would be harvesting them work in a steel factory you have a man made famine, which is what Mao did. I heard about Mao famine from my mother in the 1970's. She was progressive even for the time, which frankly was a lot more enlighten time than now. The right wing nut jobs were not in charge of the news back them. I only made it part way in to the video, I don't think this knows what his is talking about.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

13. That still doesn't account for the fact

that China was declared "overpopulated" just a generation after the alleged GLF deaths.

50 million (about the median estimate from bourgeois scholars) isn't a small number; it's roughly the combined populations of California and New York State. How can a country lose 50 million people and then be "overcrowded" 20 years later, so much so that a one-child only policy had to be implemented?

For the record, I'm no fan of totalitarian marxism, but I still think the "official" estimate of the "deaths from communism" are complete BS.

[pam4water]

14. I'm sure it was in the millions and the we will never really know how many but even if it was

50 million, that would have been less than a tenth of China's population at the time which was ruffly 600 million. Twenty years later is a full generation. Enough time to double the population. Life expectancy was not as long back then. Most of the people alive, at the time, would still be of child baring age. And Mao discourage birth control after the famine, saying he need more manpower.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

15. I couldn't see that happening

The birthrate would have to have been incredibly high (something like 10 children per family or maybe more) to re-populate the country after 20-50 million or so allegedly perished. You would need to replace the amount of people dead from famine and then add more to "overpopulate" the area.

Also realize that scholars can't even decide on how many people actually died in these famines. Some say as high as 50-70 million, while others say 5-10 million.

[pam4water]

16. No you wouldn't. The population was already over 600 million. 163 Million couples with 4 children

would be 653 million people in the next generation. Mao took birth control out of the picture for a decade. You are still picturing a modern USA like society. There was a huge amount of pressure on China to marry and have children both form tradition and the government in the 1960s. There were still a lot a arrange marriages to girls at early ages like 15. For someone married of in there teens who probably continued to have children through their 20'ies and average of 4 children in 14 years is probably on the low side. Add to that the increasing life expectancy ones Mao was gone, and you have a rapid population growth. Life expectancy was probably still below 40 in the 1950 and 60 China, so nearly half the population was at child baring ages and the great majority forcible (or other wise) married off.

[Crowman1979]

11. Plus those who make these claims about famine in China during the 1950's, have overlooked the...

...famine and genocide in the American West during the 1800's all thanks to "Manifest Destiny." Don't believe the BS about people out in the wild west pulling themselves by their own bootstraps.