Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 [NOOK Book]

Well researched, easy to read

While the story of the Great Leap Forward is heartbreaking, this book makes the story a compelling read. Reccomend this for any student of history, especially Asian, economic or Communist.

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China's mortality during the Great Leap Forward - 24/1000 - was

China's mortality during the Great Leap Forward - 24/1000 - was the same as India's, Pakistan's, and Indonesia's in 1960: India 24/1000, Indonesia 23/1000, Pakistan 23/1000. This was much less than China's 1949 figure (38/1000) and less than that of India's at the end of British rule (28/1000).
Frank Dikotter adopted 10/1000 as a `normal' yearly death rate for China, and claims this as the figure for China in 1957. Deaths above this he regards as `excess' deaths. But 10/1000 was the mortality in the USA, Britain and France in 1960. Dikotter's claims imply that China reduced mortality from 38/1000 in 1949 to 10/1000 in 1957. India only reduced mortality from 28 to 23/1000, and Indonesia 26 to 23/1000 over the same period. So if Dikotter accepts a 10/1000 mortality rate for China in 1957, then he has to accept that the communists reduced mortality from 38/1000 to 10/1000 during their first eight years, thereby saving tens of millions of lives. This would have been the most dramatic, incredible reduction in mortality in human history.
If Mao is to be condemned as a killer for presiding over a mortality rate of maximum 27/1000 say in 1960 (the worst year of the great leap forward), what do you call Churchill and other British rulers for consistently presiding over mortality rates of over 30/1000 during all the years of the British Raj? Note also that at no stage in the history of the PRC were mortality rates actually worse than any before 1949.
That is why in the Maoist period China's population growth was about four times as fast as in the three decades leading up to 1949. In fact the fastest period of population growth in China's history happened under Mao.
As Amartya Sen pointed out, four million more people died in India than in China in each year between 1958 and 1961.

Joseph Ball pointed out, ""Although problems and reversals occurred in the Great Leap Forward, it is fair to say that it had a very important role in the ongoing development of agriculture. Measures such as water conservancy and irrigation allowed for sustained increases in agricultural production, once the period of bad harvests was over. They also helped the countryside to deal with the problem of drought. Flood defenses were also developed. Terracing helped gradually increase the amount of cultivated area.
"Industrial development was carried out under the slogan of `walking on two legs'. This meant the development of small and medium scale rural industry alongside the development of heavy industry. As well as the steel furnaces, many other workshops and factories were opened in the countryside. The idea was that rural industry would meet the needs of the local population. Rural workshops supported efforts by the communes to modernize agricultural work methods. Rural workshops were very effective in providing the communes with fertilizer, tools, other agricultural equipment and cement (needed for water conservation schemes). ... Rural industry established during the Great Leap Forward used labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive methods. As they were serving local needs, they were not dependent on the development of an expensive nation-wide infrastructure of road and rail to transport the finished goods."

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