bigtoughralf wrote:Dukasaur wrote:bigtoughralf wrote:
The famine during the Great Leap Forward was primarily down to Mao's Four Pests campaign, one of the aims of which was to wipe out sparrows (because sparrows ate grain). One big side-effect of the mass culling of sparrows was an explosion in the insect population (as their main predator - the sparrow - had been wiped out) and huge amounts of grain being decimated by said insects. This meant far less food and people starved. I assume I don't need to explain to you why the famine was therefore not 'murder'.
Funny how the starvation only seemed to happen in provinces where support for the Communists was lukewarm to begin with.
lol, the old
Field Of Dreams rebuttal eh. 'Say it, and it will be true'.
I suppose it beats the jimboston rebuttal, where he just states that he is correct over and over (e.g.
this post).
The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饥荒; lit. 'three years of great famine') was a famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China (PRC).[2][3][4][5][6] Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962.[7][8][9][10] It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).[note 1] The most stricken provinces were Anhui (18% dead), Chongqing (15%), Sichuan (13%), Guizhou (11%) and Hunan (8%).[1]
The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation's planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.[4][6][8][15][17][18] During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").[8][19][20] After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_FamineSo, NOT intentional murder, but, what..?? STUPIDITY? NOT understanding the Environment? What would the socialist of TODAY call that?
and before SmallStooopidRalph claims Western bias for this source, NOTE that their is confirmation by the CCP.
same source: on the extend and Number of those who starved to death:
In 2019, Liao Gailong (廖盖隆), former Vice Director of the History Research Unit of the CCP, reported 40 million "unnatural" deaths due to the famine.[30][48]
In 2015, Yu Xiguang (余习广), an independent Chinese historian and a former instructor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, estimated that 55 million people died due to the famine.[58][59][60][61] His conclusion was based on two decades of archival research.[61]
You can read of other estimates, some higher and some lower.
and a few more details for Ralph to enjoy:
The Famine and Its Ugly Consequences
In a few of China’s poorest provinces, instances of cannibalism were documented. Here is one firsthand report from Anhui Province:
The worst thing that happened during the famine was … that parents had to decide [who] would be allowed to die first. They … could not afford to let their sons die, but a mother would say to her daughter, “You have to go and see your granny in heaven.” Then they stopped giving the girl food, just giving her water.
[When the girls died] the families would swap the body of their daughter for that of a neighbor. Five or seven women would agree to do this among themselves. Then they would boil the corpses into a kind of soup. [They] had learned to do this during the famine of the 1930s. [And they] accepted it as a kind of “hunger culture”. (Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 138)
And still, Mao refused to change course. He had silenced his critics, but in the process, he had also shut down the regime’s most vital feedback mechanisms—debate and criticism—which were now needed more than ever to prevent an arrogant, willful dictator from indulging his utopian fantasies. To distract himself from his troubles, Mao now spent more and more time with comely young peasant girls at his Saturday night dance meetings in Zhongnanhai.
Conditions Deteriorated Even Further
But, by 1960 there was nothing left to buffer the long-suffering peasants from debilitating disease and agonizing death. By the end of that year, people in some places had been reduced to eating clay soil in the hope of filling their empty bellies. By the spring of 1961, more than 30 million Chinese had died of malnutrition and related diseases.
All the trees inside the village in Anhui Province had been cut down. And nearby trees were all stripped of their bark. More than half the villagers died between New Year and April [of 1960]. When people died, no one collected the bodies. The corpses did not change color or decay because there was no blood in them and not much flesh.
Mao’s Reaction to the Suffering Peasants
No longer able to deny reality, Mao made a symbolic display of empathy with the hard-pressed peasants. He announced that he would temporarily stop eating meat. But he continued to insist that the difficulties were only temporary and that they were the product not of his own wrongheaded policies but of rich peasant sabotage and three consecutive years of bad weather and catastrophic natural disasters.
Yet through it all, in the face of severe famine, Mao callously continued to export millions of tons of Chinese ‘blood grain’ to the Soviet Union. Although Mao’s colleagues dared not oppose his policies, they knew that unless things changed soon, there was a very real danger of regime collapse. And so they quietly began taking matters into their own hands.
https://www.wondriumdaily.com/great-leap-forward-maos-denial-led-to-the-starvation-of-millions/
