Mao's Great Famine
Encyclopedia
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, is a 2010 book by professor and historian Frank Dikötter
about the Great Chinese Famine of 1958–1962.
Based on four years of research in recently opened Chinese provincial, county, and city archives, the book constructs what Andrew J. Nathan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University
writing in Foreign Affairs
, describes as "the most detailed account yet" of the experiences of the Chinese people during the famine, which occurred under the Communist regime
of Mao Zedong
. The book supports an estimate of "at least" 45 million premature deaths in China during the famine years. Dikötter characterises the Great Famine as "The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere.".
The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize
in 2011, beating five other works on the short list, for being what the judges characterised as "stunningly original and hugely important". The ₤20,000 award is the largest in the UK for a non-fiction book.
at the University of London
. The author's research behind the book was funded by, in the UK, the Wellcome Trust
, the Arts and Humanities Research Council
, and the Economic and Social Research Council
, and in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
.
The first chapter of the book, entitled "The Pursuit of Utopia", explains how the Chinese Communist Party's Great Leap Forward
program, intended to achieve the rapid modernization of Chinese industry and agriculture, instead led to the catastrophe of the famine. According to one reviewer, the chapter summarizes:
The following chapters detail the attempt to reach these goals and the consequences of the failures to do so. Dikötter was one of only a few historians granted access to the relevant Chinese archives.
First, he states that the famine lasted at least four years (early 1958 to late 1962), not the three sometimes stated. And after researching large volume of Chinese archives, Dikötter concluded that decisions coming from the top officials of the Chinese government at Beijing were the direct cause of the famine.
Beijing government officials, including Zhou Enlai
and Mao, increased the food procurement quota from the countryside to pay for international imports.
According to Dikötter, "In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death." 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.”
In their attempts to survive, Chinese people resorted to hiding, stealing, cheating, pilfering, foraging, smuggling, tricking, manipulating or otherwise outwitting the government. There were reports of armed assaults on granaries or trains. Overall, Dikötter estimates that there were 45 million premature deaths, not 30 million as previously estimated. Some two to three million of these were victims of political repression, beaten or tortured to death or summarily executed for political reasons, often for the slightest infraction.
Because local communist cadres were in charge of food distribution, they were able to withhold food from anyone of whom they disapproved. Old, sick and weak individuals were often regarded as unproductive and hence expendable. Apart from Mao, Dikkötter accuses several other members of the top party leadership of doing nothing about the famine. While famine was ravaging the country, free food was still being exported to allies, as well as economic aid and interest-free or low-interest loans.
In addition to the human suffering, some 30 to 40 percent of all rural housing was demolished in village relocations, for building roads and infrastructure, or sometimes as punishment for political opponents.
Up to 50 percent of trees were cut down in some provinces, as the rural ecological system
was ruined.
Jasper Becker
, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
, praises the book as a "brilliant work, backed by painstaking research . . . The archive material gathered by Dikötter . . . confirms that far from being ignorant or misled about the famine, the Chinese leadership were kept informed about it all the time."
Jung Chang
, author of Mao: The Unknown Story
, called the book: "The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read."
Jonathan Fenby
, author of the Penguin History of Modern China and China Director at the research service, Trusted Sources, praised Dikötter's "masterly book" and states that his "painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people."
Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar
said the book is "Pathbreaking... a first-class piece of research... [Mao] will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured. Dikötter’s book will have done much to put him there."
Historian and journalist Ben Macintyre
, one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson Prize
, said Mao's Great Famine was a "meticulous account of a brutal manmade calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century." He also said that the book "could have been overwritten, but part of what makes it work so well is it is written with quiet fury. He doesn't overstate his case because he doesn't need to. Its very strength lies in its depth of scholarship, lightly worn."
Writer Brenda Maddox
, another of the judges for the prize, said "this book changed my life - I think differently about the 20th century than I did before. Why didn't I know about this?"
Jonathan Mirsky, a historian and journalist specializing in Asian affairs, said Dikötter's book "is for now the best and last word on Mao's greatest horror. Frank Dikötter has put everyone in the field of Chinese studies in his debt, together with anyone else interested in the real China. Sooner or later the Chinese, too, will praise his name." He also writes that "In terms of Mao's reputation this book leaves the Chairman for dead, as a monster in the same league as Hitler and Stalin - and that is without considering the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when hundreds of thousands more Chinese died."
The Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra
, writing in The New Yorker
, offered qualified praise for the book, stating that the "narrative line is plausible". However he stated that Dikötter is "generally dismissive of facts that could blunt his story’s sharp edge", and thought that Dikötter’s "comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade".
Cormac Ó Gráda
, a leading scholar of famine, and professor of economics at University College Dublin
, criticised the book describing it as reading "more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument". Ó Gráda further goes on to describe the book as "weak on context and unreliable with data" and that it failed to note that "many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so". Dikötter is also taken to task for his use of an unrealistic low 'normal' mortality rate of 1 percent in order to maximise his death count. Ó Gráda says 10 per thousand adopted by Dikötter is "implausibly low".
Ó Gráda goes on to say that "The crude death rate in China in the wake of the revolution was probably about 25 per thousand. It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here (p. 331). Had they done so, they would have “saved” over 30 million lives in the interim! One can hardly have it both ways."
Ó Gráda criticises Dikötter's "breathless prose style – replete with expressions like 'plummeted,' 'rocketed,' 'beaten to a pulp,' 'beaten black and blue,' 'frenzy,' 'ceaseless,' 'frenzied witch-hunt'" which he said were more "reminiscent of the tabloid press than the standard academic monograph".
Orville Schell
, former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley
, praised Dikötter's research in Chinese archives, which enabled him to unveil "the shroud on this period of monumental, man-made catastrophe" and document how Mao's "impetuosity was the demise of tens of millions of ordinary Chinese who perished unnecessarily in this spasm of revolutionary extremism."
Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, called the book "a gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao."
George Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin called the book "excellent", and wrote that "Dikötter’s study is not the first to describe these events. Nonetheless, few Western intellectuals are aware of the scale of these atrocities, and they have had almost no impact on popular consciousness. This is part of the more general problem of the neglect of communist crimes. But Chinese communist atrocities are little-known even by comparison to those inflicted by communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, possibly because the Chinese are more culturally distant from Westerners than are Eastern Europeans or the German victims of the Berlin Wall. Ironically, the Wall (one of communism’s relatively smaller crimes) is vastly better known than the Great Leap Forward — the largest mass murder in all of world history. Hopefully, Dikötter’s important work will help change that."
Steven Yearley
, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
at the University of Edinburgh
, notes that the book "stands out" from other works on the famine "on account of its basis in recently opened archives and in the countless compelling details which are provided to clarify the interlocking themes of the text."
, political science and genocide studies professor at UBC Okanagan
, criticised Bloomsbury Publishing and Dikötter for using a cover photograph on their editions of the book of a starving child that was actually from a Life
magazine depiction of a 1946 Chinese famine, well before the events described in the book took place.
Jones places most of the blame on Bloomsbury, stating that "Most book covers are designed by the publisher, often using stock images, rather than by the author," but also accepted a blogger's point that it was unlikely that Dikötter would have been unaware of the deception, because in an interview with Newsweek
magazine, Dikötter had stated that, to his knowledge, no 'non-propaganda' images from the Great Leap Forward had ever been found. The Walker & Company edition of the book has a different cover, which incorporates a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China.
Frank Dikötter
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian and author of Mao's Great Famine. The book won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize. Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on both Mao and the Great Chinese Famine, and Professor of the Modern History of...
about the Great Chinese Famine of 1958–1962.
Based on four years of research in recently opened Chinese provincial, county, and city archives, the book constructs what Andrew J. Nathan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
writing in Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...
, describes as "the most detailed account yet" of the experiences of the Chinese people during the famine, which occurred under the Communist regime
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
. The book supports an estimate of "at least" 45 million premature deaths in China during the famine years. Dikötter characterises the Great Famine as "The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere.".
The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize
Samuel Johnson Prize
The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is one of the most prestigious prizes for non-fiction writing. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award and based on an anonymous donation. The prize is named after Samuel Johnson...
in 2011, beating five other works on the short list, for being what the judges characterised as "stunningly original and hugely important". The ₤20,000 award is the largest in the UK for a non-fiction book.
Background
Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on both Mao and the Great Chinese Famine, and Professor of the Modern History of China from the School of Oriental and African StudiesSchool of Oriental and African Studies
The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...
at the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
. The author's research behind the book was funded by, in the UK, the Wellcome Trust
Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around £13.9 billion, it is the United Kingdom's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research...
, the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Established in April 2005 as successor to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Arts and Humanities Research Council is a British Research Council and non-departmental public body that provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the...
, and the Economic and Social Research Council
Economic and Social Research Council
The Economic and Social Research Council is one of the seven Research Councils in the United Kingdom. It receives most of its funding from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and provides funding and support for research and training work in social and economic issues, such as...
, and in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange is a private, non-profit organisation located in Taipei, Taiwan, that provides support for research grants on Chinese studies in the humanities and social sciences at overseas institutions. It was founded in 1989 and named...
.
The first chapter of the book, entitled "The Pursuit of Utopia", explains how the Chinese Communist Party's Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...
program, intended to achieve the rapid modernization of Chinese industry and agriculture, instead led to the catastrophe of the famine. According to one reviewer, the chapter summarizes:
… Mao's hubristic and utterly impractical plans for remaking China in the image of communist paradise. These include mass mobilization fueled by revolutionary ardor alone, the expropriation of personal property and housing to be replaced by People's Communes, the centralized distribution of food, plans to leapfrog Britain in 15 years and outdo Stalin by "walking on two legs” (referring to development of both agriculture and industry), and regimenting and militarizing the entire society.
The following chapters detail the attempt to reach these goals and the consequences of the failures to do so. Dikötter was one of only a few historians granted access to the relevant Chinese archives.
Key arguments of the book
On a website providing exposure for the book, Dikötter detailed his key arguments.First, he states that the famine lasted at least four years (early 1958 to late 1962), not the three sometimes stated. And after researching large volume of Chinese archives, Dikötter concluded that decisions coming from the top officials of the Chinese government at Beijing were the direct cause of the famine.
Beijing government officials, including Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976...
and Mao, increased the food procurement quota from the countryside to pay for international imports.
According to Dikötter, "In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death." Mao was quoted as saying in Shanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...
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.”
In their attempts to survive, Chinese people resorted to hiding, stealing, cheating, pilfering, foraging, smuggling, tricking, manipulating or otherwise outwitting the government. There were reports of armed assaults on granaries or trains. Overall, Dikötter estimates that there were 45 million premature deaths, not 30 million as previously estimated. Some two to three million of these were victims of political repression, beaten or tortured to death or summarily executed for political reasons, often for the slightest infraction.
Because local communist cadres were in charge of food distribution, they were able to withhold food from anyone of whom they disapproved. Old, sick and weak individuals were often regarded as unproductive and hence expendable. Apart from Mao, Dikkötter accuses several other members of the top party leadership of doing nothing about the famine. While famine was ravaging the country, free food was still being exported to allies, as well as economic aid and interest-free or low-interest loans.
In addition to the human suffering, some 30 to 40 percent of all rural housing was demolished in village relocations, for building roads and infrastructure, or sometimes as punishment for political opponents.
Up to 50 percent of trees were cut down in some provinces, as the rural ecological system
Human ecology
Human ecology is the subdiscipline of ecology that focuses on humans. More broadly, it is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The term 'human ecology' first appeared in a sociological study in 1921...
was ruined.
Responses to the book
Mao's Great Famine has elicited a number of responses (here presented in alphabetical order by author):Jasper Becker
Jasper Becker
Jasper Becker is an author, commentator and journalist who has spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in China. - Journalism :In 1995, he joined the staff of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. He was later promoted to the senior position of Beijing bureau chief, which meant he was...
, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, is a book written by Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. It was published by Holt Paperbacks in 1998.-External links:**** The Future of Freedom Foundation...
, praises the book as a "brilliant work, backed by painstaking research . . . The archive material gathered by Dikötter . . . confirms that far from being ignorant or misled about the famine, the Chinese leadership were kept informed about it all the time."
Jung Chang
Jung Chang
Jung Chang is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China....
, author of Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong written by the husband and wife team of writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, and depicts Mao as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.In conducting their research...
, called the book: "The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read."
Jonathan Fenby
Jonathan Fenby
Jonathan Fenby is a British journalist, and was Editor of The Observer newspaper from 1993-1995 and then Editor of the South China Morning Post from 1995-2000, during the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty...
, author of the Penguin History of Modern China and China Director at the research service, Trusted Sources, praised Dikötter's "masterly book" and states that his "painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people."
Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar
Roderick MacFarquhar
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar is a Harvard University professor and China specialist, British politician, newspaper and television journalist and academic orientalist...
said the book is "Pathbreaking... a first-class piece of research... [Mao] will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured. Dikötter’s book will have done much to put him there."
Historian and journalist Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.- Author :...
, one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson Prize
Samuel Johnson Prize
The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is one of the most prestigious prizes for non-fiction writing. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award and based on an anonymous donation. The prize is named after Samuel Johnson...
, said Mao's Great Famine was a "meticulous account of a brutal manmade calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century." He also said that the book "could have been overwritten, but part of what makes it work so well is it is written with quiet fury. He doesn't overstate his case because he doesn't need to. Its very strength lies in its depth of scholarship, lightly worn."
Writer Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox FRSL is an American author, journalist, and biographer, who has lived in the UK since 1959.Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature and also studied at the London School of Economics...
, another of the judges for the prize, said "this book changed my life - I think differently about the 20th century than I did before. Why didn't I know about this?"
Jonathan Mirsky, a historian and journalist specializing in Asian affairs, said Dikötter's book "is for now the best and last word on Mao's greatest horror. Frank Dikötter has put everyone in the field of Chinese studies in his debt, together with anyone else interested in the real China. Sooner or later the Chinese, too, will praise his name." He also writes that "In terms of Mao's reputation this book leaves the Chairman for dead, as a monster in the same league as Hitler and Stalin - and that is without considering the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when hundreds of thousands more Chinese died."
The Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh , is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books.He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce...
, writing in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, offered qualified praise for the book, stating that the "narrative line is plausible". However he stated that Dikötter is "generally dismissive of facts that could blunt his story’s sharp edge", and thought that Dikötter’s "comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade".
Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economist, a professor of economics at University College Dublin, and a prolific author of books and academic papers....
, a leading scholar of famine, and professor of economics at University College Dublin
University College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...
, criticised the book describing it as reading "more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument". Ó Gráda further goes on to describe the book as "weak on context and unreliable with data" and that it failed to note that "many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so". Dikötter is also taken to task for his use of an unrealistic low 'normal' mortality rate of 1 percent in order to maximise his death count. Ó Gráda says 10 per thousand adopted by Dikötter is "implausibly low".
Ó Gráda goes on to say that "The crude death rate in China in the wake of the revolution was probably about 25 per thousand. It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here (p. 331). Had they done so, they would have “saved” over 30 million lives in the interim! One can hardly have it both ways."
Ó Gráda criticises Dikötter's "breathless prose style – replete with expressions like 'plummeted,' 'rocketed,' 'beaten to a pulp,' 'beaten black and blue,' 'frenzy,' 'ceaseless,' 'frenzied witch-hunt'" which he said were more "reminiscent of the tabloid press than the standard academic monograph".
Orville Schell
Orville Schell
Orville Hickock Schell III is an activist and writer working on China, and is the Arthus Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York...
, former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, praised Dikötter's research in Chinese archives, which enabled him to unveil "the shroud on this period of monumental, man-made catastrophe" and document how Mao's "impetuosity was the demise of tens of millions of ordinary Chinese who perished unnecessarily in this spasm of revolutionary extremism."
Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, called the book "a gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao."
George Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin called the book "excellent", and wrote that "Dikötter’s study is not the first to describe these events. Nonetheless, few Western intellectuals are aware of the scale of these atrocities, and they have had almost no impact on popular consciousness. This is part of the more general problem of the neglect of communist crimes. But Chinese communist atrocities are little-known even by comparison to those inflicted by communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, possibly because the Chinese are more culturally distant from Westerners than are Eastern Europeans or the German victims of the Berlin Wall. Ironically, the Wall (one of communism’s relatively smaller crimes) is vastly better known than the Great Leap Forward — the largest mass murder in all of world history. Hopefully, Dikötter’s important work will help change that."
Steven Yearley
Steven Yearley
Steve Yearley is a British sociologist, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at the University of Edinburgh, a post he has . He is currently seconded from the sociology unit to be Director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, more often known as the Genomics Forum...
, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Sociology of scientific knowledge
The sociology of scientific knowledge ' is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity."...
at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
, notes that the book "stands out" from other works on the famine "on account of its basis in recently opened archives and in the countless compelling details which are provided to clarify the interlocking themes of the text."
Misrepresentation of famine image on book cover
Adam JonesAdam Jones (Canadian scholar)
Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He is executive director of the nongovernmental organization Gendercide Watch...
, political science and genocide studies professor at UBC Okanagan
UBC Okanagan
The University of British Columbia Okanagan is a campus of the University of British Columbia, located in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The official name for the campus is simply UBC's Okanagan Campus, although it is frequently called 'UBCO.'...
, criticised Bloomsbury Publishing and Dikötter for using a cover photograph on their editions of the book of a starving child that was actually from a Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
magazine depiction of a 1946 Chinese famine, well before the events described in the book took place.
Jones places most of the blame on Bloomsbury, stating that "Most book covers are designed by the publisher, often using stock images, rather than by the author," but also accepted a blogger's point that it was unlikely that Dikötter would have been unaware of the deception, because in an interview with Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
magazine, Dikötter had stated that, to his knowledge, no 'non-propaganda' images from the Great Leap Forward had ever been found. The Walker & Company edition of the book has a different cover, which incorporates a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China.
External links
- Frank Dikötter. Mao’s Great Famine.
- Mao's Great Famine (Complete) Historian Frank Dikötter recounts the horrific cost of China's "Great Leap Forward" between 1958 and 1962. Asia SocietyAsia SocietyThe Asia Society is a non-profit organization that focuses on educating the world about Asia. It has several centers in the United States and around the world Hong Kong, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, and Melbourne...
, October 13, 2010. (Video) - Dikötter interviewed by Chinese reporter (Video)
- Jeff Kingston. Mao's famine was no dinner party. The Japan TimesThe Japan TimesThe Japan Times is an English language newspaper published in Japan. Unlike its competitors, the Daily Yomiuri and the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, it is not affiliated with a Japanese language media organization...
, 3 October 2010 - Arifa Akbar. Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years' The IndependentThe IndependentThe Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
. Friday, 17 September 2010 - Peter Duffy. The Monster. The New RepublicThe New RepublicThe magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
. 27 October 2010. - Bhupesh Bhandari. Mao, the grim reaper. Business StandardBusiness StandardBusiness Standard is an Indian English-language daily newspaper published by Business Standard Ltd in two languages, English and Hindi...
. 6 November 2010. - 荷兰学者 Frank Dikotter：毛制造的大饥荒