Frank Dikötter
Mao’s Great Famine
Thanks to extraordinarily rich archives, the reader can get much closer to every aspect of life and death during Mao’s Great Famine than ever before. But nothing illustrates the desperation for food quite as well as the eating of mud by starving villagers. Here is what happened in a county in Sichuan province, where close to ten million people died unnecessarily from 1958 to 1962:When nothing else was left, people turned to a soft mud called Guanyin soil – named after the Goddess of Mercy. A work team sent by Li Jingquan was taken aback by what they saw in Liangxian county, Sichuan. It was a vision of hell, as serried ranks of ghostly villagers queued up in front of deep pits, their shrivelled bodies pouring with sweat under the glare of the sun, waiting for their turn to scramble down the hole and carve out a few handfuls of the porcelain-white mud. Children, their ribs starting through the skin, fainted from exhaustion, their grimy bodies looking like mud sculptures shadowing the earth. Old women in ragged clothes burned paper charms and bowed, hands folded, mumbling strange incantations. A quarter of a million tonnes were dug out by more than 10,000 people. In one village alone 214 families out of a total of 262 had eaten mud, several kilos per person. Some of the villagers filled their mouths with mud as they were digging in the pit. But most of them added water and kneaded the soil after mixing it with chaff, flowers and weeds, baking mud cakes that were filling, even if they provided little sustenance. Once eaten the soil acted like cement, drying out the stomach and absorbing all the moisture inside the intestinal tract. Defecation became impossible. In every village several people died a painful death, their colons blocked up with soil.
What happened in China between 1958 and 1962 amounts to mass murder of gargantuan proportions. This still remains little known outside specialist circles.
I very much hope that this book will contribute to making Mao’s Great Famine as well known as the two other man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Holocaust and the Gulag.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Mao’s Great Famine
Frank Dikötter Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Walker Books, US / Bloomsbury, UK 448 pages, 9 1/4 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0802777683
Available here →October 20, 2010
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Frank Dikötter
Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, and also Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of nine books on modern China, including the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992), and the controversial Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago, 2004). His latest two books, China before Mao: The Age of Openness (California, 2007) and Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (just released from Boomsbury in the United Kingdom and from Walker Books in the United States), have been featured in Frank Dikötter’s two Rorotoko interviews.
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The Great Leap famine was mass murder, not miscalculation, and at least 45 million died.
Against LR · Iraq's antiquities were pillaged for structural reasons, and most of the people involved acted in good faith. On: Moral evaluation of past actors belongs inside scholarly explanation of them
Against EC · American houses were shaped by food, by dwellers rearranging space for storing, preserving, cooking and serving it. On: Historical meaning lies in exceptional events rather than in the texture of ordinary life
Against JS · The judgment of history is a fantasy, and history renders no verdict at all, only a record of contention. On: Moral evaluation of past actors belongs inside scholarly explanation of them
Against LB · Staying attached to what wears you out is the structure of optimism, not irrationality. On: Historical meaning lies in exceptional events rather than in the texture of ordinary life
Alongside KF · Indigenous North America is a 20,000-year record of invention whose architecture stands comparison with medieval Europe's. On: Moral evaluation of past actors belongs inside scholarly explanation of them
Alongside WS · Every cause of the Great Divergence is downstream of one condition, that no empire like Rome ever returned to Europe. On: Historical meaning lies in exceptional events rather than in the texture of ordinary life
Alongside AS · A social worker's finding of neglect is as factual as a doctor's reading of a blood-pressure number. On: Moral evaluation of past actors belongs inside scholarly explanation of them
Alongside TS · The fourteen million murdered between Berlin and Moscow from 1933 to 1945 died in a single event. On: Historical meaning lies in exceptional events rather than in the texture of ordinary life
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