Mao's Great Famine
Recently, I got out "Mao's Great Famine" out from the library and read through it. It detailed the famine that occurred throughout the Great Leap Forward. Not long after, I went over to Amazon and looked at some of the reviews of the book. A lot of them were positive reviews. However, I noticed there were a couple negative reviews that claimed that the books "average death rate" was a western one rather than what China had been at before the Great Leap Forward. When I looked at the name of reviewer, it looked vaguely Chinese.
After a couple reviews, I saw another from Rhode Island. Initially, it started out claiming that the book had been a subject of poor scholarship and hadn't been peer reviewed. They went further to say that the book was merely "Orientalism" and "Yellow Journalism". That went on for a while till I came across this gem.
"By contrast, the Chinese people understand that President Mao was a brilliant revolutionary, war hero, and champion of democracy and the people's rights."
"This orientalist rubbish compliments the fierce anti-China campaign from western propagandists, who employ such stooges as quislings from Taiwan province, separatists from Tibet, Liu Xiaobo, Falun Gong, etc. Their tactics consist of slandering China over issues like "currency manipulation", falsifying Chinese history, and demonizing Chinese national heroes like Mao Zedong to realize their ultimate goal of overturning the Chinese Revolution and restoring imperialist subjugation and a rapacious capitalist system in the country."
While I now doubt this guy's opinion of it was based on much fact, did anyone else read the book? And were there any complaints about it that weren't funded by the Chinese government? Also, how do you view the Great Leap Forward? Would you count it as simply a failed policy compounded by bad weather? Would you count it as a genocide? And where would you estimate the death tolls to be?
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