MCLC: GLF famine deniers

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: GLF famine deniers
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (10/16/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/world/asia/advancing-a-milder-version-of-
maos-calamities.html

MEMO FROM HONG KONG
Milder Accounts of Hardships Under Mao Arise as His Birthday Nears
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — The famine that gripped China from 1958 to 1962 is widely
judged to be the deadliest in recorded history, killing 20 to 30 million
people or more, and is one of the defining calamities of Mao Zedong’s
rule. Ever since, the party has shrouded that disaster in censorship and
euphemisms, seeking to maintain an aura of reverence around the founding
leader of the Communist state.

But with the approach of celebrations of the 120th anniversary Mao’s birth
on Dec. 26, some of his supporters and party polemicists are stepping
beyond the longstanding official reticence about the famine to argue for
their own, much milder version of the disaster and to assail historians
who disagree.

They deny that tens of millions died in the famine — it was at most a few
million, some of them say — and they accuse scholars who support higher
estimates of fanning anti-party sentiment.

“The big rumor that 30 million people starved to death in the three years
of hardship,” said a headline in September in The Global Times, an
influential party-run tabloid.

The headline accompanied a commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian,
who has won publicity for his claim that at most 2.5 million people died
of “nutritional fatalities” during the Great Leap Forward. He argues that
bigger estimates are an illusion based on flawed statistics.

Mr. Sun asserts that most of the apparent deaths were a mirage of chaotic
statistics: people moved from villages and were presumed dead, because
they failed to register in their new homes.

A new book, “Someone Must Finally Speak the Truth,” has become a
touchstone for supporters of Mao, who deny that the famine killed tens of
millions. The author, Yang Songlin, a retired official, maintains that at
most four million “abnormal fatalities” occurred during the famine.

That was indeed a tragedy, he acknowledges, but one for which he mostly
blames bad weather, not bad policies. He and other like-minded
revisionists accuse rival researchers of inflating the magnitude of the
famine to discredit Mao and the party.

“Some people think they have an opportunity, that as long as they can
prove that tens of millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward, then
the Communist Party, the ruling party, will never be able to clear
itself,” Mr. Yang said by telephone from his home in Zhengzhou, a city in
central China.

China’s leaders have not publicly commented on the controversy. But Mao’s
reputation remains important for a party that continues to stake its
claims to power on its revolutionary origins, even as it has cast aside
the remnants of his revolutionary policies. And Xi Jinping, the party
leader installed in November, has been especially avid in defending that
legacy, even though his family suffered more under Mao than did the
families of his recent predecessors.

The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, when the party leadership embraced
Mao’s ambitions to rapidly industrialize China by mobilizing labor in a
fervent campaign and merging farming cooperatives into vast — and, in
theory, more productive — people’s communes. The rush to build factories,
communes and communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist
plenty began to falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged
down production.

By 1959, food shortages began to grip the countryside, magnified by the
amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand over to the state to
feed swelling cities, and starvation spread.

Officials who voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful
conformism that ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe
finally forced Mao to abandon them.

Beginning in the early 1980s, restrictions on studying the famine began to
ease. Historians gained limited access to archives, and sets of census and
other population data gradually became available, allowing researchers to
build a more detailed, albeit still incomplete, understanding of what
Happened.

Some scholars have concluded that about 17 million people died, while
other counts go as high as 45 million, reflecting varied assumptions about
the death rate in normal times as well as other uncertainties, including
how much official statistics undercounted deaths during the famine years.

“Scholars disagree, but whether their estimate is somewhat higher or
lower, that doesn’t affect the fact that the Great Leap Forward created a
massive disaster,” Lin Yunhui, a retired party historian at the National
Defense University in Beijing who has spent much of his career studying
Mao’s time, said by telephone. “My own estimate is that there were about
30 million abnormal deaths.”

Few if any mainstream historians place any credence in the revisionists’
claims, but they express alarm that the party, which in recent decades has
tolerated more open research into the period, seems to be encouraging a
retreat into deceptive orthodoxies.

“I’ve long been maligned and attacked for my research, but now there are
these people who basically deny that there was ever a mass famine,” Yang
Jisheng, 72, a historian and former Xinhua News Agency journalist in
Beijing who has been the main target of the attacks, said by telephone. He
is not related to Yang Songlin.

“Tombstone,” Yang Jisheng’s landmark study of the Great Leap Forward
famine — published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008 and in a modified,
abridged English-language edition in 2012 — is banned in mainland China
but has been read widely there through smuggled and bootlegged copies.

Mr. Yang estimates that 36 million people died because of brutality and
food shortages caused by the Great Leap Forward. He called the denials of
widespread famine more than half a century ago a disturbing symptom of
present-day political anxieties.

“To defend the ruling status of the Communist Party, they must deny that
tens of millions died of starvation,” Mr. Yang said. “There’s a sense of
social crisis in the party leadership, and protecting its status has
become more urgent, and so it’s become even more necessary to avoid
confronting the truth about the past.”

China’s leader, Mr. Xi, is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a colleague of Mao who
was purged in 1962 and endured 16 years of imprisonment and political
ignominy.

Mr. Xi’s handling of the past, however, is driven by political
imperatives, not family memories, said Edward Friedman, an emeritus
professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who
was an editor of the English version of Mr. Yang’s book “Tombstone.”

Mr. Xi told officials in January that they should not belittle or doubt
Mao’s achievements.

He has repeatedly cited the collapse of the Soviet Union as a warning of
the costs of political laxity.

Mr. Xi approved a directive issued in April that identified seven main
ideological threats to party rule, including “historical nihilism” —
defined as attempts to “negate the legitimacy of the long-term rule of the
Chinese Communist Party” by maligning the party’s record.

“They need their great leader to be pure,” Mr. Friedman said. “They need
to have a vision of the past that’s worth being nostalgic about.”