With access to hitherto hidden Chinese archives and a vast range of official documents, [author Frank] Dikötter has revealed the full extent of the manmade disaster that Mao called The Great Leap Forward. Instead of catapulting China into superpower status, the forced collectivisation of the Chinese peasantry, beginning in 1958, plunged the country backwards into famished darkness, killing 45 million people, according to Dikötter's new and terrifying estimate.
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The scale is breathtaking: the gigantism of Mao's vision and his hubris, and the vastness of the suffering. Starving peasants ate mud and plaster from the walls, and sometimes each other; families sold children for scraps; vast forests were cut down, and buildings razed to make fertiliser, in probably the largest systematic destruction of real estate the world has seen. Sparrows were virtually wiped out. The land fell eerily silent.
The violence needed to sustain this madness was astonishing. The party cadres, knowing their own survival depended on competitive brutality, killed and maimed with abandon. "Suicide reached epidemic proportions," writes Dikötter. "Between one and three million people took their own life during the Great Leap Forward."
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Mass killings are not usually associated with Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and China continues to benefit from a more favourable comparison with the devastation usually associated with Cambodia or the Soviet Union. But as the fresh evidence presented in this book demonstrates, coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward. Thanks to the often meticulous reports compiled by the party itself, we can infer that between 1958 and 1962, by a rough approximation 6 to 8 per cent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed - amounting to at least 2.5 million people. Other victims were deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. Many more vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work - and hence unable to earn their keep. People were killed selectively because they were rich, because they dragged their feet, because they spoke out or simply because they were not liked, for whatever reason, by the man who wielded the ladle in the canteen. Countless people were killed indirectly through neglect, as local cadres were under pressure to focus on figures rather than on people, making sure they fulfilled the targets they were handed by the top planners.
But remember, Mao was a progressive.
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