Mao's famine

Godfree Roberts has redirected Unz readers to that earlier Cultural Revolution. His take turns out to be a part of Roberts' "China 2020" series, here on Mao apologetic. This apologia starts at the "Great Leap Forward" so-called. Here's a take.

Mao's career in the 1960s, after Stalin's death, has some parallels to Stalin's 1930s. First, the Party presides over a famine in the provinces; some years later, the Party's leader purges the Party. Roberts, back in 2017 and now, argues that Mao dindu-nuffin except good. I propose to use the evidence Roberts gathers for the late 1960s to evaluate how Mao was doing earlier.

Here is the state of China later:

By 1966, the Communist Party had been in power for sixteen years but, behind its successes lurked a guilty secret: eighty percent of rural Chinese remained semi-destitute, illiterate, without access to basic needs, education or medical care. The Revolution had changed little beyond ownership of their tiny plots, which remained subject to the vicissitudes of weather and fortune.

Rural China was, of course, where the famine hit earlier. This quote shines light on what the countryside was like 1959. Roberts himself admits The newly-landed peasants gave the plan a mixed reception: a third of villages radically socialized their lives (some, like Huaxi Village, still do so) a third simply went along with it and a third dragged their feet or rejected it outright.

Roberts credits Mao pre-Famine with a vast increase in population and life-expectancy over the 1950s. I would see, mainly, the dissemination of Western and Soviet science through the Chinese literate class - which Mao had, now, united. This new lore made farms more efficient - some of them. Roberts doesn't break down which third of the farmers worked better: the Maoist third, the lip-service third or the reactionary running dog third.

Because among the foreign theorists whose work Mao had accepted were, as noted, Soviets: and among them, was Trofim Lysenko. Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts reports Mao's mandate of Close Planting. It didn't work. Roberts tells us nothing of Close Planting.

Either way "efficiency" is good for the people at large; but not good for the small-scale farm: his crop is now cheaper. More food was available to the rural worker... but, after a few years, he could no longer afford it. Redundant farmers flooded to seek different work and, in days before telecommuting, that meant they had to throng to the centres of food-distribution. To the cities. The non-redundant farmers were, of course, the farmers who did NOT listen to Mao.

This time of upheaval was not fault-tolerant and Nature conspired to deliver to Mao his first test, in a drought. Mao had set himself up for this over the 1950s, as the man in charge.

Becker further lets us in on how official photography was faked in the 1960 countryside. Roberts makes hay instead over a misfiled (1946) photograph in Frank Dikotter(sic)'s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe. This, apparently, was excused by that none could find a good photograph of the famine. But so what? Roberts himself agrees there was a famine; Roberts blames the US in part for embargoing grain. Whether there exists a good photograph is immaterial to the statement, "China suffered a famine under Mao". This faux-pas might discredit Dikötter and it certainly discredits his publisher. But Dikötter is not our only source. Already mentioned is Becker; Roberts lets others swipe at Becker for him. Not that those others do much better - but at least they admit the Great Leap Forward's failure. I don't suppose anybody's even looked at Tombstone.

Roberts is doing, in short, bafflegab. He beats around the fact of a famine, he blames others, he snipes at researchers' integrity when they report on impolitic facts, he doesn't address other research. Above all he doesn't even tell us where a relevant ideology might be to blame for the failure of crops.

Well... that's Unz for you.

That China had any food at all in the early 1960s is certainly because of that lucky third who ignored Mao's diktat, and farmed according to tradition and/or to Western (not Soviet) standards. These farmers posed an embarrassment to Mao's honour which, I suspect, the Cultural Revolution avenged.