Radio Free Asia (24 February, 2012)
By Dan Southerland
Experts and survivors take a new look at China’s man-made famine.
Why should anyone care about a famine in China that occurred more than half a century ago?
And what relevance could it have for a China that has changed so dramatically in recent decades?
First, the issue is still a sensitive one in China, where the Communist Party’s legitimacy depends partly on portraying Mao as a great leader.
The official line: Mao made some mistakes but mostly benefited the country. Until recent years, many of the internal documents countering this conclusion were not publicly available.
Second, this famine was no small, localized event. Recently discovered documents reveal that the death toll was much higher than originally thought.
Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, which was aimed at collectivizing China’s farms and boosting production, ended up instead producing the biggest famine in world history.
Censorship worked
Third, the party’s censors have effectively obliterated the memory among many Chinese of this dark period and Mao’s role in it.
Even in the Internet age, when news in China sometimes moves at lightning speed through microblogs, China’s younger generation and even some urban, educated middle-aged Chinese appear to know little of the famine or the other disasters created by Mao.
Chinese textbooks have dismissed the famine as “three years of natural disasters.”
Now the record has been set straight in a comprehensive way by a conference of famine survivors and both Chinese and foreign experts.
The conference organized Feb. 15-16 by the Laogai Research Foundation’s executive director and former political prisoner Harry Wu has helped to eliminate any doubts that the famine was man-made or that Mao was chiefly responsible for it.
The conference opened at the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C.
