本帖最后由 郭国汀 于 11/6/2014 14:08 编辑
Frank Dikotter
Mao 's Great Famine, above all, is about evidence: it uses hundreds of archival
documents, from secret minutes of Party meetings to investigations by the Public
Security Bureau, to advance facts rather than theories. One fact is that Mao and
other leaders knew what was happening in the countryside as a result of the Great
Leap Forward. In the case of Mao, the smoking gun is in the minutes of a meeting
that took place in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai on 25 March 1959, when Mao
ordered that procurements be increased to one-third of all the grain, and made
available an extra 16,000 lorries to carry out the task. "When there is not enough
to eat", the Chairman explained, "people starve to death. It is better to let half of
the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." Detailed evidence of this
nature clearly undermines the widespread view that Mao, in the many months
before the Lushan Plenum in the summer of 1959, "defended the peasants". As a
result of Mao's explicit orders, from November 1958 to July 1959 procurements
25 According the Penn World Tables, China's GDP per head was the lowest in the world in
each year between 1952 and 1957, Cormac O Grada, "Great Leap into Famine", p. 192.
26 Stephane Courtois (ed.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
(Harvard University Press, 1999).
27 Jung Chang (Rong Zhang) and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unkown Story (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2005). See four reviews of this book, by Gregor Benton and Steve Tsang, Timothy
Cheek, Lowell Dittmer and Geremie Barme in The China Journal, No. 55 (January 2006),
pp. 95-109, 109-1 18, 1 19-128 and 128-139.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsITES OF HORROR 163
of grain actually increased and exports of grain doubled. What is likely to be
more reliable, the officially published speeches of Chairman Mao from which
Felix Wemheuer quotes or the unexpurgated minutes in the Party's own archives?
Most of all, only a mere fraction of Mao's Great Famine is about Mao
himself, who is portrayed as a very skilled manipulator rather than as a "madman".
Instead, the book shows how the Chairman would never have been able to prevail
without the backing of other powerful leaders, who, in turn, whipped up support
from other Party members, as chains of interests and alliances extended all the
way down to the village. Zhou Enlai, for instance, stated in November 1958:
"I would rather that we either don't eat or eat less and consume less, as long as we
honor contracts signed with foreigners", justifying increased procurements.
Wemheuer repeats the allegation made by O Grada that the total number of
victims that I give is too high. The basis of this claim is that a one per cent rate of
death is too low to be considered normal. Would it really change that much if we
doubled it to two per cent? In Fuyang 2.4 million died out of a total population of
8 million (in Cambodia under Pol Pot, 1.7 to 2.4 million people died out, of a total
of 8 million). A whole chapter entitled "Sites of Horror" shows how, in county
after county, over 15 per cent of the population died, sometimes up to a third. It is
fine to query my figures, but one also has to explain why every historian who has
spent a long time in the archives has reached a very high figure, from 38 million
by Yang Jisheng to 43 million by Chen Yizi, and most of all (but never mentioned
by Wemheuer) Yu Xiguang, who after two decades of archival research puts it at
55 million.
The book also documents the manner of death. In Fuyang, where 2.4 million
vanished, this is what happened according to a Party boss interrogated by an
investigation team in February 1961: "People died in tragic circumstances, being
beaten and hanged to death, deprived of food or buried alive. Some were severely
tortured and beaten, having their ears chopped off, their noses dug out, their
mouths torn off, and so on, which often caused death." As the book shows, there
were extreme variations across all of China, as an environment of fear created by
the leadership allowed some local cadres to use every means at their disposal to
extract food and work from the local population, while others did their best,
against all odds, to protect the villagers from the depredations of the state. Food
was used as a weapon in conditions of radical collectivization, as people were
banned from the canteen and deliberately starved to death for a whole variety of
reasons, from being too old or too sick to work to falling asleep during a meeting.
As Lenin put it, "He who does not work shall not eat". None of this could have
happened before 1949. Of course the famines under the Nationalist regime are
deplorable, but a wartime disaster is hardly comparable to a man-made famine by
a government that is not directly threatened by invasion or civil war. There is a
difference between starving to death and being starved to death.
Wemheuer in his review wishes to have it both ways. On the one hand, he
complains that the book is a "long list of atrocities", yet on the other he alleges
that I generalize from "a few examples". The chapter on housing alone is over
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 64 THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 66
4,500 words long, and a lengthy section looks at the many reasons for which
houses were destroyed. The figure that I give is up to 40 per cent, not 40 per cent.
He believes that my example of a kindergarten supervisor who used a hot iron to
punish a child is extreme, but there is another chapter of 4,500 words on the fate
of the most vulnerable members of society, children, many of whom suffered far
more exacting forms of punishment. Wemheuer ends up replicating the view of
the perpetrators of violence: after all, the Party leaders at the time were the ones
who dismissed cases of cannibalism as mere "metaphors" and punished those who
reported them.
Two-thirds of my book is about ordinary people, and it relies not only on
massive archival findings but also on more than a hundred interviews with
farmers who managed to survive, constituting the largest collection of oral history
on the period to date. If the book really portrays people as having "no agency at
all", why would it reconstruct in hundreds of pages the many ways in which
farmers tried to charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate
or otherwise outwit the state?
There is a point, in historical debates about 20th-century atrocities, where the
absence of sufficient evidence allows doubt and even denial to flourish. Yang
Jisheng, Yu Xiguang, Qiao Peihua and I, among others, have tried to document
what happened during the Great Famine on the basis of an abundance of material
straight from the Party archives. Let us hope that more historians will move into
the archives rather revert to the published speeches of Chairman Mao.
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