Mao’s Great Famine

Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter explores the horrors of the other extreme of the political spectrum: Communism and Socialism. I mean…everyone knows how bad fascism is. Nazis know how bad Nazism and Fascism are. But colleges don’t teach about how bad Socialism and Communism are. A century of documentation says it will always end in death and despair, but college campuses keep pushing it as the savior of the people.

Communism was a bad idea from the time Karl Marx shat it out from betwixt his butt cheeks, but the over education keeps thinking if only THEY were in charge, it would all turn out ok. Because only someone so highly educated could be so irredeemably stupid.

This book explores the most devastating catastrophe to hit China in a brief four years…from 1958 to 1962, China implemented Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And it resulted in famine and death. In fact, in four years, it was three times as deadly as the Holocaust. 12 million executed during the 6 years of the Holocaust. 45 million dead as a result of the four years of Mao’s policy.

That is how bad socialism is.

The author drew on an incredible scope of primary resources. People who actually survived this catastrophe were interviewed, in their native language, by specially trained interviewers, who were trained not to ask yes/no questions, and to always ask in the speakers’ native language. He wanted to eliminate miscommunication between the speaker and the listener, so the interviewers always spoke the same native dialect as the speaker. He was also given access to the state’s archives, which could only be gained through a recommendation of someone in the government. Because in China, the archives do NOT belong to the people. In America, you can file a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to gain access to documents that are not generally public access. This is not a possibility in China.

It was devastating to read.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s attempt to force collectivization on China’s way to full Communism. Starvation, disease, brutality, and murder were what resulted.

When Mao started all of this, he knew China was behind the world industrially and was largely agrarian. His intent was to leap over the US and Great Britain in industrialization. He started with purging the party of anyone who was not ideologically pure. So, he did top-down purges of party elites, all the way down to the bottom, leaving genuine monsters in charge at the local levels.

Farmers and villagers reacted badly when told they were going to lose everything. Rather than just blindly handing over their livestock to feed the cities, the farmers began slaughtering their own livestock to eat themselves. Because why should they have to hand over the wages of their hard work to city dwellers who had never worked for it?

 Farmers were then pulled off the farms to build dams and irrigation. This led to mass salinization of the farmlands…the water rose so high that the water leached salt out of the earth, resulting in literally salting the earth so nothing could grow. They ended up tilling the soil by hand because why would they maintain tools that belong to the state? That is the state’s problem. It’s the tragedy of the commons, an economic theory that has been played out for centuries the world over. If something belongs to everybody, then no one is responsible for maintaining it and it goes to dust.

Rather than talking to the farmers, the inner circle decided farmers should be close cropping and deep plowing. Close Cropping is where you plant the crops very close together. Not to be confused with companion gardening, where crops that benefit each other are grown in close proximity, each pulling what they need from the soil, companion gardening is a tried and true method, if you haven’t heard of companion gardening, you’ve probably heard of the Native American three sisters, where beans, corn, and squash are grown together. That is companion gardening at its finest.  Close cropping is where you plant everything very close together—rice, wheat, beans, corn-- so that nothing can grow because all the plants are now in competition with each other for the nutrients in the soil. Plants died.

The grossly incompetent cadre leaders would then determine something else was needed to grow and rip out completely good plants that were growing and start with a new crop of what else was needed.

Famine was endemic. People were starving to death inside of 6 months.

Deep plowing is when you normally plow to a depth of about 7” but with deep plowing you plow to about 20”. By this time, they didn’t have any tools left, so they were digging those 20” by hand. All of this with the idea of improving soil water retention. Which was not needed as water was already near the surface for the rice crops.

What was left of the plows was melted down into steel to create machinery and other industrialization projects. Forges are required to be manned. All plows and farming implements were melted down and resulted in pig iron. Not the steel that was needed. The entire countryside was destroyed in favor of this Great Leap Forward which never happened.

Coupled with the massive failure in crops, Mao Zedong went on a massive shopping spree, promising crops that didn’t exist as payment for manufacturing equipment. So, the crops in the country that normally the farmers grew for themselves with the excess sold. Now it was stripped from the country and shipped to the cities for the city people to eat with any excess being shipped overseas as payment. The country was left to starve.

So, the country people started flocking to the cities…but there was no more food or work in the cities, which was now grossly overpopulated.

You might think Mao Zedong is not responsible because the numbers were faked. The cadres in the country lied…like A LOT…about what was going on in the country. But Mao didn’t WANT to know. We know this because very early on, several party leaders stepped forward and said Hey, this might not be what’s actually happened. They were denounced as rightists and booted from the party. If they did not support Mao, then that meant they thought Mao was wrong. And Mao was never wrong. It was not politically correct to tell Chairman Mao what he did not want to hear.

The cadres overseeing the labor were incredibly vicious. They beat those who were unable to work, and they beat those who tried to steal food so that they could keep going. There was no leniency for children who were caught stealing. Children might be beaten, or they might be drowned. The book is filled with memories of watching people beaten to death for stealing, and of family members tearing each other apart due to hunger.

The people in the cities in the end were not much better. Labor was cheap, so industrial accidents were frequent. Turns out Labor Parties did not care about the laborers. They cared about meeting the quotas that had been handed down to them by the party leaders.

Death from accident was a common way to die.

The three hardest hit groups were children, women, and the elderly. Socialism sees everyone as the same. Sounds like a good idea. Men, women, boy, girl, young, old. All were equal. But what does that mean in practice under socialism/communism?

If we’re all equal, then we’re all capable of doing the exact same thing. Except it turns out we’re not. Not PC to say so…but it’s also not PC to tell Chairman Mao what he doesn’t want to hear. There were no adjustments in quota based on age or gender.

A 13-year-old girl was told to move a hundred-pound sack of earth. I’m an overfed westerner, and I’m not sure I could move a hundred pounds. When she couldn’t do it, she was beaten.

If you were unable to meet your quota, food was withheld, and you continued to starve, a never-ending spiral towards death by famine. And that is what is normal under socialism.

While theoretically there were kindergartens for the very young children, they were not the happy places we think of here in the West. No alphabets on the walls, no toys, no play time, no coloring books. They were basically holding pens. The food allotments were usually stolen by the care takers because they were starving too. 

Sometimes the mothers, knowing they were unable to take care of their children, would take their children out and abandon them to nature, hoping their kids would be able to find food on their own. The elderly were abandoned, the villages emptied out, trying to get to the cities.

This is socialism. This is what Chairman Mao did to his people. And this is what the “democratic socialists” want to do to America. Remember…you can vote your way into socialism. But you’ll have to shoot your way out. Why do you think they are trying so hard to disarm America?

The only difference is that socialism was forced on China. We’re dumb enough to vote it in. The knowledge is out there…find it!

Women, in addition to being forced to abandon or sell their children for food, were raped… a lot. Sometimes they were forced to work naked. Because they needed the food, they would do so. Just because.

Many turned to prostitution. Many more killed themselves. You could die of famine, disease, brutality, or accident. The ultimate death toll has a conservative estimate of 30 million dead, 55 million at the high end. Author Frank Dikötter puts the death toll at about 45 million. Dikötter picked his number as this is the number reported to him by an ex-patriot, who had the number from a member of the senior party during a party meeting. So, this is the number accepted by the party leaders.

This is what happens when governments turn against their people. There are an alarming number of people who claim that wasn’t real socialism. I don’t want THAT socialism; I want democratic socialism. But once you vote these self-serving assholes in, you can’t get them out. Because now they’re in charge. And now they make the rules. For the good of us all.

Socialism is a philosophy that ruins everything it touches. It’s been tried and failed in Russia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba…. lots of books on the Holocaust. There are a lot MORE books on the failure of Socialism. But none of those books are taught in college, to the people who are now trying to tell us we’re wrong for hating socialism. Only the Holocaust is taught in the west. It’s almost like the intellectuals running the colleges don’t WANT us to know how bad this is and how bad it can get.

As horrifying as this book was, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know just how bad it can get. It was very well written…and as you can see, (here for YouTube, here for Rumble) it made me cry. Like a lot. Off one example of socialism.