• DOI:10.1086/tcj.66.41262812
• Corpus ID: 141874259

SITES OF HORROR: MAO'S GREAT FAMINE [with Response]

@article{Wemheuer2011SITESOH,
  title={SITES OF HORROR: MAO'S GREAT FAMINE [with Response]},
  author={Felix Wemheuer and Frank Dik{\"o}tter},
  journal={The China Journal},
  year={2011},
  pages={155 - 164}
}

• Felix Wemheuer, F. Dikötter
• Published 1 July 2011
• History
• The China Journal

Mao 's Great Famine: The History of China 's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, by Frank Dikotter. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. xvi + 420 pp. £25.00 (hardcover). For many elderly peasants living in Central China and Sichuan Province, the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) was the most devastating experience in their lifetime. The greatest famine in Chinese history caused between 15 and 45 million deaths.1 In recent years, several important books written by Chinese scholars have been published in Hong Kong on this topic.2 Frank Dikotter' s recent contribution is Mao 's Great Famine, the longest and most detailed English-language account of this tragic event. Dikotter's book is aimed at situating the famine as the "most deadly mass killing" in human history, since at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death. In contrast to other Western scholars, Dikotter managed to gain access to eleven provincial archives. This is a significant achievement, given that the archival system in China is highly restricted. Remarkably, about 80 per cent of his footnotes are based on these archival documents. However, if one is familiar with the research3 and expects a brand new interpretation of the famine, one will be disappointed. Dikotter's account reads like a long list of atrocities committed by Mao's regime against the Chinese people and bears the hallmarks of having been written in furious outrage. The polemic and emotional language of the book is clearly targeted at the general reader. The main arguments in the first part of the book on elite politics are reminiscent of Jasper Becker's popular monograph:4 the "madman" Mao Zedong mined the country during the Great Leap and ignored the famine because of dogmatism, selfishness and stupidity. The famine resulted in the collapse of the economy, agriculture and moral values. Offering more original insights are the chapters "Destruction", "Survival", "The Vulnerable" and "Ways of Dying", in which Dikotter reveals in great detail how people suffered, died or struggled to survive. Moreover, instead of seeing China as a disciplined, unitary Communist society, he believes that the famine created disintegration, "leaving people to resort to whatever means were available to survive" (p. xiv). Dikotter argues that people died mainly of hunger and not epidemics, as in many other previous famines (p. 275). While the famine is usually dated between 1959 and 1961, Dikotter argues that mass starvation had already begun in 1958 and that it lasted until 1962 in some parts of the country. Mao 's Great Famine also brings international relations and urban society into the debate. Furthermore, he shows that the Great Leap created a huge underclass of migrant workers who suffered under terrible working conditions. He writes that, in some cities, "human markets" (renshi shichang XM-^W) appeared, where day laborers offered their services in order to survive (p. 233). Some Chinese scholars have shown in local case studies that the establishment of the people's communes resulted in massive damage to peasant houses;5 Dikotter goes even further, and claims that the Great Leap was in effect the "greatest demolition of property in human history" (p. xi). Generalization of Local Examples Like other Western scholars, Dikotter had no access to the provincial archives of Henan and Anhui, which suffered most after Sichuan. Documents from Hunan, Gansu, Guangdong and Yunnan Provinces often serve as examples. Importantly, Dikotter is aware that even classified documents from provincial archives cannot present the "truth" and "we have little alternative but to view everyday life through the prism of the state" (p. 342). In "An Essay on the Sources", he claims to have read the sources "against the grain" and treated them carefully - it is quite remarkable that the publisher allowed him to include this essay on the sources, since most US university presses tend to "ban" methodological chapters from their academic publications. …