The red elves on the other side of the world
I have a newspaper cutting here – an interview with the historian Frank Dikoetter, from The Sunday Times (London). Dikoetter spoke about his book, Mao’s Great Famine, which shows that the horrors caused by China’s Great Leap Forward in the years 1958 to 1961 were even greater than previously thought, with as many as 45 million dying as a result.
Dikoetter did his research in Chinese archives. Librarians and archivists willingly handed over old boxes of files precisely because the atrocities and deaths of those terrible years had been so thoroughly wiped from the collective memory that anyone born after 1950 knew nothing of them.
The civil servants he dealt with had no idea what he was looking for, or the terrible nature of the information contained in those files – a man who was punished by having his back broken for digging up a sweet potato for his starving child, for instance. People who sold their children to buy food. People who ate their children. People killing themselves before they starved.
When Silvio Berlusconi said that the Chinese of those times boiled children to use as fertilizer, he was pilloried and savaged, but it turns out he was wrong only in the minor detail.
The concealment was so effective that China even managed to hide those millions of deaths from starvation – thought at first to be ‘only’ 30 million, now closer to 45 million, from the West, where the discovery came only many years later.
Dikoetter’s book has won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize. Since it was published about a year ago, he has been receiving masses of hate mail via the internet, from China. It upset him dreadfully – historians do not generally receive hate mail – until he realised that it was organised politically.
I quote from the interview:
“In the beginning it depressed me because I took it very seriously,” says the mild-mannered Dutch academic, sitting in his publisher’s office still jet-lagged from flying in for the awards ceremony.
“It took quite a long while to realise these were not necessarily independent people expressing their opinion, but the wumaodang, the 50-cent party people who are actually paid (by the Chinese government) to send out hate mail. That’s what they do for a living. They all log on on Sunday and I’m just their caseload for the morning.”
So the Chinese Communist Party has its internet elves too. When I wrote that much of the Labour Party’s thinking (and that of so many of its supporters) has more to do with China than it does with the liberal west, I wasn’t too far off the mark.
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I wonder if Reno Calleja knows about this famine…
Daphne, I couldn’t watch live the speeches given today at the PN conference. My father said it is worth watching as the PM was at his best. Do you know if there is a link?
Thanks.
[Daphne – I have no idea but will find out.]
The speeches do not appear to be available just yet.
However if you bring up NET TV portal (not through maltarightnow.com) you may want to go ‘ON DEMAND’ where you will find the recent programme ‘Iswed fuq l-abjad’ of the 17th instant when the PM was interviewed. The speech you refer to should be up there soon, I hope.
I watched the PM’s speech at the conference and he was absolutely great. He did not skirt around issues and offered Joseph a ten point challenge which, no doubt, will be ignored or fudged by Joseph in his two hour speech tonight.
“When I wrote that much of the Labour Party’s thinking (and that of so many of its supporters) has more to do with China than it does with the liberal west, I wasn’t too far off the mark.”
You can summarise that as follows:
Labour’s thinking: Made in China.
With a tinge of Libya.
The resultant product – RUBBISH.
There are other published books about the millions that died under Mao’s regime. One Chinese author gives horrific accounts, not different from what we are accustomed to hear about the Nazi concentration camps. The only difference is that Mao killed more people than the Nazis or Stalin did.
What strikes me is that while Mao kept millions of Chinese at mere subsistance or even starvation level, his regime had offered large sums of money on generous terms to Mintoff’s government so that he can build the (useless?) Red China Dock.
“On tiny and immeasurably more prosperous Malta ( pop.c. 300000), Mao lavished no less than US$25 million in April 1972. Its prime minister, Dom Mintoff returned from China sporting a Mao badge” –
from Mao, The Unkown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (2006).
I believe that this episode was also mentioned by the then British foreign secretary Lord Carrington in his autobiography.
Wild Swans, by the same author (Jung Chang), is a must-read.
Now these guys have become arrogant … posting on CNN US in Chinese.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/20/zakaria-concerns-about-china/?hpt=hp_c1
45 million? That’s horrendous.
Almost as many as lost their lives in the Second World War. (55 million).
The atrocities committed in the name of Chinese communism are beyond belief.
But then even today most of the Chinese are living as slaves, and in the jungles almost naked, barefooted and subsisting on hunting.
No illusion of democracy at all but as Zizek put it, China’s authoritarian capitalism is a phenomenon and the day may soon come when the social situation will explode.