Mao's great famine
Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era. Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting and magnificently detailed book chronicles an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented. Dikotter shows that instead of lifting the country among the world's superpowers and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous -- step in the opposite direction. He demonstrates, as nobody has before, that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
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2010–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- The US supported Chaing Kai Shek and the Nationalists over Mao and the Communists after WWII. Also, Mao was a staunch Stalinist so there is the holdover tension there. Mao continued with that even more so after Stalin died and was determined to be basically the Stalin of Asia.
Also China was abused by the west prior to that, though mostly Europe so there is probably no love lost there.
I would recommend Frank Dikötter books on China, The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao's Great Famine, and The Cultural Revolution.
- You can commit atrocious evil without reaping rewards. It is extremely doubtful that Mao contributed any good. Read any book like Mao’s Great Famine or any other book detailing Maos life and exploits. He was a psychopath who refused to admit he did anything wrong. He was also an ephebophile, sleeping with girls as young as 14. Did that contribute any good?
- I agree: read books about China. Books like "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962" by Frank Dikotter, and "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression" by Courtois et. al.
These are books you are unlikely to be able to read in China, and not because reading history does not comport with some imagined "Chinese way" but rather because the truth is threatening to totalitarians.
- Exactly. Also worth studying Mao's Great Famine. Great podcast on this released yesterday: http://www.econtalk.org/frank-dikotter-on-maos-great-famine
- Read some of Anne Applebaum's stuff:
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/
In particular Red Famine:
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on...
Also read Mao's Great famine:
https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastr...
"Everytime" as the OP says is too strong. But we have often learned that things were bad beyond belief, as in the Holodomor and The Great Chinese Famine.
Also with Iraq there were incredible actions carried out against the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds and also chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein. The thing was a lot, perhaps the worst, were carried out when Hussein was an ally of the West against Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein...
- > I also re-read things for the mental approach it may instill for a period of time while and after reading it, to enjoy it (like you said), or to see how the perspective fits to my new mental models a few years later.
I feel my mental model actively changing. I read something last night (a great book on genetic programming) that I could feel actively unwinding an undeserved bias of a previous self and opening a new path for creativity.
Sadly, I suspect many actually do not make any real progress in developing their mental models. Some, after many years, I have the same conversations with about fundamentally the same subjects.
> I'm curious what books others go back to over time.
For me, George Orwell's 1984 & Animal Farm, various short classic stories, etc. If our learning processes are somewhat a support vector machine, I try to reinforce the ideas that originally drastically changed my internal model.
It's not always books and media either. I listened to Mao's Great Famine [1] over several days - and it's harrowing. I like to revisit foods that remind me of childhood (flashes of memory from being younger than 2), like orange & mango juice, and strawberry & banana smoothie.
