Mao's Great Famine
by Frank Dikötter
Summary
Between 1958 and 1962, Mao's Great Leap Forward, the campaign to catapult China past Britain by collectivising everything and conscripting the countryside into steel making and grain targets, killed tens of millions of people. Dikötter's history, built from years inside newly opened provincial and county party archives, puts the figure at a minimum of forty five million premature deaths, and its deeper claim is about the manner of them: this was not a natural disaster mishandled, but a catastrophe of coercion, in which food was allocated by obedience and withdrawn as punishment, and in which perhaps two to three million of the dead were beaten, tortured or executed outright.
The book moves between the court and the village. At the top: Mao driving targets upward against the evidence, silencing Peng Dehuai at Lushan, and the terrible archival record of leaders informed and unmoved, down to the meeting notes in which Mao accepts mass death as the price of procurement. Below: the granular county files, the cadres who beat and starved, the collapse of family and village morality that Dikötter refuses to prettify, theft, abandonment, the destruction of houses for fertiliser, and the survival strategies of people reduced to units of grain. A long section counts the collateral demolitions, up to forty percent of housing pulled down in some regions, the environment stripped, the lakes fished out, a country consumed along with its harvest.
It is organised thematically and reads fast, anger disciplined into ledger entries.
Around four hundred and thirty pages.
Best for readers who want the famine restored to the centre of twentieth century history, from the archives the party opened and has since substantially reclosed.
Historical Context & Significance
Mao's Great Famine won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011, judges calling it stunningly original, and it carried the famine, long a specialist subject, into general readership; the book has been reported banned on the mainland and circulates there anyway.
The scholarly fight it started is still running. Dikötter's forty five million, well above earlier demographic estimates, and his emphasis on deliberate violence drew criticism from historians including Cormac Ó Gráda, who questioned the demography, and others who found the framing prosecutorial; his defenders answer that the county archives changed the evidentiary base and the tone followed the documents. The argument itself measures the book's impact.
It became the middle panel of his People's Trilogy, between The Tragedy of Liberation and The Cultural Revolution, built on the same archival seam while it was open. Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian long at the University of Hong Kong, has watched that window close behind the trilogy, which may prove the books' most durable justification.