Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Recently I read a short review of this work in the New York times, and then to my surprise saw this 629 page book on the Chinese Famine of 1958-61 in my local bookstore. I thought, who would buy it? I did graduate study in Chinese History, speak Chinese, and lived in China in 1982. Now I am not in the China field. The topic is interesting to me, so I bought it and read it over the weekend. I was very pleasantly surprised. It's true that the writer's intention was to document the effects of the Great Leap Forward objectively, but I was also pleased that he was not afraid to draw conclusions and penetrate to the heart of the issue: Every major communist regime, the Soviet Union, the PRC, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea etc. caused mass starvation in the initial period when their zeal was high and they sought to get an iron grip on the population by controlling the food supply. The problem with these regimes is systemic; the suffering was not the result of "natural disasters" or "isolated abuses." Totalitarian systems have big problems pulling off mid-course corrections. They are not responsive to feedback until they go beyond the brink. In those systems everyone is a slave to their superiors and often they are also tyrants to those below them in the pecking order. The only way to prevent this from happening again is to educate the populace (stop calling them peasants) and gradually transition to openness and democracy. Other things that the writer brought out that I think people should realize: - Despite the depiction of the Communist movement as a "peasant movement," the regime caused great suffering among the farmers, killing more people than the Japanese invaders (1937-1945). - The local cadres rode hard over the rural population to please their superiors, and then when the policy changed, got the blame for the problems. How ironic! - The regime took great pains to hide the problems it created, and many Western scholars or politicians (the earlier Edward Friedman? Nixon? Kissinger?) and journalists were fooled. However, some brave analysts did pick up on this early on. The first book on this specific topic was written by Jasper Becker, a journalist who I have never met but respect very much. It's not true that no one knew about this until China opened up after 1989 -- some people just want to believe fairy tales and close their eyes to unpleasant facts. I recommend this book, with the caveat that the non-specialist reader should not get too bogged down in the details. Sometimes the writer proves his point in one chapter, and then repeats the point in more chapters that are just the same story set in different locations. For specialists the details will be interesting but the general reader may want to skim over some parts, and focus on the analysis which I think is outstanding.