Article Image

IPFS News Link • China

Mao's Great Leap Forward Killed 45 Million From 1958 to 1962

• independent.co.uk/
 
Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said. His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge. State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Ross Wolf
Entered on:

And after Mao's leap forward killing 45 Million from 1958 to 1962, out brilliant representatives in the U.S. Congress approved borrowing so many billions from the Red Communists, putting in debt U.S. Taxpayers, that Congress can't object to anything the Chinese might do in the future. Congress would have been smarter had they approved U.S. Government borrowing from the Mafia. China to conquer America did not have to launch at attack; they got Congress to Pawn America..