Henry C.K. Liu
Subject: Re: Laws of history Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 17:22:03 -0400 From: "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu at mindspring.com> To: Ken Pomeranz <klpomera at uci.edu>
The issue was not the failure of the GLF (Great Leap Forward), but DeLong's claim of Mao having purposely murdered 30 million Chinese. Please tell me how the citing of Li Biao's forward to Mao's Quotation supports DeLong's claim. If you revisit former posts on this thread, you will find the following: Subject: laws of history Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 07:17:42 -0400 From: Patrick Manning <manning at neu.edu> Reply-To:H-NET List for World History <H-WORLD at H-NET.MSU.EDU>
To:H-WORLD at H-NET.MSU.EDU From: Henry C. K. Liu hliu at mindspring.com
Did 30 Millions die of starvation caused by the great leap forward?
It is now common perception that tens of millions starved to death as a result of Mao's launching of the Great Leap Forward. Is it true or is it again a result of manufacturing history ? A China scholar sent China Study Group a reprint of an article from Australia-China Review, which contains a noteworthy refutation of the widely accepted figures of tens of millions of deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward. The following is excerpted from this article, Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy, by Wim F. Werthheim, Emeritus Professor from the Univ. of Amsterdam, one of the best noted European China scholars:
"------But the figure amounting to tens of millions, lavishly spread at present by both the current Chinese regime and Western media, and also borrowed by Jung Chang (She speaks of around thirty million, p.309), lack any historical basis.
Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s "between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese" appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability.
At my first visit to China, in August 1957, I had asked to get the opportunity to meet two outstanding Chinese social scientists: Fei Xiao-tung, the sociologist, and Chen Ta, the demographer. I could not meet either of them, because they were both seriously criticized at that time as rightists'; but I was allowed a visit by Pang Zenian, a Marxist philosopher who knew about the problems of both scholars. Chen Ta was criticised because he had attacked the pretended 1953 census. In the past he had organised censuses, and he could not believe that suddenly, within a rather short period, the total population of China had risen from 450 to 600 million (by the way: with inclusion of 17 million from Taiwan), as had been officially claimed by the Chinese authorities after the 1953 'census'. He would have like to organise a scientifically well-founded census himself, instead of an assessment largely based on regional random samples as had happened in 1953. According to him, the method followed in that year was unscientific. For that matter, a Chinese expert of demography, Dr. Ping-ti Ho, Professor of History at the University of Chicago, in a book titled Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953, Harvard East Asian Studies No.4, 1959, also mentioned numerous 'flaws' in the 1953 census: "All in all, therefore, the nationwide enumeration of 1953 was not a census in the technical definition of the term"; the separate provincial figures show indeed an unbelievable increase of some 30% in the period 1947-1953, a period of heavy revolutionary struggle (PP.93/94)!
My conclusion is that the claim that in the 1960s a number between 17 and 29 million people was 'missing' is worthless if there was never any certainty about the 600 millions of Chinese. Most probably these 'mission people' did not starve in the calamity years 1960-61, but in fact have never existed." END
As To your point: "That neo-liberal economic policies have had serious social costs is relevant -- and indisputable but to claim without evidence that the number of deaths they have caused exceeds 30 million by "several fold" only inflames the discussion without shedding any light that I can see.", it is a debating ploy to point out how ridiculous DeLong's statistics were. Neo-liberal globalization caused poverty on three quarters of the world's population which brings it to over 3 billions. At least 3% of these victims die prematurely of starvation, which bring it to 90 million, mostly children who died from malnutrition. That statistical evidence is more scientific than DeLong's 30 million deaths in China. DeLong worked at the Council of Economic Advisor which had been central in formulating US economic and trade policy. This is not the first encounter I have with him. If DeLong holds Mao personally responsible for policy failure, he must apply the same standard to himself. In previous posts, DeLong dismissed the lack of evidence with the arguments that "totalitarian" governments are "guilty" by nature. Such unscientific nonsense get posted without challenge. Furthermore, to compare Mao to Hitler, which was the thrust of DeLong's original post, was an insult to most Chinese, even to those who may not agree with Mao on policy issues and I may say to human intelligence. Mao is still much respected as a great revolutionary in China and around the world. Comparing people Americans do not approve with Hitler seems to be a favorite tactic in America.
Henry C.K. Liu
Ken Pomeranz wrote:
> Dear Mr.Liu,
> As co-editor of H-world, I almost never intervene in matters of content, but this post seems to me very problematic, and I would urge you to revise it significantly.. That Quotations From Chairman Mao never deals with the Great Leap famine is completely irrelevant to the points at issue; indeed the context of Lin Biao's remarks (which as far as I can tell, were quoted just to make the point that Mao was given credit for the state's successes, so it seems reasonable to hold him responsible for its falures) seems thoroughly beside the point. That neo-liberal economic policies have had serious social costs is relevant -- and indisputable but to claim without evidence that the number of deaths they have caused exceeds 30 million by "several fold" only inflames the discussion withoiut shedding any light that I can see. And whether Brad DeLong personally has supported such policies --I frankly don't know, and unless you think that the only alternative to supporting Ma!
!
oism is supporting neo-liberalism -- hardly seems to be a centralissue, either. If you want to post something saying that neo-liberals atthe IMF and World Bank should also be ranked among the major killers of the 20th century, that's a claim we can post -- if you support it with something -- and it is likely to serve your intellectual putrposes better than this post does.
>
> Sincerely,
> Kenneth Pomeranz
> H-world co-editor
>
Ken Pomeranz wrote:
> From: Brad De Long
> UC Berkeley
> <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU>
>
> >******************************
> >******************************
> >
> >
> >From: "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu at mindspring.com>
> >Subject: Re: laws of history
> >
> >
> >Professor DeLong, I suppose, quotes Lin Biao (out of context, I may add)
>
> It's not out of context. It's the *entire* preface to _Quotations from
> Chairman Mao_. How can it be out of context? It *is* the context...
> At 08:36 PM 5/28/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >----------------- Message requiring your approval (31 lines) ------------------
> >It is out of context in term of your accusation of Mao Zedong having murdered 30 million of his fellow countrymen with evil intent.
> >The entire collection of the Quotations from Chairman Mao never once dealt with your fantasized subject matter.
> >What was the point of your quoting Lin Biao? How does that support your groundless allegations?
> >Try for once to be responsive to the essence of the debate rather than
> >overreaching to be flippantly clever while missing the target.
> >Add up the deaths in the Third World caused in the last few decades by the neo-liberal economic perfidy of you and your colleagues in Washington, and the number exceeds 30 million by several folds.
From: Brad DeLong, University of California, Berkeley
> delong at econ.berkeley.edu
>
> So I think that it is safe to say that--in dealing with Mao's China of the late 1950s, a regime with totalitarian aspirations, a regime largely closed to the outside, a regime in which high state officials like Peng Dehuai were sufficiently alarmed by what was going on to sacrifice their careers, liberty, and lives in an attempt to bring some sanity to policy--the rule should be that we should take the bad evidence we have seriously, and presume that the deaths were likely in the tens of millions.
This is an amazingly unscientific reasoning for an economist. Peng Dehuai questioned the technical result of the Great Leap Forward. He never questioned the political motive of Mao Zedong. The political purge of Peng was a complex issue involving the dynamics of the political process of the Communist system, not dissimilar to the events surrounding Watergate in the American political culture, or the impeachment proceeding of Clinton. Peng downfall did not involve any dispute over the number of deaths any more than the impeachment of Clinton is based on sex. Mao has both written and said that the way to change a person's political mistakes is to reeducate him/her, not to kill him/her. One could legitimately criticize Mao on both personal and policy errors, as many scholars have, on the proper relationship between tolerance of opposition and effective revolutionary leadership and on the proper balance between human sacrifice and progress. The accusation of Mao murdering 300 million Chinese belongs really on the pages on the National Enquirer. America celebrates Schumpeter's "creative destruction" as a rationalization of the ruthless impact of economic policy on the lives of millions of workers for the good of the capitalist system. But that is hardly murder and Greenspan cannot be accused as a murdering maniac. Surely, Professor DeLong, an accomplished social scientist, does not reduce a discussion on Mao to such simplistic levels out of ignorance. The only explanation is that he is afflicted with a blinding ideological fixation.
>
> We should not mistake the (government-created) absence of evidence for
> evidence of absence.
Quite. It applies to the credibility of the accident/mistake theory on the bombing attack of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. But on the question of Mao's alleged murder of 30 million of his fellow citizens, the problem is a matter of logic rather than the mere absence of evidence.
Henry C.K. Liu