Rating: 
Summary: Sheds light on present as well as past
Review: "Hungry Ghosts" sets out to explain one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, and as a benefit, helps explain present-day China. Whether the specific numbers are accurate or whether Mao can be held personally responsible for the millions of starvation deaths is something that will be debated for years. However, books written about or by Ch'an monks who lived during that era support much of what Becker asserts (see George Crane's "Bones of the Master" as an example). After reading this, now I know my mother wasn't kidding me when she used to chide me for not eating my vegetables when she said "Don't you know there are starving people in China?""Hungry Ghosts" also provides insight into present day Communist Party behavior, particularly in the provinces. The recent AIDS epidemic in China is a good example. How is it local officials can round up thousands of villagers to collect their blood, using the same unsterilized needle on hundreds of people, without having any concern for the potential of blood-borne pathogens, let alone HIV? And then mix all that blood together, spin off the plasma, then reinject the mixed blood back into the villagers! That is what is happening now in China, the birth of an AIDS epidemic that may put the one in Africa to shame. Read "Hungry Ghosts" and you will see the same bureaucratic malfeasance at work today trying to deny an entire new generation of orphans being created -- not by famine as during the Great Leap Forward, but by an institutionalized silence over government initiated mass HIV infection. Sadly, some things never change. China is making great strides economically, but the government is dragging its feet with meaningful reform.
Rating: 
Summary: The greatest peacetime disaster of the 20th century
Review: -----------------------------------------------------------
A horrifying and well-researched history of how Mao's "Great
Leap Forward" became the worst famine in history, killing
perhaps 30 million Chinese (1958 - 1960) -- it appears
unlikely an exact fatality figure will ever be known. Which
adds to the horror, I think, that millions of people, with hopes
and dreams like our own, could vanish without leaving
a trace, even a number, in the world outside their homes.
Not to mention uncounted millions of children whose lives
were blighted by brain-damage from malnutrition.... FWIW, Jasper concludes that Mao's Great Famine was more
omission than commission (in contrast to Stalin's): Mao's
absurd ideas of backyard industrialization, plus turning
loose the Red Guards chaos, ruined the harvests. Then
Communist Party officials simply denied the problem, and
concocted elaborate coverups -- even painting the tree
trunks to hide that the bark had been eaten by starving
people -- when Mao or senior officials were to visit famine
areas. And a smiling-peasants "Big Lie" for foreigners,
which worked for years. It's a remarkable, and depressing, account. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The greatest peacetime disaster of the 20th century
Review: -----------------------------------------------------------
A horrifying and well-researched history of how Mao's "Great
Leap Forward" became the worst famine in history, killing
perhaps 30 million Chinese (1958 - 1960) -- it appears
unlikely an exact fatality figure will ever be known. Which
adds to the horror, I think, that millions of people, with hopes
and dreams like our own, could vanish without leaving
a trace, even a number, in the world outside their homes.
Not to mention uncounted millions of children whose lives
were blighted by brain-damage from malnutrition.... FWIW, Jasper concludes that Mao's Great Famine was more
omission than commission (in contrast to Stalin's): Mao's
absurd ideas of backyard industrialization, plus turning
loose the Red Guards chaos, ruined the harvests. Then
Communist Party officials simply denied the problem, and
concocted elaborate coverups -- even painting the tree
trunks to hide that the bark had been eaten by starving
people -- when Mao or senior officials were to visit famine
areas. And a smiling-peasants "Big Lie" for foreigners,
which worked for years. It's a remarkable, and depressing, account. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: very informative
Review: Being nearly halfway done with the book, as I encounter the unjustified and senseless brutality committed by the CCP against the peasants, intellectuals, and others labeled as enemies of the state, the only solace I can find is knowing that Mao and the rest of his deceased cronies and murderers are sure enough all miserably burning in Hell.
Rating:
Summary: A brave look at Mao's malignant megalomania
Review: Books like this are important since they set the standards for others to follow. No one - to my knowledge - has seriously tried to quantify the extent of the suffering brought on by the famine that began in the late 1950s. In Hungry Ghosts, author Japser Becker might not get his numbers absolutely right, but this is a highly engaging look at the downside of thuggish megalomania. I don't think I've ever read anything so morbid, yet so utterly fascinating. The basic thrust is that China's communists repeated the mindless agricultural policies designed by their Soviet counterparts in the 1920s. Russia's communists destroyed learning, promoted ignorance and brought famine to the Ukraine. China, following in their footsteps, made exactly the same mistakes. Strangely enough, the result was exactly the same. Famine and over 30 million deaths. What follows is the story of a country in the grip of mass delusion as moronic agricultural policies caused a collapse in crop production and an authoritarian government demanded ever higher taxes in the form of grain. Of course, communities attempted to please Mao by lying about the true level of grain production. Since they exaggerated, their grain tax quota was higher. When they couldn't pay their taxes, their food stocks were confiscated. Villagers then died, en masse. Anyone found with food was assumed to be counter-revolutionary and was either starved to death or executed in gruesome circumstances. The madness only ended when Mao's own family intervened. But only after tens of millions had perished. Some reviewers - expecially those who grew up in a stable and judicial country like Hong Kong - seem to think that the murderous circus just north of the Shenzhen river is something to be applauded and anyone who thinks differently is out to get at China. How sad can you get? Four Stars.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Job, Excellent Read
Review: I found this book well-written, well-organized, and moving. It's interesting to see how many Chinese readers consider it ethnocentric and anti-Chinese. I didn't take it that way at all -- Mao's sort of madness is all-too-universal in human history, and the story left me with a sense of great admiration for the Chinese people who somehow suffered through this period. Becker is also very careful to point out that the real roots of the disaster were not in China but in Mao's enthusiasm for actions of Stalin and the writings of Marx. And if the portions on Mao sometimes read like a bio of Idi Amin, well, I'd consider that appropriate. He was a murderous, vainglorious sociopath. The fact that he was right about the terrible crimes of the Western powers against China neither changes nor justifies a thing. Anyway, a very nicely written and fascinating account that left me wanting to learn more about both ancient and modern Chinese history.
Rating:
Summary: Read it and weep
Review: I immediately recognized the photo on the cover of Hungry Ghosts, a boy and two women (one carrying a baby) pulling a plow. When I first came to Taiwan, a few days after Lin Biao died and a few weeks before Nixon visited Mao, the government here frequently published this photo as evidence of how wrong things had gone in the PRC. Pooh, I thought, things can't possibly be as bad as they said. For proof I looked to the glowing reports published by the first American reporters to visit: one even brought along her father, who had been a missionary, and could speak some Chinese. Years after Mao died, when the PRC started opening up, it became evident that the KMT had vastly understated its case, perhaps to avoid panic here. Hungry Ghosts documents a tragedy that the world hardly noted.
I would be the last to claim expertise on PRC government affairs, but one reason I believe Hungry Ghosts is credible is that detail after detail meshes with bits and pieces I had picked up over the years, unaware of the extent of the disaster. Example: Becker mentions the dams peasants had to build. In the early 1980s, Mr Wei, from a family of tea farmers in Fujian, told me why his relatives starved:"We were told that tea is decadent and capitalistic. We were ordered to tear out all the tea trees and plant grain. Our family has farmed those hills for generation after generation. We know the soil, we know the climate, and we know that grain cannot grow there. We were ordered to build a dam. We didn't know how, so we asked the cadres. They said,'Ask an old farmer.' We had no choice, so a couple old farmers got together and planned a dam, even though they had never seen one, either. We toiled and toiled. Since we were producing no crops, we had little to eat. Finally, our dam was finished. As soon as we let the water flow, it washed away the dam. We asked the cadres what to do. They said, 'Grow tea.' But we couldn't harvest tea for several years. For three years, we had nothing to eat. Many of my relatives starved." Anybody who reads Hungry Ghosts will recognize the elements in this story. For me, practically the whole book reads like this, corroborating things I had seen and heard over the years. Mr Becker speaks with authority on modern China, but his ancient history is weak. The first chapter opens with "an inscription on a Shang tomb." I have never heard of an inscription on a Shang tomb. In, yes; on, no. If the inscription is translated correctly, it is hardly typical of early Chinese thought (unless the 'Emperor' refers to the god Di). Becker makes some outlandish comments about Confucianism. Okay, big deal, his book is about modern, not ancient China. His explanation that the Cultural Revolution was a response dealing with the GLF makes sense of an otherwise senseless convulsion. Dear reader, this is a heart-breaking book. May you and I never suffer as those poor people suffered. May such times never come again.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing and Revealing
Review: In this book Jasper Becker has done an impressive and exhaustive job on digging up information and interviews, out of a society that has pulled out all the stops to repress all knowledge of China's enormous famine of the early 60's. Chairman Mao, who has been idolized and emulated by many third world countries and disdvantaged peoples as a visionary, is instead revealed in this book as a stubborn, cruel, and apathetic dictator. Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward" quickly became a failure in its efforts to forcibly collectivize agriculture and increase production. Mao refused to believe that his great plan was causing the starvation of huge numbers of peasants, and suppressed and threatened anyone who tried to reveal the truth. The fact that communist officials down to the local level had been threatened to keep their mouths shut, and that Mao refused to admit failure, proves that these dictators would rather watch tens of millions of people die than admit that their bold plan was a dismal failure. So instead of looking like a laughing stock on the world stage, they allowed these people to die and then used an iron fist to cover up all information about the famine. Ironically, this is from a regime supposedly dedicated to the "people" and it was an eerie repeat of a similar famine inflicted on the Ukraine by Stalin 30 years earlier. Becker has done a good job of unearthing this long-suppressed information, and adequately debunks past writers and politicians who were misled and duped by the communist propaganda machine. While Becker's statistical approach makes this book repetitive in places (especially the section giving the famine's development and death tolls from various Chinese provinces), overall the book is an impressive piece of scholarship. Also, the new postscript about the recent famine in North Korea, which has resulted from almost the same political failures, offers disturbing proof that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Rating:
Summary: An Astonishing, Horrifying, Catastrophe...
Review: It has often been said that, to understand China, you must know of its past. Here is a compelling treatment of a chapter in China's history that is almost a black comedy. Mao's Great Leap Forward is predicated upon such preposterous silliness that we chuckle at its absurdities (eg, the crops will improve with "deep planting" at up to 12 feet; steel can be made by all in back yard smelters, etc...). Yet...the consequences are so awful, that any thought of smiles is quickly erased. Historians differ, but here was want and famine on a scale unprecedented in the 20th century. Perhaps as many as 30,000,000 died. Another reviewer scoffs at this number and says that it was "only" 10,000,000. Whatever the number, this is still an unthinkable tragedy, and one that happened in our lifetime. Like the Taiping Revolution that claimed as many as 22,000,000 lives (read "God's Chinese Son"), it left an indelible, but largely unknown mark on China - one that shapes the country today as it emerges as the only "other" super power. Well written and fascinating.
Rating: 
Summary: Good research and new info, also gross distortions
Review: The Great Leap Forward is the great tragedy of the PRC era. A book that summarized all previous scholarly work on the famine into one volume, plus added additional research would have been very useful. This book does a good bit of this, but is written in a polemical style, presenting a grossly one-sided picture of this event. Evidence that doesn't fit, especially regarding the Mao = Stalin-like monster thesis, is discarded. Becker's comparison between the GLF and Stalin's famine is rejected by 95% of scholars. However misguided, Mao pursued the GLF to make the peasants lives better. The GLF combined late 19th century Confucian philosopher Kang Youwei's utopian program, with Mao's restless impatience (i.e. prematurely moving lots of labor out of agriculture into industry, a major factor in the catastrophe that Becker doesn't discuss). In most places (except Sichuan tragically), the GLF was abandoned around 1.5 years after it started. Stalin's case is in another moral galaxy. He deliberately inflicted mass suffering on the Russian peasants, never changed course, and not only had no regrets, but was proud at having taught the peasants "a lesson". Becker correctly identifies fanatic provincial leaders in Sichuan, Anhui, and Henan, and their irrational and brutal policies as key causes of famine (3 of the hardest hit provinces), and there are important new revelations he has unearthed. He implies Mao supported their actions, yet Dali Yang reported, in his excellent book on the famine "Calamity and Reform", that the Sichuan leader "blocked the relay of Mao's April 29 letter" (ordering a cessation of many GLF policies) and ignored other central demands (p48). Regarding peasants hiding grain, unlike Stalin who ordered them shot, Dali Yang quotes Mao as saying "I certainly hope [they are hiding grain], I'm afraid they have nothing to eat at all!" Yet Becker would like you to believe Stalin and Mao were two peas in a pod on this issue. Becker tells us that weather was not a factor in the famine. Compare this with the evidence presented in Y.Y. Kueh's book on agricultural and weather trends. The GLF, a dangerous mix of people fearing to speak freely (because of the anti-"rightist" witch hunt of 1957-58) and experimental utopianism, caused problems in all areas, but many areas suffered widespread hunger but little or no outright starvation. 10 of China's 30 provinces had mass starvation (for periods of varying lengths); weather explains a sizable amount--but not all-- of this variation. Becker says "at least" 30 million died, but how can he say this so assuredly when quite a bit of work (ex: Penny Kane's book) cites lower figures? Further, he is apparently ignorant of what exactly the 30 million figure, that he gets from highly respected demographer Judith Banister, represents. It's not 30 million "starved to death", it's "excess mortality" or "above the normal" mortality, which is different. This broad measure is only partly made up of starvation deaths. He also isn't aware that Banister uses a very low "normal" by which to measure "above the normal"--because of tremendous PRC success in lowering the crude death rate from 1949-57-- an assumption he wouldn't agree with, thus he has no right to use her figure. The failure to understand this point makes his comparison with past famines like the 1876 famine a misleading apples and oranges comparison. He also is selective in citing Judith Banister's work. He'll gladly cite her for the 30 million figure, but not for the remarkable surge in life expectancy from 1964-79 she documents (resuming the interrupted trend from the 1950s), something that *saved* 60-100 million lives (by the same technique used to measure the GLF's 30 million) over the performance of other developing countries that didn't institute egalitarian programs. Nobel winning economist Amartya Sen has argued this very point. The chapter on 1949-79 agricultural performance in general is poor. He's unaware, apparently, of a host of work in the economic development literature on rural China that undermines his arguments. Becker doesn't survey popular attitudes in the countryside to see if the peasants share his extreme Mao = monster view. It's obvious why he doesn't, it's well known they have the wrong view, recognizing Mao's mistakes and abuses, but also viewing him as the greatest emperor ever who brought huge social justice gains. His picture remains hung on millions and millions of rural homes. So, it's obvious they, the ones who lived through the GLF, have a different view of Mao's role in this tragedy.
|
