Systematic genocide

You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path.

It is a measure of people’s continuing admiration for Chairman Mao that last year the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, unashamedly described him as a ‘favourite political philosopher’ because, as she told an audience of American high- school graduates, Mao showed that

You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path.


In a brilliant work, backed by painstaking research, Professor Frank Dikötter, has trawled through the Chinese archives to reveal some staggering new details and insights on how Mao bravely ignored everyone’s advice. He launched the forcible massed collectivisation of Chinese peasantry in 1958, a movement dubbed the Great Leap Forward, which in four years killed 45 million people. Mao did this even though his earlier rounds of collectivisation had already killed millions of peasants by seizing their food; and against the advice of Soviet leaders who well remembered how Lenin and Stalin’s collectivisation policies had killed tens of millions.

Prominent famine experts, like Justin Lin Yifu, now the chief economist at the World Bank, have excused Mao, arguing that, unlike Stalin, he wasn’t a monster who did this deliberately or knowingly. Instead, the deaths were the result of mismanagement; peasants should have had the right to leave the communes voluntarily but the plan was basically a great idea. Even the great American sinologist Professor John King Fairbanks considered that Mao’s greatest achievement had been to improve the lot of the Chinese peasantry.

Jung Chang, whose family history Wild Swans sold 13 million copies around the world, says that when she wrote the book she did not know the famine’s real cause.