However, the other mass organization, the rebels, had launched a power-seizure campaign earlier in the Corps and the city. In order to help the conservatives to take back power from the rebels, the leaders of the military Independent Regiment launched armed attacks against civilian rebels.
Following the directive from Beijing, authorizing military control of newspapers and radio stations, the PLA Qinghai Provincial Military District sent troops to take over the provincial newspaper, Qinghai Daily, from the hands of rebel civilians. After the rebels refused to give possession of the newspaper office building to the army, General Zhao Yongfu, the deputy commander of the military district, decided to use force. To create a pretext for killing, the military fabricated a story, in which it was claimed that the civilians — who were in reality unarmed — fired on troops first from the newspaper office building.
As a result, about rebel civilians were killed. During the crackdown, nearly , people were killed or tortured over the entire province.
This resulted in the deaths of 4, individuals, among whom 4, were killed outright and were forced to commit suicide. The mass killing was led by the army officers and the leaders of the Dao County militia headquarters, with cooperation from local militias and mobs. The massacre also provoked similar slaughters in the neighboring rural areas. While two rival mass organizations in Wuzhou city had several fierce conflicts, the leaders of Wuzhou Military Sub-District not only provided weapons to the conservative faction but were also directly involved in armed assault on rebels.
However, commanders of the newly re-organized Jiangxi Provincial Military District supported the rebels, and field army units were sent to Wuzhou area to help the latter on August The troops of Wuzhou Military Sub-District and militias ambushed the field army units, which resulted in five dead and 55 injured.
During the power-seizure movement in January , mass organizations in Ningxia were divided into two camps. In August, the mass supported by General Zhu launched an offensive against the opponent mass organization, blocking railways and highways in the region.
On August 28, following orders from the CCP leaders in Beijing, the field army troops directly attacked unarmed civilians that sided with Zhu, killing and wounding In an attack organized by the local militia battalion commander Huang Tianhui and carried out by militiamen, 76 landlords, rich peasants and their family members were tied up and then pushed off a cliff.
Some of them died immediately and the others later starved to death. In order to pave the way for the establishment and enhancement of these new organs of power as soon as possible, Mao launched several new political campaigns, which led directly to mass killings on the largest scale to occur during the Cultural Revolution. The campaign lasted longer and claimed more lives than any other movement during the Cultural Revolution. However, to establish order and revolutionary power, the public notices also gave the green light to regional and provincial military and government leaders to suppress one of the mass factions — usually the rebels — by armed force.
In some provinces, such as Guangxi and Guangdong, the suppression turned into new, large-scale massacres of unarmed civilians in the dissident mass faction. In September , a few months after the bloody suppression, revolutionary committees were established in all the provinces of China.
The US Census Bureau data report a population trough in the 44 [] to 30 [] age bracket, and another in the 59 [] to 55 [] age bracket. While the latter is clearly an echo of the Great Famine, the former period is not associated with any notable upheaval. There are serious questions as to whether China, a developing country and authoritarian state, has the institutional capacity and political will to publish accurate statistics.
Statistical work remains highly decentralized, and the quality and methods of statistical work vary across reporting units in China. How many Chinese have been executed, starved or otherwise killed during the years of turmoil since the regime triumphed in ? Sinologist Stuart Schram reckoned that the true toll might have run as high as 3,, Columbia University China Expert Donald Klein placed the total as low as 2,,; others say 6,, or 8,, Of course, those figures are all classic examples of the unverifiable statistic.
Rummel, New Brunswick, N. Tufts Professor Donald Klein expressed "provocation" over 16 September New York Times statement by Robert Fitch that Chinese communists had killed million since , and thus Mao was the "greatest despot and mass murderer in human history. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years The Great Famine is officially defined by the Chinese government to be three years, , when mortality rates were the highest.
As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.
A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine…. What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between and It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool — punishment for digging up a potato. The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars.
Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more would still make this the greatest mass murder in history. While the horrors of the Great Leap Forward are well known to experts on communism and Chinese history, they are rarely remembered by ordinary people outside China, and have had only a modest cultural impact.
When Westerners think of the great evils of world history, they rarely think of this one. We make little effort to recall the Great Leap Forward. This, along with his general impatience, spurred a series of increasingly reckless decisions that led to the worst famine in history.
Until that moment, Mao had been first among equals, but moderates had often been able to rein him in. As became the pattern of his reign, no one successfully stood up to him. People were to eat in canteens and share agricultural equipment, livestock, and production, with food allocated by the state. Local party leaders were ordered to obey fanciful ideas for increasing crop yields, such as planting crops closer together.
To meet their taxes, farmers were forced to send any grain they had to the state as if they were producing these insanely high yields. Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies.
Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate. The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions. Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government. Can all this be blamed on Mao?
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