by Jasper Becker
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Product Description
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Ze-dong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong.
Journalist Jasper Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to produce Hungry Ghosts, the first full account of this dark chapter in Chinese history. In this horrific story of state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder, China's communist leadership boasted of record harvests and actually increased grain exports, while refusing imports and international assistance. With China's reclamation of Hong Kong now a fait accompli, removing the historical blinders is more timely than ever. As reviewer Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times, "Mr. Becker's remarkable book...strikes a heavy blow against willed ignorance of what took place."
Amazon.com Review
This first authoritative expose of the 1958-1962 famine prompted by China's collectivization plan, "The Great Leap Forward," comes at a time when the cult of Mao is alive and well inside China, and while agents of Chinese influence are able to arrange audiences with a President. Via his painstaking research and reporting that included two treks through interior Chinese provinces, Becker tells how the famine occurred because ill-trained peasants were forced to undertake a gigantic and centralized industrial and agricultural expansion. The new factories, canals, and irrigation systems failed spectacularly, and in contrast to propaganda boasts of having economically outstripped the U.S., when in reality the populace was driven by starvation to cannibalism, slavery, and madness.
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Average Customer Review:
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Worthwhile, 2006-02-25
I find this book a most fascinating one . . . and a "required" reading for those interested not just in China's history but modern genocide, mass media control by state press, Communist theory development, among many other topics. It is easy to read and gruesome aspects of the famine are dealt with respectfully and with sensitivity.
I give it only four stars (rather than five) because I feel there is, at times, repetition of facts. All in all I highly recommend this book. Every person should read it to better understand and bring to light shameful acts against humanity.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 A must read book, 2006-01-24
This book isn't especially well written from a literary perspective. In the reviews below you will find one or two criticisms such as an incomplete understanding of ancient Chinese history, which may well be valid. Unfortunately some people have obviously got hung up on the "30 million" deaths claim, but Becker does little to independently research the size of the death toll. He just summarises the various research that has been carried out, with what looks to me like a fair-minded commentary of the problems of estimating an accurate number.
However this is not the point of the book, which is firstly to gather together evidence that this famine did happen and secondly to piece together the complex strands explaining why it happened.
Ultimate blame is placed at the foot of Mao who firstly was the architect of the radical and in some cases barmy social and agricultural reforms which initiated the famine and secondly put in place a regime of terror which led most non-heroic subordinates to feedback the information they thought he wanted to hear regardless of the reality on the ground. Most of those who dared to tell the truth, ultimately paid with their life, either immediately or a few years later in the Cultural Revolution, which itself is seen by Becker as the way Mao sought to regain control of the party from the more moderate voices who had eventually managed to put in place the reforms to Mao's policies which ended the famine.
To his credit, Becker spends some time discussing the previous famines and periods of war and unrest which provide a backdrop to the situation. He also recognises, though does not emphasis some of Mao's achievements. His overall thesis is I think not, as some seem to suggest, that Mao deliberately and consciously murdered his own people in the way that Stalin did. It's more that Mao though he might have been a master political and military tactician had little understanding of human nature or science and was so drunk on his own propaganda that he refused to see how he could have been mistaken. Becker leaves open the morally important question of the extent to which Mao had deluded himself about the suffering of his people, and the extent to which he believed that such suffering was of little consequence in the greater scheme of things.
Becker also correctly lays considerable blame at the doors of those western commentators, China watchers and academics who were duped by Mao's propaganda - way up until the early 1990s, thus paving the way for a series of disasters around the world as various third world governments from Cambodia to Tanzania tried to emulate the apparent achievements of Mao's China with disastrous policies of their own.
I believe that Becker puts forward a fair minded and highly plausible analysis of what happened during this period, and given its importance not only from a moral perspective but in understanding the history of China and the world during the subsequent 50 years, it's a book that as many people as possible should be encouraged to carefully and open mindedly read.
4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
More excellent information here..!, 2005-08-23
After reading this book, I also went to this website http://www.theepochtimes.com/jiuping.asp and read its articles entitled, "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party". The information is very in-depth and goes steps further in exposing the CCP during its bloody rise to power and its current efforts to maintain absolute control. I would highly recommend checking it out.. All the materials are FREE and they even have free audio book format mp3's
9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
World's best kept Communist tragedy , 2004-10-03
The tragedy of the massive famine that devoured untold numbers of lives in China during the 1959 - 1961 "Great Leap Forward" campaign was that the official stand of the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge it as a man-made mistake.
This book acts like Spielberg's "Shoah Foundation", it's a testament to a fatalistic catastrophe of biblical proportions. It contains testimonies of survivors which the author had interviewed. Simple as it may seem, but some of the testimonies are indeed moving, touching and shows how hunger can reveal the bestial and the monstrosity of what a human being is capable of.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
The greatest peacetime disaster of the 20th century, 2003-12-26
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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.
review copyright 1999 by Peter D. Tillman
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