Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY II
all of history occurred, Jiang Chuangang (2006) lists how famines
occurred frequently in the first half of the twentieth century in China,
citing the famines from 1928 to 1930 in Gansu and Shaanxi when more
than 10 million are claimed to have died of starvation, or the 1936–37
famine in Sichuan when cannibalism is claimed to have taken place, or
the 1942 famine that plagued central China and in which Henan’s
population is claimed to have halved. Jiang also pointed out that,
according to statistics compiled by the Information Service of the
Research Centre of China’s Population and Development, the
population of 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961 was respectively 653,460,000,
660,120,000, 662,070,000 and 664,570,000, with an increase of 11,100,000
people in three years. Though the population increases of these years
were lower than those during the years of 1956 to 1958, the increase
was still on average 5.46 per cent, higher than the world average at that
time, and much higher than pre-1949 years. Jiang further points out
that the death rate of 1959, 1960 and 1961 was 1.459 per cent, 1.791 per
cent and 1.424 per cent, an average of 1.558 per cent, which was about
the same as the world average death rate at that time, and much lower
than the death rates in pre-1949 years. During the three years of famine
30,952,300 people died, and compared with the lower death rate of
11.40 per cent during 1956 to 1958, there were an extra 8.3 million
deaths, not as many as the 30 to 40 million claimed by anti-communist
literature such as Chang and Halliday (2005). 3
Li Xuanyuan is a heavyweight e-media participant in challenging
the anti-Maoist truth. Here is a brief case study of Liao Bokang by Li
that shows how anti-Maoist truth is manufactured. Liao Bokang was
promoted to important positions by the post-Mao authorities, serving
as CCP party secretary of China’s largest city, Chongqing, and
Chairman of the Political Consultative Committee of Sichuan province.
In 2004 Liao published an article in the Dangdai shi ziliao (Documentation
of Contemporary History) compiled by the Academy of Social
Sciences of Sichuan province. In that article Liao claims that in Sichuan
alone the death toll was 10 million (remember this is the province
where Jung Chang grew up, where her father served as the deputy
propaganda chief of the province and yet Chang does not or cannot
provide any direct documentary evidence or witness account of the
famine death toll either in Wild Swans or Mao: The Unknown Story). Liao
further claims that he was interviewed in 1962 by the then Secretary of
the Communist Youth League Hu Yaobang, as well as by the Director
of the CCP Central Office Yang Shangkun, and reported the 10 million
famine death toll in Sichuan to them. When questioned by Yang about
evidence of the figure of 10 million Liao said that the figure was from
a Sichuan provincial document. Yang was surprised that he did not
know of such a document since every provincial document had to pass
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