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

Mao of course should bear the primary responsibility for the Great
Leap famine; but other Chinese leaders such as Deng Xiaoping (as I
have discussed elsewhere in this book) were also responsible, and Liu
Shaoqi was one of them. Liu at least on one occasion in 1958 even
talked about forming a commune as big as a county, and about revolutionizing
families by having husbands and wives living in different
dormitories (Qiong 2007). On 19 September 1958, when told by a local
leader in Jiangsu that one mu of land could produce ten thousand jin
of rice, Liu wondered whether more was possible and suggested
ploughing the soil deeper to produce more (Qiong 2007). 1 In his
memoirs, Wu Lengxi, the then editor of the People’s Daily, remembered
that Mao time and again urged him to be cautious in reporting so as
not to mislead the party and the public. Wu (1995) confesses that he
made mistakes by not having really understood what Mao meant and
what the consequences were. Wu says that at the height of the Great
Leap hype Mao was in the minority who warned caution whereas he
himself followed the majority, which included Liu Shaoqi (Wu Lengxi
1995).
The famine death toll
MAO: THE KNOWN STORY
The Great Leap Forward has to be the most disastrous period of the
Mao era for rural Chinese. However, for Chang and Halliday to pick
the highest number of estimates of famine death and to state that Mao
had murdered these people is sensationalism beyond the common
sense of decency. There are a number of points here in relation to the
famine death toll. Scholars have made different estimates, ranging
from 10 to 30 million deaths. These are estimates for many reasons.
One is that there were no reliable demographic censuses to make
possible an accurate figure. Second, it is hard to know whether some
casualties during the Great Leap Forward were deaths by hunger or
premature deaths due to hardship. Third, some estimates try to assess
the ‘missing’ population on the basis of normal death and birth rates
and therefore may have included millions of those who might not have
been born. In the words of Patnaik:
Some scholars have used a very dubious method of arriving at
grossly unrealistic and inflated ‘famine deaths’ during this
period (1959–61) by taking account not only of the higher crude
death rate (which is a legitimate measure) but also counting the
‘missing millions’ as a result of the lower birth rate, as part of
the toll. There is a great deal of difference between people who
are already there, dying prematurely due to a sharp decline in
nutritional status, and people not being born at all. The former
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