Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in The Great Leap

[FireIceTalon]

Denying the famine is is not only ahistorical and irrational in the face of the overwhelming evidence, it is also deeply disturbing.

That would be true if the evidence was actually overwhelming, but it is far from it. You have yet to provide even a shred of evidence for this "overwhelmingness".

I also like how you conveniently ignore the fact that I proved your claim that the Chinese population decreased in 1960, as being incorrect.

Unless the Chinese have somehow mastered the strange art of dying without actually being born, both the figures and attibuting the figures entirely to policy remains a stretch at best. Too many historians count people who were never born to begin with as famine deaths to skew the numbers much higher than they should be, and I am sure that isn't the only maniuplative way among the faulty methods they used to come to their outrageous conclusions.

I will leave you with this:

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/patnaik260611.html

the death rate in 1960 China, the worst year of the GLF and of Mao's regime in general, was about the same as an AVERAGE/non-famine year in capitalist India around the same time period and it was in fact higher in India that same year. And yet, there was supposedly no famine in India at this time. If we assume this to be true, then how can you use this to prove there was widespread famine in China at the same time? The answer is simple - you can't. And if there WAS indeed a famine in capitalist India at this time, then how come that gets glossed over and deemed as acceptable, but viewed as an attrocity in "socialist" China? We know both know the answer to that. The birthrate in China was lower than in India, but that by itself is far from being conclusive enough to support your hypothesis. Germany today has a lower birthrate than China did in 1960 by more than half, but as far as I know, there is no widespread famine going on in Germany right now. You are yet another bourgeois hack exposed. The only thing worse is the people who actually believe the manipulative crap you and your fellow ideologues spew as truth.


@Kandrathe

While it is entirely possible and believable that Mr. Yang's parents did personally survive and suffer the GLF, the problem with this is that it is an anecdote. No one is saying there wasn't suffering, hardship and death. What is being questioned are the actual figures, how much of those figures can be attributed to policy in relation to death by natural causes and by the massive natural disasters that occurred in 1959-1961, and the extremely unreliable, inconsistent, and even outright false methods (like the one I mentioned above to Jester about how many sources count unborn people toward death toll numbers) used to come to these conclusions. Also being questioned is the motive behind the research (which is probably influential for pre-determining the outcome of the research itself), that it is primarily for free-market and neo-liberal pandering, anti-communist slandering, and sensationalism rather than for actual data and a genuine understanding of historical context...on top of that then these untrue and inflated numbers, are used to produce & reinforce said anti-communist sensationalism, are also used as a shield to deny or even legitimize all the attrocities of capitalist development, neo-colonialism, imperialism and of course capitalism's big brother, fascism.