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

[Jester]

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

*rolleyes*

If you use World Bank data, the population shrinks. If you use your "China today" data, the population increases by a very small amount - annual growth of about 1/3 of a %. The exact numbers are not known, because the data is poor. But in either case, there are clearly tens of millions of missing people.

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.

There are perfectly well understood methods for estimating both excess deaths and missing births. They are used to estimate mortality from famines everywhere. If you want to exclude missing births on first principles, feel free, but it still stands as perfectly good (indeed, overwhelming) evidence for the existence and magnitude of the famine.

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. The birthrate in China was lower than in India, but that by itself is far from being conclusive enough to support your hypothesis.

The comparison is not between China and India, but between China in (say) 1955 and China in 1960. Do you have an explanation for the sudden spike in deaths? Or any explanation at all about the enormous drop in births? Or just more misdirection?

India was, at the time, a tragedy of underdevelopment, where famine was frequent and living standards were awful - among the poorest, most deprived people who have ever lived. If your only defense is that China managed to be "only" as poor as India during the GLF, then you're welcome to it. Nevermind the profound ignorance of referring to India in 1960 as "capitalist" at the height of the Nehruvian socialism...

-Jester