Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine

Frank Dikotter has provided the Chinese analog to Robert Conquest's classic treatment of the Soviet Famine of the 1930s, Harvest of Sorrow. Less sprawling than his equally insightful Cultural Revolution, Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958- 1962, provides readers with a well-researched analysis of one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters.  While Dikotter provides readers with a rich descriptions of the human costs of the famine, he also explains how the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao in particular, brought the tragedy about, or least severely deepened its impact on the Chinese peasantry. 

For students of Russian history, Dikotter begins his book with a careful political history of Mao's rupture with Soviet leaders, and Khrushchev in particular. In fact, Dikotter argues that Mao's refusal to play second fiddle to Khrushchev on the international stage contributed to China's ever worsening food crisis.  By insisting that his country could export grain to fellow socialist countries, and eventually forgo aid from Russia, Mao doomed China's peasants to unendurable levels of food scarcity.  The fact that Mao required starving peasants to help industrialize their country in the midst of agricultural chaos made matters worse. Of course, Dikotter's explanation of the causes of the famine is complex.  He argues that Mao made a series of tragic leadership mistakes, but also explains that collectivization was inherently flawed and deprived peasants of any incentive to produce food.  Overall, Dikotter's thesis seems to be twofold:  first, that Mao's philosophy of government was deeply immortal, and placed absolutely no value on even the minimum health requirements of the vast majority of China's citizens;  and second, that Communism in general produced an absurdly undemocratic and centralized system of government that provided ordinary men and women no opportunity to help themselves. 

To conclude, Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine can also be usefully compared with a new book on Communism's first famine, Douglas Smith's The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin.  Although Smith documents Lenin's repeated cynicism about the food security of his political opponents, one is struck by the fact that Russian Communists had not gone out of their way to starve large segments of their citizenry. In fact, this early famine was at least partly the result of a Civil War rather than misguided or criminal agricultural policies alone.  For Lenin did ultimately make a series of compromises that allowed Hoover and the American Relief Administration to feed millions of Russians.  By contrast, Stalin and Mao never considered even acknowledging the dimensions of the tragedy they had done so much to create.