西方人口学家对宋永毅评点的冯克《毛的大饥荒》的评论 - 未名空间MITBBS历史存档

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西方人口学家对宋永毅评点的冯克《毛的大饥荒》的评论

西方人口学家对宋永毅评点的冯克《毛的大饥荒》的评论# WaterWorld - 未名水世界

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

1 楼

该书对大饥荒的描述既不详实，也不学术；叙事天马行空，数据难觅出处。过度渲染饥
荒恐怖，却不顾这些事情曾在中国历史上多次重复。
It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is
dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and
unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it
describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous
century or so.
Grada, C. O. 2011. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most
Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Population and Development Review, 37(1)

D*A2012-03-05 08:03

2 楼

西方人口学家对中国还不了解

1)

【在 H****g 的大作中提到】

: 该书对大饥荒的描述既不详实，也不学术；叙事天马行空，数据难觅出处。过度渲染饥
: 荒恐怖，却不顾这些事情曾在中国历史上多次重复。
: It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is
: dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and
: unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it
: describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous
: century or so.
: Grada, C. O. 2011. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most
: Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Population and Development Review, 37(1)

c*g2012-03-05 08:03

3 楼

这些事情曾在中国历史上多次重复，这个一点都不假。不过历史上的饥荒和毛三年的饥荒，有个毛关系？？？
这时候你们毛轮倒相信西方人口学家了。只要有利的就相信，不利的就否定。
这不就是黑猫白猫理论嘛。
我建议你们还是到河南信阳农村住上一个月吧。

1)

【在 H****g 的大作中提到】

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

4 楼

没错，炮制三千万的coale恰恰就是不了解中国的西方人。

【在 D*A 的大作中提到】

: 西方人口学家对中国还不了解
:
: 1)

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

5 楼

粗制滥造《毛的大饥荒》的冯克呢，也是如假包换的西方人。

【在 D*A 的大作中提到】

: 西方人口学家对中国还不了解
:
: 1)

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

6 楼

傻逼才信炮制三千万的西方人。

饥荒，有个毛关系？？？

【在 c********g 的大作中提到】

: 这些事情曾在中国历史上多次重复，这个一点都不假。不过历史上的饥荒和毛三年的饥荒，有个毛关系？？？
: 这时候你们毛轮倒相信西方人口学家了。只要有利的就相信，不利的就否定。
: 这不就是黑猫白猫理论嘛。
: 我建议你们还是到河南信阳农村住上一个月吧。
:
: 1)

c*g2012-03-05 08:03

7 楼

到底是多少，这个需要从TG自己各级政府的数据累加起来，才比较准确和直接。
各种外推，都有偏颇的地方。但是您坚持的104万，实在是骗人的数据。

【在 H****g 的大作中提到】

: 傻逼才信炮制三千万的西方人。
:
: 饥荒，有个毛关系？？？

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

8 楼

你能不能学点本事，别伪造别人的观点好不好？
我什么时候说过我坚持中国饿死104万了？104万非正常死亡是国家统计局的数据。你放
着国家统计局的数据不相信，认为是骗人，而西方人同样根据国家统计局的数据推算出
来的数据，你就相信，你说你不是脑残有人信吗？

【在 c********g 的大作中提到】

: 到底是多少，这个需要从TG自己各级政府的数据累加起来，才比较准确和直接。
: 各种外推，都有偏颇的地方。但是您坚持的104万，实在是骗人的数据。

H*g2012-03-05 08:03

9 楼

Grada论文摘要
Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine {henceforth “MGF”} is the
longest and most detailed study of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) famine to
appear in English to date.{…} The tone throughout is one of abhorrence and
outrage, and sometimes MGF reads more like a catalogue of anecdotes about
atrocities than a sustained analytic argument. In style and approach it
recalls Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s controversial Mao: The Unknown Story
(2005); indeed, Chang leads the ”praise” for MGF on the back cover. MGF
may become the best-known account of the GLF famine for a while. But should
it? It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is dismissive of
academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and unreliable with data;
and it fails to note that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent
features of Chinese history during the previous century or so. More
attention to economic history and geography and to the comparative history
of famines would have made for a much more useful book. In what follows I
focus on the economic context of the famine, review features of the famine
treated by Dikötter but worth further study, and conclude by discussing
the role in these events of Mao and the party elite.
Poor China
Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness. It bears remembering that
China on the eve of the Great Leap Forward was one of the poorest places on
earth.{…} For at least a century before 1949, major famines were probably
frequent enough to warrant Walter Mallory’s depiction of China in 1926 as
the “land of famine.” The Taiping Rebellion is routinely reported as
costing 20 million lives, mostly from famine and disease. Neither R. H.
Tawney’s (1932) report that the famine of 1849 “is said to have destroyed
13,750,000 persons” nor contemporary claims that the Great North China
Famine of 1876–79 took a further 9.5 million to 13 million lives should be
taken literally, but such estimates accurately underline the apocalyptic
nature of those famines. Famine mortality probably declined thereafter. Yet
Yang (2010) claims that China’s most severe famine before the GLF famine
occurred in 1928–30, killing 10 million people. Between 1920 and 1936, he
added, “famine due to crop failures took the lives of 18.36 million people.
” Again, these numbers seem too high. Still, Tawney witnessed the
devastation that followed in the wake of the famines of the late 1920s, and
famine in Anhui province in 1929 inspired Nobel laureate Pearl Buck’s The
Good Earth. Nor did it end there. Famine in the Yellow River region in 1935
resulted in significant female infanticide in 1935–36, while the Henan
famine of 1942 produced its own catalogue of atrocities. Again and again,
what Dikötter dubs ”traditional coping mechanisms” (p. 179) had
failed to prevent famine.{…}
China’s extreme backwardness on the eve of the Great Leap matters because
it greatly increased its vulnerability to disequilibria, man-made or other.
Had Chinese GDP per head been, say, twice as high as it was, the devastation
wreaked by the Leap would presumably have been much less. Nor, on the other
hand, does MGF take sufficient account of how conditions improved between
1949 and 1958. If the standard estimate of grain output of 200 million
metric tons in 1958 is taken at face value (p. 132), then there was enough
food to provide an average daily intake of about 2,170 kcals (Ashton et al.
1984: 622; compare Meng et al. 2010). If, however, the output data are
contaminated by Leap-style ”winds of exaggeration” and refer to unhusked
grain, then the picture is much less rosy and the margin for error by
central planners much narrower. Nonetheless, the achievements of the pre-
Leap years prompted a false optimism that much faster growth was feasible—
catching up or overtaking Britain “in fifteen years” (pp. 14, 15, 73).
What did the victims die of?
Throughout history most famine victims have succumbed to disease, not to
literal starvation. Weakened immune systems and social disruption allowed
diseases present in normal times to play havoc during famines. Pre-1949
China was no exception: economic backwardness made infectious diseases such
as cholera, typhus, and malaria endemic and most famine deaths were from
such diseases and from dysentery. So what did the victims of the Great Leap
famine die of? Most accounts imply death by starvation rather than by
disease; Thaxton links most deaths in the village of Da Fo in 1960 to ”
edema,” and this is corroborated by the most detailed study of the causes
of death to date, Yixin Chen’s analysis of public health gazetteers from
Anhui province (Thaxton 2008: 209, 253; Chen 2010). Although Chen argues
convincingly that the faulty data in the gazetteers underestimate the death
toll from diseases such as dysentery and malaria, he nevertheless concedes
the primary role of edema and literal starvation. Dikötter (p. 286)
concurs and wonders why disease did not carry off more ”before terminal
starvation set in.” The primacy of starvation as the cause of famine deaths
is rather striking and poses a conundrum for demographers studying famine.
Before the 1950s only war-induced famines in economies with effective public
health regimes, such as the western Netherlands in 1944–45 or Leningrad in
1941–43, followed such a pattern. Does this imply that the Maoist public
health campaigns of the early and mid-1950s influenced the causes of deaths
during the Great Leap famine, if not the death toll itself? Could it be that
the authorities’ attempts to control migration limited, even if
unintentionally, the spread of infectious diseases? Chen (2010) gives due
credit to achievements registered before the Leap; by then three major
killers—smallpox, plague, and cholera—had been virtually eliminated and
large-scale immunization campaigns carried out. Reluctant to allow public
health improvements a role, Dikötter surmises, albeit without
supporting evidence, that the Chinese peasantry succumbed to starvation
quickly, “reducing the window of opportunity during which germs could prey
on a lowered immunity” (p. 286).
The demographic impact
MGF is full of numbers but there are few tables and no graphs.
Quantification is not its strong point. So we read that “between 1 and 3
million people took their lives” by suicide during the GLF (p. 304); that
in Xinyang in Henan province “67,000” people were clubbed to death by
militias (pp. 117, 294); that in some unspecified location “forty-five
women were sold to a mere six villages in less than half a year” (p. 261);
that “at least 2.5 million…were beaten or tortured to death” during the
Leap (p. 298); and that delays to shipping in the main ports during some
unspecified period cost “￡300,000” (p. 156). An estimate of 0.7 million
deaths from starvation and disease in labor-correction camps between 1958
and 1962 is obtained by applying an arbitrary ”rough death rate” of two-
fifths to a guess at the camp population at its peak (p. 289). The main
basis for the claim that “up to two-fifths of the housing stock turned into
rubble” (p. xii) seems to be a report describing conditions in Hunan
province from Liu Shaoqi to Mao on 11 May 1959, after Liu had spent a month
in the region of his birth (p. 169).2 On page after page of MGF, numbers on
topics ranging from rats killed in Shanghai to illegal immigration to Hong
Kong are produced with no discussion of their reliability or provenance: all
that seems to matter is that they are ”big.”
The cost of famines in lives lost is often controversial, because famines
are nearly always blamed on somebody, and excess mortality is reckoned to be
a measure of guilt. It is hardly surprising, then, that MGF’s brief
account (pp. 324–334) of the famine’s death toll arrives at a figure far
beyond the range between 18 million and 32.5 million proposed hitherto by
specialist demographers (e.g., Yao 1999; Peng 1987; Ashton et al. 1984; Cao
2005). Rather than engage with the competing assumptions behind these
numbers, Dikötter selects Cao Shuji’s estimate of 32.5 million and
then adds 50 percent to it on the basis of discrepancies between archival
reports and gazetteer data, thereby generating a minimum total of 45 million
excess deaths. Much hinges on what ”normal” mortality rates are assumed,
since the archives do not distinguish between normal and crisis mortality.
The crude death rate in China in the wake of the revolution was probably
about 25 per thousand. It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have
reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand
adopted here (p. 331). Had they done so, they would have “saved” over 30
million lives in the interim! One can hardly have it both ways.{…}
Three parts nature?
The role of the weather in 1959–61 remains contested. Is Dikötter
right to dismiss it? Contemporary Chinese sources highlighted ad nauseam the
difficulties caused by drought and flooding, while denying the existence of
famine conditions. Western journalists and historians echoed this view.
Time magazine repeatedly reported adverse weather, 5 and an eminent Harvard
Sinologist declared as late as 1969 that conditions such as those
experienced in 1959–61 “would have meant many millions of deaths in the
areas most severely affected” but for the effectiveness of public policy
and the transport network (Perkins 1969: 303). MacFarquhar’s pioneering
account of the famine also highlighted adverse weather as a factor (
MacFarquhar 1983: 322). Dikötter acknowledges the challenges posed by
the weather but blames
harvest shortfalls instead on the environmental destruction caused by the
GLF, which magnified damage caused by adverse weather shocks. Perhaps, but
here anecdotes are an inadequate substitute for more rigorous meteorological
analysis. Research on the impact of the weather hitherto has relied on
indirect measures such as the proportion of the grain crop damaged by the
weather or reported grain production. Using this approach Y. Y. Kueh found
that droughts and flooding accounted for the bulk of the shortfalls in 1960
and 1961, although he also insisted that “even without natural disasters,
the agricultural depression was inevitable” (Kueh 1984: 80–81; 1995: 224).
Researchers have only begun to use some abundantly available direct
measures that are not subject to misreporting.6 In the absence of systematic
analysis of these data, all one can say is that data from several Chinese
weather stations show signs of exceptionally adverse weather shocks in 1959
–61, though hardly enough to account for the regional variation in harvest
shortfalls.7 Dikötter’s sense that the weather did not matter much may
well be correct, but his failure to nail the issue is a lacuna.
Human agency
Malthus and his followers underestimated the role of human factors in
exacerbating and mitigating famine in the past, even in very backward
economies. As John Post pointed out in his classic account of famine in
northwestern Europe in the 1740s, even very poor economies could escape “
famine conditions and crisis mortality [by] import[ing] grain supplies,
adequate welfare programs, and… effective… public administration” (Post
1984: 17). This message is also an important implication of Amartya Sen’s
entitlements approach to famine analysis (Sen 1981). Malthusian
interpretations of famine in China begin with Malthus himself, and most
analyses of pre-1949 Chinese famines continue to be strictly Malthusian.{…}
Dikötter’s stance is the polar opposite. He repeatedly cites variants
of Liu Shaoqi’s quip (picked up by Liu from peasants in his native Hunan)
that the GLF famine was three parts natural and seven parts man-made (pp.
121, 178, 335), but only to reject Liu’s ”three-tenths Malthusian”
interpretation in favor of one that rests entirely on human agency.
As the examples of Ireland and Ukraine attest, the temptation to interpret
famines as genocides is strong. Dikötter, perhaps rightly sensing that
this approach can distort reality, does not go quite so far as Chang and
Halliday’s claim that Mao ”knowingly” allowed millions to starve. Indeed,
one plausible reading of MGF’s narrative chapters is that it took a long
time for the leadership in Beijing to grasp the scale of the catastrophe at
its height. Utopian euphoria and a revolutionary impatience to catch up
quickly had prompted the Great Leap. They also neutered Defense Minister
Peng Dehuai’s interventions at the Lushan ”think-in” in July 1959. Peng’
s protests, in any case, were less about the famine per se than the follies
of the Leap in its first phase. Dikötter’s depiction of the follies is
excellent and corroborates the more theoretical
case previously advanced by economists and economic historians such as Yao (
1999), Li and Yang (2005), Bernstein (2006), and Wheatcroft (2010).
How much did Beijing know when the famine was at its height? Despite MGF’s
relentless anti-Mao stance, it accepts that nobody at the top realized
beforehand how murderous the economic war against the peasantry would be.
Mao’s private physician, repeatedly invoked by Dikötter as a reliable
witness (p. 346), “doubted that [Mao] really knew” what was happening (Li
1994), and we are told that Mao was “visibly shaken” when presented with
graphic reports of famine from Xinyang in Henan province in late October
1960 (p. 116). Reliable information was at a premium; even the “fabled
sinologists” in the British Embassy had no clue about what was going on (p.
345). Blaming the tragedy on the usual counterrevolutionary suspects, Mao
nonetheless had “abusive cadres” removed. The news from Xinyang set in
train moves that
would mark ”the beginning of the end of mass starvation” (p. 118). In that
same month Mao, under pressure from critics of the Leap, ordered the
redeployment of a million workers from industry to agriculture in Gansu
province, citing the truism that “no one can do without grain” (
MacFarquhar 1983: 323). Various concessions to the peasantry followed, and
in January 1961 Mao told the 9th Central Committee Plenum that “socialist
construction…should take half a century” (Barnouin and Changgen 2007: 188)
. {…}
China lacked an all-seeing, all-knowing Soviet-style secret police during
the Leap. Too much reliance was placed on poorly monitored regional agents
and thuggish local cadres. Why else would it take a visit to his home
village in Hunan for Liu Shaoqi to discover the dimensions of the disaster?
What he saw converted him overnight from supporter to “blistering” critic
of the GLF (pp. 119–121). Central-planner-in-chief Li Fuchun’s reaction to
the reports from Xinyang was that misguided policies (which he had
championed)
had cost lives (pp. 116–117, 122). In a speech in Hunan to party planners
in mid-1961, he summarized what have become textbook criticisms of central
planning: ”too high, too big, too equal, too dispersed, too chaotic, too
fast, too inclined to transfer resources” (p. 122). But thanks to a form of
“closed” governance of their own creation, Mao and the party leadership
seem to have discovered “destruction on a scale few could have imagined”
rather late in the day (p. 123).
None of this absolves Mao from responsibility for the policies that caused
the greatest famine ever. But reckless miscalculation and culpable ignorance
are not quite the same as deliberately or knowingly starving millions (Jin
2009: 152). Few of the countless deaths in 1959–61 were sanctioned or
ordained from the center in the sense that deaths in the Soviet Gulag or the
Nazi gas chambers were.8
MGF’s reliance on fresh archival sources and interviews and its extensive
bibliography of Chinese-language items are impressive, but its bite-size
chapters (thirty-seven in all) and breathless prose style—replete with
expressions like ”plummeted,” ”rocketed,” ”beaten to a pulp,” ”beaten
black and blue,” ”frenzy,” “ceaseless,” ”frenzied witch-hunt”—are
often more reminiscent of the tabloid press than the standard academic
monograph. If Yang Jisheng is destined to be China’s Alexander Solzhenitzyn
, Frank Dikötter now replaces Jasper Becker as its Anne Appelbaum. The
success of MGF should not deter other historians from writing calmer and
more nuanced books that worry more about getting the numbers right and pay
due attention to geography and history.

1)

【在 H****g 的大作中提到】

c*g2012-03-05 08:03

10 楼

您以前一直提这个104万非正常死亡的“国家统计局的数据”。你们今天否定这个数据
，明天否定那个数据，
那请问左派理论家，您认为到底饿死多少人呢？我们听个准信儿。
你别伪造别人的观点好不好？我什么时候说过我相信3000万这个数字了？

【在 H****g 的大作中提到】

: 你能不能学点本事，别伪造别人的观点好不好？
: 我什么时候说过我坚持中国饿死104万了？104万非正常死亡是国家统计局的数据。你放
: 着国家统计局的数据不相信，认为是骗人，而西方人同样根据国家统计局的数据推算出
: 来的数据，你就相信，你说你不是脑残有人信吗？