Professor Rummel on Mao's millions and millions of murders. (Part 1)

As I have always suspected. (Fyodor's Rule #4: Always believe the worst about commies. It helps prepare you for facing the horror.)

Reevaluating China's Democide to be 73,000,000

Two books have had a big impact on my evaluation of Mao's rise to absolute power and his rule over China. One is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, and the other is Mao: the Unknown Story that she wrote with her husband, Jon Halliday. I'm now convinced that that Stalin exceeded Hitler in monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin.

I will extract what is most surprising about both books in two parts. In this one, I want to wholly focus on the democide under Mao, and in the next blog, I'll abstract the most important and surprising things I learned about him.

From the time I wrote my book on China's Bloody Century (1991--here), I have held to these democide totals for Mao:

Civil War-Sino-Japanese War 1923-1949 = 3,466,000 murdered
Rule over China (PRC) 1949-1987 = 35,236,000 murdered

However, some other scholars and researchers had put the PRC total in from 60,000,000 to a high 70,000,000. When I've been asked why my total is so low by comparison, I've responded that I did not include the China's Great Famine 1958-1961. From my study of what was written on this in English, I believed that:

(1) the famine was due to the Great Leap Forward when Mao tried to catch up with the West in producing iron and steel;
(2) the factorization of agriculture, forcing virtually all peasants to give up their land, livestock, tools, and homes to live in regimented communes;
(3) the exuberant over reporting of agricultural production by commune and district managers for fear of the consequences of not meeting their quotas;
(4) the consequent belief of high communist officials that excess food was being produced and could be exported without starving the peasants;
(5) but, reports from traveling high officials indicated that peasants might be starving in certain localities;
(6) an investigative team was sent out from Beijing, and reported back that there was mass starvation;
(7) and then the CCP stopped exporting food and began to imports what was needed to stop the famine.

Thus, although Mao's policies were responsible for the famine, he was mislead about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies. Therefore, I argued, this was not a democide. Others, however, have so counted it, but I thought this was a sloppy application of the concepts of mass murder, genocide, or politicide (virtually no one used the concept of democide). They were right and I was wrong.

From the biography of Mao, which I trust (for those who might question it, look at the hundreds of interviews Chang and Halliday conducted with communist cadre and former high officials, and the extensive bibliography) I can now say that yes, Mao's policies caused the famine. He knew about it from the beginning. He didn't care! Literally.