Mao's Great Famine

The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

De: Frank Dikötter

Narrado por: Daniel York Loh

Bloomsbury presents Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, read by Daniel York Loh.

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

‘A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore

'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre

‘A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.

Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.©2010 Frank Dikötter (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The horror! The horror!

Apart from the shockingly superb story, I greatly appreciate the narrator’s mastery of Chinese pronunciation!

Impotant History

This is an important history for anyone to understand the consequences of extreme communism poorly executed. Not for the squeamish, though. I was disappointed that the "epilogue" did not include the policy shifts that alleviated the famine.

Horrific detail, but very engrossing

A great narrator for this heavy topic. The book is very interesting, but also a difficult read as he describes the famine in horrific detail, but also with statistics to back it up.

I had to put this book down and come back to it several times. There is just so much detail you can handle at one time. Detail is on a level with The Rape of Nanking. Awful detail, but also very matter of fact. It’s worth the read, if you are interested in the topic. This is the second Frank Dikötter book I’ve read. The first was on the revolution itself. Now I’m going to move onto the cultural revolution.

A Devastating Review of Mao's Great Leap Forward

When you read big massive histories of China or histories of communism in China, the Great Leap Forward—Chairman Mao's audacious and ultimately catastrophic plan to make China the premier communist power in the world—usually receives a chapter, or at best, two. Those chapters begin with great hope and excitement and then transform into the horrors of starvation, disease, and abusive repression as the entire Great Leap collapses into disaster. It is a story of Mao's incredible hubris and the ultimate proof that personal power was far more important to him than the people he pretended to serve.

What Dikotter has done is get deep into the weeds of the Great Leap Forward offering an incredible amount of detail on what Mao tried to accomplish and why it went so wrong. The short answer is that Mao was unwilling to accept that anything he had thought of could go wrong and he broke and terrorized other Communist Party Members when they dared to tell him the truth. The result was what he wanted—a nation too frightened to tell him what a disaster his plan was.

Ultimately, the Great Leap killed about 45,000,000 people. Think about that number a moment. It's too huge to pass by rapidly. What might be even worse than the Great Leap itself was that it ultimately weakened Mao so much that he initiated the Cultural Revolution to hold on to his authority.

how it describes the horrors with anecdotes and then uses stats to show bot only did it happen but also that it was common

it is a great book that describes the horrors of comunisum and the blindness and evil it takes to facilitate it a great book overall would recommend

The History of Historicity

Marxists discount the past, preferring to be “unburdened by what has been,” but Dikkoter sheds light on the past in a way that, if we pay attention to it, we can see the similarities to the discourses of our own day. This has been the most significantly disturbing account I have ever read, including those I’ve examined from The Holocaust and the dekulakization that occurred in the Soviet Union. Dikotter, himself, says it only rivals those historical events. May we not be “doomed to repeat” this history in the third wave of Marxism that is racing through the Western world, but the similarities in attitude from the power brokers of our day seem unmistakable after reading this book.

Numerous statistics

I was most impressed by the detailed accounts from the government archives. I have never been given such a detailed account of The Great Famine.