Mao’s Great Famine – a harrowing read

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It’s not every day that you come across a book which is truly harrowing but here you have one. It is the unvarnished story of a leader and his nation.
In my work as a Baptist Minister I am expected to be an inspirational leader, to cast a compelling vision and set strategies that will inspire people to bring about change. This role often leads me to study books which describe great leaders and their motivation. Stories about able leaders, their thinking and psychology are an inspiration to me. ‘Mao’s great famine’, however, reveals the polar opposite of good leadership. If you are expected to lead in any sphere of life, here is how not to do it.
Under Mao the Chinese nation had a leader of blindly driven ideology whose self centred personality drove the nation into the largest man-made famine in human history. An estimated 75 million lives were lost (and yes, that is more than ten times the Jewish holocaust of the second world war). For decades the west swallowed Mao’s propaganda that during the late 1950s and early 19060s China suffered a series of natural disasters which had cost many lives.
While some of that was true, Prof Dikotter shows how shallow this claim was. With impressively researched stories, many from first hand sources, he describes how a great nation was brought to its knees. The food needed to feed the population was given away at rock bottom prices leaving the farmers without nutrition. Irrigation projects were scored according to the amount of earth moved, not the quantity of water conserved. People who questioned the state were silenced or murdered and party officials caroused in luxury on a river boat while people starved on the bank as they passed. Ridiculous state intervention in the steel market left people burning their most precious possessions in a drive to feed low quality furnaces. Children and the elderly lived on the brink, constantly at risk of starvation and dead bodies, many bloated from malnutrition, lay unburied by the side of the road. All this in a futile bid to out-perform Russia and the West.
This book doesn’t need to rely on a subtly framed argument which leads the reader to the authors’ own preferred interpretation. It lets the facts speak for themselves. Story after story, all meticulously documented, tell the harrowing story of a great nation brought to ruin. Behind the façade of communism lies self interest, greed and a fanatical desire to be one better than Russia and Britain. It is a tragic tale describing the inevitable consequences of self-aggrandisement as Mao leads his nation into chaos.This is an uncomfortable and curiously compelling book and one whose message we ignore at our peril.
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