Idiot Chinese Professor Says Great Famine Death Toll "A Rumor"

One of the darkest periods of Mao's rule of China was the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward.  Initially intended to modernize China, the idea was to transform the country from the agrarian economy a communist society.  Across the country, farming was collectivised and massive industrialization projects were undertaken.

The whole thing ended in utter disaster, with The Great Chinese Famine claiming millions of lives, stories of the hardship that the Chinese people endured under communist rule still surface today.  Exact figures of how many people died are difficult to come by, estimates of between 23 and 46 million people died.

Nitpicking over who died of what when such misguided economic and political policies caused so many to needlessly die might not seem like something that university professors would spend much time mulling over.  In China, however, professors have quite a bit of time on their hands, and they come up with some pretty off the planet claims when it comes to impressing the higher ups.

Which is exactly what Sun Jingxian, a professor at Jiangsu Normal University has done.  With supposed research spanning three years, the good professor says that errors in made the census records mean that only 2.5m people actually died during the Great Leap Forward.  So that's not so bad, right?

The hottest search term on Weibo on September 6, 2013 was “nutritional death” (营养性死亡). The term appears in a forum post written by Sun Jingxian, a professor from Jiangsu Normal University, claiming that the 30 million estimated deaths during the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) is a rumor. Instead, the professor estimated that about 2.5 million “nutritional deaths” had taken place during the “three year difficult period”.

Even by examining China's own census records, the death toll reaches about 30 million.  While it's true that not everyone died of starvation - many were beaten to death by zealous Maoists, others committed suicide - to claim that only 2.5 million people died during the famine is, by all accounts, complete bullcrap.

The forum post that Prof. Sun made attracted quite a few vocal protests from Chinese netizens, most of them of the not too complementary type.

 

 

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• The Great Chinese Famine

Why China's Farms are Failing

The Atlantic investigates how poor environmental practices threatens the food production industry in China

Food is a key issue the for the Chinese government.  Arguments that people have never had it so good under the Communists carry little weight if the people actually aren't, and The Great Leap Forward, though played down by official Party propaganda, is a stain yet to be washed clean from the collective memories of the Chinese who lived through it.

True, the populous has been lived out of abject poverty with remarkable speed since the "reform and opening up" in the 1970's. Now, none of that should detract from the food miracle that China has enacted since it began its transformation into an industrial powerhouse in the late 1970s. This 2013 report from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) brims with data on this feat. The nation slashed its hunger rate -- from 20 percent of its population in 1990 to 12 percent today -- by quietly turbocharging its farms. China's total farm output, a broad measure of food churned out, has tripled since 1978. The ramp-up in livestock production in particular is even more dizzying -- it rose by a factor of five. Overall, China's food system represents a magnificent achievement: It feeds nearly a quarter of the globe's people on just 7 percent of its arable land.

Providing food and providing money could be two government aims that ultimately prove to be incompatible.  Urbanization drives and demand for real estate for factories means that the amount of land available for farming is shrinking, and the farmland that already exists is hopelessly contaminated.  Official government reports in the pisspoor state of the soil in China gave such embarrassing results that the government refused to release it, and soil conditions in China are an official state secret.