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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