Forcing a father to bury his son alive: Coercion, terror, and violence — Mao's Communist Party engineered the worst catastrophe in China’s history

The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, 

wrote Frank Dikötter, the author of “Mao’s Great Famine”, in The New York Times 15 years ago,

and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.

 … When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.

 … The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward. 

Shouldn't Dikötter's op-ed be mandatory reading for all students (and their… teachers!) in America — and, indeed, the world? High school as well as university students? 

Whatever the case, fifteen years later, Dikötter has now written a book on the matter (the latest, actually, of several). In a New York Times book review on RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity (Bloomsbury), the NYT's international edition has entitled the Gary J. Bass piece How Mao kept on marching (you will understand the importance of this when you get to the end of this post).

Frank Dikötter [is] renowned for writing an important trilogy of books about Mao’s reign over China, digging in far-flung archives to document the oppression and mass atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Although Chinese authorities continue to deny or downplay the grim realities of their past, Dikötter functions as something like a one-man truth commission, relentlessly excavating horrors that took tens of millions of lives.

In “Red Dawn Over China,” Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, delivers a powerful, engrossing and opinionated prequel to his trilogy, showing how the Communists battled their way to power in the decades after World War I.

 … So how did this tiny band take over a country as enormous as China? Dikötter’s answer is blunt: “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it.” Far from an overwhelming mass movement that inevitably swept to power, Dikötter retells the Chinese Revolution as an unlikely event, propelled less by popular support than by unyielding cruelty and not a little bit of luck.

Mao also had outside help, a common feature of civil wars. Although the Chinese revolutionaries styled themselves as representing the authentic will of the people, Dikötter argues that on several occasions their movement was shaped and saved by foreigners — in particular, the Soviet Union

 … Dikötter spends little time on the party’s socioeconomic or cultural blandishments, instead concentrating on its violence and indoctrination.

In the areas they conquered, Dikötter writes, Communists imposed “a state of terror,” executing local officials and those considered “politically unreliable.” 

 … Dikötter is withering on credulous Americans who misjudged the Communists

 … Ending his book with the conquest of Tibet in the early ’50s, Dikötter ominously writes: “Only Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still eluded the reach of the Chinese Communist Party.”

As it happens, you can hardly go far in the mainstream media without bringing in some type of anti-Americanism or TDS: In the original American edition of The New York Times, Gary J. Bass manages to put the onus not on the China communists' atrocities but on the CCP's outside help. Is it because he is the William P. Boswell professor of world politics of peace and war at Princeton University that the original title of his book review reads as follows? One Thing Japan, America and the Soviets Did Together? Help Mao Win. Believe it or not, Gary J. Bass goes on to end said book review with condemnation of (who else?)… Donald Trump.