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by Jasper Becker

ISBN: 068483457X
Author: Jasper Becker
Language: English
Publisher: Free Press; 1st Edition, 2nd Printing edition (February 3, 1997)
Pages: 368
Category: Politics & Government
Subcategory: Politics
Rating: 4.1
Votes: 754
Size Fb2: 1339 kb
Size ePub: 1771 kb
Size Djvu: 1848 kb
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Jasper Becker Politics and Government English

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Jasper Becker is currently Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post "Mao's Great Famine" is somewhat more myopic than "Hungry Ghosts," providing little geography context for the hundreds of anecdotes Dikötter presents.

Jasper Becker is currently Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. He has also written extensively on Chinese affairs for The Guardian, The Economist, and The Spectator. Mao's Great Famine" is somewhat more myopic than "Hungry Ghosts," providing little geography context for the hundreds of anecdotes Dikötter presents. The scholarly debate between these books seems focused on the number of deaths. Taken together, the three books point to a death toll between 30,000,000 and 45,000,000 - an unfathomable tragedy. All three books correctly point out the disgusting human fault of the famine.

First Published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. Also published by THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020. This eBook version published by eBookPartnership.

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine is a book written by Jasper Becker, the Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine is a book written by Jasper Becker, the Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. Becker argues that the American press reported the Great Chinese Famine with accuracy, but leftists and communist sympathisers such as Edgar Snow, Rewi Alley, and Anna Louise Strong, remained silent or played down its severity, when Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward had turned into a horrible tragedy.

Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts: "North Korea seems in the grip of a death-cult . Jasper Becker, an award-winning author, has worked as a foreign correspondent for twenty-five years, including fifteen years based in Beijing.

Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts: "North Korea seems in the grip of a death-cult psychosis that leaves it impervious to rational notions of self-interest" (339). Bruce Cumings on the kind of racism that. Пользовательский отзыв - Lori Flatland - Goodreads. He is author of Hungry Ghosts, The Chinese, and, most recently, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea.

Mao, Zedong, 1893-1976, Famines - China, Food supply - China.

In this horrific story of state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder, China's communist leadership boasted of record harvests and actually increased grain exports, while refusing imports and international assistance.

Hungry Ghosts" is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward, " an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong.

Jasper Becker is a British journalist who spent 30 years covering Asia including 18 years living in Beijing. Earlier books such as Travels in an Untamed Land, Hungry Ghosts or Rogue Regime had described the devastating impact of Communism on the peoples of Mongolia, China and North Korea. In City of Heavenly Tranquility, he laments the destruction of old Peking and the building of the new Beijing while The Chinese and Dragon Rising set out to portray the different sides of contemporary China.

Journalist Jasper Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking. I immediately recognized the photo on the cover of Hungry Ghosts, a boy and two women (one carrying a baby) pulling a plow. When I first came to Taiwan, a few days after Lin Biao died and a few weeks before Nixon visited Mao, the government here frequently published this photo as evidence of how wrong things had gone in the PRC.

Combining years of interviews, extensive research, and painstaking detective work, a journalist exposes the horrible result of Mao Zedong's attempted utopian engineering in China between 1958 and 1962, uncovering a bloody trail of terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder. 12,500 first printing.

Comments:

Kulwes

Here is a story never taught in school, and certainly unknown to the general public. Who knew that while I and my friends were leaning to drive, eating pizza and cheese steaks, watching American Bandstand, going to school, complaining about what we wanted and didn't have - - millions were suffering beyond anything we could imagine? Starving, living in constant fear, eating their dead, selling their own children to be eaten, eating excrement, letting grain rot to avoid embarrassment to the government, all the fantastic lies just to avoid offending one man and dying by the thousands in every village. Worse than our most terrible visions of a traditional Hell, trivializing even the worst aspects of the Great Depression in the U.S. Reading this challenges normal beliefs about humanity. The Holocaust in Europe during WW II has been described as the most significant and terrible happening of 20th century history. But is that so? Based on Becker's quoted estimates, there were possibly more deaths attributable to the Great Famine than to the entire War. Is that the measure of a terrible happening?

Given today's political context, it is doubtful than anything will be learned - by the public - about this fairly recent history without a reading of this book and reference materials used to put it together. I feel that I have learned something that most people know nothing about. Mao and his mentor Stalin certainly rival Hitler in just plain nastiness.

Hamrl

I will say that this is not an easy book to read, it is fascinating but has a lot of very dry political rhetoric. The story is horrifying and unbelievable, especially when looked at in the time frame involved. This was a time when most of the world was advancing and moving into the future and yet you see China rolling back to the middle ages. This shows what can happen to a country when it is ruled by such a tyrant. The Chinese people had no hope and it makes you wonder how much hope the rural people have to this day. It is hard for a democratic people to believe the horrors suffered by the Chinese peasants. I would have given the book five stars but it was kind of slow to plow through. It was certainly an education on suffering and trying to live through a horrible time. Maybe some day there will be leadership in China that really cares about the future of their people.

Tam

This book looks at the disastrous policies of the Chinese Communist Party and how those policies led to famine in the late '50s and early '60s. Jasper's writing, while dry and uninteresting, is an example of excellent scholarship. He used countless sources, including many internal CCP documents, interviews, and plenty of statistical analysis. Mixed with the scholarship are several in-depth narratives that look at specific counties and provinces in China.

Becker's book is one of the first to detail the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone" and then Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine." The English translation of "Tombstone" removes about half of the original book's contents. "Mao's Great Famine" is somewhat more myopic than "Hungry Ghosts," providing little geography context for the hundreds of anecdotes Dikötter presents.

The scholarly debate between these books seems focused on the number of deaths. Taken together, the three books point to a death toll between 30,000,000 and 45,000,000 - an unfathomable tragedy. All three books correctly point out the disgusting human fault of the famine. Jasper's book, while dryer, does an excellent job of examining local and national faults.

Lanadrta

It is amazing that the Chinese Communist Party largely succeeded in sweeping knowledge of this event under the rug, even in the West. Will there ever be a Holocaust Museum in Beijing to commemorate the 30-40 million peasants who died of starvation in Mao's insane man-made famine? Probably not, as long as the CCP continues to control the official historical narrative in the Chinese press. However, the Party's conspicuous silence is proof of its complicity in a terrible crime against humanity.

Bukelv

Most people are familiar with the cultural revolution and the resulting bloodbath, but might not be very familiar with the famines and mass starvation that Mao's regime caused. I know I wasn't. This is a very enlightening and harrowing read. Some interesting topics covered are: mass starvation, exponential population growth, artificial famines, pseudoscience, ethnic cleansing, seizing of personal property (such as cooking utensils and livestock), and forced labor, all of which were government policies. What is interesting, is that many of these policies were the result of hyper-inflated reporting by local authorities.

Siralune

This book is very well researched and very comprehensive. It covers every section of China as it was effected by The Great Leap Forward and the horrific famine that resulted in all of China. It also covers the Russian famine that preceded the China famine but was not heeded as a lesson by Chairman Mao. It is also a study on communism and totalitarism and how it can go so wrong if policies are not allowed to be questioned even by the top officials. I would recommend this book to everyone. Read this book before "Scarlet Memorial" to fully understand the situation in China during Mao's communist era and the famine that led to widespread cannibalism in modern China.

Morlunn

What Hitler did retail, Stalin did wholesale. But it took Mao to supersize the deaths of his own people.

After reading about other man made horrors, Pol Pot, the Siberian mines, jewish death camps, etc., you would think that a reader would develop some mental calluses when reading yet another story about some historical event. You would be wrong. This book is so riveting and imparts such an emotional response that you have to put it down just to reflect. Informative, extremely well written, scary. Highly recommended.