Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030020678X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Author: Xun Zhou
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300175183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Drawing on previously closed archives that have since been made inaccessible again, this volume contains the most crucial primary documents concerning the fate of the Chinese peasantry between 1957 and 1962, covering everything from cannibalism and selective killing to mass murder.
Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107123704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 080277928X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.
Author: Andrew G. Walder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674286707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong. “Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today...[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others).” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful...Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart...What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.” —Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement
Author: C J Barker
Publisher: Book Guild Publishing
ISBN: 1835740685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
The lives of Vic Woods and Ruth Wolfe, working-class teenagers from Liverpool and London, are profoundly disrupted by the arrival of World War II. Ruth’s journey leads her to aerial photographic interpretation, though her aspirations for advancement are denied, while Vic’s wartime experiences with bomber command haunt him long after the war is over. Their post-war marriage and tumultuous relationship with their son, James, make for a gripping narrative of trauma, conflict and, ultimately, love. Set against the backdrop of World War II and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, Hungry Ghosts transports readers into the drama of two pivotal eras in history, exploring the intergenerational impact of war, particularly on the intricate relationships between fathers and sons. Hungry Ghosts is not just a war story; it’s a timeless exploration of family bonds and the indelible scars left by war.
Author: Frank Dikotter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781407495750
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 13
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Book Description
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Author: Alexander V. Pantsov
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451654480
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 784
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Book Description
"Originally published in a different version in 2007 in Russian by Molodaia Gvardiia as Mao Tzedun"--Title page verso.
Author: Joshua Eisenman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.
Author: Andrea Graziosi
Publisher: Canadian Circumpolar Institute
ISBN: 9781894865470
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
Examining commonalities and specificities of massive famines produced by the two largest Communist states.
