Overview
In the tradition of John Hersey's "Hiroshima", journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. "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. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Becker, Beijing bureau chief for the 'South China Morning Post', lays bare the facts surrounding the worst famine of modern times. In 1958, Mao Ze Dong decreed the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to spur productivity whereby peasants would be herded into giant communes and crop yields, following the dictates of Soviet quack scientist Trofim Lysenko, would increase dramatically. Because his lackeys feared to tell Mao the truth, false reports of fantastic harvests encouraged the Great Helmsman to believe his policies were a success. Thus, relates Becker, when stories of mass starvation in the countryside started reaching Beijing, Mao discounted them and chastised peasants for hiding their produce. As starvation spread, Mao refused to authorize emergency food distribution from state granaries and ordered grain exports to China's allies to stay on schedule. The author estimates that some 30 million people starved to death because of the Great Leap. In this gripping, well-researched account, Becker notes that the two worst famines of the century, the Chinese and the one in the Ukraine of the early 1930s, were both man-made. This study is a testament to the folly of utopian engineering.Library Journal
Becker, Beijing Bureau Chief for the 'South China Morning Post', sees the 1958-62 famine, even more than the Cultural Revolution that followed it, as China's greatest trauma of the century. Population statistics made public since 1979 reveal that at least 30 million people starved to death in the wake of Mao's Great Leap Forward. Although Becker concedes that the American press (especially Joseph Alsop) reported the famine with accuracy, he notes that other Western "foreign experts" who admired Mao, such as Edgar Snow, Rewi Alley, and Anna Louise Strong, remained silent or played down its severity. The tragedy could have been averted, Becker concludes, after the first year if Mao's senior advisers had dared to confront him. Unlike such academic works as Dali L. Yang's "Calamity and Reform in China" (Stanford Univ., 1996), this work presupposes little knowledge of communism and China; Becker's strength is his anecdotal, journalistic style. This is fascinating journalism, but the definitive study has yet to be written. - Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.The New York Times
An accessible, masterly account of the greatest peacetime disaster of this century. -- The New York Times Book ReviewKirkus Reviews
The first serious attempt to unearth the truth of the massive human tragedy behind the "Great Leap Forward" in China between 1958 and 1961.Becker, Beijing bureau chief for the 'South China Morning Post', conducted hundreds of interviews in his effort to understand what happened. It is an extraordinary story, in which the errors that led Stalin to devastate agriculture in the Soviet Union, killing 11 million peasants, were duplicated in China by Mao, at the cost of another 30 million lives. Mao believed that wheat could be planted so close together that you could sit on it, furrows could be plowed 10 feet deep, and gigantic dams and canals built without expert advice. The plants died, the dams filled up with silt, and the canals were useless, but Mao was told that the national grain harvest had gone from 185 to 430 million tons. The officials now began to seize grain based on the inflated claims. When the minister of defense, Peng Dehuai, questioned the figures, he was put under house arrest and a campaign of terror instituted. The result, Becker notes, was bizarre because most of the party leadership knew the truth but couldn't acknowledge the widespread starvation until Mao did so. By the end of 1960 Mao's colleagues realized that the regime was in danger of collapse. Becker believes that the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966, may well have been directed at undermining those who had striven to restore sanity. One of the most tragic aspects of this story is the role played by respected Western observers including Edgar Snow, Gunnar Myrdal, and François Mitterand. In ridiculing reports that China was suffering from famine, they may well have cost millions of lives. They also created a myth of what China had achieved, the consequences of which are still being felt in places like Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Tanzania a generation later.
A remarkable book, the more devastating for its quietness and absence of rhetoric.
From the Publisher
"An accessible, masterly account of the greatest peacetime disaster of this century."--The New York Times Book Review