
Mao's Great Famine
The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
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Narrated by:
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Daniel York Loh
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By:
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Frank Dikötter
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
‘A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
‘A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal
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, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.©2010 Frank Dikötter (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Mao disaster of China 1958-1962.
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The horror! The horror!
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Impotant History
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Excellent
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If you ever wonder what “HELL ON EARTH “ means, listen to this book.
Mr. Daniel York Loh is an excellent narrator.
My thanks to all involved, JK
EXCELLENT
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I had to put this book down and come back to it several times. There is just so much detail you can handle at one time. Detail is on a level with The Rape of Nanking. Awful detail, but also very matter of fact. It’s worth the read, if you are interested in the topic. This is the second Frank Dikötter book I’ve read. The first was on the revolution itself. Now I’m going to move onto the cultural revolution.
Horrific detail, but very engrossing
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What Dikotter has done is get deep into the weeds of the Great Leap Forward offering an incredible amount of detail on what Mao tried to accomplish and why it went so wrong. The short answer is that Mao was unwilling to accept that anything he had thought of could go wrong and he broke and terrorized other Communist Party Members when they dared to tell him the truth. The result was what he wanted—a nation too frightened to tell him what a disaster his plan was.
Ultimately, the Great Leap killed about 45,000,000 people. Think about that number a moment. It's too huge to pass by rapidly. What might be even worse than the Great Leap itself was that it ultimately weakened Mao so much that he initiated the Cultural Revolution to hold on to his authority.
A Devastating Review of Mao's Great Leap Forward
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how it describes the horrors with anecdotes and then uses stats to show bot only did it happen but also that it was common
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The History of Historicity
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Numerous statistics
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