Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay*

Gráda, CormacÓ

doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2011.00398.x

Population & Development Rev

2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2011.00398.x

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Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay*

CormacÓ Gráda

Abstract: P o P u l a t i o n a n d d e v e l o P m e n t R e v i e w 3 7 ( 1 ) : 1 9 1 -2 1 0 ( m a R c h 2 0 1 1 )

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Cited by 9 publications

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“… 15. Cormac Ó Gráda, Great leap into famine: A review essay, Population and Development Review 37(1), 2011: 191–210; Felix Wemheuer, Sites of horror: Mao’s Great Famine, The China Journal , no. 66, 2011: 155–64. …”

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Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine

Garnaut

2013

China Information

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This article reviews two recent monographs on the history of the Great Leap famine. Yang Jisheng's Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi (Tombstone: A chronicle of the Great Famine in China in the 1960s) was published in Hong Kong in 2008, and an abridged English translation was released in 2012. A monograph on the famine by Frank Dikötter was published in 2010, and a collection of documents on the famine translated by Dikötter's longterm collaborator Zhou Xun was published in 2012. The monographs by Yang and Dikötter both present plausible accounts of the policies and institutional structures that gave rise to the famine, and provide many vivid descriptions of the suffering at the village level during the period of the famine. This review reflects critically on the nature of the sources cited and the methodologies deployed in the two books. Special attention is paid to the problem of the representativeness of evidence drawn from archival and other sources.

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Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine

Garnaut

2013

China Information

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Great Chinese famine, corporate social responsibility and firm value

Gao

Liu

et al. 2023

Pacific-Basin Finance Journal

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At War with Water: The Maoist state and the 1954 Yangzi floods

Courtney¹

2018

Mod. Asian Stud.

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This article offers a critical reappraisal of the Maoist state's response to the 1954 Yangzi floods. It uses a variety of sources, including previously classified government reports and oral history testimony, to challenge the official narrative. It argues that, far from being a remarkable victory for the new government, the flood was a humanitarian catastrophe that caused almost 150,000 deaths. Government hydraulic policies were partly to blame, as the vast majority of disaster victims were located in rural areas that were flooded deliberately in order to protect cities. In addition to revealing the true scale of the flood, this article uses the disaster as a prism to examine the early Maoist state. The government's combative environmental policies turned disaster governance into a war on water. This approach had certain benefits, particularly in terms of organizing an effective urban relief campaign. Unfortunately, campaign politics fostered an atmosphere of distrust, which encouraged many citizens to resist disaster-prevention policies. The example of the 1954 flood reveals the profound impact that a political context can have upon the outcome of a supposedly natural disaster.

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Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay*

Abstract: P o P u l a t i o n a n d d e v e l o P m e n t R e v i e w 3 7 ( 1 ) : 1 9 1 -2 1 0 ( m a R c h 2 0 1 1 )

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine

Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine

Great Chinese famine, corporate social responsibility and firm value

At War with Water: The Maoist state and the 1954 Yangzi floods

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