Product Description

In 1984 American demographers calculated that at least 30 million people had starved to death in China between 1958 and 1962. This text aims to unravel the story behind these statistics and to describe how Mao Zedong created a man-made famine.;Mao's Great Leap Forward was the greatest example of Utopian engineering ever attempted. He tried to abolish money and property, and create the first Communist paradise on Earth. Instead, even in the richest regions, peasants died in their millions while the rest became gaunt skeletons. Through graphic eyewitness accounts, the author describes a catalogue of terror, cannibalism, slavery, torture and imprisonment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #900954 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
During the fifties and sixties China suffered through what many believe to have been the largest famine in human history. Ideology argued for the collectivization of agriculture and other reforms intended to bring about a communist utopia in the Middle Kingdom. The result was widespread famine which left as many as 30 million people dead and brought untold suffering to tens of millions more. Jasper Becker, an accomplished journalist working in Asia, details the horrible experience of Mao's famine in his gripping study, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine. Making use of academic studies and personal interviews with survivors, Becker has assembled the documentary evidence of China's suffering in damning detail. So long as the current regime maintains power in China, a fuller story cannot be told. Becker's book is an impressive accomplishment and an incomparable beginning to understanding the full dimensions of this 20th-century horror story.

Customer Reviews

A precise and passionate account of a man-made disaster
In Hungry Ghosts, Becker has given an exceptional account of the 1958-61 famine in which an estimated 30million perished under Mao's Great Leap Forward reforms. Whereas much of recent popular literature from China is details the standing of city-dwellers and their fate, this is the first book that I have read which focusses on the plight of the peasants. It is graphic in its descriptions of the poverty and the extremes people went to in order to survive, but it is also uncompromising in its summary that this could have been avoided entirely. An excellent, well researched book. Well worth the read.

World's best kept Communist tragedy
The tragedy of the massive famine that devoured untold numbers of lives in China during the 1959 - 1961 "Great Leap Forward" campaign was that the official stand of the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge it as a man-made mistake.
This book acts like Spielberg's "Shoah Foundation", it's a testament to a fatalistic catastrophe of biblical proportions. It contains testimonies of survivors which the author had interviewed. Simple as it may seem, but some of the testimonies are indeed moving, touching and shows how hunger can reveal the bestial and the monstrosity of what a human being is capable of.