It was only during research on Mao: The Unknown Story that I came to realise that the fundamental cause for the tens of millions of deaths was that Mao was seizing food — which he knew his people were dependent on for survival — to export and pay for arms (particularly nuclear) industries.
The archive material gathered by Dikötter, now Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, confirms that far from being ignorant or misled about the famine, the Chinese leadership were kept informed about it all the time. And he exposes the extent of the violence used against the peasants:
Mass killings are not usually associated with Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and China continues to benefit from a more favourable comparison with Cambodia or the Soviet Union. But as fresh and abundant archival evidence shows, coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap, and between 1958 to 1962, by a rough approximation, some 6 to 8 per cent of those who died were tortured to death or summarily killed — amounting to at least 3 million victims.
Countless others were deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. Many more vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work — and hence unable to earn their keep. People were killed selectively because they had the wrong class background, because they dragged their feet, because they spoke out or simply because they were not liked, for whatever reason, by the man who wielded the ladle in the canteen.
It was, he says, ‘one of the most deadly mass killings of human history’ but also resulted in the destruction of everything that was within the reach of the party. It was ‘the greatest demolition of real estate in human history — by far outstripping any of the World War II bombing campaigns’.
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