... destruction of China’s agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this oral history of modern China’s greatest tragedy...

... and “the passion between the sexes,” as unavoidable and constant. According to Malthus, without proper restraint among those who could not afford their own maintenance, humankind was likely to remain locked within a perpetual cycle of biological peril and necessary famine. The conservative establishment in Britain...

...This chapter describes the spread of famine in the cities. By the winter of 1959, the famine that killed millions in the Chinese countryside began to reach the cities. Food queues grew and the mass exodus from the countryside brought millions of hungry peasants into the cities. As food reserves...

...This chapter describes the fading of China’s Great Famine from public memory. Unlike the Holocaust or other major human catastrophes of the twentieth century, there is no place in China’s collective public memory for the Great Famine—the worst in human history. In today’s China, Mao Zedong...

... was not affected by serious famine. Third, it reviews how Chinese scholars downplayed the excess mortality in Tibet. Finally, it argues that the burden of feeding the large population of Tibetan monks was used as an argument by the CCP to justify attacking the dominant clergy during the “democratic reforms...

...This chapter explains how and why the Soviet Union since the mid-1950s and China after 1962 could prevent famine. It shows that the state readjusted relations with the peasantry. The Soviet Union became the largest grain importer in the world and built up a rural welfare system. In China...

...This introductory chapter chronicles the author’s journey in writing this book. It describes how she traveled across rural China to interview survivors of the Great Famine under Mao and to try to access as much archival material on the subject as she could. She recounts how a trip to a small...

...This chapter describes the widespread famine and death in China. Between 1959 and 1961, the four largest agricultural provinces— Sichuan in the southwest, Anhui and Henan in central China, and Shandong in the east—had some of the highest death rates. When the scale of the famine could no longer...

...The history of agriculture in the Soviet Union has been marked by the rapid collectivization drive that forced farmers in the country into state-run cooperatives and the subsequent famine that resulted in the death of six million people, a great number of whom were Ukrainians. State officials...

...This introductory chapter begins by discussing the definition of famine and hunger, followed by an overview of famine in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, where socialism was regarded as a program for escaping chronic poverty and famine. It then sets out the book’s focus, namely comparing...

...This chapter examines the relations between the state and peasants in the development of the famines. First it shows that both Communist parties in Russia and China inherited a heavy burden from history, coming to power in “lands of famine.” Second, it evaluates the impact of several Soviet...

...This chapter examines food policies and peasant–state relations between 1949 and 1958 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It demonstrates how the topic of hunger became more and more politicized, and explains how the conflicts that had developed in the early 1950s contributed to famine...

... lowest level in years, its waters only weakly replenished by the spring thaw. Typhus, cholera, typhoid fever, and smallpox raged through the affected area, rumors of cannibalism were rampant, and famine walked the land. Even the great breadbasket of the Ukraine, traditionally a source of agricultural...

...This chapter discusses the antifascist initiative and the new German “famine relief” drive, which did much to improve Munzenberg's political standing in the KPD, but which did not promise to ease ongoing tensions between the International Worker Relief and other national Communist parties...

...During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. This book analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters...

...This chapter analyses how people thought about food during times of hunger and famine, from the very poorest to the elite; how notions of social obligation related to the food supply, and how these were made manifest through systems of almsgiving; and how other groups dependent on such charity...

... entrepreneurship bribery as factors favoring bribery corruption famine 1946–1948 Moscow City Court officials profiteering theft of state property World War II abuse of office bureaucracy Communist Party USSR gift giving otkormlenie “feeding” from one’s office practices of bribery speculation...

... This chapter begins by describing the economic crises in Africa, which sparked desperate shortages of food and many other goods, including books. It was in this context that the continent was first spoken of as a place suffering from a “book famine.” Yet the problem was not limited to that decade...

...This chapter shows how the Chinese government dealt with shortages and hunger during the peak of the famine. The aim is to demonstrate the impact of government decisions regarding food supply on the development of the famine between 1959 and 1962. The chapter begins with the attitudes...

... to win over the “ethnic minorities” for the revolution. The chapter also discusses how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted Soviet policies. The chapter shows that the famines contributed to a crisis in the policy of “indigenization”, which promoted local elites and culture. In the Soviet Union...