I fail to see how Chang's credentials render her qualified in writing a historical work. According to the description of herself, she specializes in linguistics rather than history. I've read parts of her volume and much of the text consists of bloated rhetoric that one would find in a CIA propaganda pamphplet. She lambasts Mao for the Chinese having responded to American aggression in Korea because it saved a "dictatorship" from American "democracy". Never mind that there was no legal validity for the invasion of Korea by the U.S. under the UN umbrella **because of how the resolution to intervene in Korea lacked either approval or abstention from the USSR. For action to be taken by the UN in the form of troop deployments there have to be at least 9 out of 15 affirmative votes in the Security Council. Except for abstention, there has to be full approval from the permanent members of the Security Council. Because the USSR did not either approve or abstain, the UN at the behest of America behaved in a manner which violated the UN Charter.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0 ... 0.CO%3B2-C
1949-51:'the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries' and the land reform campaign--3 million dead through execution,mob violence or suicide.
Like with all of Chang's observations, this is consciously and conspicuously inflated. It has been shown that there were in fact 800,000 executions of landlords that systematically abused the peasantry:
During the "speak bitterness" meetings peasants were encouraged to accuse the landlords paraded before them. Those accused of bullying the peasant class - murder, arson, rape and beatings - were not spared. An estimated 800,000 landlords were executed as counterrevolutionaries.
Land reform in China was one of the largest and most far-reaching exaples of land expropriation in world history. In the land reform process, between 200-240 million acres of arable land were redistributed to approximately 75 million peasant families.
p.9
1949-1976:prison and labour camps--27 million dead---"by the general estimate China's prison and labour camp population was roughly 10 million in any one year under Mao.Descriptions of camp life by inmates,which point to high mortality rates,indicate a probable annual death rate of at least 10 per cent" i.e one million per annum.
Chang's calcultion has proved to be highly flawed. She claims that there was a 10% mortality rate meaning that during Mao, a highly implausible 270 million were imprisoned. Yet, Harry Wu's work shows that there were 40 million prisoners during Mao. This exposes Chang's estimates on deaths in the labour camp to be baseless.
The human rights activist and leading labor camp researcher and critic Harry Wu estimates that the total labor reform camp population for the first forty years of the PRC was 50 million people. His more reliable figures for the post-Mao years suggest 500,000 sentenced each year in the post-Mao years, which would suggest about 7-8 million from Mao’s death to the publication of his study. That would leave about 43 million in labor camps under Mao.[6] By this calculation, Chang and Halliday’s figure of 27 million deaths represents a mortality rate of 63%. That would seem rather implausible.
http://sdcc17.ucsd.edu/~twan/LoneCulprit.htm
Research in the archives by V.Zemskov and others has shown that at its peak, the Soviet labour camps had a mortality rate of 1%. To apply a 1% mortality to Harry Wu's inflated guesswork would yield a result of about 400,000 dead in the labour camps. But to attribute deaths in the labour camp as murder on the part of the Chinese government would be unsound because there was no attempt to have labourers killed as that would defeat the whole purpose of the labour camp system. A study on the Soviet labour camps proves that there was no intent to have the prisoners killed:
The GULAG was oriented towards keeping its labour force in reasonable condition for hard work so that it could fulfil the construction and production plans handed down from above. Already in the 1930s, and to an even larger extent during the post-war period, it issued numerous orders to ensure the provision of minimum levels of food, clothing and living conditions, and sought to enforce limits imposed on the exploitation of prison labour by legislation.
Leonid Borodkin and Simon Ertz, Leonid Borodkin, 'Forced Labour and the Need for Motivation: Wages and Bonuses in the Stalinist Camp System',
Comparative Economic Studies, New Brunswick, June 2005, Vol.47, Iss. 2
1958-61:The Great Leap Forward--38 million dead....due to famine,overwork,disease:grain and pork was at the same time exported to the USSR to finance his "SuperPower Programme" of industrialisation and military advancement.
This is an overestimate by a factor of almost three. According to the Chinese statistical volumes from 1983, excess deaths amounted to about 14 million. The figure of 30-40 million dead as claimed by Bannister, Ashton, and others relies primarily on guesswork, unsound assumptions, and a variety of manipulations. Deaths in China in 1958-62 amounted to the following (in 000):
1958: 7,230
1959: 8,389
1960: 13,924
1961: 13,782
1962: 7,534
Regardless of the death toll, it is rather absurd to blame Mao for deaths from famine which has periodically struck China. The Chinese communists genuinely tried to reduce the effects of the famine by importing large quantities of grain. Evidence shows that the famine resulted primarily from poor weather.
In 1963, the Chinese press called the famine of 1961-62 the most severe since 1879. In 1961, a food-storage program obliged China to import 6.2 million tons of grain from Canada and Australia. In 1962, import decreased to 5.32 million tons. Between 1961 and 1965, China imported a total of 30 million tons of grain at a cost of US$2 billion (Robert Price, International Trade of Communist China Vol II, pp 600-601). More would have been imported except that US pressure on Canada and Australia to limit sales to China and US interference with shipping prevented China from importing more. Canada and Australia were both anxious to provide unlimited credit to China for grain purchase, but alas, US policy prevailed and millions starved in China.
In late 1959, several natural disasters and bad weather conditions were reported in the press. Floods and drought brought about the "three bitter years" of 1959-62. After 1962, the economy recovered, but the politic was shifting toward a struggle against revisionism, which brought on the Cultural Revolution four years later.
Reports of severe natural disasters in isolated places and of bad weather conditions in larger areas appeared in the Chinese press in the spring of 1959, after the Wuhan Plenum in December 1958 had already made policy adjustments based on the technical criticism of Peng Dehuai on the People's Communes initiative. In March 1959, the entire Hunan region was under flood, and soon after that the spring harvest in southwestern China was lost through drought. The 1958 grain production yielded 250 million tons instead the projected 375 million tons, and 1.2 million tons of peanuts instead of the projected 4 million tons. In 1959, the harvest came to 175 million tons. In 1960, the situation deteriorated further. Drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of the cultivated area. Some 60 percent of the agricultural land in the north received no rain at all. The yield for 1960 was 142 million tons. In 1961, the weather situation improved only slightly.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FD01Ad04.html
1966-67:The Cultural Revolution--3 million dead--mob violence,executions,purges.
This is yet another outlandish claim. To start with, violence during the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1967 and was suppressed in 1968 by the PLA. When the "Gang of Four" who were identified as being responsible for the Cultural Revolution were tried, they were convicted of the following:
The 10 defendents in the trial, which began on Nov.20, were charged with 48 offenses that included the presentation of false evidence against and persecution of 729,511 people, some 34,800 of whom were said to have died as a resolt of imprionment, torture of suicide.
New York Times, Jan. 26, 1981,
Chang's work has proven to be so flawed and inaccurate that even mainstream scholars have backed away from it:
The inaccessible sources are of two kinds: anonymous interviews and unpublished documents or books. The former include ‘the wife of a Shanghai delegate’, ‘interview with a local Party historian’, ‘interview with an old underground worker’, ‘interviews with people who had been told’, ‘interview with a staff member who knew about Mao’s account’, ‘interviews with Mao’s girlfriends’, ‘interviews with Mao’s personal staff’, ‘interview with a Russian insider’ and ‘interview with a family member’. The book contains dozens of citations like these. The inaccessible documents include the partially unpublished manuscript memoirs of Mao’s second wife, Yang Kai-hui (one of these manuscripts is quoted at length in words ‘mostly recalled from memory after reading this document in an archive’); the ‘records of interrogations of executioners in the 1960s, unpublished’; ‘contemporary newspaper reports’; the ‘unpublished manuscript of a person present’; the ‘handwritten, unpublished’ diaries of Mao’s son Anying; ‘medical documents that established the poisoning’; and many more.*
Basing their argument on such sources, Chang and Halliday claim that the most famous battle of the Long March, at the Dadu Bridge in 1935, never took place. Their key piece of evidence is an interview with a ‘sprightly . . . local woman . . . who was 93 years old when we met her in 1997’, supplemented by an interview in 1983 with the then curator of the museum at the bridge. Their related claim that Chiang Kai-shek had deliberately ‘left the passage open for the Reds’ is unsourced.[/i]
How was it possible to gain access? Who gave authorisation or protection, formal or informal, to this project, or if none was given, how was secrecy maintained as the research progressed? How were the interviewees found? In what settings were they interviewed? In what manner were they questioned? How were records of the interviews kept? What motivations did informants have for talking? What methods were used to confirm their identities and to corroborate their information? How were unpublished sources obtained? How were they authenticated? Where, if anywhere, may they be consulted by other scholars (and if they can’t, why not)?
It is clear that many of Chang and Halliday’s claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence. They state, for example, that the Chinese Communist Party ‘was founded in 1920’, and not, as is usually said, in 1921 – a point they think important because Mao wasn’t in Shanghai in 1920. The two sources they cite, however, merely confirm that early Communist cells were founded a year before the First Party Congress met in Shanghai in 1921, something not contested by historians. They claim that the Kuomintang politician Wang Jingwei was the hidden ‘patron’ of Mao’s early Party career, which appears to be a misreading of the fact that Wang, who served briefly as head of the Nationalists, appointed Mao as well as other Communists to KMT posts during the time of the KMT-Communist united front.
They argue that the battle of Tucheng during the Long March was a huge defeat, not a victory as officially claimed, and that Mao engineered this disaster on purpose. This conclusion is reached by distorting what the sources say. The sources describe a protracted battle during which Mao refused to withdraw his troops and during which they suffered heavy casualties, but that nonetheless ended in a Red Army victory. Although the sources may be tendentious, Chang and Halliday do not explain why it is reasonable to use them in support of an opposite argument.
Some of Chang and Halliday’s arguments go beyond the misuse of sources to make claims that are simply unsourced. Perhaps they think these are conclusions that flow self-evidently from the pattern of events. They include claims that Stalin deliberately kept his ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US troops into Korea; that Mao helped cause Stalin’s fatal stroke; that Mao’s remarks to the East German leader Walter Ulbricht about the Great Wall had something to do with Ulbricht’s decision some years later to erect the Berlin Wall; and that Mao started both the Taiwan Strait crises, in 1954 and 1958, in order to provoke an American nuclear threat to China that would in turn put pressure on the Soviet Union to give more help to China’s own atomic bomb programme.
Chang and Halliday’s false claims include the assertion that Mao had planned for some time what became in 1962 the Sino-Indian border war, and, as part of this, a ‘hefty horse-trade’ occurred in which Khrushchev told the outgoing Chinese ambassador that Moscow would take China’s side if war broke out with India in return for Mao’s support for the Russian position on missiles in Cuba. But according to their own source, Mao’s ambassador reported these Russian protestations to Beijing as a hypocritical attempt to mask a growing alignment with India. Chang and Halliday further imply that Khrushchev’s promise of support helped Mao decide to give ‘the go-ahead for crack troops to storm Indian positions’; they fail to provide the important background information that, to quote an authoritative study by John Garver, Nehru had previously ‘ordered Indian forces to advance into disputed areas and clear Chinese forces, though without firing first. India ignored Chinese warnings to halt this “forward policy”,’ and only then did the Red Army strike ‘suddenly with overwhelming force’.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/nath01_.html
