{"id":3572,"date":"2010-09-10T10:41:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T09:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3572"},"modified":"2010-09-10T10:41:03","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T09:41:03","slug":"how-many-millions-did-mao-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3572","title":{"rendered":"How many millions did Mao kill?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone knows that, in the 20th century, the greatest killers were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin whose policies were responsible for millions and millions of lives. But many people forget about the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung.<\/p>\n<p>In \u201cMao: The Unknown Story\u201d by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday [my review <a href=\"..\/..\/biographies.html#Mao\">here<\/a>], his appalling record was examined in meticulous detail. Overall, according to Chung &amp; Halliday, in Mao&#8217;s 27 year rule of  terror, some 27 million died in prison and labour camps and close to 38  million died of starvation in the great famine, with a total death toll  of at least 70 million.<\/p>\n<p>Chung &amp; Halliday were attacked for being overly harsh in their assessment of the Great Helmsman, but now Frank Dik\u00f6tter has written &#8220;Mao&#8217;s Great Famine&#8221; [a review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2010\/sep\/05\/maos-great-famine-dikotter-review\">here<\/a>] which involves painstaking research in newly-opened local archives. His estimate of the death toll for the Great Famine of around 1960 is 45 million.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, as I know from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/China2.html\">my recent visit<\/a> to China, most Chinese even today regard Mao as basically a flawed hero and the official view &#8211; often parroted to foreigners &#8211; is that he was 70% good and 30% bad. It&#8217;s time for the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone knows that, in the 20th century, the greatest killers were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin whose policies were responsible for millions and millions of lives. But many people forget about the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung. In \u201cMao: The Unknown Story\u201d by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday [my review here], his appalling record was examined [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3572"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3591,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3572\/revisions\/3591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}