" 

  
 ==More on Mao== 

   New York Times ""Witness To Mao's Crimes"" By Edward A. Gargan (Hong Kong Bureau Chief for the NYT)Published: June 30, 1996.  Perhaps no man is responsible for as many deaths in this century as Mao. etc. 

  questions the WP sanitizing of Mao.   

 Pu Zhiqiang at  raises some worthwhile points.  See      and so on as well for his c.v. and positions.  

   Sylvia Nasar states:  
 THE world still thinks of famine the way that Malthus did, as Mother Nature's revenge on hapless humanity. In fact, famine is anything but what the dour English economist called ""nature's last most dreadful resource."" As in Somalia, it is often a man-made disaster, an avoidable economic and political catastrophe.  
 Modern transportation has made it easier to move relief supplies. But far more important are the incentives governments have to save their own people. It's no accident that the familiar horror stories of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in one-party states, dictatorships or colonies: China, British India, Stalin's Russia.  
 In Mao's China, up to 30 million may have starved during the Great Leap Forward. The government confiscated millions of villagers' family plots to gather them into collective farms, assuming the owners would keep working out of loyalty to socialist ideals. Output plummeted. But Beijing did nothing, partially because it did not realize the program had failed; it actually increased the amounts that rural areas were required to send to cities. By 1960, as the famine was coming to a peak, the authorities thought they had 100 million more metric tons of grain than they did.   

 And so on.     "