China's Great Famine (2013)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Side note, I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made. They are either created or mitigated poorly because of ignorance.
Here's a cut n paste
Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 instances of famine from 108 BC to 1911 in one province or another—an average of close to one famine per year.[50] From 1333 to 1337 a terrible famine killed 6 million Chinese. The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed no fewer than 45 million people.[51]
Japan experienced more than 130 famines between 1603 and 1868.[52]
More widely crop failure and famine are very different things. Consider, Ireland was exporting food during the Irish potato famine.
As for the others, the famines there were usually caused by external forces that have stopped being (e.g. foreign occupation, etc), so not the same.
(1) China's recent famine is why it is extremely strict.
(2) Modern famines are man-made.
The parent post seems to be responding to (1).
Sibling posts appear to think the parent post is addressing (2)?
The CCP is strict because the only thing that really matters is holding on to power.
That same party is still in power today, and currently putting millions of Muslims into concentration camps. The lucky ones get a modified house arrest, with non-Muslim minders living with them and monitoring them at all times.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m...
When a lighter touch is all that is required, they'll use social credit points to allow someone to live their lives or not:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/beijing-t...
Edit: yep - looks like the brigades are definitely out in force on this thread today.
This was such a disaster, and it harmed so much of the former elite (who ended up working in the fields and, predictably, sucked at farming) that they manage to unite and take over the CCP instances.
Nowadays, CCP leaders are highly technocratic and having a strong education is mandatory to rise in the hierarchy.
> That same party is still in power today, and currently putting millions of Muslims into concentration camps.
Yes, and even if they don't have an extermination policy that looks at least like STASI policies there.
The reason (and I only state a reason, not an excuse there) why China is so sensitive about religion is because it caused the most deadly civil war in human history, the revolt of the Taiping, when a guy believing he was the brother of Jesus brought half the country to worship him and fought the emperor.
They started their anti-muslim policy when ISIS was starting to have antennas in several countries. Religious movement triggers alarm in them in the same way as nazis do to Europeans: they know they can lead to 20 million death.
I don't think that's quite right. They're sensitive because religion causes Chinese people to organize themselves outside Communist hierarchy, which they see as a threat to Communist power. They're sensitive to all similar kinds of organization, not just religiously motivated ones.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...
I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/poverty-and-famines-an-essay-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
One can only wonder why ... Or just look at Venezuela and North Korea today.
From that time we have an expression "like a hunger-stricken from the Volga region" ("golodayuschiy s Povolzh'ya", the region among the most affected by the famine) meaning like a completely debilitated by prolonged hunger and by overall extremely bad conditions person.
You may want to read [0] or similar documents for more information.
[0]: The new Soviet archival sources Hypotheses for a critical assessment Andrea Graziosi, 1999
No modern Communist academic nor Marx himself spoke in these terms. You're projecting history onto ideology, which doesn't always work. The Marxist students being persecuted by China this year would very much disagree with your analysis, even having experienced this 'communism'.
Second, you are mismatching theory with practice.
"The root problem is the problem of the system. They don't dare to admit the system's problems … It might influence the legitimacy of the Communist party"
Can someone fwd this to Sundar Pichai in re: Project Dragonfly?
Historical material is always welcome on Hacker News. Dig away!
You often see this comparison being made (whatever the reason is), to me those deaths are different because the intention was different.
The shoah was aimed at certain people, while the great famine killed indiscriminately.
The Great Famine was aimed at every commoner by the Politburo.
Note: my mother side of the family were generational peasants in the Kiev region, the families of 5 siblings of my grandfather lived there through that time (the granddad took his family to look for better life elsewhere several years before that)
I have no doubt that the Chinese government "prioritized" their food similarly, giving less to those it considered "opposition" while making sure it's actual power-base was taken care off and wouldn't starve to death on them.
Just like the Nazis prioritized who they killed first in Dachau not only by "Jewishness" but also the political and social influences these people held, which made them capable of opposing the Nazi rule and thus had to be "taken care off" first.
As to the morality comparison, denying agency to your entire country's farmers on the belief that you can just control everything from afar and keep it running isn't that different from claiming that your country would be running well if you could just get rid of all the Jews. They're both reprehensible actions undertaken based on nonsensical beliefs; one of those beliefs just takes a bit longer to think about.