Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

So one could argue that the Great Famine was a much more widespread (factor 100 population), but less severe (factor 1/3 mortality) catastrophe. Disregarding all other factors such as causation. The "baseline" mortality due to starvation may also have been different in both instances.

Of course such number games are both cynical and insufficient to deal with the subject (e.g. your point 2).

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Dikötter's 2010 work Mao's Great Famine, seems like a very similar book with very similar conclusions.

Nobody at the time had come to terms with the fact that improvements in agriculture had massively increased the carrying capacity of the land. Whether we eventually are forced into famine or manage to curb populations before that point is still uncertain. But there is no question that the English could have intervened, stopped most of the casualties, and there would not have been a quick recurrence of the famine.

Oh. No. Don't you get it: The Western World is exactly the same as the Far East, exactly the same as Africa, and so on. For every Great Leap Forwards there's a Holocaust, for every Congolese war there's an English Civil War, and so on, and so forth, tit for tat, with absolutely no difference at all between Winston Churchill and Mao Zedong. Exactly the same. Otherwise, it's just racist.

In the book "Tombstone" (the book by the author in the OP), the author reiterates the claim that no democracy has ever suffered from a major famine, but are you asserting an equivalency?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great-shame...

> The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has ever occurred in a democracy.

I mean, they shouldn't be able to tell the difference in styles of government, am I right?

Except that most of the Entitled Class, from academia to journalists to Hollywood, has made an minor industry out of supporting totalitarian apologists such as yourself. A prominent example: the New York Times has refused to return the Pulitzer awarded to its pro-Stalinist reporter Walter Duranty, who lied so thoroughly about the Ukranian famine of the 1930's.

Sometimes this apologizing is done directly (as above and as with the fawning support for the late Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm), but more often through moral equivalence arguments such as yours.

My wife barely survived the Great Leap Forward. She spent years of her childhood hungry, only to come to this country and read people like you. Unlike you, she's very clear on the difference between Chinese Socialism and America's (semi-)free system.

> They have great leaps forward, we have wars on drugs.

In China, you pretty much automatically get the death penalty for trafficking drugs.

> we aren't allow to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country.

Those things are openly reported in the news although I'm sure there are some cover ups by individual soldiers.

In many ways, it reads like a non fictional 1984