The title of this essay is taken from a beautiful poem titled "Spring View" (春望) written by the inestimable poet Du Fu, who lived and wrote during the Tang Dynasty. The poem can be seen in its translated form here.
Even the Flowers Shed Tears
A Selection of China’s Campaigns, 1947-2018
Introduction
Over
the course of its relatively short history, the Communist Party of China has
inflicted suffering on its own people the likes of which the Meiji Restoration’s
Imperial Japan could have never managed. During the Second Sino-Japanese War,
an estimated 17,000,000 to 22,000,000 Chinese civilians were killed[1],
along with 3,800,000 to 10,600,000 military deaths[2].
These numbers, while staggering, are eclipsed by a single event after the
successful ascension of Mao Zedong to power as the Communist Party of China
took control of the Middle Kingdom. Speaking with middle aged Chinese parents
today, one can get the sense that they realize things were once bad for their
nation; one also gets the sense that, whether through willing disbelief or true
ignorance of fact, they do not know what their own government has done to them.
In a
broad sense, I wish this paper to be an exploration of the pain suffered by
those who have lived under the thumb of the Communist Party of China. For many,
they can never speak out regarding the horrors they suffered. For those who
have died due to the direct action or inept mishandling of the Communist Party
of China, it is imperative that historians, social scientists, politicians and
all others capable of speaking out not let the Party sweep its crimes under the
rug of history.
In a
more focused sense, I will be examining a few major events that have occurred
during the infancy of the People’s Republic of China. This examination will
follow a similar pattern for each event: I will identify the major actors that
are involved in the perpetration of the event, the dates during which the event
occurred, the main victims of the event, any statistics available regarding the
event, and a brief summary of how the event itself was handled both before and
after.
The
paper will be broken into two sections, with an introductory overview of the
events to be examined. As time has gone on with the party, the prevalence of
mass killing has faded, while more subtle methods have been introduced to
control the people of China. Beginning with Mao Zedong, we will see the
ham-fisted management of one of history’s greatest human rights violators,
murderers, and despots. This section will comprise the bulk of the paper and
will look at a selection of events that occurred under Mao. Examinations of the
systemic efforts to hide the atrocities committed by their predecessors will be
looked at in the second section.
In
terms of data for the paper, I will be attempting to compile both high and low
estimates into one database for the various events I will address. In addition
to that, I will compile a selection of government messaging and propaganda
regarding the events – though not an exhaustive one, as this is not feasible
given the length and breadth that some of the campaigns encompassed.
Before
beginning in earnest, it is necessary to adopt a simple definition of what type
of event I will be studying. I will be looking at four different campaigns
taken under Mao’s tenure. I have chosen these four due to their relative
importance in the scheme of Mao’s leadership, though that should not suggest
the others do not matter or there are not many of them. This, along with
lowering the total number of events to be examined, will stop the narrative
from grinding to a halt over the countless executions of supposed criminals,
many of them political dissidents, that have occurred in a trickle or stream
over the years. In this paper, I wish to look at the torrential downpours of
destruction only. This relies on my supposition that, beyond the explicit
murder of young men and women vying for democracy during the June Fourth
Incident, the Party has learned after Mao that acts of mass murder were less
than palatable and left a mess that required great effort to cover up.
I
should quickly note that in defining the totals killed, I have taken R.J.
Rummel’s democide as a jumping-off point. Rummel defines democide as the
intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed peoples by government agents acting
in their official capacity pursuing either a government policy or command. This
definition, which is much broader than many definitions of genocide, allows for
intentional acts that lead to unexpected outcomes – for example, mass famines –
to be included in any calculations of death totals. There is academic criticism
of this method, but I would argue that this is one of the best possible
definitions to encapsulate the staggering number of dead that the Party has
stacked up. In fact, this definition is used by Rummel in his work China’s Bloody Century[3]
to derive figures from historical accounts in a much more holistic way than
others.
In
advance, I ask the reader’s forgiveness if the work seems to have been too
light in some areas or too heavy in others – as with any attempt to weave a
narrative over a historical timeframe, these things rely on the writer’s skill
or lack thereof.
Overview of Data
In this
first section I will give an overview of the major events which will be
considered in this paper. The following is a timeline that shows the major events
that I will be describing, along with data on the total number killed during
the events. As I said previously, these figures are estimates and thus will be
presented with both a low and high end. Sources for all the figures are
described in the paper. As mentioned before, I have not included every single
event in my work, as this is simply impossible given the vast number of
state-sanctioned killings and imprisonments that have occurred and are
occurring under the Party’s direct supervision.
Event Name
|
Low Estimate
|
High Estimate
|
Begin Date
|
End Date
|
Land Reform
|
700,000
|
4,500,000
|
1947
|
1952
|
Suppress
Counterrevolutionaries
|
712,000
|
2,000,000
|
1950
|
1953
|
Great Leap Forward
|
23,000,000
|
53,330,000
|
1958
|
1962
|
Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
|
750,000
|
3,000,000
|
1966
|
1976
|
Total
|
25,162,000
|
62,830,000
|
Figure 1:
Sources for estimated deaths is provided in the following pages. While larger
or smaller figures can be found, I selected the most credible low and high
estimates rather than simply the largest and smallest available.
Mao Zedong’s Campaigns
Figure 2:
"Land Reform in the whole nation is already basically accomplished - the
great achievements of three years People's Republic of China"
Mao oversaw China’s most violent and
devastating campaigns. This paper will briefly explore a few, though there is
simply not enough space to explore each at the level it deserves. To keep
things simple, I will give an overview of each of the named campaigns along
with figures that could be found regarding the number of dead or imprisoned,
along with sourcing for each.
Figure 3:
Peasant Denunciation of Landlord, Date Unknown
Mao Zedong himself, when looking back
on the initial Land Reform Campaign which lasted from 1947 through 1952 with a
legal start date of June 30, 1950, remarked that 700,000 counterrevolutionaries
and class enemies had been executed during the simultaneous Land Reform
Campaign and Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. These numbers are
questionable at best, though the high estimates are even more so. Fung Hoichiu,
who was the Secretary General of Hong Kong/Kowloon Trades Union Council, stated
that his sources estimated the death total at around 20,000,000 total.[4]
Rummel puts the figures at closer to between 3,000,000 and 4,500,000 total dead
once all is said and done during the first Land Reform Campaign. When looking
at the totality of Mao’s campaign against landlords beginning in 1947 until
Mao’s grip on power ended with his death in 1976, between 13,500,000 and
14,250,000 total deaths related to class-based persecution occurred according
to Harry Wu[5].
The land reform campaign was incited
as part of a move towards collectivization. Those who owned land were to be
painted as evil and worthy of death, and Land Reform Squads were created to
root out and exterminate all landlords throughout China. Kang Sheng, a pivotal
part of Mao’s rise to power and the architect of the Land Reform Campaign,
utilized the lessons he had learned in Moscow while much of the rest of the
party was suffering the Long March in order to orchestrate what would be one of
the deadliest campaigns under Mao’s tenure. According to John Byron and Robert
Pack in their work The Claws of the
Dragon: Kang Sheng – The Evil Genius Behind Mao – And His Legacy of Terror in
People’s China,
… agrarian reform cut
a bloody swath through much of rural China. Squads of Communist enforcers were
sent to the most remote villages to organize the local petty thieves and
bandits into so-called land reform teams, which inflamed the poor peasants and
hired laborers against the rich. When resentment reached fever pitch, peasants
at staged "grievance meetings" were encouraged to relate the
injustices and insults they had suffered, both real and imagined, at the hands
of "the landlord bullies." Often these meetings would end with the
masses, led by the land reform teams, shouting "Shoot him! Shoot
him!" or "Kill! Kill! Kill!" The cadre in charge of proceedings
would rule that the landlords had committed serious crimes, sentence them to
death, and order that they be taken away and eliminated immediately.
Roving bands of peasants, or dispossessed youth killing those
they deem to be anti-Party or anti-people, is a common theme in the Party’s
bloody early history. Harry Wu, in his Classicide
in Communist China, notes that by 1976 up to 90% of all landlords had been
executed, effectively destroying an entire class within the nation. By the
official end of Land Reform – when it was declared successful in 1953 – around
forty percent of the land had been forcibly stolen from the gentry class[6].
The next
campaign under Mao that will be examined is the Campaign to Suppress
Counterrevolutionaries, which extended from 1950 till 1953. Created under the
auspices of Liu Shaoqi, ostensibly to stop the banditry and resistance by
remnants of the Kuomintang, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
overlapped in part with the Land Reform. The campaign occurred at the same time
as the Korean War; Liu Shaoqi himself notes the importance of the Korean War
for both the Land Reform and Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in
this way:
Once the gongs and drums of resisting
the United States and assisting Korea begin to make a deafening sound, the
gongs and drums of the land reform and suppression of counter-revolutionaries
become barely audible, and the latter becomes much easier to implement. Without
the loud gongs and drums of resisting the United States and assisting Korea,
those of the land reform and zhenfan would make unbearable noise. Here a
landlord is killed and there another is beaten; there would be fuss everywhere.[7]
The brutality and violence of the Land Reform was matched by
that of the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. The Kuomintang and the
supposed bandits were used as a scapegoat to suppress dissidents of any kind. Again
to Rummel, whose excellent sourcing has been a boon for this paper, for a
description of how the trials and executions occurred for those accused of
being counterrevolutionaries:
At such meetings, the
“criminals”—alleged “counterrevolutionaries”—might be penned up at the center
of the field, near a rostrum. After an announcement that the meeting was now
open, one of the accused “counterrevolutionaries” might then be hauled onto a
rostrum by soldiers and forced to kneel before the crowd. A public official,
possibly the mayor, might then recite the “counterrevolutionary” activities of
the “criminal” or a complainant would make his case against the accused, after
which the crowd would be encouraged to roar, curse and shout things like “Kill
him,” “Shoot the beast.” Then the verdict of death would be announced. Hearing
this, the crowd might then roar “Long Live the CCP!”; “Long Live the Victory of
the Revolution!” Each of the “counterrevolutionaries” would be similarly tried
and condemned.
Afterwards, perhaps that evening or the
next day, the executions would be announced by loudspeaker, and households and
organizations would be ordered to send representatives to the execution
grounds. Past clapping crowds shouting “Shoot the Counterrevolutionaries!” the
victims might be trucked to a field packed with chatting and laughing
spectators. After each “counterrevolutionary” was shot, the crowd then might be
directed to applaud.16 After the above meeting held in Shen-yang, over 400
“counterrevolutionaries” were shot.17 Said Chow Ching-wen, a high communist
official at this time, “The masses had no quarrel with those who were executed,
yet they shouted and applauded the Government-sponsored massacre. I think in
their hearts they must have been frightened.”
Figure 4:
“He who harms the people will not easily escape justice!”
Total estimates range from the official figure of 712,000
executions to 2,000,000[8].
These numbers are again staggering, as is the lack of knowledge in the West of
their very existence. This was just the first of the political purges
undertaken by Party officials, and not even the last to be performed by Mao and
his direct subordinates. A similar purge, the Sufan movement, was aimed at
those inside the party and may have claimed another 700,000 lives[9].
Between the
Land Reform and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, a lowest
possible estimate of those killed is fielded by a team of scholars working on The Black Book of Communism[10]
– at the very least, 1,000,000 people were killed given the necessity of at
least one enemy per village, while the highest estimate they suggest for the
period from 1947 to 1953 is around 15,000,000.
The
deadliest event in modern Chinese history was the Great Leap Forward. Estimates
are almost impossible to make of the exact total given the overwhelming effort
by government officials to cover up the catastrophic results that happened as a
result of Mao’s failed attempts at collectivization and industrialization.
Today in China, students are taught not about the Great Famine, but instead
about the Three Years of Natural Disaster. The name alone gives enough
explanation as to what they intend, shirking the responsibility of those in
charge – Mao foremost among them – for failing in such a monstrous way. While
it is true that several factors conspired to bring about this event, the
crucial piece was indeed the leadership’s decision to pursue a type of
collectivization that ruined the economic productive capabilities of a nation
for many years, leaving those most vulnerable members of society exposed and
even more destitute than they had been originally. Stories of cannibalism,
infanticide, and extreme physical and mental duress abound during the Great
Leap Forward.
Figure 5: "Long live the General Line! Long live the Great Leap Forward! Long live the People's Communes!"
The lowest
figures, in terms of total deaths and population loss, come to 23,000,000[11].
The highest estimates put the total famine deaths at 53,330,000[12].
The massive variance can be attributed to a few things: first, the officials
who oversaw the villages, towns, cities and provinces were under great pressure
to show that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a success. Second, people would often
underreport the number of dead in an attempt to continue collecting social
security for the deceased[13].
It is not possible for me to properly encapsulate the amount of suffering
experienced by those who went through this time of mass collectivization, nor
do I want to tarnish the seriousness of the topic by doing so in an academic
essay. Suffice it to say that this famine was the single deadliest man-made
disaster in all of history.
The last of
the events that will be examined during Mao’s tenure is that of the Cultural
Revolution, or more officially titled the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution. This event lasted far longer than the others, spanning from 1966
until 1976. Given the scope and detail that one could give to this time period
alone, it is impossible for me to properly encapsulate the spirit and actions
that took place during this ten-year period. To suggest that it began from
Mao’s fear that he was losing power would be an oversimplification; to delve
too deeply into the supposed roots given by official accounts would be to give
too much credence to any Party narrative. Even determinations of the total
dead, while usually difficult given the active attempts to cover up failures by
Party officials and inconsistent record keeping from villages, towns and
cities, are more confused here than anywhere else. In the decades after the
Cultural Revolution, much effort would be spent in hiding the truth of what
happened.
The total
dead from the Cultural Revolution is far below that of the Great Leap Forward,
although the damage to Chinese history and culture is incalculably higher. While
on the low end some estimates suggest that only 750,000 people were killed[14],
higher estimates go as far as to suggest 3,000,000 were killed during the
cultural revolution[15][16].
The authors of Mao’s Last Revolution suggest
that 36,000,000 people were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
Figure 6: "Criticize the old world and build a new world with Mao Zedong thought as a
weapon"
In total, a
bare minimum can be established from the figures I have cobbled together – in
these four events alone, Mao directed policies that would lead to the deaths of
between 25,162,000 people at the low end and 72,580,000 at the high end. This
can by no means be taken as definitive, as the prospect of properly calculating
the total number of deaths in the face of a systemic effort to hide such
figures is nearly impossible. Add to that the lackluster – and sometimes
completely nonexistent – systems of bookkeeping in rural areas of China, and
the true extent of Mao’s devastation on the Chinese people will likely never be
known. As Yang Jisheng found while reporting on the effects of the Great Leap
Forward, there still exists a large effort even in the lower reaches of the
Chinese political world to obfuscate the damage caused by Mao and his failed
policies.
Another
impossibility is determining how much of this should be attributed to malice,
incompetence, or bad luck. While the Chinese government itself will claim that
the Great Famine was greatly driven by drought and natural disaster, outside
observers are quick to point out the massive economic and social disruption
brought about by the movement of huge numbers of people, both in terms of
physical location and change in profession forced upon them by collectivization.
Again, any attempts to split the natural from the manmade here are doomed for
failure given the Party’s inimical footing towards those looking to investigate
their past actions. In the face of such an adversary and so many dead and
persecuted, one can only hope that history does not repeat itself.
Systemic Erasure
Immediately following the death of
Mao, efforts to hide his true face from the Chinese people began. In 1981, the
Party published the Resolution on CPC
History[17].
In it, they play a trick of intellectual sophistry by dividing Mao in half. Mao
Zedong Thought, an “intellectual” theory so deeply enshrined in the party as to
be inseparable without the death of the Party itself, is cut away from Mao
Zedong the man. The Party claims, in no uncertain terms, that the actions taken
by Mao from 1966 to 1976 show a failure by Mao Zedong to live up to Mao Zedong
Thought. Further, they blame the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution on
Lin Biao and Jiang Qiang, two disgraced former high-ranking officials. This
obviates the fact that the Cultural Revolution was dreamed up by an aging Mao
afraid that his power was going to be removed by the very Party he had helped
to solidify.
While
discussing the Great Leap Forward, the Party carefully describes how in the
aftermath of the worst famine in history the Party took time to self-criticize
and examine the good and the bad that came from the deadliest event in Chinese
history. To suggest that there is both good and bad to be found in the Great
Leap Forward is, without a doubt, a level of cold revisionism that would warm
the hearts of the most fervent holocaust deniers today.
Discussing
the Anti-Rightist campaigns, the party first praises the steps taken to root
out the bourgeoisie infiltrators, while only noting that “the scope of this
struggle was made far too broad and a number of intellectuals, patriotic people
and Party cadres were unjustifiably labelled “Rightists", with unfortunate
consequences.” Unfortunate consequences, in this case, amounted to between
712,000 and 2,000,000 deaths.
In reference
to both the Land Reform and Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries that
killed between 1,400,000 and 6,500,000 people, the Party remarked that they
“successfully transformed the educational, scientific, and cultural
institutions of old China.”
In passing,
I will note an unassuming sentence from Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone. While
collecting provincial-level data on the number of dead from the Great Leap
Forward, he suggested that his “inquiries uncovered
cases of provincial leaders from the famine years continuing the interfere with
mortality figures in the 1980s.”[18] The efforts to hide the various
failures of the Party began immediately and continue to this day.
The Resolution on CPC History was authored
while Deng Xiaoping was leading the Party and nation. While many consider him a
great liberalizer of markets and politics in general, it must be remembered the
role he played in both the censorship of Chinese history and his own direct
role in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, known in China as the June Fourth
Incident. A group of mostly college students, rallying in the fashion of their
parents and grandparents for social change, were gunned down by military and
police forces. Deng Xiaoping directly ordered these actions to be taken against
the students. While the official accounting of the event states that around 1,000
civilians were killed, a secret British cable that was recently reported on
suggests that number may be closer to 10,000[19].
Horrifying details are revealed in
the British cables, including the descriptions of female student protestors
being bayoneted as they begged for their lives, pieces of the dead being hosed
into the drains in the aftermath, and mothers being shot to death as they
attempted to help their injured children. After the first wave of killing,
government officials told around 1,000 protestors that they could leave the
scene. A hidden machine gun encampment mowed them all down in a preplanned
secondary massacre. This event, taking place more than a decade after the
events of the Cultural Revolution, were shocking and horrifying to all those
who witnessed them. The horror of the situation extended to those in charge,
with General Xu Qinxian being forced to resign after refusing Deng Xiaoping’s
order to use force on unarmed civilian protestors. According to the above
British cables, twenty-seven army officers were shot by their own soldiers for
refusing to kill the civilians, with the soldiers explaining that they
themselves would have been killed if they had not killed their insubordinate
officers.
I bring this up to make clear that
nothing has fundamentally changed about the Party’s willingness to use
violence. What has changed is their skill at hiding their past and present
crimes. The protestors in Tiananmen Square truly believed that their
government, which had previously made mistakes, had their best interests at
heart[20].
Regardless of what had happened in the past, official communications by the
Party suggested that any prior failures were due not to malice, but
incompetence. Protestors believed that they could achieve their goals by using
their voices; they learned, in the most terrible way, that this would not be
accepted.
June Fourth Incident is a banned topic
online, in books, and in classrooms. Tiananmen Square Protests is a banned
term. Both 63+1 and 65-1 are banned terms, as each equal 64[21].
Any discussion of or gathering regarding the massacre is banned[22].
In fact, one will find that much regarding the dark past of China is banned
within China. As I mentioned in the beginning of this essay, children are still
taught the twisted Party historical account; instead of massive failure on the
party of the Party and Mao, young students learn of the Three Years of Great
Famine, where nature conspired to ruin the glorious path of Mao’s
collectivization and industrialization towards Communism. Instead of a
desperate attempt to retain power in the face of his old age and likely failing
health that lead to mass death and persecution and the destruction of Chinese
culture, the Cultural Revolution is painted as a misguided effort by a wartime
Chinese leader working during a time of peace.
I will not attempt to fully explain
the level of effort expended by the Party to cover up and change history.
Suffice it to say that an endless sum is spent on the task along with the
intellectual work of countless people. Hopefully, I have succeeded at giving a
small glimpse into this.
Conclusion
This brief examination that looks at
bits and pieces of China’s history has been deeply affecting. On a human level,
it is impossible to conceive the number killed in the Party’s short history.
The ripples of those deaths – friends, family, and the society as a whole –
still run through China today. All the time and effort spent by the Party to
hide their blatant and excessive abuses on their citizens cannot hide these things
completely, even with the unchecked power of the most powerful single-party
state on earth. They may have successfully hidden exact numbers, but the sheer
volume of silenced voices is too loud to be kept quiet.
My only hope for the people of China,
who have suffered more than any will ever fully know, is that they can one day
find a government that works for rather than against them. For now, their
government actively suppresses their thoughts, their history, their culture,
and their dead. I will not pretend that I am an unbiased observer of the
situation. It is impossible to be an unbiased observer when facing a monstrous
leviathan that has chewed up tens of millions of its own people.
As I suggested in the introduction,
this essay was neither comprehensive nor capable of getting every detail correct.
On the first point, I have neither the time nor expertise to craft a
comprehensive accounting of the various campaigns carried out by the Party. On
the second, the Party’s work obfuscating the numbers makes any accounting of
the dead or persecuted an exercise in estimates. As above, I can only hope that
my effort sheds some light for those who do not know the Party. With China
solidly set as a major power in the world, it is more important now than ever before
that the world knows who they are and what they have done.
Bibliography
Clodfelter, Michael. "Warfare and Armed
Conflicts: A Statistical Reference", Vol. 2, pp. 956.
R. J. Rummel. “China's Bloody Century”. Transaction,
1991.
Rousset, David. “White Book on Forced Labour and
Concentration Camps in the People’s Republic of China I: The Hearings”.
International Commission Against Concentrationist Regimes, 1956.
Wu, Harry. “Classicide in Communist China.”
Comparative Civilizations Review, 2012.
Guillermaz, Jacques. “The Chinese
Communist Party in Power 1949–1976”. Translated by Anne Destenay.
Westview Press, 1976.
Kuisong, Yang. “Reconsidering the Campaign to
Suppress Counterrevolutionaries”. The China Quarterly, 2008.
Changyu, Li. “Mao’s ‘Killing Quotas’”. Advancing
Social Justice, 2005.
Werth et. al. “The Black Book of Communism”. Harvard
University Press, 1997.
Xizhe, Peng. “Demographic Consequences of the Great
Leap Forward in China's Provinces”. Population and Development Review Volume
13 Number 4, 1987
Jisheng, Yang. “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine
1958-1962”. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
MacFarquhar and Schoenals. “Mao’s Last Revolution”.
Harvard University Press, 2008.
Chang et. al. “Mao: The Unknown Story”. Jonathan
Cape, 2005.
The Communist Party of China. “Resolution on CPC
History”. 1981.
Lusher, Adam. “At least 10,000 people died in
Tiananmen Square Massacre, secret British cable from the time alleged”. The
Independent, 2017.
Gordon, Richard and Hinton, Carma. “The Gate of
Heavenly Peace”. Documentary Film, 1995.
Engel, Pamela. “94 search terms that China bans
because of Tiananmen Square”. Business Insider, 2014.
Ser, Kuang. “How China has censored words relating
to the Tiananmen Square anniversary”. PRI, 2016.
[1] Clodfelter,
Michael. "Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference", Vol.
2, pp. 956.
[2] R.
J. Rummel. “China's Bloody Century”. Transaction, 1991.
[3] R.
J. Rummel. “China's Bloody Century”. Transaction, 1991.
[4]
Rousset, David. “White Book on Forced Labour and Concentration Camps in the
People’s Republic of China I: The Hearings”. International Commission Against
Concentrationist Regimes, 1956.
[5]
Wu, Harry. “Classicide in Communist China.” Comparative Civilizations Review,
2012.
[6] Guillermaz, Jacques. “The Chinese
Communist Party in Power 1949–1976”. Translated by
Anne Destenay. Westview Press, 1976.
[7]
Kuisong, Yang. “Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries”.
The China Quarterly, 2008.
[8]
Changyu, Li. “Mao’s ‘Killing Quotas’”. Advancing Social Justice, 2005.
[9]
Werth et. al. “The Black Book of Communism”. Harvard University Press, 1997.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Xizhe, Peng. “Demographic Consequences of the
Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces”. Population and Development Review
Volume 13 Number 4, 1987
[12]
Jisheng, Yang. “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962”. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2012.
[13]
Ibid.
[14]MacFarquhar
and Schoenals. “Mao’s Last Revolution”. Harvard University Press, 2008.
[15]
Other sources claim higher numbers, but do not provide any sourcing whatsoever
for their claims. See, for example, this
interview with Merrill Goldman at the Holocaust Museum.
[16]Chang
et. al. “Mao: The Unknown Story”. Jonathan Cape, 2005.
[17]
The Communist Party of China. “Resolution on CPC History”. 1981.
[18]
Jisheng, Yang. “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962”. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2012.
[19]
Lusher, Adam. “At least 10,000 people died in Tiananmen Square Massacre, secret
British cable from the time alleged”. The Independent, 2017.
[20]
Gordon, Richard and Hinton, Carma. “The Gate of Heavenly Peace”. Documentary
Film, 1995.
[21]
Engel, Pamela. “94 search terms that China bans because of Tiananmen Square”.
Business Insider, 2014.
[22]
Ser, Kuang. “How China has censored words relating to the Tiananmen Square
anniversary”. PRI, 2016.
