More Chinese were killed my Mao than the Japanese.
My history teacher once told us in class that Mao killed more people than Hitler due to his policies.
India democracy killed more people than Mao.
How?
Here is the calculation of the fact:
It is accurate that 2 million children are killed in Indian democracy every year. 60 years of independence, democracy (plus Gandhi, Nehru, …. Singh) has killed 60*2mil = 120 million. Note that this is an UNDER-estimation, because living conditions are better off now than before. And this is children only! If we assume add adult death due to religious violence, communal murder, … etc, one can easily add it up to 200 million abnormal death.
Back to topic.
I read some papers about the big famine written by both Chinese and Westerners. The number of casualty is more a guess-work than any accurate statistics. For instance, some people would find some empty villages that used to have x number of people. They assumed that all these x number of people were died of hunger. In fact, as typical Chinese culture, many of them sought help from, and eventually lived with, their relatives far away, leaving their worthless house behind. Note that, in Chinese rural area, there is no Hukou system to accurately count the number. Some quotes from inside CPC seem more like a result of in-fight between factions within: (see
˵˵ËÄ´¨¶öËÀ1000ÍòÈË - »÷Ë®ÖÐÁ÷ - ëÔó¶«ÆìÖÄÍø in Chinese) in order to gain an upper hand on one side within the party, cadres used to depict a picture of the other side as bleak as possible. Other paper used national population census to estimate the casualty. The problem is at that time, the census conducted at that time was crude and flawed. Some places event had residual National Party (KMT) forces occupied. The most sensational number I saw thus derived was from a western scholar, who claimed the killing is 70-80 million (out of a population of about 600 million!). A typical problem is that for a missing data, people tempt to interpolate based on surrounding unreliable numbers, causing even greater error in the result.
I grabbed this data from internet, how many varieties of story can you guys create?
Population in PRC (Unit: 10,000)
1958 65994
1959 67207
1960 66207
1961 65859
1962 67295
1963 69172
Here is another countering paper:
His points are:
1) if that number is true, more than 5% people of the country were dead. The deduction in population must be palpable everywhere. In 2007, 8 million people layed-off, people talked about and saw those jobless everywhere. Suppose the government was hiding and there were actually 20 million unemployed. But, why his parents never saw people died of hunger at that time. His parents were from Hebei, a poor province. His mother had 50+ people in her family and none died of hunger. His father had 100+ people in his family, none died of hunger. Isn’t it funny that only 3% city dweller unemployed but people feel like almost every family has one unemployed, while 5% of the national population is wiped out, not many people can notice that?
2) There were 17 million “educated youth” went countries side, which was 1% of national population, which unit now doesn’t have one of these “educated youth”? If indeed, 30 million died of hunger, why never heard of anybody talked his/her family had one? Not even pictures.
3) In the three years of famine (1959, 60, 61), landlords, “rich peasants”, anti-revolutionaries, ‘bad-guys”, rightists (i.e. those are the people identified to be subjected to proletarian dictatorship of CPC, and thus must be suppressed) had 95% survivability as of early 80s. Shouldn’t those sub-classes be starved to death first?
4) Such a massive death in such a short period of time, one must think someone would bury them together in a place. Anybody find suspicious graveyard with thousands, or hundreds, perhaps in tens of dead bodies? None!
5) According to 1983 publications of population, in 1962, all of sudden population jumped.(see above data) Note that 1961 is still a famine year, how could women got enough to eat and started pregnant? Suppose indeed 30 million women all got pregnant in Jan or Feb, and gave birth in Nov, or Dec. Do you believe it?
-end of the paper
No question that CPC committed some atrocities. No question that Mao was a tyranny.
Hasn’t western type democracy/system/politicians committed atrocities and been a tyranny against the oppressed nations?
The point is CPC and Mao has done/did more goodies to the Chinese than bad things, so far.
Of course, these are opinions.
The fact is western democracy kills more Indians than Mao and CPC all together killed Chinese.