Excerpts from Cormac Ó Gráda’s review of new book by Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine. “MGF may become the best-known account of the GLF famine for a while. But should it? It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so…”

Utsa Patnaik: “On Famine and Measuring ‘Famine Deaths.’” Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner. Ed. Sujata Patel, Jasodhara Bagchi, and Krishna Raj. New Delhi: Sage, 2002.
This is a long, dense and rigorous critique of the ways in which the death toll of the Great Leap Forward famine has been produced or ‘socially constructed.’ More specifically it is a sustained engagement with the so-called pioneering work of Banister, Coale and Amartya Sen on the issue. From the inclusion of the “unborn” among the famine …

Introduction: the origin of the debate
The debate centered on the evaluation of Mao Zedong, taking place in recent issues of the Chinese Language weekly journal, the Dowei times, finds its origin in the heated exchanges between Professor Chen Junfu of Temple U and Mr. Gao Wenqian, author of the book,”Zhou Enlai in his late years” on the special talk show radio program of the Voice of America (VOA) to mark Mao’s 110th birthday on Dec. 26, 2004. Initially I was approached for this program by its producer, because of my …

Many developing countries which have a high proportion of poor in their population, are typically characterised by a high death rate as well as a high birth rate, with the birth rate exceeding the death rate. The rate of natural increase is given by the difference between the birth rate and the death rate. The actual increase of population is obtained by subtracting from this the net out-migration from the country, if any. In the course of development as health services reach a larger segment of the population, education levels improve and per head real incomes rise, it is expected that not only will the death rate come down but so will the birth rate. The aim is to obtain an even faster decline in the birth rate than in the death rate, if the rate of natural increase is to come down from initial high levels. China however although starting from a worse situation had lowered both the death rate and the birth rate much faster.

This article was written as a foreword to the Chinese edition of Shenfan, which is the title of the second volume of the history of Long Bow Village, Shanxi Province, China. The first volume, Fanshen, told the story of the land reform that transformed the community between 1945 and 1948. Shenfan takes up the story with the organization of mutual aid leading first to lower and then to higher stage cooperation between 1948 and 1971, the year I first returned to China after a U. S. government mandated absence of seventeen years.