Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts", a book detailing the Chinese famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward. The paper considers four main points made by Becker concerning Mao's responsibility for the famine: a reliance on pseudoscience, a faulty industrial policy, fear and intimidation that inhibited truth telling and failure to act once the truth was known. Each of these is considered in turn and Becker's argument regarding each is critiqued.

From the Paper:

"In his ground-breaking study, "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine", British journalist Jasper Becker depicts what is clearly one of the most tragic events in all of human history: the heretofore little known and misunderstood Chinese famine that resulted from Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962. He outlines the events which led to the massive starvation of an estimated 30 million people as Mao's government pursued an agricultural-industrial revolution based on pseudo-scientific fantasies about manufacturing and production, and backed by state-sponsored violence and intimidation designed to fabricate for official records what was not and could not be realized in actual practice."

More papers on Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts":

• Essay # 86215 : "Famine in the PRC."
• Article Review # 72649 : "Review of "Ghosts in the Nursery"
• Analytical Essay # 121278 : "Ghosts in Literature and Film"

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