By Felix Wemheuer
concentrating on famine as a political instrument, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts approximately nutrition between peasants, city populations, and the socialist country led to the hunger loss of life of hundreds of thousands. a massive contribution to chinese language and Soviet historical past, this provocative research examines the long term results of the good famines at the courting among the kingdom and its electorate and argues that the teachings governments discovered from the catastrophes enabled them to beat famine of their later many years of rule.
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Extra info for Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
Sample text
The governments demanded sacrifices from both the rural and urban populations and the curbing of food consumption. Third, the roots of both Communist parties in the countryside will be compared. It will be shown that the necessity of winning over the peasantry for socialism and the extraction of resources from the countryside for the development of industry were conflicting goals. In the “dual society” of the planned economy, peasants were second-class citizens. Fourth, the question will be raised as to what impact collectivization and radical social transformation in the countryside had on the famine.
The two “great famines” of 1931–1933 in the Soviet Union and 1959–1961 in China can be better understood in the context of this century of hunger, not only of war and terror. While famines did not always occur in the same regions, many people experienced more than one such catastrophe of hunger in their lifetimes. For example, a peasant who was born in 1890 in the south of Russia and died in 1950 could have experienced famine in 1891, 1921–1922, 1931–1933, during World War II, and in 1946–1947.
31 This relief system was weakened when imperialism entered China after the Opium War of 1840 and the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1860), resulting in a crisis in the Qing dynasty. 32 Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley has argued that in the late Qing period, the modernizers in the administration were already less interested in famine relief than the more conservative and traditional Confucian officials were. 33 It also seems that the GMD focused all its efforts on unifying the nation and fighting its enemies.