易子而食 — “Trade children, then eat.”
Now Frank Dikötter, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Hong Kong University, has laid out the vast horror in detail, drawing on local and provincial archives that have only recently become available to approved foreign scholars. In terms of Mao’s reputation this book leaves the Chairman for dead, as a monster in the same league as Hitler and Stalin – and that is without considering the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when hundreds of thousands more Chinese died. One of Dikötter’s observations is that Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution to wreak revenge on close colleagues who had dared to show him up. It is a mark of the historical darkness that still envelops China that many Chinese blame the famine on the Soviet Union, which, they maintain, snatched food from the mouths of starving Chinese by insisting that Beijing export grain to repay Moscow’s loans.
Via aldaily.com.
Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.