Autocratic Ghosts and Chinese Hunger

Continuing revelations about Joseph Stalin’s reign have led many historians to rank him the greatest mass murderer of our century and possibly of all time. But a growing body of evidence indicates that they are probably mistaken: Mao Zedong, the dictator of Communist China for nearly thirty years, appears to have outdone his Russian counterpart after only a dozen years in power. Two recent books by scholars of Chinese Communism further cement the case that Stalin did not retain the number-one rank for long. One of these works, Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1996) focuses on Mao’s single greatest atrocity, the Great Leap Forward. The other work, Zhengyuan Fu’s Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) puts Communist China into a three-thousand-year historical perspective, arguing that Chinese Communism married Marxism-Leninism to the native-grown Chinese despotic tradition. Both books are excellent contributions to herculean task of writing the history of modern China.