Any assertion that China is a Confucian culture and society, or has maintained some sort of essential continuity with an older, traditional form of Confucianism, has to deal with the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These events fundamentally contradicted Confucian principles and ethics.  They are overpowering examples of how structural political power can shape social and economic behavior, regardless of more diffuse senses of cultural appropriateness or tradition.  Much the same could be said of other important aspects of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, but the Great Leap Forward, in particular, stands out in the extent of its brutality and violence as a demonstration of how meaningless Confucianism can be in the face of concerted state power.

This sad thought comes to mind today because of Frank Dikkotter's op-ed in the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday.  Dikkoter has a new book out, Mao's Great Famine, and it is garnering reviews.  His op-ed reminds us of just how bad things were:

Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.

But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

The violence and death were not simply an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise well-intentioned policy; they were integral to the policy itself:

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement….

…

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”

As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.

Dikkotter draws upon local CCP archives.  His evidence includes reports written at the time or not long afterward by local Party leaders.  He digs deeply into still existing records to bring to light the horrible realities of that time.

It is important to remember this, because there is a concerted effort to forget it in China today.  The careful research of Yang Jisheng, published in his book Tombstone – 墓碑 – is banned in China. The Great Leap is not covered, in any depth, in school curricula.  The Party does not want to discuss it because any sustained conversation might lead to questions about the responsibility of leaders – not just Mao, but Deng Xiaoping and others – and the structural failings of authoritarianism.

But it also raises disturbing questions about culture and tradition, and their weakness in the face of structural power.  Dikkotter hints at this problem in an interveiw with Evan Osnos:

…Of course, people are no longer starved or beaten to death in the millions, but the same structural impediments to the building of a civil society are still in place, leading to similar problems—systemic corruption, massive squandering on showcase projects of dubious worth, doctored statistics, an environmental catastrophe and a party fearful of its own people, among others.