Geography Reference
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moves. He rarely attended meetings but did read the daily transcripts
of the proceedings in the Great Hall of the People. He became increas-
ingly suspicious of the loyalty of Liu Shaoqi and saw Lin Biao as one of
his few true supporters. Mao also admired Chen Boda for defending
the Great Leap Forward:
Confronted two years later with the massive starvation during the Great
Leap Forward, Chen dismissed the millions of deaths. “This is an
unavoidable phenomenon in our forward march,” he declared. No won-
der Mao liked this mean, petty, and ambitious man. In one simple sen-
tence, he absolved Mao of responsibility for one of the greatest
catastrophes the country had ever faced—a catastrophe for which Mao's
policies were directly responsible. (Li 1994, 390)
The Great Leap Forward was, in reality, a great leap backward. An
estimated 20 to 40 million people died of starvation between 1959
and1962becauseofthefoodshortagescreatedbythemovement.
(This number, already appallingly tragic enough, would have been
much higher had not Canada and Australia sold, over Washington's
objections, thousands of tons of wheat to China.) Agricultural produc-
tion in China did not recover its 1957 levels until the early 1970s. The
Great Leap scandalized the Soviets and solidified their determination
to distance themselves from Mao's madcap adventurism. For the
Nationalists on Taiwan, it was just one more instance of Chinese
Communist tyranny. This time, however, instead of fearing and
loathing the Communists, the Nationalists simply laughed at them.
Ever since Great Leap days, the idiom “primitive methods for making
steel” (tufa liangang) has been a part of popular speech in Taiwan as
an idiom for doing things in a comically outmoded and inefficient
manner.
During the famine associated with the Great Leap Forward, “Mao
knew that people were dying by the millions. He did not care”
(Li 1994, 125). He often shocked foreign visitors with his callous atti-
tude toward human life. India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
was appalled when Mao told him not to fear the atom bomb; it is noth-
ing but a “paper tiger” because “China has many people. They cannot
be bombed out of existence.
The deaths of ten or twenty million
people is nothing to be afraid of” (Li 1994, 125). Later he expounded
on his “paper tiger” theory again to Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan.
Mikoyan was so taken aback by Mao's nonchalance about China's
potential loss of tens of millions of lives in a nuclear war that he sought
out Dr. Li and had a heart-to-heart conversation and a stiff drink with
...
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