Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
today will do less harm than in the past, for there
will be no financial sharks to speculate in misery. And the instruments
of distribution and apportionment (roads, trucks, staff) are better organ-
ized today than they used to be.
Conclusion: the Chinese will continue to listen to the teachers of
Marxism at the weekly meeting.
(Trudeau and H´bert 2007, 178-79)
In fact a famine
...
But now we know much more about Great Leap China than we did in
the early 1960s. A Chinese translation of Deux innocents was published
in topic form in China in 2006, and in the introductory Chinese-
language material there was not one word about what is now known
about the famine and starvation.
The next year, in his long introduction to the 2007 republication
in Canada of the English translation of Deux innocents,Alexandre
Trudeau (son of Pierre Trudeau, who died in 2000) acknowledged
that “The Great Leap Forward caused a great famine” and that it
was the Chinese Communist Party's “first great catastrophe,” but he
did not discuss the magnitude of the resultant starvation (Trudeau
and H
´
bert 2007, 26-27). “This charming period piece gives us a
memorable picture of a China that has largely vanished,” writes
Canadian historian and popular commentator Margaret MacMillan
on the jacket of this republication. But if Great-Leap China has indeed
largely disappeared, the Chinese people can only celebrate in jubilation
and relief and hope that no man-made famine ever stalks and starves
them again.
THE LULL BEFORE THE STORM
Mao was an unpopular man in China in the early 1960s, and he
knew it. In 1961 a play called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office became
quite popular and was performed in Beijing before sellout audiences.
The plot of the play was an oblique historical condemnation of Mao's
role in the Great Leap Forward and a celebration of Peng Dehuai's
courage in criticizing him over it. The historical Hai Rui was a loyal
and upright official during the Ming dynasty who bluntly criticized a
Ming emperor's policies and was, as a result, dismissed from office
in disgrace. Anyone who saw the play and had a finger on the pulse
of political developments in China knew that the character Hai Rui
was the historical and literary counterpart to Peng Dehuai, while the
stubborn and obtuse Ming emperor who failed to heed the loyal min-
ister's remonstrations was none other than Mao himself. Jiang Qing,
