Great Chinese Famine - Further Perspectives

Further Perspectives

The discussion includes other scholars who caution against taking a one-sided approach or see the issue in a wider context.

Some argue the famines happened in Republican Era are causing the death rate as about five millions/year, as the same as in the Great Famine. The famine in northern China in 1920-1921, for example, caused 10 million deaths.

Former Chinese dissident and political prisoner, Minqi Li, a Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, has produced data showing that even the peak death rates during the Great Leap Forward were in fact quite typical in pre-Communist China. Li (2008) argues that based on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949.

Nobel Prize winner economist Amartya Sen puts this famine in a global context. His book Development as Freedom argues that lack of democracy is the major culprit: "Indeed, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country—no matter how poor." He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and that has an independent press. During that terrible calamity the government faced no pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, and none from opposition parties, which were absent." This claim has been disputed by other economists, including Prabhat Patnaik who has pointed out long-lasting starvation in India in spite of its democratic government.