Communists: worse than Nazis.
\n\n\n\n" }THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.
\nThe toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.
\nAfter 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book \u00e2\u0080\u009cTombstone\u00e2\u0080\u009d could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and expression has tightened during the Communist Party\u00e2\u0080\u0099s 18th National Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.
\nThose who deny that the famine happened, as an executive at the state-run newspaper People\u00e2\u0080\u0099s Daily recently did, enjoy freedom of speech, despite their fatuous claims about \u00e2\u0080\u009cthree years of natural disasters.\u00e2\u0080\u009d But no plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. One might wonder why the Chinese government won\u00e2\u0080\u0099t allow the true tale to be told, since Mao\u00e2\u0080\u0099s economic policies were abandoned in the late 1970s in favor of liberalization, and food has been plentiful ever since.
\nThe reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has ever occurred in a democracy.
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