like a long list of atrocities committed by Mao's regime against the Chinese people and bears the hallmarks of having been written in furious outrage." Dikötter defended the estimate of 45 million dead, citing other Chinese authors who had spent time in the party's archives, including journalist Yang Jisheng (36 million), economist Chen Yizi (43 million), and historian Yu Xiguang (55 million). Dikötter dismissed comparisons between the Great Chinese Famine and those under Republican China, positing that the latter were wartime disasters, while the former was a human-made disaster during times of peace, commenting: "There is a difference between starving to death and being starved to death." Dikötter challenged the notion that Mao did not know about the famine throughout the country until it was too late as "largely a myth—at most partially true for the autumn of 1958 only." At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated 25 March 1959, Dikötter continues, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, and announced that "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." Thomas P. Bernstein of Columbia University offered his view that Mao's statement in the 25 March 1959, meeting was "an instance of Mao's use of hyperbole, another being his casual acceptance of death of half the population during a nuclear war." According to Bernstein, Mao did not in fact accept mass death. In October 1958, Mao expressed real concern that 40,000 people in Yunnan had starved to death and shortly after the 25 March meeting, he worried about 25.2 million people who were at risk of starvation. From late summer on, Mao forgot about this issue until the Xinyang Incident came to light in October 1960. Anthony Garnaut, a social historian of China, posited that Dikötter's juxtaposition and sampling techniques fall short of academic best practice. According to Garnaut, the allegations Dikötter levels at Yang Jisheng's work ("At times it looks like a hotchpotch which simply strings together large chunks of text, some lifted from the Web, a few from published sources, and others transcribed from archival material.") are either sloppily drawn or disingenuous. Garnaut wrote that Dikötter's interpretation of Mao's quotation ("It is better