to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill") not only ignores the substantial commentary on the conference by other scholars and several of its key participants but defies the very plain wording of the archival document in his possession on which he hangs his case. According to Garnaut, people whom Mao was saying turn out to be a metaphor of large-scale industrial projects, and Mao's saying seems not mean pushing to extract more resources out of the countryside to feed industry. Mao's quotation "let half the people die" is also quoted in the introduction of the book by Zhou Xun, who is Dikötter's collaborator. Zhou's book provides extracts of the documents Dikötter refers to. According to Zhou, Dikötter's book "makes a key contribution to our understanding of how, why, and what happened during the Great Famine in China." Dikötter responded to Garnaut, saying that "if [Granaut] is right and it was no more than a metaphor, just what kind of metaphor was this? I have never heard of it before, unlike, say, 'kill a chicken to scare the monkey'. And what kind of metaphor would 'let half the people die' be, right in the middle of mass starvation? The conference was convened to address a collapsing economy and the mounting famine. If it is merely a form of hyperbole, then it is, to say the least, a strange one." There is a discussion about interpretation of Mao's quotation in the H-PRC section of the H-Net. Dikötter posited that it is not a metaphor, commenting that "so much sinological energy spent on one sentence, it leaves one slightly bemused." Warren Sun, Chinese Studies specialist at Monash University, criticised Dikötter for having deliberately distorted documentary evidence about Mao's saying, positing that Dikötter's work is "fraud". Shen Zhihua, historian of Sino-Soviet relations, also pointed out that Dikotter's quotation was out of context. Mao's biographer Philip Short wrote that "Dikötter's errors are strangely consistent. They all serve to strengthen his case against Mao and his fellow leaders." About Dikötter's errors and misleading comments, Short said the main problem of Dikötter's book is that it does not offer credible explanation of why Mao and his colleagues acted as they did. Noticing that other parts of Mao's remark ("If we want to fulfil the plan, then we need greatly to reduce the number of projects. We need to