f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine [Author] Yang Jisheng [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/08/08 [Review] 
The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was. But for me, the most fascinating part of Tombstone was how the vast Chinese government hierarchy rippled policies and misinformation up and down it - how the local cadres tried to bow to the demands they were hearing from higher up, how the higher ups took the falsified statistics and claims often at face value, and how the highest officials in Beijing seem almost childishly helpless as they stagger between skepticism of reports given them and unthinking acceptance of positive results. Mao particularly comes to mind in his constant swerving between “left deviationism” and “right deviationism” as he tries to get communal kitchens to work and takes at face value the harvest figures and “sputniks” (even as in other incidents, he scoffs at a local official, telling him flat out that such yields were simply impossible), as he is flattered by under-officials; despite his information problems, he astonishingly repeatedly engages in tactics of announcing liberal discussion and then brutally punishing anyone who was foolish enough to do aught but flatter Mao and his policies. Indeed, as Jisheng says, officials were placed into a situation of ‘slaves to those above, tyrants to those below’ (or however his phrase went). With such perverse incentives, it’s no surprise that we run into such perfectly Hayekian examples as ‘deep plowing’ or ‘sputniks’ or ‘close planting’ or the failure of communes to realize any gains of scale (and did realize diseconomies, like the example of how communes needed lumber to fire their large ovens/stoves rather than the little bits of grass individual households could use). What is surprising is how effective the Chinese government was in maintaining control despite these severe systemic problems. How could so many millions starve to death, and no province rise up in rebellion? How could the revolts be so small scale, when the abuses were so bad and the death tolls large fractions of entire local populations? How did emigration not overwhelm any checks set up? It’s easy to agree that Sen is basically right: Mao’s famine could not have happened in any country with remotely democratic institutions like India, because the pressure would simply have overwhelmed any coercion the feeble government could orchestrate. But there’s also a flip side here: Mao remarks with surprise ‘how good’ the Chinese people were, that he could summon millions and disperse them with a wave of his hand, and another high official says similarly that it is only the goodness of the people which prevented the Army from being called in. Jisheng is at pains to show that the Communist propaganda worked and the people were not uniformly cynical about the regime like the Russians at the end of the USSR were: many officials sacrificed their careers or lives for their people, high officials are routinely shocked when they return to their home villages, and throughout we see people who are in all seriousness convinced that all the faults stem from local or midlevel officials and if only they can get word to the Emperor in Beijing all will be made well. This naive faith, which initially strikes one as pathetic & moronic & lacking any critical thinking makes me wonder if it could also be related to how China seems to have vastly outperformed India in the past decades, since it switched to sane economic policies; if the Chinese people’s faith and hard work could lead to such utter disaster when applied to futile policies, does it yield equally unusual results when finally applied correctly?
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