Instructions:

This questionnaire requires you to read three articles, watch a video, and answer four corresponding short answer questions. If you find it necessary, feel free to research outside sources. Please try to write succinct answers, and by no means exceed 500 words per answer.

Step 1: Read the three articles entitled "Op-Ed No. 1," "Op-Ed No. 2," and "Op-Ed No. 3"

Step 2: Answer the first three short answer questions (no more than 500 words per answer)

Step 3: Watch the video (linked below)

Step 4: Answer the fourth and final question (no more than 500 words)

Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world

Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror famine that likely took more lives than the Holocaust. But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.

Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao’s Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine….

What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.

The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter’s work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao’s part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to “merely” starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.
While the horrors of the Great Leap Forward are well known to experts on communism and Chinese history, they are rarely remembered by ordinary people outside China, and has had only a modest cultural impact. When Westerners think of the great evils of world history, they rarely think of this one. In contrast to the numerous books, movies, museums, and and remembrance days dedicated to the Holocaust, we make little effort to recall the Great Leap Forward, or to make sure that society has learned its lessons. When we vow “never again,” we don’t often recall that it should apply to this type of atrocity, as well as those motivated by racism or anti-semitism.

The fact that Mao’s atrocities resulted in many more deaths than those of Hitler does not necessarily mean he was the more evil of the two. The greater death toll is partly the result of the fact that Mao ruled over a much larger population for a much longer time. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no wish to diminish its significance. But the vast scale of Chinese communist atrocities puts them in the same general ballpark. At the very least, they deserve far more recognition than they currently receive.

I. Why We So Rarely Look Back on the Great Leap Forward

What accounts for this neglect? One possible answer is that the most of the victims were Chinese peasants – people who are culturally and socially distant from the Western intellectuals and media figures who have the greatest influence over our historical consciousness and popular culture. As a general rule, it is easier to empathize with victims who seem similar to ourselves.

But an even bigger factor in our relative neglect of the Great Leap Forward is that it is part of the general tendency to downplay crimes committed by communist regimes, as opposed to right-wing authoritarians. Unlike in the days of Mao, today very few western intellectuals actually sympathize with communism. But many are reluctant to fully accept what a great evil it was, fearful – perhaps – that other left-wing causes might be tainted by association.

In China, the regime has in recent years admitted that Mao made “mistakes” and allowed some degree of open discussion about this history. But the government is unwilling to admit that the mass murder was intentional and continues to occasionally suppress and persecute dissidents who point out the truth.

This reluctance is an obvious result of the fact that the Communist Party still rules China. Although they have repudiated many of Mao’s specific policies, the regime still derives much of its legitimacy from his legacy. I experienced China’s official ambivalence on this subject first-hand, when I gave a talk about the issue while teaching a course as a visiting professor at a Chinese university in 2014.

II. Why it Matters

For both Chinese and westerners, failure to acknowledge the true nature of the Great Leap Forward carries serious costs. Some survivors of the Great Leap Forward are still alive today. They deserve far greater recognition of the horrible injustice they suffered. They also deserve compensation for their losses, and the infliction of appropriate punishment on the remaining perpetrators.

In addition, our continuing historical blind spot about the crimes of Mao and other communist rulers, leads us to underestimate the horrors of such policies, and makes it more likely that they might be revived in the future. The horrendous history of China, the USSR, and their imitators, should have permanently discredited socialism as completely as fascism was discredited by the Nazis. But it has not – so far – fully done so.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

Venezuela’s tragic situation would not surprise anyone familiar with the history of the Great Leap Forward. We would do well to finally give history’s largest episode of mass murder the attention it deserves.

Are Dictatorships More Successful Than Democracies?

A group of European readers of this column recently wrote to me, arguing that from an economic point of view, dictatorships have been outperforming democracies for many years and that if the trend continues, there will be very little incentive to replace autocrats with the rule of law.

This is an old discussion that resurfaces from time to time. The success enjoyed nowadays by autocracies awash in natural resources has reignited it. A recent article in the online magazine American.com measures economic performance against the degree of political and civil freedom existing in various nations. The conclusion is that in the last 15 years, the economies of nations ruled by despots have grown at an annual rate of 6.8 percent on average—two and a half times faster than politically free countries. Those autocracies that have opened their markets in recent decades but continued to restrict or prevent democracy—China, Russia, Malaysia, and Singapore, for example—have done better than most of the developed or underdeveloped countries that enjoy a considerable measure of political and civil freedom.

It would be silly to deny that a dictatorship can boast sound economic results. Any political system, free or unfree, that removes some obstacles to entrepreneurship, investment and trade, and makes a credible commitment to safeguard property rights to a certain extent will trigger a virtuous economic cycle. Spain’s Francisco Franco and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew discovered that in the 1960s, as did China’s Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, and many others at various times.

But this is not the end of the story. Of the 15 richest countries in the world, 13 are liberal democracies. The other two are Hong Kong, a Chinese territory that enjoys far greater civil liberties than mainland China, and Qatar, where the abundance of oil and natural gas, and the tiny population, translate into a large per capita income average.

What this picture really tells us is that stability and reliability are most important when it comes to economic prosperity over the long term. Spain, a modern success story, has seen its wealth double since 1985 and yet at no point in the last quarter-century did the Spaniards achieve annual growth figures comparable to those of China. Similarly, the U.S. economy has grown by a factor of 13 since 1940, but never experienced “Asian” growth figures.

When the environment in which the economy breathes depends on institutions rather than on the commitment of an autocrat or a party, stability and reliability generate the sort of long-term results that we call “development.” That is probably why Chile’s economic performance after Pinochet compares favorably to the years when the general was in power. Not to mention the fact that dictatorships that enjoy economic success are heavily dependent on technology invented in countries where exercising a creative imagination does not land one in jail.

Another reason dictatorships are outperforming liberal democracies has to do with the fact that many of the latter countries are fully developed. Once a country starts to move forward, spare capacity and unrealized potential tend to allow it to grow faster than developed nations. Furthermore, if we consider that China is a disproportionately big component of the group of unfree nations outperforming liberal democracies, the growth rate gap is not surprising.

In fact, liberal democracies can compete favorably with dictatorships even in the short term. India, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is a liberal democracy. So is Peru, whose economy is experiencing 7 percent annual growth. These are imperfect democracies, for sure, and in the case of Peru there has been little poverty reduction. But the recent success indicates that elections, freedom of the press and freedom of association can coexist with high economic growth.

From a moral point of view, the relative prosperity that a dictatorship can trigger is a double-edged sword—it brings relief to people who are otherwise oppressed but also serves as an argument for the indefinite postponement of political and civil liberty.
Two things are certain, however. First, history indicates that the combination of political, civil and economic freedom is a better guarantee of ever-increasing prosperity than a capitalist dictatorship. Second, there are sufficient examples—Portugal or the Baltic countries—of underdeveloped countries that have generated stable and reliable environments through political freedom to invalidate the notion that a country should be kept in political and civil infancy until it reaches economic maturity.

Starving for Food, Thirsting for Freedom

When a natural disaster strikes, the world receives a “sudden call” that it must act immediately. Most recently, the floods in Pakistan revealed the dynamism of the international community. However, when a government erodes democracy and violates human rights to the point of creating a humanitarian crisis, the world is often silent.

Today in Darfur, the death toll continues to mount. An estimated 400,000 have perished since 2003 from violence, disease, malnutrition, and lack of clean water.

We know that this tragedy is not a product of natural disaster. These deaths result directly from the loathsome policies of Omar al-Bashir’s government in Khartoum, not from an unforeseeable “act of God.”

As this calamity unfolds, it must be acknowledged as the latest in a long line of man-made humanitarian crises. The Sudanese regime now, among other ghastly prescriptions, deprives Darfurians of food — just as over the past century, tens of millions of people starved to death not because of ill luck but because of bad governance.
In what is a deadly irony, most of these starvation victims died under dictatorships that trumpeted the good they could do for their fellow citizens — governments that promised to “serve the people.”

It might seem ironic that a strong and controlling state apparatus could fail to meet its citizens’ most basic need to eat. Yet these governments — whether communist, fascist, or just plain autocratic — shared a similar feature: they rejected individual rights and limited the ability of their citizens to provide for themselves by controlling their mobility, access to resources, property rights, freedom of information and their ability to associate with others in mutual cooperation. While promoting the idea that they could help the masses, authoritarians let the individual members of such masses suffer — or even starve.

Democratic governments and NGOs must remember that humanitarian relief should help the starving, but it must also do more. It must help alter the very conditions that lead to famine in the first place.

To establish the link between autocratic government and devastating famine, one need only look at some of the deadliest mass starvations of the 20th century.

In the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1922, some 9 million people starved to death under Vladimir Lenin’s government; in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, as many as 10 million people starved to death in Stalin’s Holodomor; in Axis-occupied Greece during the 1940’s, 300,000 people starved to death under Nazi policy; in British-administered Bengal in 1943, some 3 million starved to death as a result of colonial rule; as many as 2 million died in Vietnam during World War II as a result of Japanese occupation; in communist China between 1958 and 1962, between 10 and 30 million people died during the famines caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward;” in Cambodia beginning in 1979, 1.5 million starved following the failed policies of the Khmer Rouge; a military dictatorship in Ethiopia presided over a famine in 1984 that took the lives of more than 1 million; and an estimated 2 million starved to death during the 1990s in totalitarian North Korea.

All these regimes were dictatorships regardless of how they came to see themselves — as people’s revolutions, democratic revolutions, or enlightened occupiers. The economic and social development that they claimed to pursue should never have been used as justification for violating basic freedoms and the right to life. And in some instances, such as the Ethiopian famine, the West addressed this with well-meaning “We Are the World” songs and charity initiatives as if it were some kind of natural catastrophe as opposed to an utterly avertable, man-made tragedy that should have marshaled the world to pressure the Ethiopian despot.

The 20th century reveals that the only long-term sustainable deterrent to man-made humanitarian crises is the realization of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Preventative steps must be taken to avert man-made famine and it can start with development aid.

The Swedish government, one of the largest donors to the developing world, has been exemplary in reengineering its approach to foreign assistance. It balances immediate humanitarian concern with long-term solutions to provide better government.

As one Swedish government memo (available to the public) describes it, “The aims of Sweden’s engagement in partner countries are to contribute to development and poverty reduction. The scope and direction of Swedish aid, however, depend on how democracy issues are handled by the partner country.”

Gunilla Carlsson, Sweden’s minister for development cooperation, states that “Sweden must be loyal to certain fundamental values and principles and to the individuals in the country concerned, though not necessarily to the partner country’s government.”

As a human rights campaigner, I am sensitive to the fact that many development professionals want to avoid politics altogether. However, the empirical mountain of dead bodies caused by autocratic political systems shows that this is ineffective. Craig Johnstone, the Deputy United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, made the following observation at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2009:

“Taking care of people and protecting people in totalitarian regimes is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. It’s difficult because if you don’t become an advocate with the governments on behalf of the people then you are a party to the human rights violation yourself.”

Nevertheless, as Johnstone observed:

“If you push so hard that you are kicked out of the country, as happens to us from time to time in some of the countries we’ve talked about, you are forced to abandon the very people whose hope you are charged with maintaining. We have to find a balance.”

When NGOs try to persuade repressive governments to improve their rights records it usually becomes a shame game portrayed as a “violation of sovereignty” by the tyrant in question. Governments are better equipped than NGOs to provide regimes with incentives to respect human rights, as with offshore carrots and sticks, they don’t need to worry as much about getting “kicked out.” However, few states actually use their leverage. A painful reminder of this was the widely publicized visit by U.S. Secretary of State Clinton to China last February. She made clear to her hosts and the press that economic matters and trade — not human rights — were at the forefront of the U.S agenda. Shamefully, this attitude has been replicated in more than a dozen trouble spots by the Obama administration.

In light of government hesitancy, NGO advocates can have an especially important role when it comes to development. They must pressure donor governments to link aid to human rights — especially when such aid is all about political objectives such as in the case of Egypt and more than a dozen African countries. The Swedish government is taking a leadership role that should be emulated by all Western governments and praised by development NGOs.

Amartya Sen teaches that an open society with democracy and good governance is one where famine finds it nearly impossible to take root. In societies like Sudan where such values are not upheld, human health, especially an empty stomach, can’t be sufficiently addressed.

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