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от на 06/10/2019

CAMPAIGN TO 'ELIMINATE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES' 1953 * Mao declared that "95 percent of the people are good," leading the party to target 5 percent in many organizations as "bad elements" who should be purged and repressed. At least hundreds of thousands died. THE GREAT FAMINE 1959-61 * The greatest loss of life came in the Great Famine, a result of Mao's misguided industrialization effort called the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese government over the years has given varying estimates of deaths and at one time blamed them on the weather. For years many scholars said 20 million died. But Judith Bannister, a demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau, has put the toll at about 30 million. Using material contributed by China's State Statistical Bureau as well as China's State Family Planning Commission, she and other demographers employed complicated formulas involving birth rates before and after the period to reach their conclusion. An even higher figure -- 43 million -- is now gaining some academic currency. Chen Yizi, a former Chinese official now at Princeton University's Center for Modern China, spent years researching the subject in China. He conducted a county-by-county review of deaths in five provinces and, by extrapolation, arrived at 43 million. A research center in Shanghai recently reached the same figure for the number of famine deaths. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION 1966-76 * Mao's movement to destroy his adversaries, counter "bureaucratism" and create a new society. Assessing the figure presents problems; in many places, fighting among Red Guard factions erupted and government and police authority collapsed. Many were tortured or driven to suicide. There have been wild fluctuations on death estimates -- from hundreds of thousands to 20 million. Relying on official Chinese sources, some Western scholars have long accepted that half a million people died in the Cultural Revolution. Hu Yaobang, former communist Party chief, has been quoted as saying that 1 million people died during the period, but the figure apparently excludes the fighting between Red Guard and army factions. A number of scholars, including Harry Harding of the Brookings Institution, believe about 1 million died. But as new evidence emerges, an even higher toll is likely. Two of the Cultural Revolution campaigns least known in the West and least studied by scholars -- the "purification of class ranks" (1968-70) and the campaign against "May 16 elements"(1968-69) -- are now revealed to be among the bloodiest.