New Book Details the Horrors of the Great Leap Forward
22 September 2010
A disturbing new book by Professor of Modern Chinese History Frank Dikötter has been causing quite a stir. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 is receiving considerable media coverage, both print and broadcast, due to its assertion that Mao's Great Leap Forward resulted in 45 million deaths and horrific suffering, with desperate survivors driven to cannibalism or resorting to eating mud.
Dikötter (PhD History 1990) is on leave from SOAS at the University of Hong Kong, where he is Chair Professor of Humanities. His extensive research included sifting through newly opened Chinese archives, resulting in a book that reviewers are calling the most complete picture to date of the depth and scale of the horrors inflicted on China during the Great Leap Forward, an attempt in the late 1950s and early 1960s to modernise and industrialise the country at incredible speed.
"This is for now the best and last word on Mao's greatest horror. Frank Dikötter has put everyone in the field of Chinese studies in his debt, together with anyone else interested in the real China." – Literary Review
"Frank Dikötter has written a masterly book that should be read not just by anybody interested in modern Chinese history but also by anybody concerned with the way in which a simple idea propagated by an autocratic national leader can lead a country to disaster, in this case to a degree that beggars the imagination." – the Guardian
For further information, contact:
William Friar
Communications Officer
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
+44 (0)20 7898 4135 | w.friar@soas.ac.uk
