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Mao's secret tragedy

In 1984 American demographers uncovered evidence that at least 30 million people had starved to death in China between 1958 and 1962. This is the first book to unravel the story behind the statistics. Based on hundreds of interviews and unpublished documents, it describes how Mao Zedong created a man-made famine throughout China. Mao's Great Leap Forward was the greatest example of Utopian engineering ever attempted. Instead, even in the richest regions, peasants died in their millions while the rest became gaunt skeletons. Through graphic eyewitness accounts, the author describes a catalogue of terror, cannibalism, slavery, torture and imprisonment that took place on a massive scale during the great famine in which 10 million people were arrested and sent to death camps while a further 10 million fled their homes. He goes on to explain how the darkest secret of Mao's rule was kept hidden and why evidence of what happened was disbelieved for so long.

More people died in this catastrophe than in the Second World War or in the concentration camps of Hitler or Stalin. Hungry Ghosts prompts a reassessment of the founder of modern China.

Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine
Published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd 1996