How many starved?
Four historians. Fifteen million to forty-five million dead. Provincial archives show where the grain went.
One campaign. A fiftyfold gap.
Each row is one historian’s figure for deaths in the great famine. 4 give a number. A bar is a range, a tick is a floor, a square is a single figure.
Every name opens the source: who they are, what the figure rests on, their affiliations and the published criticism of their work. Judge them yourself.
The weather was normal. The mortality followed the politics.
Every serious demographic reconstruction starts at fifteen million excess deaths, and the archival histories built from county gazetteers and provincial party files reach thirty to forty-five million. In Sichuan and Anhui, where provincial first secretaries enforced procurement with the greatest fanaticism, more than one in seven rural residents perished while state granaries held millions of tons in reserve.
We show the full scholarly range alongside the provincial archival reconstructions. Hunger on this scale was not an act of nature. It was the arithmetic of compulsory requisition.
Sources 来源
Every row is in the database. A link is the proof.- 1Frank DikotterThe Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury, 2013. Second of the People's Trilogyat least 45 million premature deathsOpen ↗
- 2Felix WemheuerA Social History of Maoist China, Cambridge University Press, 2019; the review essay on Dikotter, The China Quarterly 219, 201415 to 30 million excess deathsOpen ↗
- 3Maurice MeisnerMao's China and After, third edition 199915 to 30 million deadOpen ↗
- 4Zhou Xun 周逊Violence in Revolutionary China: 1949-1963, in The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 4 (2020)30 to 45 million premature deathsOpen ↗