During Mao’s reign, agriculture numbers were padded constantly. They were only padded by a few percent at each level, but as each reporting hierarchy added its own padding, eventually you got massive overestimates.
This is why 50 million people died in the famine under Map, more than the Holocaust and “gulag archipelago” combined. I don’t think people
realize just how bad it was, it was a time of absolutely insanity and deprivation.
40% of all building structures were torn down between between 1958-1963 if that gives you any idea of how detached from reality society under Mao was.
Also, China is lying about their pollution numbers, and just simply moving the factories farther west. Western China is one of the most rural parts of the world and its very hard to measure / prove who is using what / polluting what. No matter what the US does regarding global warming, it’s very likely any gains will be “eaten” by a growing, data faking, Chinese government.
The entire movement was based at least in part on the lies and padding of Lysenkoism, showing how padding and lies and tragedy begets more of the same.
I don't feel that it's actually needed in this case but here you go. It's like asking for a citation confirming that France was key for the American colonies winning their independence from GB
Yang Jisheng (30 October 2012). Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 240. ISBN 978-0-374-27793-2.
Kimberley Ens Manning; Felix Wemheuer; Gao Hua (1 January 2011). "Food Augmentation Methods and Food Substitutes during the Great Famine". Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine. UBC Press. p. 177. ISBN 978-0-7748-5955-4.
Ralph Thaxton (5 May 2008). Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village. Cambridge University Press. p. 128. ISBN 978-0-521-72230-8.
Jump up ^ Yang Jisheng (30 October 2012). Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 126. ISBN 978-0-374-27793-2.
Dali L. Yang (1996). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-0-8047-3470-7.
You shouldn't be downvoted. Those are harsh accusations, they deserve sources. Because it fits what most of us expect the Chinese government could be doing makes it even more important to have sources, confirmation bias is the enemy of rational thinking.
Asking for references is one thing, but this “citation needed<EOF>” trope is growing old. It’s dismissive , and as lazy as it accuses the poster of being. It’s flippant and disrespectful.
Let me put it this way: if someone then does provide citations, it suddenly sounds harsh, and could do with an apology. But in that case, why not be civil to begin with? Like you were, for example.
Or, if you’re actually interested in the pursuit of truth, why not try and truly contribute by spending 30 seconds looking for references yourself, and adding those??
You had a comment here complaining about 'carpet bombing with [citation needed]' and you deleted it, but I agree with you on this.
Wikipedia posted a great article called "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat." [1] It describes the various ways special interest groups and fringe fanatics will fight to make their views recognized. One of the ways they called "gaming the system" where they frivolously request [citation needed].
The fact that China underwent a terrible famine shortly following the Communist Revolution is pretty common knowledge. Other than that, he wasn't clear what he was requesting citations for.
I occasionally post this way when I realize part way through the original article that I have wasted my time reading an unsubstantiated diatribe that starts out sort of stealth-ed as a reasonably objective article (I don’t post this way about comments). My intention in such a case is to warn other readers who are not interested in that sort of thing not to waste their time. The last time I did this, I said:
"Exploitation and inequality is innate to the industrial-capitalist system; a fact well-known at least since the time of Marx." Citation needed?
The quote was taken from an article on environment problems in India. My problem with this is only that they said it without showing their work. If Marx said this, cite him. If it’s “well-know” prove it. Since they don’t bother to support this anywhere near the text of the claim, I don’t trust them anymore. I’m out, even if I was inclined to agree with them.
I agree in general that we shouldn’t be rude or dismissive, but I think we also need to retain the ability to call out unsubstantiated claims that purport to be common knowledge, or are poorly attributed, and to protect our time.
In the rare case that I regret reading something pretty long halfway through, I sometimes quickly post this way, get down voted, and hope I saved somebody some time. Anyone who wouldn’t read the article knowing that statement was in it can then choose not too. I guess if this is more annoying than reading a bad article, I could stop doing it or at least rephrase.
At this stage in my life I'm cynical to the point that I'd want a citation that a given government number from any regime in any time period was NOT manipulated for propaganda purposes.
Hacker News isn't like other places though. There doesn't seem to be an official rule about jokes [1] but they generally get voted down.
In a world filled with fake news, a tradition of posting at least one link might be a good thing? (Unless it's personal experience, which is useful in itself.)
Yes it is. Don't kid yourself thinking that we are a class above Reddit or something.
This burden of research that some impose upon others is bullshit. If one is intellectually omnivorous they do not keep links of all their findings handy, it is simply not possible. This incessant wailing for citations is an activity fit for gutter-snipes, not productive software engineers.
Why shouldn't we try to do better than most parts of Reddit? I don't mean Ask Historians [1] level discussion, but posting a relevant link is not hard.
Nor is doing a quick search on Google to see if you can find citations yourself. The fact that this took me about two minutes to find should frankly make you feel ashamed at your insistence that everyone provide citations for everything you don't know anything about: this is you being intellectually lazy :/.
> But rather than admit this truth and risk being accused of failure or, worse still, denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, local party bosses fiddled the figures they sent to the central authorities.
> They curried favour by vying with each other to increase their targets of food production to ludicrous and entirely fictional levels. Then they lied that they had not only met but exceeded them.
> On paper, China was bursting with food of every type. The people’s bellies were full. Poverty and want had been eradicated.
> In reality, as the notional, non-existent surpluses were commandeered to feed the industrial workers in the cities, vast areas of China were left with a fraction of the sustenance needed to survive.
> In one province, the grain harvest shrank from 82,000 tonnes in 1957 to 18,000 tonnes three years later. Yet the local party boss still reported a bumper harvest of 130,000 tonnes.
"Madman who starved 60million to death: Devastating book reveals how Mao's megalomania turned China into a madhouse"
Clearly it would be better to cite the book (which I can't easily, as not all knowledge can be hyperlinked), or a higher-quality secondary source, but this is definitely sufficient enough to put the onus firmly on you to cite why you are so resistant to this thought process.
Some tips, if the issue is that you don't know how to do research: You might try searching for the title of the book, which might find you some more reviews, and you might find some which disagree and essentially write a "rebuttal". You might also can try to search for those specific numbers in the final paragraph I quoted from this article.
Thanks for the link! However, your accusations that I don't know how to do research are unfounded.
I'm also not at all ashamed to keep doing something I usually do and recommend it to others. As you say, it usually takes only a couple minutes to do, so why not?
If it's a subject I know (and I'm therefore commenting about) then I generally find it pretty easy to find a reliable link.
I kind of see it the other way, IMO making unsourced comments (especially about complex and widely ignored subjects such as chinese history and invoking the Holocaust) should be frowned upon. It's too easy to cherry-pick facts to fit a narrative in these conditions. Not saying that's what the parent was doing, but he could've been doing it and I definitely lack the necessary knowledge to form my opinion. As such I kind of end up dismissing his comment because I simply can't reasonably trust it at face value.
I don't know about you but I'm not exactly super knowledgeable about Maoism, the "Great Leap Forward" and the state of chinese agriculture in the 1950's. Maybe I'm just being ignorant but given that this is a computer hacking forum I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect that most readers will be better versed in the subject than I am.
So yeah, Citations Needed as far as I'm concerned.
Citations are great, but in this case it does sound like a formality of posting a Wikipedia link. This is not an obscure topic, and none of us need to be directed to the appropriate resources. A request to add such a link wouldn’t be out of line, but a curt two-word dismissal certainly is. Worse, it makes more reasonable and understandable requests seem churlish when they arise.
It's in the section on Famine [1]. Main article [2].
> Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. A 1959 drought and flooding from the Yellow River in the same year also contributed to famine.
> During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.
During Mao’s reign, agriculture numbers were padded constantly. They were only padded by a few percent at each level, but as each reporting hierarchy added its own padding, eventually you got massive overestimates.
This is why 50 million people died in the famine under Map, more than the Holocaust and “gulag archipelago” combined. I don’t think people realize just how bad it was, it was a time of absolutely insanity and deprivation.
40% of all building structures were torn down between between 1958-1963 if that gives you any idea of how detached from reality society under Mao was.
Also, China is lying about their pollution numbers, and just simply moving the factories farther west. Western China is one of the most rural parts of the world and its very hard to measure / prove who is using what / polluting what. No matter what the US does regarding global warming, it’s very likely any gains will be “eaten” by a growing, data faking, Chinese government.