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.
> 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.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-starv...
"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.