[PEN-L:7707] Re: Re: Bozofilter time

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

DeLong find the follwing offensive:   I take it that I am the "petit-bourgeois
scribbler/parlor dilettante" referred to here.

Yet he characterizes the follwing as benign:   The fact remains that Mao Zedong
was (along with Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler) the head of one of the very,
very few regimes that managed to kill more than thirty million people in this
century. Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution count as among
the greatest human disasters of this century...

He never response to my serious points except through ridicule, Bozo style.

Professor DeLong, as an economist, please answer my post on LBO reproduced
below:

There would have been no deaths in the 1961-62 famines if not for the US
embargo.

Reports of severe natural disasters in isolated places and of bad weather
conditions in larger areas appeared in the Chinese press in the Spring of 1959,
after the Wuhan Plenum in December 1958 already made policy adjustments based
on the technical criticism of Peng Dehuai on the Peoples Communes initiative.
In March, 1959, the entire Hunan region was under flood and soon after that the

spring harvest in South-west China was lost through drought.  The 1958 grain
production yielded 250 million tons instead the projected 375 million tons, and
1.2 million tons of peanuts instead of the projected 4 million tons.
In 1959, the harvest came to 175 million tons.
In 1960, the situation deteriated further.
Damaged by drought  and other bad weather affected 55% of the cukltivated area.
Some 60% of the agricultural land in the North received no rain at all.  The
yield for 1960 was 142 million tons.
In 1961, the weather situation improved only slightly. In 1963, the Chinese
press called the famine of 1961-62 the most severe since 1879. In 1961, a food
storage program oblidged China to import 6.2
million tons of grain from Canada and Australia. In 1962, import decreased to
5.32 million tons.  Between  1961 to 1965 China imported a total of 30 million
tons of grain at a cost of US$2 billion. (Robert Price, 'International Trade of
Communist China' Vol II, pp 600-1).
More would have imported except US pressure of Canada and Austrailia to limit
sales to China and US interference with shipping prevented China from importing
more.
Canada and Australia were both anxious to provide unlimited credit to China for
grain purchase, but alas, US policy prevailed and millions starved in China.

Henry C.K. Liu