Frank Dikotter on Mao's Great Famine

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2018

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Historian Frank Dikotter of the University of Hong Kong and author of Mao's Great Famine talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Dikotter chronicles the strategies Mao and Chinese leadership implemented to increase grain and steel production in the late 1950s leading to a collapse in agricultural output and the deaths of millions by starvation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:12.6	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:17.6	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:20.5	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:24.8	back to 2006.
0:27.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:29.6	We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.8	Today is July 24th, 2018, and my guest is historian Frank DeCutter, chair professor of humanities
0:40.5	at the University of Hong Kong, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:45.6	He's written numerous books on China, including Mao's Great Famine, the history of China's
0:49.6	most devastating catastrophe.
0:52.0	It won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.
0:56.0	It is the subject of today's episode, Frank Welk of DeCutter.
0:59.6	Thank you.
1:00.6	This is a very depressing book about an extraordinarily tragic topic, but it's a topic that I think
1:05.8	everyone should know something about, and that few do, which is the famine in China from
1:11.0	1958 roughly to 1962, it resulted incredibly in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
1:19.5	So let's begin with some background.
1:20.9	What were the origins of what is called the Great Leap Forward, what was Mao trying to
1:24.3	do and how did that lead toward the famine?
1:26.8	Well, in a nutshell, what is the Great Leap Forward?
	...

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