buckley's book, "freedom at risk," visit his publisher's web site, encounterbooks.com and search his name or the book's title. .. he speaks with the age of society in new york city. this is about one hour and 20 minutes.

>> thank you. it is a great honor to in my time with an important and difficult look like this one, so we have asked professor dikötter to begin our discussion tonight by giving us a short reading. i think anybody writing about a subject as huge and difficult to comprehend. inevitably he found a way to make it somehow intelligible and you break it down and write about it. and professor dikötter had taken a kind of mosaic approach. he uses the rich and often ghastly detail that he has painstakingly unearthed and archives across china. to come at the disaster on a number of different scales from the world of internal leadership politics in beijing and cold war diplomacy and trade that is on

the large-scale to the faith of individual villages and farmers on the small-scale. and what emerges is a picture of a country convulsed not just by hunger, in fact the word famine is in some ways inadequate to describe what happened, but by monumental dislocations of lives, of ideas, of nature, of morals, of reason and about just held society together. toward the end of the book, he describes several places that he calls sites of horror, where the toll of these convulsions was especially ertl and where the sources give us an especially vivid picture of that brutality and he is going to begin with one of these. >> thank you very much for coming tonight. i discovered a lot during these

four years of research on the -- collecting extraordinary material from public security bureau reports and investigation into mass murder, confessions by people presided over the deaths of literally millions as well as sometimes letters written by ordinary people. all along, i knew quite well that there were other great mass murderers in the 20th century, joseph stalin comes to mind. adolf hitler as well and of course there is pol pot. pol pot killed 1.7 million to 2.4 million people in a country of about 8 million and that constitute the great mass murder of the 20th century.

it is sometimes said that nothing similar ever happened in china because of such a large country. i'm i am going to read you about one place of no more than two, 2.5 pages on this place. you will find out that the numbers correspond to cambodia. cambodia, 8 million people, 1.7 to 2.4 million people died in that country. let me read you about who yacht. i'm going to have to look over my glasses. nothing was as bad as -- run by one of mao's most devoted followers. like other provinces it was divided into regions having over a dozen. one of these regions was foo yong, fu yong had a population of 8 million in 1958.

three years later, more than 2.4 million people had died. one of the reasons for the high death rate was the landscape itself, flat and generally barren as there were a few places to hide. many of those who want to flee the area follow the river into a neighboring country where the famine was worse. the white river itself was a web of death. in 1957 and became the focus of a huge irrigation project which commanded up to 80% of the labor force. every hackers a large water weight. fields with the as smooth as a mirror, plowing making the soil is powerful. foo yong would catch up with the future in a mere year or two. slogans such as in day time we

fight the sun come at night we battle the stars were behind the ceaseless exploitation of the work along the river. many succumbed to disease, exhaustion and death. to prevent workers from returning home over the chinese new year, the militia fueled their homes with the inexorable advance of and channels. everything in the way was flattened. trees, graves and even large bridges were torn down forcing farmers to walk several kilometers each day to a camp. entire villages were compelled to relocate overnight. hundred simply vanished from the map. other giant schemes took away the best workers in the fields before the sewing or beeping was even completed. so abundant was the crop that grain should be turned into alcohol. they have built they built more than 3200 factories in

january 1959. less than half of the wood and many tons of grain went to waste. just as ruinous reference to mechanized agriculture. cranky iron wheels were added to some 10,000 cars which were so heavy that olds could no longer pull them. to compound the problem the old cars were banned from the roads and farmers seem to use them and announced as rightists. the grain outfit plunged but seles cobblers doubled it on paper. requisitions follow. carried out with routine violence, they sometimes extracted close to 90% of the actual crop. to compensate for the shortage of grain, it burst into local households in carried away cables, chairs and beds. farmers were even forced to turn in a certain amount of cotton clothes, up to several a family. failure to fulfill the quota

left a band for the canteen. he had to hand over the cotton jackets of its 15 -- 17-year-old 17-year-old -- in the freezing cold, they had to bury themselves underneath some straw to keep warm. by 1960, there was so little left to collect that in one community the biggest haul consisted of 100 coffins. torture was rampant. iron wire was used to tear the ears of bad elements while women were stripped and suspended i their hair. the use of violence was summarized as follows by the party bosses, and here i quote. people died in tragic circumstances being beaten and hanged to death, deprived of food or buried alive. some were severely tortured and beaten, having their ears chopped off, their noses dugout, their mouths torn off and so on, which often caused death.

we discovered how extremely serious all of this was once we started investigating, i'm quote murder was common. a small village, nine out of 19 had killed at least one villager during the famine. the team leader defied people. in some cases villages were deliberately entrapped. in late 1959 at the height of the famine, one of the food processing factories along to the local grain bureau lets bean cakes in the courtyard with the gates wide open. as starving farmers try to pilfer the food, the case were suddenly locked behind them. i quote, some of those who were forced into a grain fat that was tight at the end. then they were beaten with iron bars. a were covered in blood. others had their faces carved by knives and oil rubbed into the

ones. help for the famished was withheld. 15 tons of grain sent to support those in need in one county alone were confiscated, hastening the death of thousands people also died when a the local authorities tried to hide the famine from inspection teams the militia for instance were instructed to seal off the villages and anyone -- onto the streets. in one commune targeted for a visit by the ministry of interior in 1960, the county had scrambled to round up and hide more than 3000 villagers. locked up without any medical support, several hundred died in a matter of days. a local carter had a quick look at chiang-ching-kuo.

he won't live, bury him quickly he ordered as the inspection team was on the way. he was still breathing while being buried. that's it. now i will sit down and continue >> so, before we start a discussion i just want to mention that this book will be on sale at the end of this event and professor dikötter will be signing copies of that one may finish. so, much of the book is about

how the country got to replace foo yong, and to get there, you begin in beijing in 1953 with mao zedong's reaction to the death of stalin. you don't call the book china's great famine. you call it mao's great famine and i wonder if he could talk a little bit about why do you begin, why do you began the story there and what was happening in chinese leadership? >> there are reasons why the great leap forward starts by the end of 1957 and one of the greatest reasons is the death of a man called joseph stalin. the death of stalin is mouse liberation. for a very long time, mao was being very much indebted to stalin, and he sees himself as their real leader of the

socialist camp. think about it. stalin never let the bolshevik revolution. lenin did. mal sees himself as somebody who brought humanity to what he would describe as liberation. mao was the one unlike stalin who fought the americans to stand still in the korean war. after mao's that's a rather rotund and awkward man called liu shaoqi succeeds him and mao has very little respect for that particular person. now when he goes to moscow in 1957 and liu shaoqi openly proclaims that the soviet union has -- is going to overtake the united united states in the production of butter, milk and other dairy products, mao jumps in and says we will overtake england. you may overtake the united states but we will overtake england, still seen as a major power within 50 years.

he states his own prestige on the great leap forward from socialism into communism. but most of all of course, what mao really wishes to demonstrate is not the ability of the country to overtake england but to actually outdo the soviets to show that mao or stalin in the past have discovered that bridge to communism. what is that bridge? the people's communes. mao sees the real wealth of the country in hundreds of millions of farmers in the countryside. if only they could be harnessed. everything could be collectivized. if every man could work like a soldier in a continuous revolution tackling one after the other, surely the country could be catapulted past the soviet union and all the others. it is mao's great famine because he is the one who initiates this and he is the one who very much make sure that number two,

three, for four everybody, line, will actually support that. the first thing he does is purge the party as tens of thousands of carpers were unwilling to actually go along with the great leap forward and are replaced by unscrupulous men willing to benefit from the radical wins the glow from beijing. something else he does is takes to task not so much number two, but zhou enlai. in public meetings in front of other leaders, he demeans him, humiliate him, makes him right to self confession two or three times until zhou enlai himself finally falls in line and declares his full support for the great leap forward and his dying admiration for mao

tse-tung. mao tse tung is the one who pressures him. mao tse tung is also the one who allows them to stop by stepping back in 1961. >> maybe it would be helpful to walk us through the first few months or years of how mao's actions ramified on a local level. how did it begin? >> it begins in moscow as khrushchev somehow wishes to enter into competitive, frighteningly competitive knitting with the united states. this is where mal very much starts the great leap forward past the soviet union and possibly even england. but the key point is really the winter of 57 and 58. often we think about the people's communes as the key moment that it is precisely during the winter of 57 and 58 that mao sees an opportunity to

use these hundreds of millions of farmers during the slack season to transform the face of china by having them work day in and day out on massive irrigation projects. one of the myths that one can find enough literature about this period is that in 1958, there was this great -- for the great leap forward and death and hunger only starts to creep in at the advent of 1958, possibly early 59. but people die as early as february 1958. there is a county province where tens of thousands of people die of overwork, exhaustion, disease and famine. by the summer of 1958, in the province. why? because villages are being herded into this and the land is

being taken away. their livelihood, their cattle, everything is collectivized and nothing remains to force these people to go to these irrigation projects and work. these irrigation projects often are are away from the village. they are not being given enough food and they have to sleep outside. mao's dr. actually writes about this himself. is a privilege person he has to spend two weeks working on an irrigation project just outside of peking. his back is broken after two weeks. this is a privileged carver carver then goes back to have a nice bath in beijing. these farmers have to work for weeks on and. they are exhausted, given insufficient food, literally driven to overwork themselves to death. so the horror starts very much in the beginning. that is one of the key dates.

another key date is a year later in the summer of 1959 when a number of key influential people, including general zhou enlai, speak out against the great leap forward creating a backlash, meaning that mao pushes even harder with yet another purge of carpers who are unwilling to go along with the vision of the leap. by the end of it, by 1960, by the time we reached october 1960, so many tens of millions of people had died unnecessarily, often and violent conditions as the two pages on food young show. the transportation system has creeps to a hault.

farmers eat the plaster from the wall and sometimes even mud in order to somehow get by. october 1960, the leadership is for the first time willing to look at the catastrophe in its full scope and very gradually through 1961 mao allows some of his key players to reintroduce a measure of the free market, the measure of liberty and the measure of movement. by 1962, the great leap forward is pretty much abandoned. >> to get back to the earlier period, one of the things that surprised me in reading this was that the famine actually begins with this bizarre period of

feasting, of politically mandated gluttony when the state is claiming that there is such intense surpluses that people should be consuming them in larger and larger quantities. why? why did that happen? >> on the ground, on the ground, local carters, party officials are trying to outdo each other in fulfilling and overfill filling the latest command that comes from above, producing quota that are out of our relationship with which is being produced on the ground. now, if there is so much grain, as mao and others seem to believe by the summer of 1958, and the big question is what are we going to do with it? it seems like in the absurd

question but khrushchev visits peking in the summer of 1958 and is taken to the swimming pool via mao tse tung for a little chitchat. of course he is very much unable to swim and sits by the sight of the pool watching mao tse tung go up and down. he is told that china's real problem is that there is so much drain, what should we do with it? and khrushchev doesn't say anything. he says very quietly, how can you produce so much grain? we all work or a hard and there is never quite enough to feed everybody. how can you possibly claim there is too much grain? but that is the official slogan. there is too much grain. so why not feed? this is very much mao's command. on the other hand of course the villages by the summer of 1958 have already seen so much of their labor, of their homes, of their tools confiscated by the

party that they see here an opportunity to really get back what is in fact their own. after all it is public canteen. these public dormitories, these public kindergartens have been set up with their tools, with their furniture, with their breaks. so what can they do? they eat, they feast. they try to eat as much as they can to get something back in the full knowledge that all of that one day will be gone. >> then there is a sort of parallel story that you tell of the state's own appetites at this moment for industrial machinery and for various other things that china is purchasing internationally and paying for ingrained. i wonder if you could talk a

little bit about china's trade at this moment and how that affected the famine. >> in 1958, china buys so much equipment, entire factories from the soviet union, that when the bills come in by december, while they have to be paid, but i december 1958, that leadership starts realizing that all these targets, all these quotas, all these digits on paper don't quite correspond to the reality. the grain output is much lower. zhou enlai, the one that was so reluctant to go along with it, at this point in time has become absolutely crucial in actually fulfilling, implementing that vision that mao has about the leap forward into communism. he is the first one to say that he would rather not eat than not honor foreign contracts.

deng xiaoping jumps in and says look, if every man and every woman could eat less, less meat, less grain, then we could repay our debt to the soviet union in no time. mao tse tse-tung himself envisages a country from which meat would be banned. export all of it. so there is a myth that somehow by the end of 1958, the leadership prudently steps back, but this is quite -- it is not at all but you see in the very detailed minutes of top leadership meetings. in march -- on march 25, a few months later, 25 of mao -- mao go so far as to say in a top-secret meeting that let half the people die and provide the other half can eat their fill.

he makes it very clear that great procurement should not so much decrease but increase up to 30% of all the grain in order to meet these foreign commitments and repay the debt to the soviet union. he makes available extra tracks to make sure that the grain procurements can actually be carried out. speedways that the priority? >> is more important for zhou enlai and other of the top leaders to save face than it is to save lives. there is a slogan with which mao comes up on that meeting on the 25th of march, 1959. he who strikes first prevails. when i read that slogan and these minutes, which i found in a very remote provincial archive, in jiangsu province i didn't quite understand what he meant i that until later on when

i came across another document that was dated a few months later, june 59, and here we have a man who is very much responsible for agriculture explain that saying to some of his subordinates. he explains that he who strikes first means that the party should get to the grain before the farmers actually get their hands on it. and he explains that this particular saying should not be used because it might lead to misunderstanding. he is also the man who very much takes to task those who somehow art timid about beating the grain out of farmers. this is this is a beautiful thing about these archives. you get direct quotations. what does he say? he says if you are afraid of waging war on the farmers then there is something ideologically

wrong with you. what i'm trying to say is that come even before the summer of 1959, when most historians see a backlash against those who speak out, even in all of the summer of 1959, mao zedong, zhou enlai and others are very much aware of the fact that they are taking far too much grain from the countryside and that it has to be done by force, by conversion. >> so on the one hand you paint a picture of a party leadership that is all powerful, that can compel people to behave in these unthinkable ways toward one another that rip whole communities apart? on the other hand you have some intriguing details about the extent to which the chaos and the famine spreads even into the leadership compound in beijing

and mao's doctor notes there are people that are malnourished even within the walls where mao lives. you describe the building of the great hall of the people in the fact that it was difficult to get workers to show up to the job, that they were engaging the same kinds of acts of sabotage and shoddy workmanship that were happening in other parts of the country. how do you reconcile the sort of all-powerful hand at the local level and then the inability to control it so close to the center? >> mao, chairman mao does his very best to set the tone at the top and in these public rituals of humiliation, of leaders who did not quite follow the command that comes from him, he sets the

tone and make sure that the right people get into the right key positions. these people and turned to very much to adopt the very same strategy. this is not a party where you applied for membership. this is a party where you get purged on the ground. local carvers are under great pressure to fulfill and over an overflow phil constantly changing targets, quotas and ditches. in other words they are being replaced by people who are quite willing to go along with whatever command comes from peking because there are benefits. on the other hand, ordinary people outside of the party know very well that this is a dysfunctional system and in order to survive, they must learn in order to get through the violence, the violence of collectivization and the violence of food procurement and the misery of starvation in

order to somehow get by and try to survive. all people have to rely on their wits. they have to steal, pilfer, forage, smuggle, charm or otherwise out with the state and its representatives. and that it isn't just ordinary people who bends every rule in the book. everybody all the way to the top are trying to somehow manipulate the system in order to get by and further one's own career. on the one hand, there is an image, an image on paper of a command economy in which everything is determined at the top by a man who is the master planner which shows or commands how much of each particular goods should be produced by whom, when and where. yet the reality is everyone somehow is trying to bend the rules. that kind of environment in

which the rule of survival pretty much dominates. the ability to bend these rules for ordinary people is very much linked to the ability of people to survive. 's bea i thought it was interesting that you take issue with some recent scholarship on the great leap that looks at these acts of trickery, of grain to meet a quota or welding shoddy railroad ties. there is a scholar who considered that the kind of her role like action of righteous resistance of the people against the state. you argue the picture is not so black and white, that since food was finite, one individuals gain

is another's loss. you put sand in the grain, the guy down the line at the factory for me was going to have to eat that and it is really a much murkier moral universe. >> indeed. you see, about one third of the book is about ways of surviving and i read a few pages about the horror where death was dominant, but throughout the country of course many more people manage to survive. they tried to somehow survived by not working. farmers come as soon as the party official walks through his fields, drop their tools, sit down and wait for the day to be over in order to somehow preserve some energy. they are going to the fields and taking spikes of grain before it is even reaching maturity. they would eat the grain raw,

green. shippers will somehow use bamboo tubes that go straight into drain, out the grain and replace it with that. at every level people are trying to somehow get bye bye stealing a potato, but will bring something, by walking away with a handful of grain that doesn't belong to them. what has to come in this kind of universe, the only way to survive is to bend the rules to some extent but also the strategy of survival. in some cases for instance the local leadership might actually side with the villagers, very powerful forms of resistance that develop. the village will keep two books. there is a book to account for the grain but it is for the eyes of the grain inspector. there's another book for the eyes of the villagers. a lot of the grain is actually hidden behind walls of the floorboards.

when the state goes out, as i described earlier on in 1959, i actually tried to get to the grain. he who strikes prevails as the saying by mao but that is actually what happens. people do try to hide as much as they can. sometimes as individuals, sometimes among families, sometimes entire villagers -- villages. these forms of existence are extremely interesting and the full scope of human behavior in times of agony, pain on a matter of scale. but it is not quite right i believe to describe these actions as heroic acts of resistance against the state. it reminds me of the words of someone who managed to survive through auschwitz and then went on to write some very profound books about what it means to actually survive through horror.

he was very much the first one to say that he was not a hero for having survived. if anything the hero's were dead because he himself had to undergo all sorts of routine degradation and make all sorts of moral compromises in order to somehow get by. for instance, by not sharing a handful of food that he might have discovered. and very much the same picture here. to steal from the state seems heroic but to replace grain in a sack by sand seemed like a good strategy. but somehow, somebody down the line in that public and teen will be chewing on grid and will probably die as a consequence. bit by bit, starvation becomes expansive. people turn against each other. they start stealing from neighbors. families turn on themselves.

a man who lives just outside of peking systematically takes the grain from his 8-year-old daughter and at some point he takes a cotton jacket and trousers. this girl dies of pain and cold in the middle of the winter. so what he said to describe what had happened in auschwitz during the second world war, describing describing -- and i would see china from 1958 to 1962 as one giant gravestone. >> i want to have a chance to get to your questions but i for we do that, i thought we could talk of little bit about how you did your research, how you uncovered stories like that. i mean, the whole use of archives, national, provincial,

local for the period after 1949 is something that is very new in the field of history. particularly for an event that is as politically sensitive as this one. how did you approach these archives? how were you received by the archivist? were there other people in archives? what was it like during this research? >> well, i'm off to hong kong some four or five years ago and one can do wonderful things from hong kong. some of the things i started doing was to take a little train. you can take a taxi from the station, clear customs. of course if you buy your coffee at starbucks. [laughter] you get on the train and two hours later you are inclined joe and by about 9:40, 9:50 i would

d&d provincial archives trying to see what was there. and of course i spent some 20 years working with archives in china, but ready much most of its pre-1949, some 10 years ago, 15 years ago that was the cutting edge sort of research on when archives in the republican era were being opened up. i always kept my eye and on the border post 49. so i was playing around with an idea about a project on everyday life. it was a very simple question. here we have the people's republic but what happened to the people? what do we actually know about people and how they lived and how they died? in particular during the maoist era. i quickly discovered that the period of the great leap forward was actually very rich and i think that one of the reasons for that is that none of the key

terms used during this period sound particularly negative. 1966 -- there was very little there. if you look at the early years in the archives, 1949, an awful lot of the political carried all sorts of negative connotations. i don't know whether you speak chinese but a lot of these are called jen fan, the three ante, the anti-this, the anti-that. so of course it is material that appears to be more sensitive to the archivist. so that period there seems extremely interesting and on top of that, once i started and quang pham at the start of the a four year project that took me who are part of china and i think i benefited as others did from a sense of openness and

willingness in the years that ran up to the olympics. i think there was a sense that somehow the olympics were a great occasion and things ought to be easier -- things ought to be eased up and opened up so there was a great window of opportunity. this is not to say i walked into an archive, show me how many people died in this county. how did you explain what you were doing? >> i am honest. i was quite straightforward. i said i did economic history and economic history is pretty much what it boils down to. how much? how much grain is being produced? how much grain is being exported? how much grain is being procured? hard economic history. and then of course when she start reading the material from economic history, it evolves

into other very interesting documents. that is how i started off. in some places there was great willingness to show material and in other places i would ask to wait and drink tea for a couple of hours and i was told in a polite manner that there simply wasn't anything on my topic. and maybe i should go somewhere else, which i did. >> one of the main themes in your book and sort of this whole event is the extent of falsifying official information that went on during this period. when you are in the archives and you see something like 67,000 people were beaten, were clubbed to death with sticks or in the commune some 22,000 beams in

floorboards were torn out of people's homes overnight in a movement to mechanize the commune. the carts produced were so ramshackle but they fell to pieces the moment anyone tried to use one. how do you begin to go about verifying a story like that or a statistic like that? be the thing is, when we hear the term archive, it sounds rather boring boring except if you are a historian like me and you become very excited by that term. archives is more than just one thing. archives is basically anything that was written down in some sort of official capacity as a positive in that. like most one-party states whether it is under stalin, under hitler under mao, theaters are very well aware of the fact that propaganda is absolutely essential and next to

propaganda, the system has to be developed to find out what has really happened. so on the one hand, this massive amount of literature used for propaganda purposes and on the other hand there is an extraordinary amount of inspectors, teams, secretaries by anybody in any capacity sent down to investigate what is happening on the ground. from 1958 to 1962, an awful lot happens, including a number of of -- and every time there is a purge, every time the wind turned so to speak there is some sort of secret investigation carried out frances by the public security bureau. now you get a sense of what is written for mere propaganda purposes and what is investigated down in order to find out what is actually happening on the ground.

you get a good feel for that. the public security bureau in general is not allowed to produce a quota. they may very well kill the quota as in get rid of 5% of the people, but when they investigate mass murder or when somebody has to write his own confession you will see that the numbers tend to very. their questions, there were queries and they tend to quagga late at some point. so of course a lot of it is questionable but in general there is very little incentive for somebody or a team who is investigating mass murder to actually increase the number of deaths or exaggerate the amount of torture. very little incentive to do that it is the other way around. >> what was the most surprising thing you found in the archives? >> what took me aback right awa,

was the extent of violence, the extent of violence. i expected it to be about famine. i expected to read about starvation. i didn't realize rather naïvely i should say, that collectivization means collective violence. when you take away everything, when you strip every incentive to work from people, you have to literally beat them to get them to do things. the ways in which villages became so brutalized in part of the countryside, they produce this mounting spiral of violence and i was very much taken aback by it and the arsenal of horror

and the ways in which people were demeaned. the imagination of the few to inflict pain and anguish on the many really took me aback and it comes back and report after report after report. that really surprised me tremendously. and then i guess that once in a while, one gets the feeling that there is a treasure trove and that happened on one or two occasions. for some reason, the minutes of top leadership meetings were actually available right there in front of me, minutes that have not been bred to my knowledge by other historians.

>> provincial archives? >> there is one provincial archive and if you read the book carefully you will know which one it is. an extraordinarily amount of detailed minutes of who said what, when and where and how mao sets the agenda, how he responds to some other views, extremely interesting and that about me really to link up not just the stories of ordinary people which was my point of departure, but how these stories linking to a much broader political framework to link up if you wish with the power with the lives of people in the countryside. >> one think interestingly that you don't make as often as to any connection to historical forces prior to the 1950s. you are a historian of earlier periods. do you see anything happening not so much of the leadership level but in chinese society

that created the conditions in which people could behave like this to one another or do you really see it by merrily as coming from the top down? >> i wrote a little book, very short, called the age of openness, china before mao that it describes the republican era as a period of great openness and the circulation of ideas, people people, situations, objects move rather freely. the realm of relative freedom that is then subsequently closed down after 1949. so the real key period i think his 1949 to 1957, the 10 years prior to the great leap forward. and i am working on that right now. >> one last question. anybody who has read a little bit about this period knows that it is an issue of major

contention among scholars about what the death toll was in the great leap forward. and your numbers are i guess about 50% higher than some recent studies that have come out of the mainland. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you came to them and why and how these numbers are important. in some ways they are so bafflingly huge. >> it is a good question but let me just say one thing first. this is a regime that very much reduces people to mere digits on a balance sheet. it sees human beings as livestock. people have to be clothed, housed and fed and all of that cost. in many cases people were too weak, to paul orgel to contribute to the supply and are

being deliberately starved to death. this is a regime that reduces people to numbers. i am not the one who wants to do the same thing again and only look at numbers. i think the task of the historian is really to discover the human stories behind his horror and that is what the book tries to do. there is one chapter that tries to look at the scope of the catastrophe because it is unavoidable. i didn't set out to do it. it just happened. over the course of these for years that came across again and again, came across extremely detailed investigations generally carried out by the public security bureau but sometimes by county party committees or even provincial party committees and 62, 63, 64 and immediately in the aftermath of the famine trying to find out

people who have died unnecessarily and some of these areas. for instance, here is the head of the public security bureau in sichuan province, a place which is twice the size of france, who writes confidentially to the man who was presided over in the province and a great leap forward and he tells them in a whole list of statistics that he has presided over the death of eight to 10 million people in the secret document. there are quite a few symbols so i took those documents and i compared them to whatever statistics have been produced on the basis of official population numbers. so pretty much all the numbers and the estimates we have of extrapolations on the basis of official populations and statistics. the documents i have are not

official, haven't been published. i compare them and i discovered that there is a gap of 30, 40, 50%, sometimes 100%. on that basis i estimate that the number of 30 to 32 million has been produced several times by a number of historical information would have to be increased by at least 50%. i say at least 45 million people died unnecessarily and it could be more. let me add one little note, namely that a man was sent by another man before tiananmen square in 1949. the whole team of people in the archives to find out what happened in the countryside. he came to the united states, said that during their investigation of the archives,

they had concluded that at least 45 billion people had died during the great leap forward. so my estimate very much corresponds to the team that went to similar archives in the 1990s. i still don't know what it means but i have no idea how you get your head around 45 million. it is mind-boggling. i haven't even started to understand what that means. i cannot imagine how much 45 million is. >> at the end of the book, you touch briefly on the sort of high political legacy of this event, that there was a backlash and the leadership against mao and than that led to his being sort of sidelined and regrouping to come back with a vengeance during the cultural revolution.

but how do you interpret the legacy of the great leap forward for the rest of chinese society in the short term and maybe even in the longer-term? >> well, whatever legacy there is is a very direct one in the sense that there is no public memory. there is no memorial. there is no museum. there is very little thinking and writing about this period, which is not to say of course that many people in the countryside have their memories and are sometimes quite key to share them. as part of this book, there is a project, team of people who went to the countryside, to do insider interviewing, collecting memories of people all over the country. over 100 interviews are being transcribed and will be

deposited with a public library. there probably will be a look on that by my colleague. but beyond that, it seems to me that you cannot really understand this embrace so to speak of consumerism, not a word i particularly like, but nonetheless consumerism today without understanding the extraordinary anguish, deprivation and pain during those years. not entirely dissimilar to what happened in europe after the second world war. once you have gone through that, for instance in holland where i grew up, your parents had to eat tulip bulbs in 1945. you want to have a lot of meat on the table. you want to have a fridge, a car and a house, a very normal human impulse to focus on material goods.

although that of course also has a very convenient political aspect for the current leadership which is decisively to focus on the material aspects at the expense of the political. >> alright on that note i think i will open it up to questions from all of you. i have been asked to ask you first of all that you wait for the microphone before you ask a question. and second, that you stand up if you can and identify yourself before you ask your question. maybe we will start here in the front. >> i'm a student from columbia. the death toll of 45 million in the great famine -- the

communist governments on estimates of the number of chinese who died at the hands of the japanese. i think that figure is 35 million. so, i find it very ironic that the 20th century's -- the chinese were more likely to die at the hands of other chinese than at the hands of the japanese. >> you are quite right. i mentioned pol pot earlier on simply because the population in cambodia is the same as the population in fuyong, the region i wrote on and the number of deaths are actually higher in sub13 been in cambodia so you would have to take a whole pot and cambodia and multiply it by 20 in order to get roughly near what happened during the great leap forward. it was just short of about 10 million of the total number of people who died worldwide during the second world war.

it is just inconceivably large number of people but you are quite right. certainly after 1949, the entire 20th century, the likelihood in china to be killed or starved to liberally to death by somebody else is much higher than being killed by japanese. to be fair this is also quite true for of course the europe. europeans are very good at killing each other. >> hi end thank you very much for a very interesting talk and a very compelling book. i have two questions. the first question is, your descriptions of getting access and actually getting information is very interesting and two at certain extent it seems almost like accidental research or a little bit of hit and miss. as a historian i'm interested in what is your impression of the extent to which your book