Mao’s Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter. As a development economist working on food policy, I simply had to read this book after reading Pankaj Mishra’s review in The New Yorker. Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, has exploited a new Chinese law which has opened up some of the Communist Party’s archives. With an estimated death toll of 45 million, the Chinese famine of 1958 has been one of the worst famines in history, the Chinese version of the Holocaust or the Gulag. This book illustrates the spectacular failings of centrally planned economies, but it is not for the faint of heart, as the final chapters discuss the many ways — including cannibalism — in which people survived. UPDATE: It turns out Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution has also been reading this book. Here is his review.
Published January 23, 2011