Was Mao running camps like Hitler and Stalin or did his people just starve to death?
most of the deaths were just people starving to death but yeah, there were camps too
>>316710
They literally starved to death. Mao was basically have this unrealistic expectations where everyone has to meet, and everyone is scared to report bad news since he'll punish them severely, so they made shit up.
So Mao, being pleased that his unrealistic expectations were met, made even more unrealistic expectations.
Then everyone died. The end.
>>316724
By camps, you meant "collectivization" where people have to work for X thing they have no idea about right?
But the real heinous shit is in the Cultural Revolution, not the Great Leap Forward.
Mao's camps emphasized re-eduction and people actually got to leave them.
A lot of China's next leadership after Mao had actually been sent to camps during the cultural revolution. They even sent the last Qing emperor (who also collaborated with the Japanese and 'ran' Manchukuo during the war) to one and he actually got out and re-integrated into society, I'm pretty sure he died a gardener or a librarian.
They weren't intentionally meant to be a place you sent someone to die, though some people inevitably died in them.
>>316710
>hey lets kill all the birds that eat our grain (and locusts)
please redpill me on the cultural revolution
>>316710
Starvation by incompetence. His attempts at boosting grain production had the opposite effect and instead fields were left untended and agricultural labor was diverted to public works projects: building canals and dams (that were in the end useless). The GLF was an attempt to remodel agrarian society along communistic lines via authoritarianism and violence. It instead resulted in massive death tolls in select provinces (run by Mao loyalists) and highlighted the authoritarian flaw/character of the CCP.
>>316710
There were camps. They still exist btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai
They had a higher death rate than the soviet Gulags too.
>>316738
Yeah we all watched "the Last Emperor" too, bud.
>>316710
There are no defensible estimates for millions of starvation deaths during the Three Bad Years. Read "Through a Glass Darkly" by William Hinton for a both a first hand account of this period and an analysis of where the "numbers" come from. Spoiler: cold war era figures assembled by people that weren't there based on shoddily taken census statistics long after the fact.
>>316738
This.
>>317999
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813529697?keywords=some%20of%20us&qid=1448733256&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583671803?keywords=the%20unknown%20cultural%20revolution&qid=1448733474&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
>>318041
Then you should know.
>>316738
Oh fuck off. "Reeducation" meant slave labor. You can't be this gullible.
>>318022
now lake laogai makes sense
>>318051
Stop being ridiculous.
Of course people raised in places like Shanghai are going to have more opportunities because 1. The hukou system 2. Urbanized places had the infrastructure to resist the more radical cultural engineering of the cultural revolutuion.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is merit in examing the Maoist period beyond the common claims of stagnation and horror, but how can you look at the inner and outer party politics in the era afterwards (Deng Xiaoping shakily coming to power, Democracy Wall etc.) and not realize that something was heavily fucked up.
Books I've enjoyed from the urban and rural side are as follows.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002NT2F0Y/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?qid=1448734551&sr=8-4&pi=AC_SX110_SY165&keywords=yue+daiyun+to+the+storm&dpPl=1&dpID=51w-aIQqK0L&ref=plSrch http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1580465218/ref=mp_s_a_1_10?qid=1448734646&sr=8-10&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=Barefoot+doctors
They would hire a few thousand people to build something and then execute them for secrecy.
>>316731
Both are "real heinous shit". One maybe greater than the other, but both era independently created mass deaths through famine and through brutal military crackdown of dissents.
As a Chinese poster, I'm genuinely curious about your backgrounds from where your love of China comes from.
>>319493
not OP, but I'm curious about the whole region over there, and marxist-leninist countries.
I also live in BC, so I meet Chinese people all the time. American btw
>>316710
he had reduaction camps but most of his people that died because of him was due to his handling of things
>>318022
Except your source contradicts that.
>According to the researchers James D. Seymour and Richard Anderson, the products made in laogai camps comprise an insignificant amount of mainland China's export output and gross domestic product, .[9] They argue that the use of prison labor for manufacturing is not in itself a violation of human rights, and that most prisoners in Chinese prisons are serving time for what are generally regarded as crimes in the West. The Western criticism of the laogai is based not only on the export of products made by forced labor, but also on the claims of detainees being held for political or religious violations, such as leadership of unregistered Chinese House Churches.[10] While the laogai has attracted widespread criticism for the poor conditions in the prisons, Seymour and Anderson claim that reports are exaggerated, stating that "even at its worst, the laogai is not, as some have claimed, 'the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulag.'"[9]
>>316710
He didn't purge them as hard as Stalin, no.
Most of the people he 'killed' essentially died due to him being a totally shit ruler
>>320903
This desu.
Hitler should have just pretended to be a Jew, founded Israel, worked up Jewish pride and get all the Jews to come to Israel, and started a war with the rest of the Middle East. That way he could have killed even more Jews and not devastated Europe.
>>316738
>people actually got to leave them
Sure Lin Biao
I'm American, but I live in Beijing just now. im also a journalist so its my hobby and duty to know local history.
No you see Mao didn't do anything wrong, the people voluntarily agreed to work for him in these "camps", communism is about love and peace.
>>316710
A little of both, when you read on the conditions of his bases that he established where many would travel to as recruits you'll see just how bad it was and how only the high ranking officials like him got unevenly large amounts of food, while the main body got stock with small rations.
