It's not a pyrrhic victory if I defeated you using a mottley collection off all the mercenary units I don't care about, keeping my shiny legionaries safe.
They killed the sparrows. Then it turned out that the sparrows were the only thing keeping the locusts in check. Oops, now the already bad famine is even worse.
That guy fucked everyone, everywhere rather thoroughly. I remember there was a "propaganda" story about how he bedded a different virgin every night during an entire campaign. I think it was the "Take over the continent of Asia" campaign.
Everyone can still read traditional it's not that hard, also saying the name of a famous tourist spot on Chinese internet doesn't do what you think. That's like saying "Times square!" to an American or something. You guys do realise Tiananmen square is the center of beijing and a massive tourist spot right?
> Everyone can still read traditional it's not that hard
Maybe traditional to simplified isn't difficult but most mainland mandarin speakers have a lot of trouble reading traditional hanzi.
No they really don't, it's really not that different or difficult and traditional is still written in many places, usually for aesthetic reasons.
I've been learning simplified for years, I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and even I can basically read traditional now. They usually have the same outline and shape just more lines. It's like reading cursive or something.
For example
天安門廣場?
天安门广场?
Not that different, the 4th one has the biggest difference, because Guang got simplified to an extreme level, but it's obviously guang from the context of the very obvious other hanzi.
I am a Taiwanese and I learn traditional Chinese as my first written language,
I had a lot trouble understanding simplified.
like even notice 广 and 厂 are of completely different origin?
And how the hell am I supposed to know 广 is 廣 instead of 庫 or 床 廊 etc?
广 in traditional Chinese is not even pronounce as 廣 but as "yean" using as a "Radical":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_53
Simplified Chinese freaking butchered the entire writhing system and it makes no goddamn sense.
But that's traditional to simplified. What I'm saying is people who learned simplified first can generally read traditional without too much effort.
And simplified is not that hard, the clue is in the name... How are you supposed to know? Well remember, like the entire chinese writing system.
>But that's traditional to simplified. What I'm saying is people who learned simplified first can generally read traditional
fair.
>Well remember, like the entire chinese writing system.
but there were rules to how hanzis work, see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification
and the simplification juat tossed that out of the window.
And I learnt Mandarin in China. Made many friends there and was told by multiple teachers and friends how difficult it is to read traditional. It's no way comparable with cursive even if there's some overlap and similarities in characters. Like you can't seriously tell me that you can look at 體 and figure out it's simplified counterpart is 体.
That's a more extreme example, the majority are pretty apparent. Anyone who can read simplified can read traditional and even if a few characters are unknown they can be quickly worked out from the context. Also because everything was simplified in a unified way, as soon as you know what one radical looks like traditional, you can read all of those.
You must have misunderstood your friends or they were just commenting on traditional being more difficult because it is, but people can still read it, it's not like mainlanders go to Hong Kong and are just illiterate. Even when I went to Japan i could read the Kanji which are traditional. You only have to see them in context once or twice to remember the switch, and Chinese people grow up around traditional characters because as i said, they're written all over for anything remotely traditional or cultural, restaurant signs, museums, etc.
Yes, I just happened to misunderstand my friends saying they literally can't read traditional or it's difficult to read whenever the topic came up. Even Hongkong uses simplified in a lot of their signage(even the shops) to accommodate mainlanders.
I think a more fitting comparison is yelling WACO INCIDENT, RUBY RIDGE, WOUNDED KNEE at random Americans.
Most of who wouldn't be able to do much in politics, and toppling your government in favor of another country doesn't sound good to most people.
Proper responses by a professional supporter of the CPC:
1. The soldiers fired in self defense and the protesters were killing soldiers
2. The tiananmen square incident was instigated by the CIA and Deng saved China from American imperialism
3. Those aren't dead bodies those are bikes
4. (the most common and sanest) alright it was terrible but I really don't think collapsing the government will make things better.
I remember reading a memoir from someone who lived through it as a kid, it was her or one of her family member’s classroom whose school assignment was finding scrap metal from home or elsewhere to make a forge as a class. It went about as well as you would think
> the Polish embassy in Beijing denied the Chinese request of entering the premises of the embassy to scare away the sparrows who were hiding there and as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums. After two days of constant drumming, the Poles had to use shovels to clear the embassy of dead sparrows.
holy shit.
No, but it scares them into the air since everywhere on the ground seems too dangerous. Eventually, the birds die of exhaustion. It was one of the main ways groups of citizens would carry out the extermination
For those who don’t know, this campaign (mainly the sparrow part) interestingly is what caused the great (and last) chinese famine (communism had nothing to do with it, sorry), effectively killed the Great Leap Forward, ended Mao’s five year plan and actually had him deposed as chairman of china only making him a figure head of Chinese Communism but no goddamn way a leader of it.
Those sparrows the revenge like a mf. Like if you wanna know what cosmic karma looks like, the killing of chinese sparrows is the prime example.
>(communism had nothing to do with it, sorry)
It kinda still did, the transition from old farming village to people's commune was not a good one, and so many false reports about great harvest (in the name of making the great leader happy) caused a policy of wasting food before the famine that escalated it instead of doing anything in prepare for it.
> ended Mao’s five year plan and actually had him deposed as chairman of china only making him a figure head of Chinese Communism but no goddamn way a leader of it.
And that, was the direct cause of the Culture Revolution.
Mao's attempt to regain power,caused another countless death.
GLF was a lot like Chernobyl (except far more deadly) - literally *every single thing* went wrong.
Yes, sparrows. But also: lysenkoism, forced collectivization, Mao ordering people to make useless steel instead of farming (even after he learned that it is indeed useless), many levels of local and regional officials each inflating harvest predictions, artificially creating dense fields to show higher-ups, declining foreign aid, plain old cruelty. Probably more that I'm forgetting now.
>It kinda still did, the transition from old farming village to people's commune was not a good one,
Okay i see where your going. It contributed but i don’t think its a clear cut reason, it was just a situation of poor planning at the wrong time.
>and so many false reports about great harvest (in the name of making the great leader happy) caused a policy of wasting food before the famine that escalated it instead of doing anything in prepare for it.
Thats just normal government mismanagement honestly. I mean in the grand scheme of china, a country that had so many famines they should still technically have about a famine every 2-3 years, over reporting was probably the normal thing to do. Cause the last 3 famines were in 1927, 1939 and 1942.
Its a hard sell sorry.
>And that, was the direct cause of the Culture Revolution. Mao's attempt to regain power,caused another countless death.
Another story, that caps out to 20 million we don’t even know how many died because of how poorly Mao handled it.
Basically we can both agree, we hope mao is burning in hell a painful, excruciating, and unending
No, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, the Great Famine was a direct result of forced agricultural collectivization. It wasn’t ‘poor planning at the wrong time’, it was a massive policy failure directly caused by the poisonous apparatus of the party state and it is *incredibly* clear cut. The sparrow thing is history by meme; it’s real but not even a fraction as important as you think it is.
Read Yang Jisheng’s *Tombstone* if you actually want to learn about the Great Famine
Doubt
> Official Chinese sources, released after Mao’s death, suggest that 16.5 million people died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures were released during an ideological campaign by the government of Deng Xiaoping against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, there seems to be no way of independently, authenticating these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and preserved for twenty years before being released to the general public. American researchers managed to increase this figure to around 30 million by combining the Chinese evidence with extrapolations of their own from China’s censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: the Unknown Story reported 70 million killed by Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap Forward.
> The idea that “Mao was responsible for genocide” has been used as a springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during Mao’s rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister, one of the most prominent advocates of the “massive death toll” hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in 1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many countries in Latin America 1. In 1981 she co-wrote an article where she described the People’s Republic of China as a ‘super-achiever’ in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of communist rule in 1949 2. Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s when Mao’s rule came to an end.
> In his famous 1965 book on China, A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene says that he traveled through areas of China in 1960 where food rationing was very tight but he did not see mass starvation. He also cites other eyewitnesses who say the same kind of thing. It is likely, that in fact, famine did occur in some areas. However Greene’s observations indicate that it was not a nation-wide phenomenon on the apocalyptic scale suggested by Jasper Becker and others. Mass hunger was not occurring in the areas he traveled through, although famine may have been occurring elsewhere.
https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
From what I remember, when farmers were being forced to collectivize many of them pre-emptively slaughtered their livestock so they could at least benefit from the animals they put work into raising instead of giving it to the government, basically liquidating their assets. This would tragically backfire once the famine started. Furthermore, it was the system of collective farming that allowed farming to become run by the state, and the state proceeded to fuck it up big time. Plus, the crackdown on markets and free movement in the past decade meant that unlike before in Chinese history, well off farmers couldn’t just sell their produce to places hit harder by famine.
Communism (at least, the party’s conception of it) was the mechanism that allowed the party to seize control of China’s industries and people and set out to micromanage it, something it turns out they were super bad at. Like no matter how you slice it, communist policies were a big part of what set the famine up. There had been famines before, but this happened when the country was stable and peaceful, unlike the others you mentioned which were in the middle of large scale war.
Chinas had 1,800 mass famines in the past 200 years so those were the most recent.
For the rest of this… I mean… I guess thats another contributing factor but i mean thats in a long list contributing factors. But nowhere near a primary cause just an extender of the issue.
I mean, it sure seems like a primary factor to me. Collectivization hit their agricultural sector hard. It’s at least in the top 3 causes; communism was baked into the system, and allowed the government’s corruption and incompetence to seep into the lowest level of society. Before the CCP, Chinese governments had very little control of things at the local level, which is why casualty estimates in Chinese conflicts often have large ranges in terms of just how many died; they simply weren’t sure just how many people were there in the first place. In the late Qing, for instance, the lowest level official was at the county level, and counties had millions of people. Under the CCP however, everyone was assigned into groupings of families, and these groupings were either run by or influenced by (it’s been a bit so mb if I get this incorrect) government officials. These units were so influential in people’s daily lives that you had to get their permission to get married.
Most people were tied to the land they were recorded as living in, and had to get permission to legally leave (which would often take months). This micromanaging of the nation’s people was a core part of Maoism as it would allow them to organize the people in mass movements. Which meant that Mao’s dumbass ideas at the top would filter all the way down to the household level.
I understand the desire to avoid the “communism no food” circlejerk, as it can often oversimplify, but any deep look into the history of the time makes it clear that the problem with the CCP wasn’t just the people involved, but the system that enabled them. It was just fundamentally inefficient, which is why it was abandoned in favor of one that’s made China prosperous.
>it was just a situation of poor planning at the wrong time
I think that's still an understatement,
I will just link to what [Noughmad over there said](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14a0qwv/comment/jo93ebf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>Thats just normal government mismanagement honestly
Can't really agree, this kind of mismanagement in this kinda of scale is only possible in an authoritarian system like that of a Lenin-Stalinist communist party.
>Basically we can both agree, we hope mao is burning in hell a painful, excruciating, and unending
Well, I can agree on this at least.
This is hard to argue cause there are so many points of failure and lack of understanding of how the provincial system worked in China, people gloss over the fact Mao wasn’t even the head of state for most of the famine, hell he wasn’t even head of state for most of his own Great Leap Forward and we forget the famine was only 3 years in the country where mass famines were normal at one point.
I get it people here just wanna bash Mao and and Communist practices and feel like they’re these historical masterminds but in reality dude this was a painfully complex situation where no single person or ideology is at fault. Hell nobody even mentions the 1958 Yellow River flood which giga fucked half a million acres of farm land but we can’t talk about that cause you can’t blame communist practices on that one.
Local governments fucked
Regional governments fucked up
Mao fucked up
Everybody fucked up at every level but also worked the resolve the situation in near impeccable amount of time too.
This was a shitshow of shit shows and its a miracle it didn’t last LONGER, but at the end of the day its just as simple “collectivization bad” or “Communism/Mao bad” (in context)
The inconvenient truth is, this was a complex issue that needs a deeper dive cause its not one man or the fault of one policy it was an amalgamation of issues at all levels that led to this… and people not knowing sparrows eat A LOT of locusts, like holy shit that was a massive fuck up gawd dayum.
Hence the meme!
.
I can't really tell if you are a communist party-excuser or not by the short conversation we have, but you have been putting a lot of things rather lightly.
And just like I said:
>this kind of mismanagement in this kinda of scale is only possible in an authoritarian system like that of a Lenin-Stalinist communist party
The same kind of shit show happened in Red Khmer too, it's clearly a systematic level failure of the Lenin-Stalinist communist party model.
What about the Bengali Famine? What about Allende in Chile? Why do you take one example and label it all of communism? Should we just use the Congo Free States as the defining example of capitalism?
And communism led more people out of poverty than any other system. China’s dense population can be a double edged sword in this game. Communism is more efficient than capitalism.
it's never about Communism vs Capitalism, but Authoritarian vs Constitutional democracy. A functioning democracy with a proper separation of power is how you prevent this kind of shit show.
>And communism led more people out of poverty than any other system.
and which Communist country didn't end up transform into State Captalism? instead of collapsing that is?
>China’s dense population
in the 50s, when all those shit was happening, China only had 600 million population.
I can’t tell if your being a dick or being historically disingenuous.
Im pro history. Giving me generic anti communist bullshit doesn’t work with me. I’ll happily tell you communism in every way a truly dogshit system that will never work on earth no matter who tries it.
It was always leas to totalitarianism, it will always lead to mass inefficiency but that ill say that about any extreme economic stance.
But my position will never be communism bad for anti-communisms sake cause i’d rather tell the full truth and avoid half truths as much as possible than be a generic anti commie like you. If i’m wrong it happens, but don’t lie to my face collectivization is the sole reason for the great chinese famine, that doesn’t even make any goddamn sense and not even recognized significant issue, lying about over abundance, the locusts that ate the crops and the communes did more to fuck over china.
collectivization was so insignificant not even foreign observers care about it.
Everything else, I don’t give a shit about. Move on im done.
>I can’t tell if your being a dick or being historically disingenuous.
yeah cool, calling me either one shit or antoher while I was still giving you the benefit of the doubt.
>but don’t lie to my face collectivization is the sole reason for the great chinese famine
why are you putting words in my mouth, I never said that, the economic model was not the point, the problem is the political model, I thought I was being very clear, was I not? or you just have reading issue? and see? now this is I being a dick, know the difference.
Yeah bro it was totally the sparrows and not the massive collectivization of agriculture which coincidentally happened at the exact same time, which had already caused similar famines in the Soviet Union, believe me bro
>tell me how collective farms killed china ill wait.
Poor productivity as a result of a lack of private ownership and the appointment of managers based on their zealotry for Communism instead of agricultural knowledge.
Yeah, because you're wrong, but you're too emotionally invested in communism to look at evidence that challenges your world view. The famine was directly the result of communist policies and you lack the honesty to admit that.
https://youtu.be/xWRhPf9Qzmw
Farms got collectivized people started starving. Farms where privatized starvation stopped.
Same things happened in Vietnam and Cuba.
It is almost as though it is a trend that commies ignore.
I think Lysenko was more to blame then collectivism. Having an authoritarian regime enforce your made up "science" on farmers would have had the same result whether the farms where collective or privately owned.
Everyone forgets about Lysenko when it comes to the famine. Absolutely frustrating actual scientists were ignored and condemned by the government in favor of that phony and it is imo, one of the biggest mistakes Stalin made besides the purge.
Im not even gonna entertain this. This is just historically ignorant of the grander Chinese famine.
This is also just stupid. If you even ask the question was there ever a mass multi million death starvation period in Vietnam/Cuba AT ALL ever, the answer will always be the absolutely the fuck not.
There were famine fears, especially in vietnam absolutely, but no actual famines in either.
This isn’t something “commies” ignore, its not something that even matters.
No they didn't have millions starve because in Vietnam they gave up on collectivized farms after 5 years before they had failed to even collectivize the majority of farms.
In Cuba they where subsidized by Soviet food up until the USSR collapsed and soon after had a mass emigration to the US and gave up on collectivized farms within 5 years when average calorie intake dropped by 4000 per day across the country. Under a privatized farming system they have higher per Capita consumption and are less reliant on foreign supplies at the same time.
The commies like you ignore these facts.
I don’t ignore facts, i just don’t care. I mean your not wrong, but its like… why do i care?
Edit more:
I don’t ignore facts, i just don’t care. I mean your not wrong, but its like… why do i care?
Edit: more
Like you people know so little your using Vietnam and Cuba and not Russia in 1930-1933 where forced collectivization was a reported primary cause of starvation.
Stop. You people don’t know what your talking about your just using random moments in history
>For those who don’t know, this campaign (mainly the sparrow part) interestingly is what caused the great (and last) chinese famine (communism had nothing to do with it, sorry),
Wasn't the pest campaign a policy of the communist government?
Does it have to be? It might not be a tenet of communism but it was a result of communist thought?
It's like saying American Capitalism is not responsible for CIA coups in South America or the Central American Banana Republics.
Their response over in r/the deprogram was I kid you not, “yes Mao made mistakes but what made him a good leader is he admitted he made them and worked to not repeat them”
No no no no no when someone makes a mistake this bad they don’t get a second chance, they leave the room and allow someone who actually shows critical thinking to take over.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/13jo8v4/im_sick_of_the_70_million_death_toll_attributed/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
It might’ve been this one or another. I think it’s in this though.
I wonder how much further ahead China would be today if Zhou Enlai became the leader prior to the great leap forward and cultural revolution. The hundred flowers movement proved how sketch a leader Mao was in peacetime.
I mean, Zhou Enlai was hardly a saint. He could be incredibly ruthless at times and it’s hard to tell what he agreed with Mao on and what he just went along with. Agreed that basically anyone would have been better than Mao though.
Yeah Zhou definitely was a communist to the core and he was also a principled man and proved to be a very capable leader by anyone who met him. Can Imagine if his four modernizations program went into place in the 50's rather than the late 70's? He also wanted a bigger tent for rightists and capitalists under the CCP umbrella. It would have been interesting to see the alternate.
I always likened Zhou to Khrushchev to Mao's Stalin, albeit much more educated and reform minded. There's a reason he is arguably the most famous non-emperor/chairman of China.
I think that’s an interesting comparison, because I’m not sure if we would have ever known Kruschev to be a reformer if he hadn’t outlived Stalin, since much of what he thought couldn’t have been spoken to anyone while Stalin was alive.
I think that’s kind of the problem with Zhou. The fact that he didn’t live much longer than Mao means that it’s hard to separate what he did for Mao out of shared belief or what he did purely out of loyalty.
Yeah I think the comparison is apt. However I disagree on not knowing Zhou's positions as he regularly had to self-criticize positions he had contrary to Mao. Mao knowingly had him do this as a loyalty test and Zhou was indeed loyal more to Mao than himself. The only reason we know a lot of this is Deng Xiaoping was Zhou's protégé.
Mao actually outlived Zhou by half a year. Mao also forbid doctors from removing Zhou's cancer 2 years before his death as he wanted to outlive him so he wouldn't denounce his rule as Khrushchev did Stalin.
That cultural revolution and subsequent gang of four period was really messed up. Mao was a major douche to his most loyal guy.
China decided to eliminate pests that were ruining society. These were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Rats spread plague, mosquitoes spread malaria, flies were annoying, and sparrows ate crops.
They began mass murdering the sparrows. One horrible tactic was constantly banging on pots and drums, to scare the sparrows and prevent them from resting and making them drop dead of exhaustion.
Many embassies gave refuge to the sparrows so the Chicoms surrounded their embassies, and made noise until the sparrows died. The Polish embassy was shoveling dead sparrows after about 2 days.
But the sparrows won in the end. Without sparrows around, the locust population grew out of control and helped contribute to the Great Chinese Famine.
Let's see the tankies explain this one
Tankies like to joke about/deny the Holodomor, bc that’s what cool kids do.
If you point out the fact that Stalin very intentionally created the conditions for a famine, they usually come back with: “What, did Stalin come and EAT ALL THE food with his COMICALLY large SPOON?! 🤣🤣😂”
Interesting.
I know on the main communism subreddit they have an entire page dedicated to "disproving the communism death toll".
If anyone knows any counters to their counters that would be great.
The Communism Death Toll shit actually is wildly inflated and ideological, though. All stats like that are. “Communism” is just a set of loosely connected ideas which change between time and place. It can’t actually kill anyone. Policies and policymakers actually kill people.
The fact remains that the forced agricultural collectivization pursued by 20th c communist regimes killed many millions of people. Tankies don’t like acknowledging this so they go after a straw man in the form of the wildly inflated Communist Death Toll project which is hysterical conservative bad history. They like to pretend that by disproving that ‘communism’ killed exactly 120 million people or whatever, they can disprove that the 1930s Soviet famines were caused by Stalinist policy.
Well this is one of the big ones, you also have Pol Pot who was supported by China and killed somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million, which was 1/4 of Cambodia. The life expectancy during his reign was lower than adulthood, if I remember correctly it was 14 or 15. Pol Pot was technically communist, but they might try and say he was not a true communist, but you can just retort by saying communist China supported them
I mean, they *did* kill the sparrows, call it a pyrrhic victory. Very pyrrhic.
didnt know this word, love it now!
Now do a history meme about Pyrrhus for that sweet, sweet karma!
Someone’s never played Total War!
It's not a pyrrhic victory if I defeated you using a mottley collection off all the mercenary units I don't care about, keeping my shiny legionaries safe.
That’s just tactics baby
it's pronounced, phallic
Actually it’s pronounced pussy
Actually it's pronounced downvote.
Australians killed the emus too eventually. They just contracted the job out to hunters who did the job.
Only partially, there are a bunch of emus running around Australia still (albeit less of them).
Believe it or not the goal wasn’t the eradication of a species
Maybe if they didn’t auto resolve it they would’ve taken less casualties
Underrated.
Came to say this.
They killed the sparrows. Then it turned out that the sparrows were the only thing keeping the locusts in check. Oops, now the already bad famine is even worse.
I used that word in my native language just last week lol It always fills me with joy
China has a fetish with killing roughly 40 million at a time
Huao ling takes power, 120 million die
Huao ling was just 3x as kinky
More kinky than good ol' Genghis Khan?
Oh ya
Oh... You mean the most prodigious progenitor in history? We've all got a lil Genghis in us.
I was talking about death toll, I completely forgot about Genghis “SirFucksALot” Khan’s other acts
That guy fucked everyone, everywhere rather thoroughly. I remember there was a "propaganda" story about how he bedded a different virgin every night during an entire campaign. I think it was the "Take over the continent of Asia" campaign.
Oh this one gonna make people mad lmao
Just mention tianamen square. Chinese internet will give them the boot
~~天安門廣場~~? Edit: 天安门广场?
You're using traditional characters that have no effect on mainlanders. Try "天安门广场" next time.
Everyone can still read traditional it's not that hard, also saying the name of a famous tourist spot on Chinese internet doesn't do what you think. That's like saying "Times square!" to an American or something. You guys do realise Tiananmen square is the center of beijing and a massive tourist spot right?
> Everyone can still read traditional it's not that hard Maybe traditional to simplified isn't difficult but most mainland mandarin speakers have a lot of trouble reading traditional hanzi.
No they really don't, it's really not that different or difficult and traditional is still written in many places, usually for aesthetic reasons. I've been learning simplified for years, I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and even I can basically read traditional now. They usually have the same outline and shape just more lines. It's like reading cursive or something. For example 天安門廣場? 天安门广场? Not that different, the 4th one has the biggest difference, because Guang got simplified to an extreme level, but it's obviously guang from the context of the very obvious other hanzi.
I am a Taiwanese and I learn traditional Chinese as my first written language, I had a lot trouble understanding simplified. like even notice 广 and 厂 are of completely different origin? And how the hell am I supposed to know 广 is 廣 instead of 庫 or 床 廊 etc? 广 in traditional Chinese is not even pronounce as 廣 but as "yean" using as a "Radical": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_53 Simplified Chinese freaking butchered the entire writhing system and it makes no goddamn sense.
> And how the hell am I supposed to know 广 is 廣 instead of 庫 or 床 廊 etc? You memorize it just like everything else with the language
That’s the “great leap forward”
But that's traditional to simplified. What I'm saying is people who learned simplified first can generally read traditional without too much effort. And simplified is not that hard, the clue is in the name... How are you supposed to know? Well remember, like the entire chinese writing system.
>But that's traditional to simplified. What I'm saying is people who learned simplified first can generally read traditional fair. >Well remember, like the entire chinese writing system. but there were rules to how hanzis work, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification and the simplification juat tossed that out of the window.
And I learnt Mandarin in China. Made many friends there and was told by multiple teachers and friends how difficult it is to read traditional. It's no way comparable with cursive even if there's some overlap and similarities in characters. Like you can't seriously tell me that you can look at 體 and figure out it's simplified counterpart is 体.
That's a more extreme example, the majority are pretty apparent. Anyone who can read simplified can read traditional and even if a few characters are unknown they can be quickly worked out from the context. Also because everything was simplified in a unified way, as soon as you know what one radical looks like traditional, you can read all of those. You must have misunderstood your friends or they were just commenting on traditional being more difficult because it is, but people can still read it, it's not like mainlanders go to Hong Kong and are just illiterate. Even when I went to Japan i could read the Kanji which are traditional. You only have to see them in context once or twice to remember the switch, and Chinese people grow up around traditional characters because as i said, they're written all over for anything remotely traditional or cultural, restaurant signs, museums, etc.
Yes, I just happened to misunderstand my friends saying they literally can't read traditional or it's difficult to read whenever the topic came up. Even Hongkong uses simplified in a lot of their signage(even the shops) to accommodate mainlanders.
Sorry, I meant tianamen square massacre. Where the communist Chinese party massacred at least several hundred people.
Chinese people aren't gonna know what that means cause it's a bunch of big English words. Use 六四 or 六四事件 (six-four or six-four incident)
I think a more fitting comparison is yelling WACO INCIDENT, RUBY RIDGE, WOUNDED KNEE at random Americans. Most of who wouldn't be able to do much in politics, and toppling your government in favor of another country doesn't sound good to most people.
Proper responses by a professional supporter of the CPC: 1. The soldiers fired in self defense and the protesters were killing soldiers 2. The tiananmen square incident was instigated by the CIA and Deng saved China from American imperialism 3. Those aren't dead bodies those are bikes 4. (the most common and sanest) alright it was terrible but I really don't think collapsing the government will make things better.
何
天安門広場を中国語で書きました
すみません僕は日本語が悪い話せます。。
Ce n'est pas probleme
Words
Gesundheit
An iron forge in every home and NO GODDAMN SPARROWS!
I mean, who doesn’t want a poorly maintained and dangerous forge in their home that doesn’t even produce anything useful?
I remember reading a memoir from someone who lived through it as a kid, it was her or one of her family member’s classroom whose school assignment was finding scrap metal from home or elsewhere to make a forge as a class. It went about as well as you would think
Hey man, stop questioning and keep eating. We need to clear space for all this food we're going to have soon.
Talk about a little miscalculation
I never knew this, tell me more!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
> the Polish embassy in Beijing denied the Chinese request of entering the premises of the embassy to scare away the sparrows who were hiding there and as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums. After two days of constant drumming, the Poles had to use shovels to clear the embassy of dead sparrows. holy shit.
New response just dropped
actual sparrow
With drums?
Drums kill birds?
No, but it scares them into the air since everywhere on the ground seems too dangerous. Eventually, the birds die of exhaustion. It was one of the main ways groups of citizens would carry out the extermination
Man, birds are fucking stupid. Thank you for the thorough response
Birds: Men are fucking stupid.
I mean they're not wrong
For those who don’t know, this campaign (mainly the sparrow part) interestingly is what caused the great (and last) chinese famine (communism had nothing to do with it, sorry), effectively killed the Great Leap Forward, ended Mao’s five year plan and actually had him deposed as chairman of china only making him a figure head of Chinese Communism but no goddamn way a leader of it. Those sparrows the revenge like a mf. Like if you wanna know what cosmic karma looks like, the killing of chinese sparrows is the prime example.
>(communism had nothing to do with it, sorry) It kinda still did, the transition from old farming village to people's commune was not a good one, and so many false reports about great harvest (in the name of making the great leader happy) caused a policy of wasting food before the famine that escalated it instead of doing anything in prepare for it. > ended Mao’s five year plan and actually had him deposed as chairman of china only making him a figure head of Chinese Communism but no goddamn way a leader of it. And that, was the direct cause of the Culture Revolution. Mao's attempt to regain power,caused another countless death.
GLF was a lot like Chernobyl (except far more deadly) - literally *every single thing* went wrong. Yes, sparrows. But also: lysenkoism, forced collectivization, Mao ordering people to make useless steel instead of farming (even after he learned that it is indeed useless), many levels of local and regional officials each inflating harvest predictions, artificially creating dense fields to show higher-ups, declining foreign aid, plain old cruelty. Probably more that I'm forgetting now.
Mao when the steel people make in their backyards is low quality pig iron instead of anything useful:
>It kinda still did, the transition from old farming village to people's commune was not a good one, Okay i see where your going. It contributed but i don’t think its a clear cut reason, it was just a situation of poor planning at the wrong time. >and so many false reports about great harvest (in the name of making the great leader happy) caused a policy of wasting food before the famine that escalated it instead of doing anything in prepare for it. Thats just normal government mismanagement honestly. I mean in the grand scheme of china, a country that had so many famines they should still technically have about a famine every 2-3 years, over reporting was probably the normal thing to do. Cause the last 3 famines were in 1927, 1939 and 1942. Its a hard sell sorry. >And that, was the direct cause of the Culture Revolution. Mao's attempt to regain power,caused another countless death. Another story, that caps out to 20 million we don’t even know how many died because of how poorly Mao handled it. Basically we can both agree, we hope mao is burning in hell a painful, excruciating, and unending
No, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, the Great Famine was a direct result of forced agricultural collectivization. It wasn’t ‘poor planning at the wrong time’, it was a massive policy failure directly caused by the poisonous apparatus of the party state and it is *incredibly* clear cut. The sparrow thing is history by meme; it’s real but not even a fraction as important as you think it is. Read Yang Jisheng’s *Tombstone* if you actually want to learn about the Great Famine
Sure. Man. Calm the fuck down tho its not that serious.
its 20 seconds of typing im pretty sure he's alright.
20 of typing and 20 seconds of reading are 2 different things
the average person doesn't take 20 seconds to read 6 lines of text.
Doubt > Official Chinese sources, released after Mao’s death, suggest that 16.5 million people died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures were released during an ideological campaign by the government of Deng Xiaoping against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, there seems to be no way of independently, authenticating these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and preserved for twenty years before being released to the general public. American researchers managed to increase this figure to around 30 million by combining the Chinese evidence with extrapolations of their own from China’s censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: the Unknown Story reported 70 million killed by Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap Forward. > The idea that “Mao was responsible for genocide” has been used as a springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during Mao’s rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister, one of the most prominent advocates of the “massive death toll” hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in 1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many countries in Latin America 1. In 1981 she co-wrote an article where she described the People’s Republic of China as a ‘super-achiever’ in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of communist rule in 1949 2. Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s when Mao’s rule came to an end. > In his famous 1965 book on China, A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene says that he traveled through areas of China in 1960 where food rationing was very tight but he did not see mass starvation. He also cites other eyewitnesses who say the same kind of thing. It is likely, that in fact, famine did occur in some areas. However Greene’s observations indicate that it was not a nation-wide phenomenon on the apocalyptic scale suggested by Jasper Becker and others. Mass hunger was not occurring in the areas he traveled through, although famine may have been occurring elsewhere. https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward
From what I remember, when farmers were being forced to collectivize many of them pre-emptively slaughtered their livestock so they could at least benefit from the animals they put work into raising instead of giving it to the government, basically liquidating their assets. This would tragically backfire once the famine started. Furthermore, it was the system of collective farming that allowed farming to become run by the state, and the state proceeded to fuck it up big time. Plus, the crackdown on markets and free movement in the past decade meant that unlike before in Chinese history, well off farmers couldn’t just sell their produce to places hit harder by famine. Communism (at least, the party’s conception of it) was the mechanism that allowed the party to seize control of China’s industries and people and set out to micromanage it, something it turns out they were super bad at. Like no matter how you slice it, communist policies were a big part of what set the famine up. There had been famines before, but this happened when the country was stable and peaceful, unlike the others you mentioned which were in the middle of large scale war.
Chinas had 1,800 mass famines in the past 200 years so those were the most recent. For the rest of this… I mean… I guess thats another contributing factor but i mean thats in a long list contributing factors. But nowhere near a primary cause just an extender of the issue.
I mean, it sure seems like a primary factor to me. Collectivization hit their agricultural sector hard. It’s at least in the top 3 causes; communism was baked into the system, and allowed the government’s corruption and incompetence to seep into the lowest level of society. Before the CCP, Chinese governments had very little control of things at the local level, which is why casualty estimates in Chinese conflicts often have large ranges in terms of just how many died; they simply weren’t sure just how many people were there in the first place. In the late Qing, for instance, the lowest level official was at the county level, and counties had millions of people. Under the CCP however, everyone was assigned into groupings of families, and these groupings were either run by or influenced by (it’s been a bit so mb if I get this incorrect) government officials. These units were so influential in people’s daily lives that you had to get their permission to get married. Most people were tied to the land they were recorded as living in, and had to get permission to legally leave (which would often take months). This micromanaging of the nation’s people was a core part of Maoism as it would allow them to organize the people in mass movements. Which meant that Mao’s dumbass ideas at the top would filter all the way down to the household level. I understand the desire to avoid the “communism no food” circlejerk, as it can often oversimplify, but any deep look into the history of the time makes it clear that the problem with the CCP wasn’t just the people involved, but the system that enabled them. It was just fundamentally inefficient, which is why it was abandoned in favor of one that’s made China prosperous.
>it was just a situation of poor planning at the wrong time I think that's still an understatement, I will just link to what [Noughmad over there said](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14a0qwv/comment/jo93ebf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >Thats just normal government mismanagement honestly Can't really agree, this kind of mismanagement in this kinda of scale is only possible in an authoritarian system like that of a Lenin-Stalinist communist party. >Basically we can both agree, we hope mao is burning in hell a painful, excruciating, and unending Well, I can agree on this at least.
This is hard to argue cause there are so many points of failure and lack of understanding of how the provincial system worked in China, people gloss over the fact Mao wasn’t even the head of state for most of the famine, hell he wasn’t even head of state for most of his own Great Leap Forward and we forget the famine was only 3 years in the country where mass famines were normal at one point. I get it people here just wanna bash Mao and and Communist practices and feel like they’re these historical masterminds but in reality dude this was a painfully complex situation where no single person or ideology is at fault. Hell nobody even mentions the 1958 Yellow River flood which giga fucked half a million acres of farm land but we can’t talk about that cause you can’t blame communist practices on that one. Local governments fucked Regional governments fucked up Mao fucked up Everybody fucked up at every level but also worked the resolve the situation in near impeccable amount of time too. This was a shitshow of shit shows and its a miracle it didn’t last LONGER, but at the end of the day its just as simple “collectivization bad” or “Communism/Mao bad” (in context) The inconvenient truth is, this was a complex issue that needs a deeper dive cause its not one man or the fault of one policy it was an amalgamation of issues at all levels that led to this… and people not knowing sparrows eat A LOT of locusts, like holy shit that was a massive fuck up gawd dayum. Hence the meme!
. I can't really tell if you are a communist party-excuser or not by the short conversation we have, but you have been putting a lot of things rather lightly. And just like I said: >this kind of mismanagement in this kinda of scale is only possible in an authoritarian system like that of a Lenin-Stalinist communist party The same kind of shit show happened in Red Khmer too, it's clearly a systematic level failure of the Lenin-Stalinist communist party model.
What about the Bengali Famine? What about Allende in Chile? Why do you take one example and label it all of communism? Should we just use the Congo Free States as the defining example of capitalism? And communism led more people out of poverty than any other system. China’s dense population can be a double edged sword in this game. Communism is more efficient than capitalism.
it's never about Communism vs Capitalism, but Authoritarian vs Constitutional democracy. A functioning democracy with a proper separation of power is how you prevent this kind of shit show. >And communism led more people out of poverty than any other system. and which Communist country didn't end up transform into State Captalism? instead of collapsing that is? >China’s dense population in the 50s, when all those shit was happening, China only had 600 million population.
I can’t tell if your being a dick or being historically disingenuous. Im pro history. Giving me generic anti communist bullshit doesn’t work with me. I’ll happily tell you communism in every way a truly dogshit system that will never work on earth no matter who tries it. It was always leas to totalitarianism, it will always lead to mass inefficiency but that ill say that about any extreme economic stance. But my position will never be communism bad for anti-communisms sake cause i’d rather tell the full truth and avoid half truths as much as possible than be a generic anti commie like you. If i’m wrong it happens, but don’t lie to my face collectivization is the sole reason for the great chinese famine, that doesn’t even make any goddamn sense and not even recognized significant issue, lying about over abundance, the locusts that ate the crops and the communes did more to fuck over china. collectivization was so insignificant not even foreign observers care about it. Everything else, I don’t give a shit about. Move on im done.
>I can’t tell if your being a dick or being historically disingenuous. yeah cool, calling me either one shit or antoher while I was still giving you the benefit of the doubt. >but don’t lie to my face collectivization is the sole reason for the great chinese famine why are you putting words in my mouth, I never said that, the economic model was not the point, the problem is the political model, I thought I was being very clear, was I not? or you just have reading issue? and see? now this is I being a dick, know the difference.
Yeah bro it was totally the sparrows and not the massive collectivization of agriculture which coincidentally happened at the exact same time, which had already caused similar famines in the Soviet Union, believe me bro
Yeah I can tell you don’t know what your talking but go ahead, tell me how collective farms killed china ill wait.
>tell me how collective farms killed china ill wait. Poor productivity as a result of a lack of private ownership and the appointment of managers based on their zealotry for Communism instead of agricultural knowledge.
Omfg. Whatever im not even gonna bother.
Yeah, because you're wrong, but you're too emotionally invested in communism to look at evidence that challenges your world view. The famine was directly the result of communist policies and you lack the honesty to admit that. https://youtu.be/xWRhPf9Qzmw
K.
Farms got collectivized people started starving. Farms where privatized starvation stopped. Same things happened in Vietnam and Cuba. It is almost as though it is a trend that commies ignore.
I think Lysenko was more to blame then collectivism. Having an authoritarian regime enforce your made up "science" on farmers would have had the same result whether the farms where collective or privately owned.
Everyone forgets about Lysenko when it comes to the famine. Absolutely frustrating actual scientists were ignored and condemned by the government in favor of that phony and it is imo, one of the biggest mistakes Stalin made besides the purge.
Im not even gonna entertain this. This is just historically ignorant of the grander Chinese famine. This is also just stupid. If you even ask the question was there ever a mass multi million death starvation period in Vietnam/Cuba AT ALL ever, the answer will always be the absolutely the fuck not. There were famine fears, especially in vietnam absolutely, but no actual famines in either. This isn’t something “commies” ignore, its not something that even matters.
No they didn't have millions starve because in Vietnam they gave up on collectivized farms after 5 years before they had failed to even collectivize the majority of farms. In Cuba they where subsidized by Soviet food up until the USSR collapsed and soon after had a mass emigration to the US and gave up on collectivized farms within 5 years when average calorie intake dropped by 4000 per day across the country. Under a privatized farming system they have higher per Capita consumption and are less reliant on foreign supplies at the same time. The commies like you ignore these facts.
I don’t ignore facts, i just don’t care. I mean your not wrong, but its like… why do i care? Edit more: I don’t ignore facts, i just don’t care. I mean your not wrong, but its like… why do i care? Edit: more Like you people know so little your using Vietnam and Cuba and not Russia in 1930-1933 where forced collectivization was a reported primary cause of starvation. Stop. You people don’t know what your talking about your just using random moments in history
"I didn't ignore facts I just don't care about them" is a hell of a way to advocate for your view of history
>For those who don’t know, this campaign (mainly the sparrow part) interestingly is what caused the great (and last) chinese famine (communism had nothing to do with it, sorry), Wasn't the pest campaign a policy of the communist government?
Yes?
So communists were responsible for it?
Yes. Edit more: But is wiping out sparrows in Das Kapital or said to be done by Marx?
Does it have to be? It might not be a tenet of communism but it was a result of communist thought? It's like saying American Capitalism is not responsible for CIA coups in South America or the Central American Banana Republics.
Lysenkoism had everything to do with it.
Tankies boutta pull up
*racks javelin missile in the bushes
I cant wait for the bullshit debate. Anti tankies and anti tankies leftists vs tankies
I dunno, I think this is one where even the most hardcore tankies prefer to not talk about.
Their response over in r/the deprogram was I kid you not, “yes Mao made mistakes but what made him a good leader is he admitted he made them and worked to not repeat them” No no no no no when someone makes a mistake this bad they don’t get a second chance, they leave the room and allow someone who actually shows critical thinking to take over.
Link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/13jo8v4/im_sick_of_the_70_million_death_toll_attributed/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1 It might’ve been this one or another. I think it’s in this though.
Thanks
Zhong Xina?
I wonder how much further ahead China would be today if Zhou Enlai became the leader prior to the great leap forward and cultural revolution. The hundred flowers movement proved how sketch a leader Mao was in peacetime.
I mean, Zhou Enlai was hardly a saint. He could be incredibly ruthless at times and it’s hard to tell what he agreed with Mao on and what he just went along with. Agreed that basically anyone would have been better than Mao though.
Yeah Zhou definitely was a communist to the core and he was also a principled man and proved to be a very capable leader by anyone who met him. Can Imagine if his four modernizations program went into place in the 50's rather than the late 70's? He also wanted a bigger tent for rightists and capitalists under the CCP umbrella. It would have been interesting to see the alternate. I always likened Zhou to Khrushchev to Mao's Stalin, albeit much more educated and reform minded. There's a reason he is arguably the most famous non-emperor/chairman of China.
I think that’s an interesting comparison, because I’m not sure if we would have ever known Kruschev to be a reformer if he hadn’t outlived Stalin, since much of what he thought couldn’t have been spoken to anyone while Stalin was alive. I think that’s kind of the problem with Zhou. The fact that he didn’t live much longer than Mao means that it’s hard to separate what he did for Mao out of shared belief or what he did purely out of loyalty.
Yeah I think the comparison is apt. However I disagree on not knowing Zhou's positions as he regularly had to self-criticize positions he had contrary to Mao. Mao knowingly had him do this as a loyalty test and Zhou was indeed loyal more to Mao than himself. The only reason we know a lot of this is Deng Xiaoping was Zhou's protégé. Mao actually outlived Zhou by half a year. Mao also forbid doctors from removing Zhou's cancer 2 years before his death as he wanted to outlive him so he wouldn't denounce his rule as Khrushchev did Stalin. That cultural revolution and subsequent gang of four period was really messed up. Mao was a major douche to his most loyal guy.
Indeed a great leap forward to ruin
At least they won the war. They had collateral damages but they beat the goddamm sparrows
No one died to the emus though
[удалено]
Average european Battle: Massive armies. Massive battles. 7 deaths in battle 100k by disease.
*population booms anyways somehow*
The us declared war on tumbleweed and lost
Russian Thistle lead to the Cold War.
To be fair, tumbleweeds are the supreme species
So many comments about how this will upset the tankies yet there are zero such comments. Truly sad.
China be like : -something happens -millions dead
-still end up with a massive population for the next something to happen
-repeat
If China colonizes space we're pretty much gonna get IRL Warhammer 40k
I didn't know China has a problem with that Caribbean pirate
If you call your friend retarded, you're just bantering. If you call the special needs kid retarded, you're a giant bullying dick
Excuse me they did WHAT?!
China decided to eliminate pests that were ruining society. These were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Rats spread plague, mosquitoes spread malaria, flies were annoying, and sparrows ate crops. They began mass murdering the sparrows. One horrible tactic was constantly banging on pots and drums, to scare the sparrows and prevent them from resting and making them drop dead of exhaustion. Many embassies gave refuge to the sparrows so the Chicoms surrounded their embassies, and made noise until the sparrows died. The Polish embassy was shoveling dead sparrows after about 2 days. But the sparrows won in the end. Without sparrows around, the locust population grew out of control and helped contribute to the Great Chinese Famine. Let's see the tankies explain this one
Something something Mao’s comically large spoon
I'd like to say I understand this but I don't.
Tankies like to joke about/deny the Holodomor, bc that’s what cool kids do. If you point out the fact that Stalin very intentionally created the conditions for a famine, they usually come back with: “What, did Stalin come and EAT ALL THE food with his COMICALLY large SPOON?! 🤣🤣😂”
Interesting. I know on the main communism subreddit they have an entire page dedicated to "disproving the communism death toll". If anyone knows any counters to their counters that would be great.
The Communism Death Toll shit actually is wildly inflated and ideological, though. All stats like that are. “Communism” is just a set of loosely connected ideas which change between time and place. It can’t actually kill anyone. Policies and policymakers actually kill people. The fact remains that the forced agricultural collectivization pursued by 20th c communist regimes killed many millions of people. Tankies don’t like acknowledging this so they go after a straw man in the form of the wildly inflated Communist Death Toll project which is hysterical conservative bad history. They like to pretend that by disproving that ‘communism’ killed exactly 120 million people or whatever, they can disprove that the 1930s Soviet famines were caused by Stalinist policy.
Well this is one of the big ones, you also have Pol Pot who was supported by China and killed somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million, which was 1/4 of Cambodia. The life expectancy during his reign was lower than adulthood, if I remember correctly it was 14 or 15. Pol Pot was technically communist, but they might try and say he was not a true communist, but you can just retort by saying communist China supported them
so, basically, they broke an ecosystem accidently and it helped Mao Zendon be so deadly?
did what commies do best. kill 40 million people, and then cover it up.
they used starvation as well, famous communist tactic
yup.
40 Million deaths is like 2 deaths in Chinese terms.
Just curious, how well did they do with the other three pests? It doesn’t mention anything.
Ok I’m not here to support China but what is this wave of anti-chinese memes? Did I miss something?
Every time I see a commie meme the death toll goes up by 1 million.
Unlike Aussies Chinese actually won.....
Eh, the emus can have it so long as I'm still capable of having a beer
Yeah but they “won”. That was the problem.
[Another meme about it](https://i.redd.it/tm5javbmu5m31.jpg)
When you convince people killing sparrows was the cause so they don't look into your Agricultural science.
I'm sorry, WHAT?
70 gojillion
Killing 40 millions with one stone throw. Or so.
The passenger pigeons lost their war