MARK COLVIN: The 20th Century brought forth many monsters; many of them are recognised as such.

Very few people have any illusions about the scale and atrociousness of the actions of Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler.

But for some reason, Mao Zedong has escaped some of the disgust and contempt that most people retroactively feel for the dictators of the last century.

There are still shops selling Mao memorabilia, from posters and badges to copies of the Little Red Book.

But even if people think they're using these things ironically, how long will they be able to do so as more evidence of Mao's infamy emerges?

A new book, based on meticulous research in the Chinese archives, says Mao Zedong was responsible for the deaths of 45 million people between 1958 and 1962 alone.

It's called "Mao's Great Famine: A History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe", and its author is the scholar Frank Dikotter, of Hong Kong University.

The big numbers and the small details are simply mind boggling.

I asked Professor Dikotter; how do you kill 45 million people?

FRANK DIKOTTER: It's a large country but how do you go about doing that? The first step in 1958 is to pretty much declare, as Mao does, that every man, every woman is really a soldier in a giant army. And then you use that giant army in one continuous revolution, you deploy your workforce that runs in the hundreds of millions to tackle one task after the other; either working on irrigation projects in the evening, or smelting iron in backyard furnaces in daytime, or working on the fields.

Now, the problem with that approach is that once you start collectivising everybody, as you do in the army, once you start herding people together in giant people's communes and you collectivise everything, you strip people from their land, their homes, their livestock, their tools, there's absolutely nothing left, there's no incentive to work; the profit motive is gone.

The only thing that you have left is a stick; coercion and terror are the foundation of that regime and you must force famished people to go into the fields and do work for you.

MARK COLVIN: How did they coerce people?

FRANK DIKOTTER: People were... once the carrot is removed and there's nothing but a stick left, people are beaten all the time. People are forced to strip in the middle of the winter to work outside. Pregnant women…

MARK COLVIN: Why? Why would you force people to strip in winter?

FRANK DIKOTTER: You would force them to strip in the belief that they will have to work in order to stay warm. And this happened from the North all the way down to the South, even in Guangdong Province it happened.

In one case 300 people had to strip bare and work in the middle of the winter on an irrigation site. There's nothing but the stick to force people to do work. Some people have their ears chopped off, their noses lopped off. The slightest infraction is punished by drastic measures.

One man called Juan Se Eow (phonetic) for stealing a potato, has his legs tied up with iron wire, a 10 kilo stone dropped on his back; somebody chops off one of his ears and then he's branded with a sizzling tor.

In Sichuan some people are poured in petrol and sent alight. A small boy for having stolen a grain is punished; his father has to actually bury him alive and the man dies of grief himself. The whole thing...

MARK COLVIN: And you found all these things in the Beijing archives?

FRANK DIKOTTER: Not just Peking, there are dozens of archives. It's a massive one-party state that like all one-party states meticulously compiles its own crimes; there's extremely detailed records that give you the name, the place, who did what to whom when and where. An extraordinary amount of documentation that shows levels of violence and coercion are widespread throughout the country.

You could put it very simply; once there are no incentives to work in the countryside villages and party officials are locked in a spiral of violence, a mounting spiral of violence.

MARK COLVIN: And how long does this go on? It begins in the late 40s.

FRANK DIKOTTER: Well the so-called revolution takes place in 1949, so the Great Leap Forward started in '58, 10 years after the Chinese conquest of China.

MARK COLVIN: So the killing doesn't really start until the Great Leap Forward?

FRANK DIKOTTER: Indeed; 1958 and there is a retreat in 1962, so it's about four years of a catastrophe that destroys not just human beings but also housing stock. In some places Hunan Province, 40 per cent of all the housing is destroyed, to create fertilisers, to straighten roads, to punish people, to build giant canteens for the people's communes.

MARK COLVIN: So 45 million people in just four or five years; 10 million people a year he was killing?

FRANK DIKOTTER: That's... that's pretty much, that's pretty much it yes. And these are new statistics based on all sorts of surveys. Sometimes at the level of entire provinces like Sichuan, which is the size of France; extremely detailed surveys by the very public security bureaus themselves.

MARK COLVIN: How much of this was also reinforced with mass political brainwashing?

FRANK DIKOTTER: A lot. Even before this all starts in 1957 there is purge carried out to get rid of party members who somehow don't toe the line. Hundreds of thousands of party carders are dismissed and replaced by very hard unscrupulous men, who are quite willing to trim themselves to benefit from these radical whims that blow from Beijing, Peking.

And for the ordinary man on the street, farmers know very well that there is no point in speaking out or doing anything that might go against the grain. Falling asleep at a meeting is enough to warrant a beating. People who don't turn up in the morning in the canteen get beaten; some of them get banned from the canteen because they don't work hard enough. Nobody wants to speak out in those circumstances.

MARK COLVIN: Does the political brainwashing go on even after the Great Leap Forward is over?

FRANK DIKOTTER: 1962: the Great Leap Forward is over, this catastrophe doesn't quite stop; of course you can't just reverse a disaster of such gargantuan proportions, but at least people die in less greater numbers.

But then of course from 1962 to '66 there's a little bit of breathing space, but '66 is the start of the Cultural Revolution.

MARK COLVIN: And this cultural revolution then takes more lives.

FRANK DIKOTTER: It takes far less lives; it takes about two or three million as we can tell from what has been published on that topic so far on the basis of official and semi-official sources. God knows what the archives will reveal when they're opened on that particular period.

MARK COLVIN: Do you think it's possible as Jun Chang suggested five years ago in a book that Mao's ultimate death toll could be 70 million.

FRANK DIKOTTER: I don't think that would be very astonishing.

When we see the extraordinary extent of death and violence and coercion that took place during the Great Leap Forward, on the basis of these party archives, one really wonders what will come out once we can read on the Cultural Revolution.

And don't forget that while I've been able to use these party archives, not all of them are open, it's only a partial opening up. Everything is very sensitive in the central party archives in Beijing is still locked away very safety.

MARK COLVIN: Frank Dikotter, author of "Mao's Great Famine: A History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe".

A longer version of that interview, in which Professor Dikotter talks about why people didn't rebel, about the degree of denial in present-day China, and how he managed to get the information in the first place, will be on our website from this evening.


 

Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Mr Dikötter said that he was once again examining the Party's archives for his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.

He said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13,000 opponents of the new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks. "We know the outline of what went on but I will be looking into precisely what happened in this period, how it happened, and the human experiences behind the history," he said.

Mr Dikötter, who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said while it was difficult for any historian in China to write books that are critical of Mao, he felt he could not collude with the "conspiracy of silence" in what the Chinese rural community had suffered in recent history.