| ID | 129450 |
| Title Proper | Response to 'hard facts and half-truths |
| Other Title Information | the new archival history of China's great famine' |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Dikotter, Frank |
| Publication | 2013. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | It is a rather perplexing task to respond to Anthony Garnaut's criticisms of Mao's Great Famine,1 in as much as his review2 provides ever-shifting characterizations of my book. The reader initially learns that, taken on their own, its first 16 chapters of 'general narrative' would represent 'a worthy sequel' (p. 232) to my earlier volume on Republican China.3 Unfortunately, the following 21 chapters of 'archival anecdotes stripped of geographical, temporal, and institutional context … are likely to generate discomfort on the part of the reader but not comprehension' (p. 232). Next, in what he describes as a
'pedantic exercise in cross-referencing footnotes' (p. 233), he claims that the first section of Mao's Great Famine owes 'a large unacknowledged debt to Yang Jisheng' (p. 233) and his pioneering study Tombstone,4 alleging that, in a series of 'unlikely coincidences' (p. 234), the sources I used in those chapters are heavily dependent upon leads taken from Tombstone. He then dissects one chapter's footnotes in detail, but rather grudgingly has to admit that later in that same chapter 'some illustrations of what communization meant in practice' are 'all [Dikötter's] own' (p. 234). Yet ultimately, a mere two and
one-half pages after judging them a worthy sequel to The Age of Openness: China before Mao, he complains that my 'chapters that describe the genesis of Great Leap policies' simply 'strip Yang's archival discoveries and synthesis of published material of the his- torical context provided by Yang' and then 'rearrange the resulting fragments into an idiosyncratic vignette of totalitarian folly' (p. 234). Both can hardly be true. |
| `In' analytical Note | China Information Vol. 27, No.3; November 2013: p.371-378 |
| Journal Source | China Information Vol. 27, No.3; November 2013: p.371-378 |
| Key Words | China ; Great Famine ; Mao's Great Famine ; Geographical Stripped ; Temporal Context ; Idiosyncratic Context ; Historical Context ; History |