Jasper BeckerRezensionen

I came to this book after reading Grass Soup and In Search of My Homeland, both memoirs by "rightists" who had been sentenced to a labor camp during the 1958-1962 famine in China. I was interested in learning more about this time period of Chinese history, and Hungry Ghosts was a good overview: well-written and well-documented. He relied on hundreds of sources, both written and oral, Chinese and Western. One of the things I liked was that he references many internal reports and Chinese demographers, not relying on Western ones. There are extensive endnote citations and pages of bibliography. This is important because the famine has at various times been denied, acknowledged, ignored, and blamed on various factors by various people.

Becker begins with an overview of famine in China and elsewhere in the world, and in particular the Soviet famine of 1930-33. He discusses the causes of the famine, it's effect on various regions and groups of people (like the Tibetans and prisoners in the labor camps), and the aftermath, which led to the Cultural Revolution. He situates it in both Chinese history and in the world and spends several chapters at the end of the book discussing how the famine was documented, how the various death toll estimates were arrived at, and how the Western press influenced policy and was influenced.

I came at the book already knowing something about the famine from the memoirs I had read, and I think Becker was writing for an audience that either didn't know it had happened or denied it had happened. His tone at times was, I don't know, strident? in making his points. He was definitely trying to convince people. All in all, however, I found the book both easy to read and yet comprehensive and well-documented. I would recommend it to anyone interested in this time period.½

I really liked this book. It tells the story of Mao Zedong and what he did to China during his reign. Mao kept anybody outside of China in ignorance of what was happening in the horrific famine. His man-made famine is something very few people know about, even now. As my daughter said"How could something like that happen (45 million dead in 3 years) and I never learned about that in school?" This book will open your eyes.

One of the most compelling history books I've ever read, period. I'm a lover of history who recognizes that 90% of the books I read make most people fall to sleep - but with 'Hungry Ghosts', I recommend it even to those who typically would never pick up a history book at all.

The modern and recent scholarship of 'Hungry Ghosts' provides a perspective on Maoist China which has only recently been revealed. After reading this book, I must seriously reconsider the conventional wisdom that "Hitler was the most evil historical actor of the 20th century." But its even more than that, though: the megalomania of Mao, and the wild, collective mass-delusion of hundreds of millions of ideologically brainwashed Chinese is truly breathtaking to read about; nothing short of astonishing, even in the context of a century that was filled with many instances of insane atrocities.

Read this book.

Excellent Scholarship

This book looks at the disastrous policies of the Chinese Communist Party and how those policies led to famine in the late '50s and early '60s. Jasper's writing, while dry and uninteresting, is an example of excellent scholarship. He used countless sources, including many internal CCP documents, interviews, and plenty of statistical analysis. Mixed with the scholarship are several in-depth narratives that look at specific counties and provinces in China.

Becker's book is one of the first to detail the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone" and then Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine." The English translation of "Tombstone" removes about half of the original book's contents. "Mao's Great Famine" is somewhat more myopic than "Hungry Ghosts," providing little geography context for the hundreds of anecdotes Dikötter presents.

The scholarly debate between these books seems focused on the number of deaths. Taken together, the three books point to a death toll between 30,000,000 and 45,000,000 - an unfathomable tragedy. All three books correctly point out the disgusting human fault of the famine. Jasper's book, while dryer, does an excellent job of examining local and national faults.

The China of the 1990s is not exactly the same country as the China of today. It is the same place, and to some extent, the same people, but you could say the China of the 1990s was an entirely different world.

Perhaps the same is true for the author, as the chapters in this book, boldly entitled The Chinese, seem to be very different from what the author suggests in the introduction. There, the author writes that statistics in China are unreliable, nonetheless, each chapter of the book is studded with statistical data. Scandals and social problems described are quite typical of the 1990s, such as the countryside outbreak of AIDS caused by blood plasma recycling, and the popularity of qigong. In the introduction the author also writes that the book is structured as a pyramid, with many chapters devoted to describing young people, while the final chapters would be dedicated to describing the "ruling class" of cadres, but this structure is not discernable.

The material for the book was collected during the first five years of the author's stay in China, from 1995 - 2000, and the book was first published in 2002. It is the typical kind of journalistic writing, that relies heavily on limited sources claiming universality, hence the pompous title of pretending to be a book describing "The Chinese", a country of 1.3 billion people a tremendous diversity. As many such books, the undertone is hostile and critical at best.

The book is very boring to read, and by now quite outdated.

Interesting account of the historical background of how the two Koreas came into being and how their futures took the trajectories they did. Korea was historically a vassal state of China sort of a protectorate. In the early part of the 20th century it was annexed by a resurgent Japan and became a reluctant party to it's empire.

After WWII the two superpowers decided to split Korea at the very arbitrary 38th parallel with the North coming under the Soviet Orbit and the South under the influence of the US. The Soviets had to pick a stooge to run the northern part of the Peninsula so selected a pliant Kim Il Sung while there were several more deserving candidates. They were the ones who built up his image, projecting him to a level far above his original stature which was a minor minion in the Sino-Soviet war machine. He was the one who created a state where the people were made obligated to be greatful to it's benevolent leader. Following in his footsteps was his equally bizzare and subhuman offspring Kim Jong Il. A man who presided over the death of nearly 5 million of his own countrymen through starvation, purges and executions. A man who maintained a 10000 bottle wine cellar, an army of gourmet chefs and the best gourmet food flown in from around the world when his people were falling dead on the street from starvation. All this in a region of wealth and plenty and not sub-saharan africa.

The South was also ruled by a brutal dictator but his tactic was to give free reign to the Capitalists especially the founder of Hyundai who founded the Chaebols. Due to this tactic, South Korea has experienced exponential growth and prosperity.

Interesting account of the historical background of how the two Koreas came into being and how their futures took the trajectories they did. Korea was historically a vassal state of China sort of a protectorate. In the early part of the 20th century it was annexed by a resurgent Japan and became a reluctant party to it's empire. He was the one who created a state where the people were made obligated to be greatful to it's benevolent leader. Following in his footsteps was his equally bizzare offspring Kim Jong Il. A man who presided over the death of nearly 5 million of his own countrymen through starvation, purges and executions. A man who relentlessly pursued the

After WWII the two superpowers decided to split Korea at the very arbitrary 38th parallel with the North coming under the Soviet Orbit and the South under the influence of the US. The Soviets had to pick a stooge to run the northern part of the Peninsula so selected a pliant Kim Il Sung while there were several more deserving candidates. They were the ones who built up his image, projecting him to a level far above his original stature which was a minor minion in the Sino-Soviet war machine. Following in his foorsteps was his equally bizzare and subhuman offspring Kim Jong Il. A man who maintained a 10000 bottle wine cellar, an army of gourmet chefs and the best gourmet food flown in from around the world when his people were falling dead on the street from starvation. All this in a region of wealth and plenty and not sub-saharan africa.

The South was also ruled by a brutal dictator but his tactic was to give free reign to the Capitalists especially the founder of Hyundai who founded the Chaebols. Due to this tactic, South Korea has experienced exponential growth and prosperity.

A good overview of the operations of the North Korean government, it relies heavily on defector sources and is a pretty easy read. One drawback is that its primary focus on Kim Jong Il makes it a little dated now, but it still gives a good sense of the workings of the Kim family and the government.

Although this book is now a few years old, nothing that the North Korean regime has said or done since the mid 2000s leads one to challenge the picture presented in this book. The author, a foreign correspondent of long standing, covers many aspects of the history of the Koreas, the Kim family and the way in which they have systematically exploited their people and kept them cut off from the outside world in an intense and all-embracing way that very few other modern regimes have managed, except perhaps Enver Hoxha's Albania and Pol Pot's Kampuchea. Some of the examples of totalitarian repression, famine and extremely bizarre behaviour described here are almost unbelievable to a reader living in a stable Western democracy; indeed that very unbelievability has done the North Korean people a similar disservice to that inflicted on Jews when the first reports from the Holocaust leaked out and so much public and Governmental opinion in the West refused to believe such horrors could really be happening. But this book is not simply a catalogue of atrocities. The author quotes a wide range of different opinions and analyses North Korea's international role in nuclear weapons proliferation, the politics of trade, aid and international development, and the shifting nuances of its relationship with the Soviet Union/Russia and China. He comes up with a reasoned, though rather downbeat conclusion that neither the engagement approach of Bill Clinton and former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, nor the more confrontational approaches adopted earlier and later have really worked, but that there needs to be some kind of firmer international structure to isolate such rogue nations (at the time of writing this, even China seems to have lost patience with its former staunch ally). With the coming to power of the youthful Kim Jong Un, the regime's natural unravelling seems to be further away than ever before; there is no chance of a North Korean Gorbachev, nor, it would seem, even a North Korean Deng Xiao Ping.

My only small criticisms about the book were that the author occasionally jumped around a bit chronologically and there were sometimes a few too many dry economic statistics for this reader. 4.5/5½

This is one of the most fascinating book about the history of Beijing within the history of China. The book is a collection of chapters about different periods in Beijing's history and the people who were effected, usually negatively. After finished Becker's book, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of depression at history and culture of Beijing (and China) that was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution and the Communists. Becker sprinkles the book with his own insights and his feelings of loss at the destruction of all the history of China/Beijing, which I found both interesting and sad. If anything, City of Heavenly Tranquility caused me to be more interested in China, past and present.

Scary stuff kiddies.

long time Chinese correspondent writes about the Chinese people--beginning with the peasants, and moving up the classes of people including the cadres at the top and the private businessmen. Becker lets the Chinese speak for themselves, has many contacts and esposes many myths about China as understood as truths by many Americans. I learned a lot.

Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts: "North Korea seems in the grip of a death-cult psychosis that leaves it impervious to rational notions of self-interest" (339). Bruce Cumings on the kind of racism that is allowed to run free when talking about North Korea: "Prominent Americans lose any sense of embarrassment or self-consciousness about the intricate and knotty problems of racial difference and Otherness when it comes to North Korea and its leaders" (49).I'm sure there are better books about the Great Leap Forward out there. The author doesn't even try to hide his pro-West, anti-Communist, orientalist biases.

I'd like to give this book 3.5 stars, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and round up. This book manages to give a solid, fact-supported account of the story of where China has been, where it is today, and where it may go. It looses some points though because the facts appear in such large clumps that one can't digest them all at once. At first I tried, but my attention would drift I'd have lost the thread of what the facts were about by the time Becker returned to the narrative. I found the book much more engaging when I skimmed over the denser fact-clumps.

I first read this book when it came out. Now, 13 years later, I find it has lost none of its shock value. Every page heaps multiple outrages on multiple outrages. It is still the world's most outrageous coverup, and it cost 30 to 60 million deaths in three years Hitler and Stalin had nothing on Mao.
Unlike any other famine, this one did not have a political objective or a natural basis - it was essentially unintentional, and entirely man--made, making it even more horrifying. It was of such proportion the country even suppressed the 1964 census data. Doctors were not permitted to claim starvation as a cause of death. Cannibalism was rampant. And the entire time, China continued to export grain. The state's granaries remained full.
Mao implemented the "Great Lea Forward" to catch up to the West, using an agricultural policy he knew had totally failed in Stalin's USSR 25 years before. Everyone had to go along, or face death. No one could avoid lying that everything was going great, and exceeding expectations, because that's what Mao had to hear. The result was an unending and unendurable hell, which, far from catching up, actually saw wheat production actually drop below the level of the Han Dynasty, 2000 years prior.
The details elicit emotions like I have never experienced in reading the worst atrocities of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, probably because this had no such goal - it just happened and kept happening to a worse and worse effect. It is all thoroughly and painstakingly documented, making it absolutely believable, and horrifyingly real, from the bizarre policies that led to it (melting all metal in backyard furnaces to create "steel") to the insane agricultural "solutions" (cutting three to six foot deep furrows so the wheat harvest would multiply) inspired by Mao, it is all there, in seeming science fiction of the worst kind. Absolutely horrifying and totally absurd - if it wasn't true. Truly a must read.

A series of articles rather than a comprehensive history of Beijing by an author who laments the destruction of the old imperial city.

This is a sobering book. It will keep you up at night and astound you that such things actually happened. But - I also got a different look at Mao. For the longest time I just thought he was horrible. Now I think there are many things he didn't really know about. The lengths his people would go to in order to make it look like his idea's were working were unbelievable. Everyone was so afraid of not being a success that they were very deceptive. I recommend this book to give you a different look at how Mao got away with so much. Warning - if canniblism is too much for you to handle, do not read this book. It is harsh. (