What else is new, in all their diligence the galaxy brains are trying to undermine the academically rocksolid claim that cannibalism was widespread in China during the man made famines (1950s-1980) by trying to dispute those facts through stating that cannibalism has always been prevalent throughout Chinese history, so don't blame Daddy Mao plz!
This is platinum tier Changsplaining, the CCP simps have a habit of making themselves look even worse in their ideologically barreled rebuttals. Yes, Chinese culture is weird and the Chinese have been eating each other since the ethnogenesis of the Chinese people, and likely before that too. Likewise they'll probably start eating each other somewhere in the future again, it's somewhat of an intermittent cultural habit.
Cannibalism during the famines and especially Cultural Revolution was more than just a survival strategy though, and it's been documented in hundreds of cases how Party officials and young Red Guard cadres would eat the flesh, organs and reproductive organs of killed 'contra-revolutionaries' as an act of power. In Guangxi, which is the best documented province, the bodies of those people would then be put on meathooks at local markets, and the flesh sold as pork. This was not due to starvation but due to ritual cannibalistic practices fueled by revolutionary fervor.
Below are some anecdotal impressions from cannibalist communist China. Yikes!
This scene from Three Body Problem might've been based off the story of Wu Fushang.
In 1968, "a geography instructor named Wu Shufang (吴树芳) was beaten to death by students at Wuxuan Middle School. Her body was carried to the flat stones of the Qian River where another teacher was forced at gunpoint to rip out the heart and liver. Back at the school the pupils barbecued and consumed the organs."
Song Yongi, Chinese Historian working at Calstate LA, documents:
"Independent researchers in Guangxi counted a total of 421 people who were eaten. There were reports of cannibalism across 27 counties in Guangxi; that's two-thirds of all the counties in Guangxi. There was one man who was said to be in the so-called fifth category, who was beaten to death where he stood. He had two kids, one of 11 and one of 14. The local officials and armed militia said that it was important to eradicate such people, and so they not only killed those two children: they ate them too. This took place in Pubei county, Guangxi, where 35 people were killed and eaten in total. Most of them were rich landowners and their families. There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this."
Time:
'On July 10, 1968, a criticism rally was held in front of the Shangjiang Town hall, Sanli district. During the ensuing chaos, Liao Tianlong, Liao Jinfu, Zhong Zhenquan and Zhong Shaoting were beaten to death.
"Their bodies were stripped of flesh, which was taken back to the front of the brigade office to be boiled in two big pots. Twenty or thirty people participated in the cannibalism. Right out in the open, they boiled human flesh in front of the local government offices.”
Frank Dikotter, professor and chair of humanities at the University of Hong Kong states
"it is not enough to eliminate your class enemy. You have to eat his heart, so there are very well-documented cases of ritual cannibalism. There was a hierarchy in the consumption of class enemies. Leaders feasted on the heart and liver, mixed with pork, while ordinary villagers were allowed only to peck at the victims' arms and thighs."
1993, Newsweek:
"the accounts were harrowing. Principals killed in schoolyards by students, then cooked and eaten. Government-run cafeterias displaying human bodies hanging from meat hooks and dishing them out to employees ... Documents smuggled out of China last week described atrocities of the Cultural Revolution in grotesque detail."
You know nothing of Chinese history,
you just plagiarized, cut and pasted large text from an anti-China X account and post :
Pretty obvious straight plagiarism, complete with the author's original typos, like "Song Yongi, Chinese Historian working at Calstate LA". His actual name is Song Yongyi, chere is no "Yongi" in Chinese, and noone puts "Calstate" in one word, it's
Cal State.
Next time you plagiarize, at least make an effort to not be so obvious, lest you become known as the Nasa Test Pilot of anti-Chinese/anti-Russian/pro-Israeli commentary on this board...
This being said, here is my criticism of the post by Andrew Côté (who btw is
a neoliberal luciferian satanist from San Francisco) that LaNegra ripped off:
Dikötter is a virulent anti-China activist-academic, along the same lines as Adrian Zenz or Sarah Paine. It's kind of surprising that he is still based in Hong Kong, though he really is part of the Hoover Institute US neocon academic ecosphere. As is Song Yongyi, the Cal State Fullerton prof also quoted above.
I can also quote articles from Time or Newsweek about the Bucha massacre, incredibly deceptive outright anti-Russian lies, turning the massacre of Bucha civilians who collaborated with the Russian troops that conquered the city by Ukrainian militia (the "Safari" unit) into fictitious Russian war crimes:
The scenes of depravity they left behind have changed the course of the war in Ukraine. The Russian army’s crimes, described in both Kyiv and Washington as a campaign resembling genocide, have hardened the will of Western governments to arm Ukraine and narrowed the space for a negotiated peace. Leaders from across Europe have come through Bucha to see the devastation for themselves. They emerged voicing new pledges of support for Zelensky, promising more than a billion dollars in military aid from the European Union alone.
The scenes of depravity in this commuter town outside Kyiv have changed the course of the war in Ukraine
time.com
There is no doubt that the Cultural Revolution was a period of great repression and bolshevik folly along the lines of the Khmer Rouge horrors in Cambodia, the Bolshevik culls of the 1920 or the
Grande Terreur during the French Revolution. Dikötter's estimate of 2 million killed is probably an accurate high estimate, but cannibalism was a very marginal phenomenon among those millions.
As well, making sweeping generalizations on Chinese culture based on that decade of bolshevik folly would be as misguided as making those generalizations about German culture based on the Weimar period, or on French culture based on the Great Terror.
Dikötter also has other kooky takes about China, he is so anti-China that he claims that the period of prohibition on opium that came after opium was strictly banned under Mao was worse than when opium was evrywhere in China. In fact the CPC culled over a million drug dealers, triad members and people who profited from the opium trade. They took the same wide net approach as Bukele did in El Salvador, except they killed the people they've rounded up instead of putting them in labor camps.
In
Patient Zero (2003) and
Narcotic Culture (2004),
Dikötter posits that the impact of the prohibition of opium on the Chinese people led to greater harm than the effects of the drug itself. These works
have been poorly received by academics, with historian
Kathleen L. Lodwick saying that "
Narcotic Culture appears to be one of the
revisionist histories of which there have been several lately that have aimed at convincing us that
imperialism wasn't all that bad, or at least that we should not blame the imperialists, in this case the opium traders who made vast fortunes from the trade, for the social problems they created. Closer attention to accuracy in the bibliography would have caught some errors, which appear more than once and so are not simply typos."
Alan Baumler wrote in his review of
Narcotic Culture, "the authors' unwillingness to engage with the secondary literature, poor conceptualization, and questionable use of evidence make the study less useful than it could be."
Timothy Brook wrote that the authors of
Narcotic Culture "float some extraordinary propositions that go not only beyond received wisdom, but beyond actual evidence and even common sense."
Dikötter is also from the same retarded school of professional China doomers as Gordon Chang, claiming that the economy of China is all smoke and mirrors and is going to collapse anytime now.
