Lies about Mao

 https://mronline.org/2011/06/26/revisiting-alleged-30-million-famine-deaths-during-chinas-great-leap/

Thirty years ago, a highly successful vilification campaign was launched against Mao Zedong, saying that a massive famine in which 27 to 30 million people died in China took place during the Great Leap period, 1958 to 1961, which marked the formation of the people’s communes under his leadership.  The main basis of this assertion was, first, the population deficit in China during 1958 to 1961 and, second, the work of two North American demographers, A J Coale (Rapid Population Change in China 1952-1982, 1982) and Judith Banister (China’s Changing Population, 1987).  No one bothered to look at the highly dubious method through which these demographers had arrived at their apocalyptic figures.

The ‘estimate’ was later widely publicised by Amartya K Sen, who built an entire theory saying that democratic freedom, especially press freedom, in India meant that famine was avoided while its absence in China explains why the world did not know that such a massive famine had taken place until as much as a quarter century later when the North American demographers painstakingly uncovered it.

The capitalist press was happy to reciprocate the compliment by repeatedly writing of “30 million famine deaths,” to the extent that a fiction was established as historical fact in readers’ minds.  The London Economist had a special issue on China some years ago, which repeated the allegation of 30 million deaths in three separate articles and refused to publish the Letter to the Editor this author sent contradicting the claim.  More recently, in his Introduction to the book Mao Zedong on Practice and Contradiction, which he edited and published in 2006, Slavoj Zizek also mentioned the figure of 30 millions as though it were a given fact.  Well-known intellectuals have to be taken seriously and the claim examined.

There are two routes through which very large ‘famine deaths’ have been claimed — firstly, population deficit and, secondly, imputing births and deaths which did not actually take place.  Looking at China’s official population data from its 1953 and 1964 censuses, we see that if the rate of population increase up to 1958 had been maintained, the population should have been 27 million higher over the period of 1959-1961 than it actually was.  This population deficit is also discussed by the demographers Pravin Visaria and Leela Visaria.  The population deficit was widely equated with ‘famine deaths.’  But 18 million of the people alleged to have died in a famine were not born in the first place.  The decline in the birth rate from 29 in 1958 to 18 in 1961 is being counted as famine deaths.  The Chinese are a highly talented people, but they have not learnt the art of dying without being born.

There is a basic responsibility that everyone, and more particularly academics, has to be clear and precise about.  To say or write that “27 million people died in the famine in China” conveys to the reader that people who were actually present and alive starved to death.  But this did not actually happen and the statement that it did is false.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140715080652/https://mzd.szhgh.com/maoshidai/2014-07-11/56759.html

famine

@pawelwargan

The famines that occurred early on in revolutionary societies were in fact the last famines of the capitalist-feudal order that came before. Socialism solved the problem of hunger, which had tormented the peasantry for centuries.

Historical records from pre-revolutionary China cite 1,828 catastrophic famines over about 2,000 years, or roughly one per year. These would routinely claim millions of lives. What stopped them? The revolution, with its land reforms and Communist Party forces tasked with serving the people.

That process did not happen with the snap of the fingers, but required seismic social transformations — a long struggle of shedding the old and building the new. That is why the last famine occurred after the revolution.

We also know what happens when the capitalist dictatorship is restored in a formerly socialist country. After the defeat of the USSR, hunger returned to Russia at levels unseen since the immediate post-war period, when the country was still reeling from the effects of Germany’s war of extermination.

The levels of hunger and death imposed by global capital on the people of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990s were historically unprecedented in peacetime.

China's hydraulic culture

China has suffered massively from floods, famine and civil war for thousands of years.

Their flooding problem is unique on the planet and a destructive force like no other.

Imagine a Mississippi river that overflows every couple of years, moves hundreds of miles every few decades and never stops.

The book series "3 Body problem" is a metaphor for China's floods. Chinese know their geography requires a hydraulic culture to survive, it's just a question of having a competent one.

The CCP has brought sovereignty, peace, and prosperity to 1.4 billion Chinese.

https://x.com/i/status/2109633225819816217

"the 1855 avulsion moved the Yellow River’s outlet from south of the Shandong Peninsula (Yellow Sea) to the Bohai Gulf about 300 miles north, and compares that single event to the Mississippi somehow relocating from New Orleans across the American South to reach the Atlantic at St. Augustine, Florida (~600 miles).

The Yellow River is famous for this because of its enormous sediment load from the Loess Plateau (historically ~1–1.6 billion tons per year, far higher than the Mississippi’s ~0.2–0.3 billion tons). On the flat North China Plain the sediment settles, raising the bed until the river becomes an “above-ground” (suspended) river, often higher than the surrounding land. When levees fail, the water seeks a lower path and can abandon its channel.

~1,593 levee breaches/floods.

26 major course changes (some counts of ~6 especially large ones).

Outlets shifted between the Bohai Sea (north of Shandong) and the Yellow Sea/Huai system (south), distances of hundreds of miles/kilometers.

Chinese saying: it “breaches its banks twice in three years and changes course once in a century.”

In the last millennium one analysis found lower-course shifts roughly every ~25 years and breaches about once a year on average (higher in chaotic periods).

Delta/terminal channels were even more mobile: dozens of shifts (reports of >50 since 1855; roughly every decade in some modern periods before heavy engineering)."

China's rare earth elements plan

A continuing series of well thought out 5 year plans gave China their rare earth elements empire while the West was sleeping.

https://archive.ph/dTVFT

China’s centrality in rare earths didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of decades of planning and domestic and overseas investment, often directed from the highest levels of the party and the Chinese government.

A Five-Year Plan drafted by Mr. Deng and Mr. Fang, covering 1981 to 1985, ordered that China “increase the production of rare-earth metals.”

Today, China is working to cement its lead in rare earths by churning out more trained technicians and researchers than any other country. Programs in rare earths are offered by 39 universities.

The United States and Europe have no such programs — not even at Iowa State University, an institution that once trained generations of American engineers in rare earths. Iowa State has not offered a course in rare earths for the last several years and has one graduate student doing independent study in the field. It plans to offer a course next year.

China has hundreds of scientists exploring rare-earth technologies. Technicians at a refinery in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, spent seven years doing experiments to refine dysprosium, a rare earth, to extraordinary purity. The refinery is now the world’s sole source of that rare earth, which is used in capacitors — tiny devices to control electricity — found in Nvidia’s Blackwell artificial intelligence chips.

Cornell rape accusations

 https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/2105704280217055649

(she expected them to) reward her by making sure she gets to be "one of the guys" - a sort of friend of the frat who gets special privileges. After the night of sex when the men told others what happened and then uninvited her from their party, she felt like they did not hold up their end of the implicit bargain. in her head, she played the role of the cool girl for them, and then they threw her away. She went from feeling like "the cool chick," to feeling like a dupe who got used and tossed aside.

She sees her consent as contingent on their silence and a place in their group; "I never would have agreed to do those things had I known you would destroy my reputation, and kick me out of the group." In her head, since consent was contingent on being given a place in their group and their social protection, when they broke their end of the agreement her consent was (in her mind) contingent upon, her consent no longer holds.

False rape accusations

Duke (2006)

Crystal Mangum accused three Duke lacrosse players of gang rape. Charges were dropped; the players were declared innocent by the North Carolina Attorney General. Mangum later admitted the story was fabricated.

Hofstra (2009)

An 18-year-old student accused five men of gang rape in a campus bathroom. She recanted within days after a cell-phone video showed consensual sex. She was charged with filing a false report.

Xavier (2012)

Basketball player Dez Wells was expelled after a fellow student accused him of sexual assault. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters investigated, a grand jury declined to indict, and Deters publicly called Xavier’s process “fundamentally unfair.” Wells transferred to Maryland and later settled a lawsuit with Xavier.

UC Boulder (2013)

A student (Sarah Gilchriese) reported an alleged assault months after it supposedly occurred. Prosecutors declined to charge. The university’s handling of the case and related Title IX complaints drew federal scrutiny and later lawsuits from accused students claiming biased investigations.

UVA / Rolling Stone (2014)

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article “A Rape on Campus” described a brutal fraternity gang rape of a student identified as “Jackie.” Police found no evidence; Rolling Stone fully retracted the story. The account collapsed under basic fact-checking.

Mattress Girl / Columbia (2014)

Emma Sulkowicz accused fellow student Paul Nungesser of rape and carried a mattress around campus as a protest art project. Columbia’s process found Nungesser not responsible. He later sued; the university settled.

Clemson (2015)

Andrew Pampu was found responsible by the university after Erin Wingo claimed she was too intoxicated to consent. A friend later texted Pampu admitting they had lied. A jury awarded Pampu $5.3 million in a defamation/conspiracy case (later partially reversed on appeal).

Sacred Heart (2016)

Nikki Yovino accused two football players of rape at an off-campus party. She later admitted the sex was consensual and that she had lied to preserve a romantic relationship. She pleaded guilty to false reporting and served prison time. The players sued her and the university.

These cases share several features: rapid institutional action under Title IX pressure, limited due-process protections for the accused, heavy media or campus-activist coverage before facts were established, and eventual recantation, prosecutorial refusal to charge, or civil findings that the original claims were false or coordinated.

Why are students allowed to run wild in public schools?

The Obama administration’s January 8, 2014 Dear Colleague letter on the “Nondiscriminatory Administration of School Discipline,” essentially instituted racial quotas on any attempts to control student behavior.

Using Civil Rights Data Collection figures showing large racial gaps in exclusionary discipline:

• Black students were about 15% of enrollment but accounted for 35% of students suspended once, 44% of those suspended more than once, and 36% of those expelled.
• Black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as White peers to be suspended or expelled.
• Over half of school-related arrests and law-enforcement referrals involved Black or Hispanic students. 

The letter argued these gaps were not explained by differences in the frequency or seriousness of misbehavior. It applied a disparate-impact standard under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act: a race-neutral policy could still violate federal law if it produced a “disproportionate and unjustified effect” on students of a particular race. Schools that failed to address such disparities risked federal investigations and loss of funding. It also promoted alternatives to suspension and expulsion (restorative practices, counseling, positive behavioral interventions) and warned against over-reliance on school resource officers.