Eroica

Has anyone else noticed that an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of western discourse concerning Chinese history deals with topics such as:

-Massacres
-Famines
-Natural disasters
-Persecutions

Even on this forum, as regards issues related to China, such topics arise on an unnervingly frequent basis despite being no more prominent in the history of China than the history of any other comparable nation. It amounts to a terrible misrepresenation to give such undue weight to the tragedies in the history of a country. It truly saddens me to see garbage like Jung Chang's "Mao: The Unknown" story and Frank Dikotter's "Mao's Great Famine" outperforming every scholarly work on Chinese history simply on the basis of them being packed to the brim with hyperbolic stories of death and suffering. What makes matters worse is that this misrepresentation is not usually innocent, it is politically motivated, as so much modern China scholarship tends to be. Hence why we end up with covers like this on supposedly "objective" accounts of Chinese history:



Just ranting.

dream208

The Orientalism is alive and kicking in the West.

mingming

How can it be "Unknown" if she knows it? Even her title defies the rules of logic.

I guess you have to chose authors and publishers carefully when you buy Chinese history books by Western scholars. Most of the books in my library are by Spence, Brooks, Ray Huang, or Frederick Wakeman Jr. I never even heard of "Dikotter". Also as a rule, I tend not to go into Chinese history after 1912, simply because there is too much politics involved.

Linschoten

So one shouldn't talk about what went on in China under Mao? What went on in Russia under Stalin? What went on in Germany under Hitler? Becausue it's all politically motivated propaganda? Because it can't be acknowledged in China as yet because the country is still under the rule of Mao's party?

Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter | Book review | Books | The Observer

Literary Review - Jonathan Mirsky on 'Mao's Great Famine' by fFrank Dikotter

Interview: Frank Dikötter, Author of 'Mao's Great Famine' [UPDATED] | Asia Society

gaius valerius

I am guessing you're simply picking the wrong books. Here, have a go at this one: . I've just read it and did not found it 'orientalist'.

mingming

No one said anything of the sort.

Nice you posted some reviews saying good stuff about the book. Now why don't you look at the opposite side of the coin and give us some negative reviews of it? Everything has two sides to it.

Linschoten

Indeed, it's all part of the debate.

Review of Frank Dikötter, Mao


The fact is that I would much rather read about China's rich and ancient culture, and the only threads on it that I have contributed to here have been about that; but the OP seems to me to beg quite a lot of questions. We were told for years that tales of what went on in Russia under Stalin were wildly exaggerated, and that people who wrote about them were just politically motivated; since the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, it has all become a matter mainstream discussion. And there is nothing anti-Chinese (let alone 'Orientalist') in people discussing these matters, anything morre than it is anti-German for people to discuss Nazi Germany. Though I do wish that people would talk more about other periods of German history!

mingming

No serious Chinese scholar can deny the existence of something like the GLF. The problem is a lot of books on the that subject seems to ignore the fact that the weather played just as important a role in the deaths of millions as the CCP policies. Around the same years the GLF was going on (1958 to 1961), there were droughts and poor weather conditions in China. For example in 1959, the Yellow River flooded, killing about 2 million people directly or indirectly. In 1960, there was a serious drought, followed by torrential rain in Southern China. All this was further compounded by poor leadership and poorer decision making by the CCP.

As for Dikotter's book, I noticed a lot of his points are nothing new. They have already been raised before by previous scholars. All he did was put the death toll higher, a number which is constantly being fought over by scholars. Therefore, Dikotter's numbers cannot be considered accurate because I don't think anyone knows the accurate number.

Jake10

I would say that there are far more misconceptions about the west being taught in China than the other way around. The biggest reason is that there are a lot of Chinese people in the west who contest the misconceptions in the classrooms, while here there are only a few students from the west studying. Also, students are freer to challenge teachers in the west.

Mandate of Heaven

I thought you had never heard of Dikotter just one hour ago.

What happened? You read the book in one hour?