101 Ways To Insult China

Right, I didn't even realise it was a real book that you can order from amazon until I read this article (and then googled). Hmm, have you read it? Does it say anything about boiling babies? ...Next time I'm home...

Yeah, sure I've read it.

Its up on my shelf next to my copy of マンガ中国入門 やっかいな隣人の研究 and my personal collection of neo Nazi litrature.

The book is garbage. I wouldn't use it to wipe my bum on.

It takes any regime that is vaigly socialist, and any crime that happened in proximity to that regime, and it nails both on the doors of communism.

85 million as a death toll for communist rule in the 20th century seems LOW, no? Man-made famine in the Ukraine and in GLF China accounted for 60 million deaths alone.

Some figures put it as high as 144 Million.

Personally, I think that's steep.

None of these criticisms of the Black Book of Communism touch the claim that Chinese boiled babies for food or for fertilizer. Is there any evidence that they did or did not? Whether or not the book makes overly broad generalizations is not relevent to whether it is factual or not.

When I was in school in California, the editor of our school newspaper received death threats and Vietnamese marched in the streets, all in response to an article claiming there was no longer a local dog population because Vietnamese had eaten them. Vietnamese-Americans found this claim inconvenient and abhorrent, but in fact it was true.

Given the fact that Chinese did many disgusting things during the cultural revolution, making these claims believable if unlikely, shouldn't you argue with the facts rather than the messenger lest we all conclude that the claim might be true?

I haven't actually read the Black Book myself, but I am told that on page 492, it says that in Henan, during 1959:-

"Thousands of detainees were systematically tortured, and children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer––at the very moment when a national campaign was telling people to "learn the Henan way."

The book also claimss that there were 63 proven incidents of canbalism in Henan duiring that time, including some cases in which children were eaten

I've been told that the original source for this was “Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine” by Jasper Becker, which claimed that a party secretary named Jiang Xuezhon ordered children's bodies to be rendered down to make fertilizer (The ex Italian pm claimed that it was on Mao's orders).

I haven't personally verified either of the above. However, I would suggest that if you are interested in the topic, that you should be the one to find credible evidence that it happened.

On the whole though, I would take anything in a book such as this with a very large dose of salt. There may be truth there, but it certainly wasn't official state policy to kill children for use as fertilizer, and while there were some real incidents of cannibalism during Mao's time, they were in extreme situation. Situations which I might add were very similar to instances in which Americans and Europeans also resorted to eating the dead.

i hope China would put aside communism in the future, it's ruining the country

China isn't actually communist. Not in the traditional sense of the word.

It is a centralized legalist society with state ownership of farming land, but it's not really comunist and it is getting less so as time goes on.