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Hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, computer-security experts and U.S. officials say.

By DAVID E. SANGERNICOLE PERLROTH

The New York Time

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Tensions remained high on the Korean peninsula throughout April, due to the massive US-led military exercises, carried out together with their south Korean puppets, aimed at rehearsing a possible invasion and occupation of the socialist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north of the peninsula, as well as a possible nuclear conflict with both the DPRK and China.

The US deployed F-22 stealth war planes to south Korea on 31 March, following two weeks of massive demonstrations of US military firepower, which had included dummy bombing raids by nuclear capable B-52 bombers and B-2 stealth bombers, all this clearly indicating US preparedness to resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the event of any conflict in the region.

B-2 bombers carry 16 B83 nuclear bombs, each with a yield of 1.2 megatons – 75 times the power of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. If two B-2 bombers dropped their payloads on north Korea, they would destroy all its large and medium-sized cities.

Furthermore, US B-1 bomber pilots at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas reportedly shifted their training programmes to training for trans-Pacific flights towards targets in East Asia, instead of flights to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Washington also upgraded a shipment of 60 F-15 fighter planes to south Korea and also sent a large number of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) trucks. The newspaperUSA Today indicated that these trucks, used to guard against roadside bombs in US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, would “ offer similar protection in north Korea, should US forces need to travel on its roads” – in other words, if US forces sought to invade and occupy the DPRK.

Missile defence targets China

At the same time, the US sent three guided missile destroyers to Korean waters and announced a 50 percent increase in its anti-ballistic missile interceptor systems in Guam and Alaska. Although ostensibly defensive in nature, such missile interceptor systems could, by removing the country’s ability to meaningfully retaliate, potentially leave China at the mercy of a US nuclear first strike.

A recent article entitled ‘War with China’, published in Survival, the magazine of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think tank patronised by and serving the UK’s military and security establishment, sets out some of the calculations in leading US circles regarding the possibility of war with the DPRK or of ‘regime change’.

Written by James Dobbins, a former US assistant secretary of state who currently holds top positions at the RAND think tank, it cites “collapse” in the DPRK as the most likely cause of a war between China and the United States, followed by conflict over Taiwan, cyber war, conflict over control of the South China Sea, and conflicts with India.

Dobbins makes clear that aggressive military operations by the United States, sending forces into the DPRK, is at the heart of any response envisaged by Washington and that it would lead to the distinct possibility of a clash with Chinese forces stationed along the China-DPRK border.

He writes: “The immediate operational concerns for United States Forces-[south]Korea/Combined Forces Command would be to secure ballistic-missile-launch and WMD["weapons of mass destruction"] sites. If any coherent north Korean army remained, it could be necessary to neutralise its long-range artillery; it could be necessary to neutralise its long-range artillery threatening Seoul as well… While south Korea would provide sizeable forces and capabilities for these missions, they would be inadequate to deal with the scope and complexity of a complete north Korean collapse. Substantial and extended commitments of US ground forces would be required to rapidly seize and secure numerous locations, some with vast perimeters .”

Dobbins adds: “The likelihood of confrontations, accidental or otherwise, between US and Chinese forces is high in this scenario.”

US imperialism goes by the playbook

Whilst all these aggressive moves by the US to ratchet up tensions in and around Korea are claimed to be in response to actions by the DPRK, including and following from its third nuclear test in February, on 4 April, mainstream US media, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal, revealed that the Pentagon has all along been following a step-by-step plan, dubbed “the playbook“, drawn up months in advance and approved by the Obama administration earlier in the year.

The flights to South Korea by nuclear capable B-52 bombers on 8 March and 26 March, by B-2 bombers on 28 March, and by advanced F-22 Raptor fighters on 31 March were all part of this pre-arranged script, designed to demonstrate, to the DPRK in the first instance, the ability of the US military to conduct nuclear strikes at will anywhere in North East Asia.

Contrary to lying imperialist propaganda, there is absolutely nothing defensive about any such moves by the US. According to CNN, the “playbook” was drawn up by former defence secretary Leon Panetta and “supported strongly” by his replacement, Chuck Hagel. The plan was based on US intelligence assessments that “there was a low probability of a north Korean military response” – in other words, that the DPRK posed no actual threat, the very opposite of what imperialist governments and mass media have been preaching daily and incessantly for the last several months.

US officials even cynically claimed that Washington would now, following this unprecedented display of US nuclear blackmail step back, due to supposed concerns that American actions and statements “could lead to miscalculations” by the DPRK.

Yet at the same time, Defence Secretary Hagel emphasised the supposed military threat posed by the DPRK, declaring that it presented “ a real and clear danger“. The choice of words was deliberate and menacing, being an echo of the phrase “a clear and present danger” habitually used to justify past US wars of aggression.

British imperialism hitched to the war chariot

British imperialism has also given its full political backing to US imperialism’s war drive in East Asia. Prime Minister David Cameron used a 4 April visit to Scotland to claim it to be a “fact” that the DPRK has the technology to attack both the United States and the United Kingdom with a nuclear missile.

Speaking to workers in the defence industry, Cameron said: “How concerned am I about north Korea? Very concerned, it has extremely dangerous technologies in terms of nuclear and its weapons [sic]… The fact is, as I wrote in a [Daily Telegraph] newspaper article this morning, north Korea does now have missile technology that is able to reach, as they put it, the whole of the United States and if they’re able to reach the whole of the United States they can reach Europe too. They can reach us too, so that is a real concern .”

Even ruling class pundits were quick to nail Cameron’s hyperbole as outrageous lies.

James Hardy, Asia Pacific Editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, a prestigious establishment publication, commented: “ From what we know of its existing inventory, north Korea has short and medium range missiles that could complicate a situation on the Korean Peninsula (and perhaps reach Japan), but we have not seen any evidence that it has long-range missiles that could strike the continental US, Guam or Hawaii .”

If this seasoned military analyst is correct, then the entire basis on which US imperialism, along with its allies and lackeys, is presently targeting the DPRK is completely spurious.

Mark Fitzpatrick, Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the IISS, and a former official in the George W Bush administration, bluntly told ITN News: “North Koreadoes not have any missile capabilities that could hit Britain, and it is difficult to envision circumstances when north Korea ever would want to attack the UK, even if they could .”

Clearly, besides a craven desire to crawl before Washington, Cameron’s major motivation for his Goebbelsian ‘big lie’ is his wish to preserve the ability of British imperialism to do precisely what he accused the DPRK of contemplating, namely delivering a nuclear strike against its enemies.

Cameron used the mythical threat from the DPRK to argue for maintaining and then replacing Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines. Here he was playing politics as the Conservatives are in favour of a Trident replacement system but are presently in conflict with their Liberal Democrat coalition partners as to whether to maintain a continuous at-sea nuclear “deterrent“, given the huge costs associated with commissioning a new generation of submarines.

Cameron told his audience during a visit to one of the Royal Navy’s Vanguard-class submarines: “I strongly believe we should replace [Trident] on a like-for-like basis. … There are nuclear states and one cannot be sure how they will develop.”

Expanding on his theme, he made clear that his broader political aim is to legitimise the ongoing US aggression against the DPRK, up to and including British support and participation in a possible war. A token British military contingent has in fact been participating in the current military exercises in Korea. Around 1,000 British military servicemen lost their lives in the Korean War of 1950-53.

The Prime Minister said: “ I think the question we need to ask ourselves in the context of this debate about a nuclear deterrent, is what will a country like north Korea be like in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years .” He added: “ To me, having that nuclear deterrent is quite simply the best insurance policy you can have that you will never be subject to nuclear blackmail.”

That, of course, is precisely the conclusion that the DPRK has itself rightly drawn from more than 60 years of constant US imperialist threats of nuclear attack, fully backed by British imperialism. But coming from the mouth of a UK prime minister it reverses black and white. The issue is not what the DPRK, or any other anti-imperialist state, might, completely hypothetically do, three decades from now, but rather the very real nuclear blackmail and warmongering practised by US and British imperialism in the here and now.

Once again, the British ruling class is happily helping to serve up the lies necessary to justify military aggression by US imperialism. The parallels with the claims made by the Labour government of Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 are all too obvious – you only need to substitute Cameron for Blair, Kim Jong Un for Saddam Hussein and you have another ready-made ‘dodgy dossier’ designed to make the case for war.

The only difference is that any war on the Korean peninsula would be even more devastating and destructive than the genocidal war waged against Iraq, as it could very easily turn into a nuclear conflict involving not just the DPRK, but also China and quite possibly Russia, too.

Blackmailing Beijing

It is by playing on such very real fears that US imperialism is exerting enormous pressure on China with a view to weakening or severing its historic alliance with the DPRK.

The two major parties of US imperialism are predictably singing from the same hymn sheet in this regard.

On CBS, Republican Senator, and former presidential contender, John McCain of Arizona said: “China can cut off their [the DPRK's] economy if they want to. Chinese behaviour has been very disappointing, whether it be on cyber security, whether it be on confrontation in the South China Sea, or whether it be their failure to rein in what could be a catastrophic situation .”

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York added: “The Chinese hold a lot of cards here. They’re by nature cautious, but they’re carrying it to an extreme. It’s about time they stepped up to the plate and put a little pressure on the north Korean regime.”

Making it crystal clear how the US build up of missile defence systems is intended to blackmail Beijing, US Deputy Defence Secretary Ashton Carter declared: “If north Korea is causing the US and others to take actions which they [the Chinese] find to be the sort of thing that they do not like to see, there is an easy way to address that.”

In fact, a major US upgrade of missile defence systems in California and Alaska, targeting China, was decided by the Obama administration months ago, long before the recent upsurge in tensions with the DPRK.

Nevertheless, this same message has now been carried to Beijing by a succession of high level US visitors, in the space of two weeks, starting with Secretary of State John Kerry. Speaking in the south Korean capital Seoul before arriving in Beijing, Kerry made clear that the US would continue to deploy anti-ballistic and other strategic weapons whose main target can only be China, unless Beijing “put some teeth” into forcing the DPRK to give up its tiny arsenal of nuclear weapons.

After meeting with Chinese leaders, Kerry said the discussion had included “why we have taken the steps that we have taken” in missile defence. “ Now obviously if the threat disappears – i.e. North Korea denuclearises – the same imperative does not exist at that point of time for us to have that kind of robust forward leaning posture of defence ,” he claimed.

The US is aware that China presently accounts for an absolute majority of the DPRK’s foreign trade and supplies nearly all the country’s oil and much of its food. So long as this state of affairs continues, US-led sanctions cannot have a decisive effect on the country.

It is therefore ardently to be hoped that, in their mutual interest, and that of the working and oppressed people of the whole world, both these socialist countries would resist imperialist blackmail and attempts at ‘divide-and-rule’, and would value and safeguard their historic alliance, which was created and nurtured by such outstanding revolutionaries as Comrades Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and which has served both countries so well, and that neither of them would say or do anything that might undermine their traditional revolutionary friendship.

In Britain, the revolutionary working class movement must give its full support to the DPRK in its courageous struggle against nuclear blackmail and threats of US-led aggression and demand:

Hands off Korea!

novanews

RT

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and President Xi Jinping at the signing of a joint statement on deepening mutually beneficial cooperation and relations, a comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation in the framework of negotiations between the leaders in the Grand Kremlin Palace (RIA Novosti / Sergey Guneev)

Economic goals aside, a principle aim of the BRICS is creating a multi-polar world where political change gives the people of member states more clout, professor Shreeram Chaulia told RT.

South Africa is making final arrangements for a summit of the world’s fastest developing economies – known as the BRICS group – which is due to start on Tuesday.

The heads of government of Brazil, Russia, India, China and the host nation South Africa, will convene for a fifth time, with the group being hailed as potential game-changer for the International arena.

Professor and dean of New Delhi-based Jindal School of International Affairs, Shreeram Chaulia says the BRICS has justified its existence, making achievements both on the economic and political fields.

RT: This summit’s us significance is in the fact it concludes the first cycle hosted by all the members. So what’s the group actually achieved in that time?

Shreeram Chaulia: It has grown in political maturity. I would say that from the early days when it was seen as an upstart, was still getting its act together and resolving and ironing out some differences – we have come a long way in five years. The fact that these summits are continuing to be held is silencing some of the critics, who said it was a marriage of convenience or just a short piece item, nothing more. What we are seeing now is that the agenda has quite advanced, especially, in the economic realm. The economic integration between Latin America, Asia and Africa has been spearheaded by this vehicle of the BRICS. And BRICS has become, I would say microcosm of the multi-polar world order. And it’s no small achievement.

RT: The new Chinese leader Xi Jinping has strengthened relations with Russia on his first official visit abroad – to Moscow – will this have any significance on the group? 

SC: Definitely, Russia and China are the central pillars of the BRICS. If you remember they were the originators of the concept and they have in many ways brought along South Africa, India and Brazil to play a larger role. And also Russia and China are much more global in their overall approach towards the world order and trying to transform the world order. The other three I would say are a little more “status quiet”, although they too want to move towards multi-polarity.

So, Russia and China, the fact that the leadership in both countries in emphasizing how this two can become a kind of a steering mechanism, within the five-member group of BRICS and in many ways set the agenda is undeniable. In India, we welcome the fact that Russia is there because it also helps us to overcome any concerns that China will somehow be the only dominant player. Russia and China together – it makes a fabulous combination because these two societies are emerging in a way of leading the pack in terms of the political agenda of this organization.

RT: You’re talking about the impact on the world order, but BRICS are described as an economic group, are you saying they are going to cross to the political line and have influence on the world diplomatic agenda?  

SC: The BRICS represents 43 per cent of the world’s population. This is a huge chunk and they need a political change. People – and not only in the BRICS member countries, put peoples of the rest of the global South – are expecting change and this can’t happen without the political agenda be it in Syria, be it in Egypt, be it in Africa. We need to create multi-polarity. Multi-polarity is a political project. The economic vehicles, I see them as means for a achieving a political goal and end point, which is to create a more just and equitable world order.

RT: Egypt’s also expressed interest in joining the bloc. What would it offer the group, and how attractive would it be to the current Power Five?

SC: I hope they’ll eventually join, but right now the size and current state of the Egyptian economy doesn’t justify it, but eventually it’ll expand because there are more emerging economies and the more the better because that’s how we achieve the multi-polarity through multilateralism.

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China envoy says there was no $8 billion South Sudan aid offer

by DefenseWeb

China never promised South Sudan $8 billion in development funds when South Sudanese President Salva Kiir visited Beijing in April, but much more than this could be offered if the country achieves lasting peace, a senior diplomat said on Thursday.

South Sudan’s government announced the figure following the trip, and until now Beijing has neither confirmed nor denied it.

Speaking to Reuters in an interview, China’s special envoy to Africa, Zhong Jianhua, who has helped in mediation efforts between the two Sudans and knows both countries well, said there was no $8 billion development deal, Reuters reports.

“If there was any promise, it was that after South Sudan achieves peace with Sudan then it is a very promising country and can ramp up development, and then China is willing to play a development role in South Sudan and help them. But those plans have to wait for peace before we can talk about this,” Zhong said, sitting in a meeting room inside the Foreign Ministry.

“I don’t believe that this is something both sides acknowledged following the visit. This was not mentioned in any of the official Chinese reports following the visit; there was nothing about $8 billion,” he added.

“It’s not impossible – maybe in the future, and maybe not only $8 billion,” Zhong said, without elaborating.

“Certainly, it needs a development plan, and a big one at that. It faces a lot of challenges. I’ve been to Juba many times. Running water, electricity, road lights, bridges — it needs a lot.”

Relations between the two Sudans soured soon after South Sudan achieved independence in 2011 following a long and bloody civil war, due to arguments over oil revenues and territory.

Landlocked South Sudan shut down its 350,000 barrel-per-day crude output in January last year in a row with Sudan over how much it should pay to send the oil through Sudanese pipelines to the Red Sea.

South Sudan said on Tuesday it would be ready to restart oil production within three weeks after finalizing a deal to resolve bitter border and security disputes with Sudan.

China has had to play a delicate balancing act.

It is already the biggest investor in oilfields in South Sudan, through state-owned Chinese oil giants China National Petroleum Corp and Sinopec. Beijing is also one of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s major supporters.

Zhong said that while he was pleased this week’s agreement had been reached, he remained concerned about the peace process.

“These antagonistic feelings still exist. There are still people who think now is not the time for reconciliation … But the general trend is still progressing in a positive way.”

China would continue to work with the international community to mediate between the two sides, he added.

“President Hu (Jintao) told President Kiir very clearly when he visited that if you want to develop, it will be very hard without peace,” Zhong said.

China’s parliament formally elected Xi Jinping as president on Thursday to replace Hu after 10 years in the job.

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By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

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Posted by: Sammi ibrahem Sr

by Utsa Patnaik

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.

Two routes

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 over 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, have 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.

China had lowered it death rate sharply from 20 per thousand to 12 per thousand between 1953 and 1958. (India did not reach the latter level until over a quarter century later.) After the radical land reforms and the formation of rural cooperatives, there were mass campaigns to clean up the environment and do away with disease bearing pests while a basic rural health care system was put in place. That a dramatic reduction in the rural death rate was achieved, is not disputed by anyone.

During the early commune formation from 1958, there was a massive mobilisation of peasants for a stupendous construction effort, which completely altered for a few years the normal patterns of peasant family life. Women were drawn into the workforce, communal kitchens were established and children looked after in crèches as most of the able-bodied population moved to irrigation and other work sites during the slack season.

We find a graphic description of this period of mass mobilisation in William Hinton’sShenfan. When this author spent three weeks in China in 1983, visiting several communes – which still existed at that time – he was told every time that “we built our water conservation system during the Great Leap.” The birth rate fall from 1959 had to do with labour mobilisation, and not low nutrition since the 1958 food grain output was exceptionally good at 200 million tons (mt).

Holes in the argument

There was excess mortality compared to the 1958 level over the next three years, of a much smaller order. Let us be clear on the basic facts about what did happen: there was a run of three years of bad harvests in China – drought in some parts, floods in others, and pest attacks. Food grain output fell from the 1958 good harvest of 200 mt to 170 mt in 1959 and further to 143.5 mt in 1960, with 1961 registering a small recovery to 147 million tons. This was a one-third decline, larger than the one-quarter decline India saw during its mid-1960s drought and food crisis. Grain output drop coincided in time with the formation of the communes, and this lent itself to a fallacious causal link being argued by the academics who were inclined to do so, and they blamed the commune formation for the output decline. One can much more plausibly argue precisely the opposite – that without the egalitarian distribution that the communes practised, the impact on people of the output decline, which arose for independent reasons and would have taken place anyway, would have been far worse. Further, without the 46,000 reservoirs built with collective labour on the communes up to 1980, the effects of later droughts would have been very severe. Recovery to the 200 million ton level took place only by 1965. Throughout, however, the per capita food grain output in China even during the worst year, 1960, remained substantially above that in India.

As output declined from 1959, there was a rise in the officially measured death rate from 12 in 1958 to 14.6 in 1959, followed by a sharp rise in 1960 to 25.4 per thousand, falling the next year to 14.2 and further to 10 in 1962. While, clearly, 1960 was an abnormal year with about 8 million deaths in excess of the 1958 level, note that this peak official ‘famine’ death rate of 25.4 per thousand in China was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism. If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’ Even this order of excess deaths is puzzling given the egalitarian distribution in China, since its average grain output per head was considerably above India’s level even in the worst year, and India saw no generalised famine in the mid-1960s.

Ideological bias

Relative to China’s population, this figure of plausible excess mortality is low and it did not satisfy the academics in northern universities who have been always strongly opposed to socialised production. Coale’s and Banister’s estimates gave them the ammunition they were looking for to attack the communes. How exactly do Coale and Banister reach a figure of ‘famine deaths’ which is three times higher than the maximal plausible estimate? Examining carefully how they arrived at 30 million ‘famine deaths’ estimate, we find that the figure was manufactured by using indefensible assumptions, and has had no scholarly basis.

In the 1982 census, there was a survey on fertility covering one million persons or a mere 0.1 per cent sample of the population, who were asked about births and deaths from the early 1950s onwards. The very high total fertility rate obtained from this 1982 survey is used by them to say that millions more were actually born between the two census years, 1953 and 1964, than were officially recorded. They ignore the birth rate of 37 per thousand derived from a very much larger 1953 sample which had covered five per cent of all households and was specially designed to collect the information on births and deaths used in the official estimates. Instead, they impute birth rates of 43 to 44 per thousand to the 1950s, using the 1982 survey. There is no justification for such an arbitrary procedure of using a much later reported high fertility rate for a long distant past. We know that a distant recall period makes responses inaccurate. These imputed extra births between 1953 and 1964 total a massive 50 million but according to them did not increase by an iota the 1964 population total, 694.6 million, the official figure which they assume as correct. Thus, although all official birth and death rates are rejected by them, the official population totals are accepted. This opportunistic assumption is clearly necessary for their purpose because it allows them to assert that the same number of extra people died between 1953 and 1964, as the extra people they claim were born.

Fallacious claims

But the demographers are still not satisfied with the 50 million extra births and deaths that they have conjured up. Fitting a linear time trend to the falling death rate of the early fifties is done to say that deaths should have continued to decline steeply after 1958 and since it did not, the difference from the trend meant additional ‘famine deaths.’ Such straight-line trend fitting is a senseless procedure since the death rate necessarily shows non-linear behaviour. It cannot continue falling at the same steep rate; it has to flatten out and cannot reach zero in any population – not even the inimitable Chinese people could hope to become immortal. The final estimate of extra deaths in both authors is raised thereby to a massive 60 million, a heroic 65 per cent higher than the official total of deaths over the inter-censal period.

Having created these 60 million extra deaths at their own sweet will out of nothing, the authors then proceed to allocate them over the years 1953 to 1964, arbitrarily attributing a higher portion to the great leap years in particular. The arbitrariness is clear from the variation in their own manipulations of the figures. Coale’s allocation raises his peak death rate in 1960 to 38.8 per thousand while Banister is bolder and raises it to 44.6 compared to the official 25.4 for that year, and 30 million ‘famine deaths’ are claimed over the Great Leap years after all this smart legerdemain [sleight of hand]. Having violated every tenet of reason, these ‘academics’ may as well have allocated all their imaginary deaths to the Great Leap years and claimed that 60 million died – why hang themselves only for a lamb rather than for a sheep! Seldom have we seen basic norms of academic probity and honesty being more blatantly violated, than in this travesty of statistical ‘estimates.’ And seldom have  noted intellectuals, who might have been expected to show more common sense, shown instead more credulous naiveté and irresponsibility, by accepting without investigation and propagating such nonsensical ‘estimates,’ giving them the status of historical fact. In the process, they have libelled and continue to libel Mao Zedong, a great patriot and revolutionary. They have unwittingly confirmed the principle attributed to Goebbels – that a lie has to be a really big lie and be endlessly repeated; then it is bound to be believed.

Thirty million or three crores is not a small figure. When one million people died in Britain’s colony, Ireland, in 1846-47, the world knew about it. When three million people died in the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the fact that a famine occurred was known. Yet 30 million people are supposed to have died in China without anyone knowing at that time that a famine took place. The reason no one knew about it is simple, for a massive famine did not take place at all. The intellectuals who quote the massive famine deaths figure of 30 million today, are no doubt outstandingly clever in the small, im kleinen, but are proving themselves to be rather foolish im grossen, in the large. A person has to be very foolhardy indeed to say that 30 million people died in a famine without anyone including the foreign diplomats in China and the China-watchers abroad having the slightest inkling of it. And those who credulously believe this claim and uncritically repeat it show an even greater folly than the originators of the claim.

With thanks to People’s Democracy, Vol. XXXV, No. 26, June 26, 2011, Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)