An account of one of history’s most appalling and avoidable tragedies claimed the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, the country’s leading award for non-fiction writing last night.
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by the Dutch historian Frank Dikötter has transformed historians’ understanding of the Great Leap Forward, the four-year economic experiment that killed at least 45 million Chinese people in the middle of the 20th century.
Ben Macintyre, the Times journalist and bestselling author who chaired the judging panel, called it “a meticulous account of a brutal man-made calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century”.
Long before last night’s award ceremony at the London headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Dikötter’s book had achieved critical acclaim, but it is now likely to reach a much wider readership following the success of previous winners including Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (later adapted into the Hollywood film Green Zone) and last year’s triumphant Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.
The book is widely seen as the fullest account yet of the period between 1958 and 1962, when, in Dikötter’s words, “China descended into hell”. He writes: “Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.”
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Specifically Dikötter uses newly opened Chinese archives to demonstrate that the scale of the fatalities was probably 15 million higher than previously thought, if not more. He also argues that death on anything like that scale could have been averted if the political will had been there, and that between 6 and 8 per cent of the victims, or two to three million people, were buried alive, tortured or beaten to death.
He writes that between 30 and 40 per cent of all housing was reduced to rubble for reasons ranging from punishment of the occupants to forced relocations to the production of fertiliser, and that the regime presided over a sustained and intense attack on nature that greatly worsened the impact of the famine through soil erosion, water loss and enormous, counterproductive irrigation schemes.
Dikötter, who is married and lives in Hong Kong, is professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and professor of the modern history of china on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
His eight books to date have chronicled the emergence of modern China from perspectives as diverse as sexuality, race and drug use.
The five shortlisted books that Dikötter beat to the £20,000 prize were a pair of biographies (of the artist Caravaggio and the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck), a study of Cavaliers, a history of refugees from American independence and a book arguing that human life is steadily improving.