Ian Buruma: Reeducation Through Horror

Here are two snippets from a Chinese Communist journal called People’s China, published in August 1956: "In 1956, despite the worst natural calamities in scores of years, China’s peasants, newly organized in co-operatives on a nation-wide scale, produced 2,740 million Yuan’s worth more farm products than in 1955, an increase greater than the average annual increase in the previous three years…. " The scholar of modern China Frank Dikötter seeks to dismiss all this. Read more