Only twelve years into his thirty-year reign, Mao Zedong surpassed Joseph Stalin as history’s leading mass murderer, according to evidence released recently by the People’s Republic of China. Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts and Zhengyuan Fu’s Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics show that Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”—the nadir of 3000 years of autocracy—was far worse than most experts had thought.
Autocratic Ghosts and Chinese Hunger
By Bryan Caplan
This article
appeared in
the Winter 2000 issue of The Independent Review.
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| Other Independent Review articles by Bryan Caplan | |
| Winter 2005 | The Half-Life of Policy Rationales:How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues |
| Spring 2001 | Libertarianism Against Economism:How Economists Misunderstand Voters, and Why Libertarians Should Care |
| Winter 1999 | The Political Economy of Dictatorship |
