In Reply to: and then again maybe not (democide) posted by lydia on September 29, 2003 at 13:30:37:
I know not to take Gregory Schneider seriously, LOL! I mean I really did have a laugh when I read his numbers. There weren't that many people around during the periods he described. China may have 1.3 billion people now, but it had half of that number of people back then. Kill 700 million and there's nobody left.
People die all the time. If I were to misuse statistics I could say 1 million people died in the UK the last 10 years, but was it because of the British government?
I don't find his stats one bit credible.
Of the the 11 categories you mentioned, several of them don't belong to the CCP. If those figures are correct, even though they don't jive with the rest of the reliable data of some very harsh critics of the CCP, it adds to 57,829,000, a far cry from 1 billion.
I'd strike off:
Dynastic and Republican China (pre CCP)
Warlord China (pre CCP)
The Nationalist Period (pre CCP)
The Sino-Japanese War (because the CCP was not responsible for the majority of these deaths, the Japanese were)
Japanese Mass Murder in China (the CCP was not responsible for Japanese mass murder)
I'd cut at least 4 mil of the nearly 5 mil victims of the civil war, as most of the atrocities were comitted by Nationalist forces and resulting warlord anarchy.
The Totalization Period and The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period is an overlap for the same Collectivization and "The Great Leap Forward" period, bringing it to 26,630,000. The figures I have are higher, at 28 mil. The Cultural Revolution causing 7.7 mil deaths is a much higher figure than the data I found, and maybe be an overlap. The so-called Liberalization period is debatable as being CCP or in the name of communism too. And the figures I have are much lower.
Anyway, somewhere we agree on 50 mil. and I counted in abortions and genocide and satellite wars.
I do agree that Communism is a failed experiment and its advocates and rulers are responsible for millions of deaths, but falsified and misued stats make the scale of the atrocities unbelievable, and therefore undo the message that there has been large scale human suffering.