Because this book consists of a broad compendium of Cold War hoaxes, I'm simply picking one here: the Chinese famine of 1960. If one gets some understanding of this event then you may be able to form an opinion of the other charges in this book.
Now there's no real question that a famine did occur in China in the year of 1960. China was traditionally known as the land of famine. Walter Mallory, Secretary of the China International Famine Relief Commission, even wrote a book by that name CHINA: LAND OF FAMINE, which was published in 1926 by the American Geographical Society. The real crux of the claim made about this famine of 1960 is that it was allegedly the worst famine in Chinese history, a famine so enormous that no previous parallel for it existed. This was given a veneer of scientific credibility when Judith Banister published the first serious critical demographic study of China in 1987, entitled CHINA'S CHANGING POPULATION. The Chinese government had only the year before published its own official population statistics in the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986. Banister was an official for the Reagan adminstration and she at one point (p. 85) throws out a comment that:
"...the official data imply that those four years saw 15 million excess deaths ... The computer reconstruction of China's population trends utilized in this book ... results in an estimated 30 million excess deaths during 1958-61."
Unfortunately most people have simply jumped onto those few brief phrases and proceeded to extrapolate without ever actually looking at either the official statistics or Banister's critically revised statistics. The best death thing to do here is simple reproduce some of the figures for population and deaths on a per thousand basis which Banister actually gives in her demographic reconstruction on page 353:
Year Population in thousands Deaths per thousand
1949 559,545 38
1950 563,253 35
1951 567,659 32
1952 574,991 29
1953 584,191 25.77
1954 594,725 24.2
1955 606,730 22.33
1956 619,136 20.11
1957 633,215 18.12
1958 646,703 20.65
1959 654,349 22.06
1960 650,661 44.6
1961 644,670 23.01
1962 653,302 14.02
The thing to note here is that the drop in mortality between the years of 1949 and 1957 is an unprecedentedly swift decline in mortality from 38 to 18.12, a drop by about 52.3%. Banister herself recognizes the achievement with the comment:
"From a demographic perspective, the PRC has come a long way since 1949. A sweeping mortality decline took place in the 1950s, and after a temporary but jolting setback, slower improvement in mortality occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Even allowing for considerable underreporting of deaths, China has attained relatively high life expectancy and relatively low infant mortality for a developing country, at least until the rise in female infanticide caused by the compulsory one-child limit."
-- Banister, p. 376.
Looking at these figures, the obvious question to raise is which standard of mortality are we using when computing a famine death toll. Whenever one speaks of a "famine," "epidemic" or "disaster" of some kind causing deaths, the implication is that one has an expected "normal" death toll which is forecast under ordinary conditions. The "famine" death toll then corresponds to those occurring beyond the "normal" expectancy. For a country which achieves such a rapid drop in mortality within such a short historical period of 8 years, there is no clearly defined "normal" mortality rate as things are in a state of flux. In this case the more honest thing to do is to calculate varying death tolls according to varying expectations. What I compute roughly from Banister's figures is that if one uses the 1949 mortality rate as a standard of expectation, then the only genuine famine year was 1960 and this famine killed about 4.35 million in that year. On the other hand, if one uses the 1957 mortality rate as a baseline, then all 4 years from 1958 to 1961 were years of famine and the death toll was about 25.4 million. Banister's figure of "30 million" is obviously a rounded version of this. Is it really accurate and honest to cite the figure of 25.4 million for 1958-61 to an audience without elaborating on the fact that this enormous figure has been computed based upon the greatly reduced mortality rate of 1957? Most people who throw around figures like "30 million" are frequently under the misimpression that this represents 30 million deaths occurring beyond the standard of mortality of 1949. That is definitely not the case and using such a figure in this way gives a false impression to the reader.
Say if we take the famine of 1936 which is usually estimated as having killed about 5 million (Robert Nash, DARKEST HOURS: A NARRATIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLDWIDE DISASTERS FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE PRESENT, p. 734). It should be noted that this 5 million estimate could easily be an underestimate since there was no good demographical system in pre-revolutionary China. But let's work with it anyway. If one takes the population estimate which Banister makes for 1949, then 5 million deaths relative to a populace of 559,545 thousand represents about 8.93 deaths per thousand. If one were to add this to the mortality rate of 38 per thousand then one would have 46.93 per thousand. Even if we agree to lower this by 1 to 45.93 per thousand, taking account the fact that conditions of civil war still existed for part of 1949, then the figure is still larger than the 44.6 per thousand which Banister gives for 1960. This type of heuristic comparison illustrates the fact that the absolute mortality rate in 1960 was not substantively different from what China would have experienced during many previous famines. The whole point is simply that the death rate of 44.6 in 1960 stands out against the death rate of 18.12 in 1957. But then, so does the death rate of 1949 stand out against that of 1957 and the higher death rates in pre-revolutionary China were a "normal" thing from year to year with a much higher death toll than 30 million when compared to the mortality rate of 1957.
With regards to the official data from the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986, which Banister claims implies "15 million excess deaths," the general form is the same:
Year Population in thousands Deaths per thousand
1949 541,670 20
1950 551,960 18
1951 563,000 17.8
1952 574,820 17
1953 587,960 14
1954 602,660 13.18
1955 614,650 12.28
1956 628,280 11.4
1957 646,530 10.8
1958 659,940 11.98
1959 672,070 14.59
1960 662,070 25.43
1961 658,590 14.24
1962 672,950 10.02
The thing to note here when comparing with Banister's model is that the drop in mortality between the years of 1949 and 1957, although still very steep, is actually less percentage-wise. Here the drop is by only 46%, from 20 to 10.8, rather than from 38 to 18.12, the drop by about 52.3% which Banister's model gives.
Is it possible that the official statistics might actually be correct in saying that mortality in 1949 was as low as "20" per thousand and then in 1957 as low as "10.8" per thousand, and that Banister's figure of "18.12" per thousand might be too high? Not really. Statistics in the United States have assigned a death rate of 13.8 per thousand to the year 1913 and 9.6 per thousand in 1957. (John Kantner, "A Comparison of the Current Population in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A." Published in Alex Inkeles & Kent Geiger, (eds.), SOVIET SOCIETY: A BOOK OF READINGS.) China was traditionally known as the land of famine, long before anyone ever heard of Mao Zedong, and it is not at all probable that even Mao would be able to so quickly reduce the mortality rate of China by 1957 to something lower than that of the USA in 1913. Banister's own figure of 18.12 per thousand for Chinese mortality in 1957 could itself be an underestimate, as might her figure of 38 for 1949. But the 10.8 figure in the official data is definitely a sharp underestimate. The most likely explanation for why the official Chinese data underestimated the mortality so sharply for the first decade and a half or so after the revolution was simply the lack of any good record-keeping system in China prior to 1949. If the data had been deliberately fixed so as to lower death rates to Mao's advantage then there's no reason why the official data should give such a low mortality rate as 20 per thousand to the year 1949. This only lets Chiang Kai-Shek off the hook. Just compare the drop from 20 to 10.8 which the official statistics give for 1949-57 to the drop from 38 to 18.12 which Banister's reconstruction gives. Although Banister's absolute figures are greater, the relative drop shown in Banister's data is sharper and reflects better on Mao than does the official data. There is no reason why the official statistics should show this if the motive behind making them was to exculpate Mao. In actuality, both sets of data reflect favorably on Mao. The basic form is that mortality rates were brought down sharply by the Chinese revolution.
The BLACK BOOK fails to provide any demographic population data of the above type and so it throws out wild figures of alleged "victims" without allowing the reader to know by what methodology they were arrived at. If someone is taking a serious interest in these questions then looking up real demographic studies, not only of China but of any relevant country, is essential.
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