[1] The book was well-received in the popular press and won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011,[2] and has been described by Andrew J. Nathan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, as "the most detailed account yet" of the Great Chinese Famine.
[3] Academic reviews were much more critical, due to the book's selective use of sources, lack of context, methodological flaws, sensational tone, and distortion of evidence.
Beijing government officials, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, increased the food procurement quota from the countryside to pay for international imports.
In addition to the human suffering, some 30 to 40 percent of all rural housing was demolished in village relocations, for building roads and infrastructure, or sometimes as punishment for political opposition.
[15] Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (1998), praised the book as a "brilliant work, backed by painstaking research ... .
"[16] Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850–2009 (2009) and China Director at the research service Trusted Sources, praised Dikötter's "masterly book", and stated that his "painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people.
"[17] Jonathan Mirsky, a historian of China and journalist specialising in Asian affairs, wrote in Literary Review that Dikötter's book "is for now the best and last word on Mao's greatest horror.
Steven Yearley, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at the University of Edinburgh, said that the book "stands out" from other works on the famine "on account of its basis in recently opened archives and in the countless compelling details which are provided to clarify the interlocking themes of the text.
"[19] George Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin called the book "excellent", and stated that "Dikötter's study is not the first to describe these events.
Ironically, the Wall (one of communism's relatively smaller crimes) is vastly better known than the Great Leap Forward – the largest mass murder in all of world history.
"[20] Essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra wrote that the "narrative line is plausible" but Dikötter is "generally dismissive of facts that could blunt his story's sharp edge", and said that Dikötter's "comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade", citing Amartya Sen's research on India, which compared unfavourably with China under Mao.
Leonard stated that "Dikötter looks at China under Communist rule in a narrow vacuum, thus dispensing with the inconvenient fact that famine in this part of the world has been a recurring phenomenon, which Mao did not invent or even magnify.
"[22] Cormac Ó Gráda, famine scholar and professor of economics at University College Dublin, criticised the book as "more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument", and stated that it failed to note that "many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so."
Ó Gráda wrote that the "10 per thousand" normal mortality rate adopted by Dikötter is "implausibly low" and used to maximise his death count.
[23] In The China Journal, Felix Wemheuer, lecturer of Chinese history and politics at University of Vienna,[5] said that Dikötter's figure of 45 million dead was higher than other estimates of 15 to 40 million dead, and commented: "It seems that his interest is in presenting the highest number possible, to label the Great Leap as the greatest mass killing in human history.
"[5] Wemheuer stated the figure was derived from discrepancies between Cao Shuji's 2005 estimate of 32.5 million and data from official county police reports, to which Dikötter added 40–50 percent.
At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated 25 March 1959, Dikötter continues, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, and announced that "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward.
[28] Anthony Garnaut, a social historian of China, posited that Dikötter's juxtaposition and sampling techniques fall short of academic best practice.
According to Garnaut, the allegations Dikötter levels at Yang Jisheng's work ("At times it looks like a hotchpotch which simply strings together large chunks of text, some lifted from the Web, a few from published sources, and others transcribed from archival material.
[35] Gao Mobo criticized Dikötter, writing "Instead of analyzing policy and organizational failures such as overly large communes that led to supervision failure, information failure such as the difficulty of knowing what was actually happening on the ground in time to address the problems before it was too late, and mass movement actions driven by political passion for experimentation, Dikötter focuses on isolated facts during the GLF, such as some houses being dismantled for the purpose of collecting fertile soil in some places, and violence against villagers by some local official thugs.
"[37] Adam Jones, political science and genocide studies professor at UBC Okanagan, criticised Bloomsbury Publishing for using a cover photograph on their editions of the book of a starving child that was from a Life depiction of a 1946 Chinese famine.
[9] The Walker & Company edition of the book has a different cover, using a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China.
[39] Historian and journalist Ben Macintyre, one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson Prize, said that Mao's Great Famine was a "meticulous account of a brutal man-made calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century.