Slim Evans: Red Labour organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935, June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice

This year, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of Canada's foundation in 1921, People's Voice is printing a series of articles on the party's history and prominent members.

     Arthur H. "Slim" Evans is best known as the main organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935. For his decades of organizing efforts, Slim Evans was repeatedly charged and jailed, but was widely hailed as an outstanding champion of workers' rights.

     Born on April 24, 1890 in Toronto, Slim Evans left school at 13 to help support his family. He sold newspapers, drove a team of horses and learned the carpentry trade. Like many others, Evans came west in 1911, working at various jobs on the prairies, before heading to Minneapolis and then Kansas City. There he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment for participating in a free speech fight, having read aloud the Declaration of Independence at a rally. "All I did was read it. I was too shy and too nervous at that time to make up any speech of my own," he said later.

     Evans was released in 1912 after leading a jail strike of political prisoners. In 1913 he was shot in the leg at the infamous Ludlow Massacre of striking Colorado coal miners. During five years across the western USA, he worked with many labour giants including "Big Bill" Haywood, Frank Little and Joe Hill.

     In 1916, Evans returned to Canada, doing farm work, carpentry, and then becoming a miner. He was active in the One Big Union, the Canadian equivalent of the IWW, and volunteered to help organize coal miners in the Drumheller Valley region of Alberta. The Drumheller miners walked out in solidarity with the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Rejecting the United Mineworkers of America which had failed to help them, the miners also demanded recognition of the OBU. The mineowners, the Alberta government, and the UMWA fought back, and the OBU was defeated after a lengthy battle. Evans was later sentenced to three years in prison, on trumped-up charges of using UMWA funds to fund a wildcat strike without permission. The truth was that he had used union funds to feed striking miners rather than send it as "per capita" to UMWA headquarters.

     Evans was released in March 1925, after one year in the Prince Albert Penitentiary. A petition to the Minister of Justice with over 8700 signatures of miners and other supporters from across B.C. and Alberta was the cause of his early release.

     By this time, the OBU had nearly disappeared, but Evans remained a prominent labour activist, working at a variety of different jobs. He also built a home for his family, at 17 E. 42 Avenue in Vancouver.

     In 1926, Evans joined the Communist Party of Canada. As he said later, "I believe I was a communist right from the first time I started to travel through the country and saw conditions in the various mining camps and the rotten conditions that prevailed there."

     The onset of the Great Depression saw conditions become much worse. Millions were jobless and hungry. In 1932 Evans helped organize the BC section of the National Unemployed Workers Association, fighting to win increased rates for relief work. Later that year, he began organizing the coal miners of Princeton into the Mine Workers Union of Canada, an affiliate of the Communist-led Workers Unity League. Police and the Ku Klux Klan cooperated to break the Princeton miners' strike for higher wages, and Evans was imprisoned for 18 months in Oakalla penitentiary. The authorities also evicted his family from the house on 42nd Avenue when they were unable to pay the mortgage. Another huge labour campaign finally won Evans' release in 1934, just as the struggle of the unemployed began to boil over.

     Thousands of unemployed men in the "slave camps" run by the federal government joined the WUL-affiliated Relief Camp Workers Union. BC members of the RCWU voted in April 1935 to strike for "work and wages." For two months, the strikers conducted a powerful campaign for their demands in Vancouver, and then voted to take their struggle directly to Ottawa. Riding the freights, they reached Regina, where Prime Minister R.B. "Iron Heel" Bennett invited the union to send a delegation to present their grievances. Slim Evans headed the eight-member delegation, which was subjected to a verbal attack by Bennett. Evans called Bennett a liar, and the delegation headed back to Regina, where a brutal RCMP attack halted the Trek on July 1, 1935.

     But stopping the Trek did not change the course of history. The slave camps were soon shut down, Bennett's Tories suffered a massive defeat, and workers began winning gains such as unemployment insurance. Evans and others were charged under Section 98 of the Criminal Code for "membership in an unlawful organization" - the RCWU. But the cases died when the new Liberal government was compelled to repeal Section 98.

     Slim Evans continued his labour activities, helping to organize workers at Cominco in Trail, B.C., into Local 480 of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union. In 1937 he led a campaign for medical funds to support the MacKenzie Papineau Battalion fighting for the freedom of Spain. During World War Two, he was a shop steward of the Amalgamated Shipwrights in the Vancouver shipyards.

     Tragically, Slim Evans died on February 13, 1944, from injuries after being struck by a car three weeks earlier. He was buried in Ocean View Park cemetery in Burnaby. His place in Canadian history was regained with "Work and Wages," the most complete collection of information on his life, edited by his daughter Jean Evans Sheils and Ben Swankey, published in 1977 by the Trade Union Research Bureau. Anniversary celebrations of the On to Ottawa Trek held in 1985 and later years have also done much to educate new generations of labour activists about the contributions of this remarkable Communist.

(The above article is from the June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

MARKHAM ONTARIO COUNCIL BANS CRITICISM OF ISRAELI APARTHEID, Special to Peoplesvoice, May 16-31, 2011

Special to PV
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint79/08%29%20MARKHAM%20COUNCIL.htm

     The municipality of Markham, Ontario, northeast of Toronto, has been known for its rapid population growth in recent years. Now, Markham is in the news for another reason. On May 3, a majority of city councillors adopted a motion to censor "Israeli Apartheid Week", an event held this year in 95 cities and more than 75 universities on six continents. This includes three cities in Israel and four cities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

     Organized every March by students on Canadian campuses, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) features film screenings and high-profile forums with prominent academics and community leaders. IAW condemns all forms of racism and discrimination, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti‑Arab racism, and homophobia. Many Jewish students are involved in organizing IAW.

     The Canadian Arab Federation says the May 3 motion "aims to deny Canadian students and academics the rights of freedom of expression and academic freedom, rights that are enjoyed by Israeli students and academics... The motion creates the absurd situation where Canadian students and academics are allowed to freely criticize their own government but are banned from criticizing a foreign government.

     "The motion put forward by Councillor (Howard) Shore is one of several attempts currently being undertaken to censor and suppress public debate on this subject in order to shield Israel's actions from scrutiny and criticism. Such actions are an attack on free speech the likes of which we have not seen since the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts."

     The CAF points out that Markham councillors ignored a comprehensive study undertaken by Toronto City staff, which determined the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" does not promote hatred or discrimination, and does not violate the Criminal Code or the Ontario Human Rights Code.

     Markham City Council also ignored the compelling evidence introduced from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Conference of Southern African Christian Churches, the Association of Civil Rights of Israel and the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, that irrefutably proves Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are systematically discriminated against and that the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa.

     Speakers against the Markham motion represented diverse supporters of free speech and Palestinian rights, including Jews, Christians and Muslims of all ages and gender, and from various backgrounds.

     On the surface, the motion is puzzling, since there are no university campuses or IAW events in Markham. But the municipality includes the provincial riding of Thornhill, represented by MPP Peter Thurman - the same MPP who put forward a non-binding motion in the Ontario legislature last year to condemn IAW.

     Also, Markham City Council decided recently to send a trade mission to Israel. Rejection of Councillor Shore's motion would have implied that the city condones the labelling of Israel as an Apartheid state, leaving it in the awkward position of doing business with an apartheid regime.

     As CAF National President Khaled Mouammar stated, "Regrettably, this politically expedient decision runs counter to the Town of Markham's stated mission to recognize and accept the diversity of its residents, to respect the differences in all peoples and their right to hold different opinions, to promote the value of human rights, and to oppose racism and discrimination."

No Anti-Poverty Plan in Ontario NDP Platform, by Donald Hughes June 30, 2011

Source:  the Media Co-op

http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/donald-hughes/7639

Last weekend, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath released her party's platform for the coming provincial general election in October. The platform presented accepts neoliberal constraints while failing to address Ontario's poverty crisis.

Horwath's fiscal plan centers on the repeal of recent corporate tax cuts, restoring 2009's 14% general rate. Given that the federal general corporate rate is set to fall to 15% in 2012, the combined rate will be 29%. This would still represent a fall in the general corporate rate of over one-third from the year 2000.

The revenue gained from the corporate tax increase is largely directed towards alternative tax cuts. The four main tax cuts contained in the plan are an investment tax credit, removal of the HST from gasoline, removal of the HST from home heating and a modest small business tax reduction.

The largest area of increased public spending is health care, with a series of small spending initiatives to improve access at emergency rooms and community clinics. This is funded primarily out of unidentified cuts to public services and a promise to reduce the use of consultants and administrators.

Another area of spending is a commitment to meet 50% of transit operating costs province-wide, with a commitment to freeze transit fares. No additional funds are made available for transit infrastructure.

The NDP platform promises to continue to index welfare and disability payments to inflation, and includes a reduction to the disability clawback rate against earned income, but otherwise accounts no money for benefit increases. Likewise, there is no new money for housing initiatives.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has called for an immediate increase in the rates of 55%, or a monthly Ontario Works payment of about $1,000. This move would restore Ontario Works to the level achieved under the last NDP government in the early 1990s.

A coalition of food security campaigners, including The Stop Community Food Centre in Davenport, have called for an immediate $100 increase in Ontario Works payments, to about $700 a month, with an aim towards "Putting Food in the Budget."

The Housing Network of Ontario has focused on promoting a policy centered on a new housing benefit as a short-term measure to alleviate poverty and improve housing access.

The NDP platform contains no specific commitment to expanding child care access in Ontario. Affordable, non-profit child care has been a component of Quebec's limited antipoverty strategy.

Another feature of this year's NDP platform is the absence of a post-secondary education strategy. In recent elections, the NDP often campaigned on promises to freeze or reduce tuition fees. In the current platform there is no significant spending related to education at any level.

Horwath's platform represents a shift to the political right for the NDP. It avoids addressing a large number of issues associated with social-democracy and the labour movement in favour of debt stabilization and generally low taxation. The aim appears to be to accept neoliberal constraints in return for the ability to make minor reforms in government. This strategy has been launched at the expense of many of the NDP's traditional campaign positions.

Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government: Nothing short of disgusting, Morning Star, Sunday 03 July 2011

http://bit.ly/iEcMMg

Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government, which has thrown its own working class to the wolves of imperialism, has demonstrated its non-partisanship by treating the Palestinian people likewise.

George Papandreou's willingness to dance to Israel's tune is nothing short of disgusting.

His government has thrown its weight behind the oppressor and abandoned the oppressed by using the law against the Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human campaigners.

Not that Papandreou's government stands alone. It is backed by the so-called Quartet, fronted by war criminal Tony Blair, which is happy to parrot Tel Aviv's propaganda about Gaza.

The Quartet - the UN, US, EU and Russia - claims to have concerns about difficult conditions facing Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

But it notes "a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials" entering Gaza over the past year.

And this group of influential global powers, which has failed to take any action to halt Israel's rapacious colonisation of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, or to weaken Israel's stranglehold on Gaza open prison, lectures those who wish to deliver aid to use "established channels."

Perhaps they are unaware that Israel's capricious control of the "established channels," otherwise known as the border crossings with Israel and Egypt, is a key factor in the impoverishment of Palestinians in Gaza.

Gazans are not the victims of an uncontrollable force of nature.

They have been "put on a diet," as one cynical Israeli politician put it, as part of a collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.

That punishment is to endure until one Israeli prisoner of war is released, even though it is the Netanyahu government that is frustrating negotiations to free Gilad Shalit.

Who says this? Hamas? No, it is Shalit's family, who regard Netanyahu as the biggest disaster to befall their son and see the prime minister as prepared to see Shalit come home in an Israeli flag-covered coffin.

But as tragic as Shalit's case is, his name is known all over the world.

The thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are, with the exception of prominent activists such as Marwan Barghouti, held hostage in anonymity.

While they languish in foreign jails, their compatriots in Gaza suffer a more insidious imprisonment.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency reported last month that unemployment in Gaza has risen to 45.2 per cent, purchasing power fell by 7.9 per cent in the second half of 2010, marking a cumulative decline of 34.5 per cent since 2006.

Electrical power is subject to continual cuts, 95 per cent of the water supply is unfit for human consumption and shortage of medical supplies has brought the health system to virtual collapse.

Great power complicity with Israel's occupation and expansionism has conspired to deny not only Palestinians' human rights but even their very humanity.

Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human was organised to expose this reality and to bring hope to a victimised population.

It is being scuppered by a government that is bankrupt in more ways than one.

The Palestinians are not alone.

The majority of the world is with them, which is why over 120 countries back UN recognition of their sovereign state, no matter what the rich and powerful pretend.

Once again, our government and all others collaborating with Israel's repression must face protests and be told that their shameful collusion must end.

A line of struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, by Elisseos Vagenas, of the CC of the Communist Party Greec

http://bit.ly/l2yNAk

This article was written during the important (48-hour) nationwide general strike on 28-29 June which has embraced every workplace. The strike demonstrations of All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) which rallies the trade unions that work on a class oriented basis have been unprecedented.

The demonstrations and the mass rallies of PAME are different from those of the compromised trade union leaderships of the federations of the unions in the private (GSEE) and the public sector (ADEDY). The reason is not only the massive participation of the working people, their militancy and the measures for their protection but also the fact that they do not merely seek to block the new “package” of anti-people measures but to put forward the need to come into full conflict with the EU and capitalist exploitation as a whole.

In contrast with the demonstrations of the so called “indignant citizens“, who shout the so called “neutral” though misleading slogan “thieves, thieves” in front of the parliament, the slogan which is prevalent in the massive demonstrations of PAME is: “No cog can turn without the workers. Worker you can do without the bosses!”

The line of struggle of the communist party and the class oriented labour and trade union movement becomes increasingly important under the current conditions as the Greek people experience the consequences of the capitalist crisis that brings poverty, unemployment and destitution for the working class-popular families and when the government of PASOK along with the EU and the IMF implement a savage anti-people programme aiming at the reduction of the price of the labour force and the increase of the competitiveness and the profitability of the capital.

The KKE stressed from the very first moment that the capitalist crisis, which the Greek people are experiencing, expresses the sharpening of the main contradiction between the social character of production and labour on the one hand and the private capitalist appropriation of its results on the other. In addition, it struggled against the misleading campaign claiming that the government of PASOK was allegedly subservient to the IMF or to foreign powers revealing that the anti-labour memoranda expressed concrete choices of the Greek bourgeoisie concerning alliances that ensured its profitability in these specific conditions.

KKE has refuted the social-democratic and opportunist positions which are spread by the forces of the so-called European Left Party (ELP) as well as by others, positions that attribute the causes of the crisis to the neo-liberal management because they conceal the activity of the laws of the exploitative system; they conceal that the crises break out irrespective of the social-democratic or the liberal management as the sharpening of the contradictions of the system: the anarchy and the unevenness that characterises capitalist production, the over accumulation of capital which was accumulated in the period of economic growth due to the exploitation of the labour force and cannot find a way out that ensures a high rate of profit.

Over the last two years there have been multifaceted class-oriented struggles against the assault of capital, the anti-people policy of the liberal government of ND previously and the social-democratic government of PASOK today which is supported by the other bourgeois political forces and the subjugated leaderships of the government and employer led trade unionism.

More than 20 nationwide general strikes have been successfully organised in the period 2010-2011; likewise a series of strikes in sectors and companies, mass rallies, occupations of public buildings and other buildings as well, massive struggles with the participation of hundreds of thousands of workers and popular forces.

The KKE and PAME, the class oriented labour movement, the militant rallies supported by our party in the movements of the farmers, the self-employed, the women and the youth have played a leading role in these struggles.

The line of struggle of the KKE and the class oriented movement has made a special contribution to the conflict with capital and the anti-people policy as it clarified from the beginning that the crisis, the deficit and the debt are a product of capitalist development, of the strategy that supports the monopoly groups and that the workers are not responsible for it. More and more working people see this fact today when they compare the state debt (350 billions Euro) with the deposits of the Greek capitalists which in Switzerland amount to 600 billions Euro.

More and more working people are abandoning the bourgeois parties (PASOK-ND), open their eyes to the assessments and the proposals of KKE since the communists are proved correct by the developments. The KKE has denounced the government and the EU because they blackmail the people that the government won’t receive the 5th instalment of the loan unless they accept the new anti-labour measures.

The communists in Greece support firmly that it is the plutocracy that must pay for the crisis as it is responsible for it. At the same time, the KKE believes that the struggle for every problem of the people must develop in the direction of organising, concentrating and preparing broad popular and working class forces not only in order to create better conditions for the sale of labour power but also for the overthrow of the exploitative system so as to pave the way for the people’s power and the people's economy, for socialism.

A National Exercise in Scare Tactics, Written by Tamar Gozansky, Communist Party of Israel, Friday, 24 June 2011

http://bit.ly/lZWFtt
Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Barak and the remainder of Israel’s cabinet members are running a scare campaign about what, supposedly, will befall Israel if the UN General Assembly votes in September in favor of recognition for a Palestinian State based on the 1967 borders. Foreign Minister Lieberman has even announced that the approval of such a resolution means no less than the annihilation of Israel.

This is why the government has pulled an even more drastic tactic out of its sleeve – a national drill run by the Home Front Command, optimistically labeled “Turning Point 5”. According to the plan, command and field simulation exercises were carried out for a scenario, in which hundreds of ground-to-ground missiles are fired into Israel for a period of one month. The citizens, who according to this scenario will be subject to bombardment by thousands of missiles, were required to drill “entry into protected spaces” after receiving a warning on their cell phone. Two million school children also took part in the drill.

The information publicizing the national drill have stated, that in the framework of the simulation exercise, authorities practice responding to an event in which 400,000 citizens leave their homes because of a missile attack and are transferred to live in army bases and tents in the Negev desert.

Only part of Israeli citizens have cooperated with the guidelines and actually entered a protected space on the day of the drill. But everyone, even those who did not take the exercise seriously, were treated with a fair dose of brainwashing and induced panic: in the next war Israel will be bombarded with thousands missiles that will strew death and destruction. When such a scenario is presented as inevitable, as a natural disaster, as a stroke of fate – so the military and civil establishments would like to hope – few will ask the question: how can such a missile attack be prevented?

Those who do ask will require an answer: perhaps Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, should be listened to and the answer is not a military initiative against Iran? Perhaps the advisable thing to do is to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders? Perhaps Israel’s militaristic thinking should be replaced by civilian-oriented thinking, and instead of living on the sword, we should begin to think about how we can achieve a life of peace and neighborly relations with the Arab nations?

But the Netanyahu government and the army hope that the voice of the questioners and of those who reject the logic of the scare tactics will be fainter than the incessant grating of the inflammatory fear-mongering sounded through the established media channels.

After five days of a media-saturated national scare campaign about the bombardment by thousands of missiles in the coming war, Netanyahu hopes he will stop being bothered by those who ask him, why he recently stated that the conflict with the Palestinians was insoluble, and that he will not be pestered with demands to present an actual plan for an agreement, so that he can continue to bandy the empty slogan, that “we are in favor of negotiating with the Palestinians over everything”.

George Orwell wrote in “1984” that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” When this reasoning is applied to the Home Front Command drill, we can say that if it is granted that the people in Israel are doomed to be victims of a missile assault, and its freedom is expressed in the certainty of that knowledge, all else follows: the government must be trusted; it is natural for the establishment to root out “traitors”, anyway there is “too much democracy”; and “is this a time to be discussing the price of cottage cheese!?” and so on and so forth.

And thus, the national drill accomplishes its true goal.

Revisiting Alleged 30 Million Famine Deaths during China’s Great Leap, Written by Utsa Patnaik, in People's Democracy, (Weekly Organ of the CPI(M), Vol. XXXV No. 26, June 26, 2011

http://bit.ly/jaBMO0


THIRTY years ago, a highly successful vilification campaign was launched against Mao Zedong, saying that a massive famine in which 27 to 30 million people died in China took place during the Great Leap period, 1958 to 1961, which marked the formation of the people’s communes under his leadership. The main basis of this assertion was, first, the population deficit in China during 1958 to 1961 and, second, the work of two North American demographers, A J Coale (Rapid Population Change in China 1952-1982, 1982) and Judith Banister (China’s Changing Population, 1987). No one bothered to look at the highly dubious method through which these demographers had arrived at their apocalyptic figures.



The ‘estimate’ was later widely publicised by Amartya K Sen who built an entire theory, saying that democratic freedom, especially press freedom, in India meant that famine was avoided while its absence in China explains why the world did not know that such a massive famine had taken place until as much as a quarter century later when the North American demographers painstakingly uncovered it.



The capitalist press was happy to reciprocate the compliment by repeatedly writing of “30 million famine deaths,” to the extent that a fiction was established as historical fact in readers’ minds. The London Economist had a special issue on China some years ago, which repeated the allegation of 30 million deaths in three separate articles and refused to publish the Letter to the Editor this author sent contradicting the claim. More recently, in his Introduction to the book Mao Zedong on Practice and Contradiction, which he edited and published in 2006, Slavoj Zizek also mentioned the figure of 30 millions as though it were a given fact. Well known intellectuals have to be taken seriously and the claim examined.



TWO ROUTES

There are two routes through which very large ‘famine deaths’ have been claimed --- firstly, population deficit and, secondly, imputing births and deaths which did not actually take place. Looking at China’s official population data from its 1953 and 1964 censuses, we see that if the rate of population increase up to 1958 had been maintained, the population should have been 27 million higher over the period over 1959-1961 than it actually was. This population deficit is also discussed by the demographers Pravin Visaria and Leela Visaria. The population deficit was widely equated with ‘famine deaths.’ But 18 million of the people alleged to have died in a famine were not born in the first place. The decline in the birth rate from 29 in 1958 to 18 in 1961 is being counted as famine deaths. The Chinese are a highly talented people, but they have not learnt the art of dying without being born.



There is a basic responsibility that everyone, and more particularly academics, has to be clear and precise about. To say or write that “27 million people died in the famine in China” conveys to the reader that people who were actually present and alive, starved to death.  But this did not actually happen and the statement that it did is false.



China had lowered it death rate sharply from 20 to 12 per thousand between 1953 and 1958. (India did not reach the latter level until over a quarter century later.) After the radical land reforms and the formation of rural cooperatives, there were mass campaigns to clean up the environment and do away with disease bearing pests while a basic rural health care system was put in place. That a dramatic reduction in the rural death rate was achieved, is not disputed by anyone. During the early commune formation from 1958, there was a massive mobilisation of peasants for a stupendous construction effort, which completely altered for a few years the normal patterns of peasant family life. Women were drawn into the workforce, communal kitchens were established and children looked after in crèches as most of the able-bodied population moved to irrigation and other work sites during the slack season. We find a graphic description of this period of mass mobilisation in Wiliam Hinton’s Shenfan. When this author spent three weeks in China in 1983, visiting several communes --- which still existed at that time --- she was told every time that “we built our water conservation system during the Great Leap.” The birth rate fall from 1959 had to do with labour mobilisation, and not low nutrition since the 1958 foodgrain output was exceptionally good at 200 million tons (mt).



HOLES IN THE ARGUMENT

There was excess mortality compared to the 1958 level over the next three years, of a much smaller order. Let us be clear on the basic facts about what did happen: there was a run of three years of bad harvests in China --- drought in some parts, floods in others, and pest attacks. Foodgrain output fell from the 1958 good harvest of 200 mt to 170 mt in 1959 and further to 143.5 mt in 1960, with 1961 registering a small recovery to 147 million tons. This was a one-third decline, larger than the one-quarter decline India saw during its mid-1960s drought and food crisis. Grain output drop coincided in time with the formation of the communes, and this lent itself to a fallacious causal link being argued by the academics who were inclined to do so, and they blamed the commune formation for the output decline. One can much more plausibly argue precisely the opposite --- that without the egalitarian distribution that the communes practised, the impact on people of the output decline, which arose for independent reasons and would have taken place anyway, would have been far worse. Further, without the 46,000 reservoirs built with collective labour on the communes up to 1980, the effects of later droughts would have been very severe. Recovery to the 200 million ton level took place only by 1965. Throughout, however, the per capita foodgrain output in China even during the worst year, 1960, remained substantially above that in India.



As output declined from 1959, there was a rise in the officially measured death rate from 12 in 1958 to 14.6 in 1959, followed by a sharp rise in 1960 to 25.4 per thousand, falling the next year to 14.2 and further to 10 in 1962. While, clearly, 1960 was an abnormal year with about 8 million deaths in excess of the 1958 level, note that this peak official ‘famine’ death rate of 25.4 per thousand in China was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism. If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’ Even this order of excess deaths is puzzling given the egalitarian distribution in China, since its average grain output per head was considerably above India’s level even in the worst year, and India saw no generalised famine in the mid-1960s.   



IDEOLOGICAL BIAS

Relative to China’s population, this figure of plausible excess mortality is low and it did not satisfy the academics in northern universities who have been always strongly opposed to socialised production. Coale’s and Banister’s estimates gave them the ammunition they were looking for to attack the communes. How exactly do Coale and Banister reach a figure of ‘famine deaths’ which is three times higher than the maximal plausible estimate? Examining carefully how they arrived at 30 million ‘famine deaths’ estimate, we find that the figure was manufactured by using indefensible assumptions, and has had no scholarly basis.



In the 1982 census, there was a survey on fertility covering one million persons or a mere 0.1 per cent sample of the population, who were asked about births and deaths from the early 1950s onwards. The very high total fertility rate obtained from this 1982 survey is used by them to say that millions more were actually born between the two census years, 1953 and 1964, than were officially recorded. They ignore the birth rate of 37 per thousand derived from a very much larger 1953 sample which had covered five per cent of all households and was specially designed to collect the information on births and deaths used in the official estimates. Instead, they impute birth rates of 43 to 44 per thousand to the 1950s, using the 1982 survey. There is no justification for such an arbitrary procedure of using a much later reported high fertility rate for a long distant past. We know that a distant recall period makes responses inaccurate. These imputed extra births between 1953 and 1964 total a massive 50 million but according to them did not increase by an iota the 1964 population total, 694.6 million, the official figure which they assume as correct. Thus, although all official birth and death rates are rejected by them, the official population totals are accepted. This opportunistic assumption is clearly necessary for their purpose because it allows them to assert that the same number of extra people died between 1953 and 1964, as the extra people they claim were born.



FALLACIOUS CLAIMS

But the demographers are still not satisfied with the 50 million extra births and deaths that they have conjured up. Fitting a linear time trend to the falling death rate of the early fifties is done to say that deaths should have continued to decline steeply after 1958 and since it did not, the difference from the trend meant additional ‘famine deaths.’ Such straight-line trend fitting is a senseless procedure since the death rate necessarily shows non-linear behaviour. It cannot continue falling at the same steep rate; it has to flatten out and cannot reach zero in any population --- not even the inimitable Chinese people could hope to become immortal. The final estimate of extra deaths in both authors is raised thereby to a massive 60 million, a heroic 65 per cent higher than the official total of deaths over the inter-censal period.



Having created these 60 million extra deaths at their own sweet will out of nothing, the authors then proceed to allocate them over the years 1953 to 1964, arbitrarily attributing a higher portion to the great leap years in particular. The arbitrariness is clear from the variation in their own manipulations of the figures. Coale’s allocation raises his peak death rate in 1960 to 38.8 per thousand while Banister is bolder and raises it to 44.6 compared to the official 25.4 for that year, and 30 million ‘famine deaths’ are claimed over the Great Leap years after all this  smart legerdemain. Having violated every tenet of reason, these ‘academics’ may as well have allocated all their imaginary deaths to the Great Leap years and claimed that 60 million died --- why hang themselves only for a lamb rather than for a sheep! Seldom have we seen basic norms of academic probity and honesty being more blatantly violated, than in this travesty of statistical ‘estimates.’ And seldom have  noted intellectuals, who might have been expected to show more common sense, shown instead more credulous naivete and  irresponsibility, by accepting without investigation and propagating such nonsensical ‘estimates,’ giving them the status of historical fact. In the process, they have libelled and continue to libel Mao Zedong, a great patriot and revolutionary. They have unwittingly confirmed the principle attributed to Goebbels --- that a lie has to be a really big lie and be endlessly repeated; then it is bound to be believed.



Thirty million or three crores is not a small figure. When one million people died in Britain’s colony, Ireland, in 1846-47, the world knew about it. When three million people died in the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the fact that a famine occurred was known. Yet 30 million people are supposed to have died in China without anyone knowing at that time that a famine took place. The reason no one knew about it is simple, for a massive famine did not take place at all. The intellectuals who quote the massive famine deaths figure of 30 million today, are no doubt outstandingly clever in the small, im kleinen, but are proving themselves to be rather foolish im grossen, in the large. A person has to be very foolhardy indeed to say that 30 million people died in a famine without anyone including the foreign diplomats in China and the China-watchers abroad having the slightest inkling of it. And those who credulously believe this claim and uncritically repeat it show an even greater folly than the originators of the claim.                                                
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