Estado Sentido

«BEIJING — The document, written by Communist Party investigators as famine raged in China in 1961, reads almost like a cookbook.

In Qiaotou district, in Sichuan Province, “An old lady named Luo Wenxiu was the first to start consuming human flesh,” investigators wrote. “After an entire family of seven had died, Luo dug up the body of the 3-year-old girl, Ma Fahui. She sliced up the girl’s flesh and spiced it with chili peppers before steaming and eating it.” The report, dated Feb. 9 of that year, is one of more than 100 astonishing documents collected by the historian Zhou Xun in a new book about Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, published by Yale University Press.

In another, an investigator recounted how the body of a 5-year-old Sichuan boy provided “four separate meals” for his mother, who strangled him with a towel first. “Such shocking and disturbing incidents are by no means unique,” the investigator, Wang Deming, wrote in the report dated Jan. 27.

Unlike the horrors of the Soviet gulag or the Holocaust, what happened in China during the Great Leap Forward has received little attention from the larger world, “even though it is one of the worst catastrophes in twentieth-century history,” writes Ms. Zhou, an assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, in the introduction to “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962.”

“In China itself, the famine is a dark episode, one that is not discussed or officially recognized,” she writes.»

A Great Leap Into the Abyss - no New York Times.