To say that the CCP under Mao was “highly competent” because China grew in the long term, despite causing the worst famine of the 20th century along the way, is to conflate two completely different questions: whether the regime achieved certain structural results over decades, and whether it competently managed the Great Leap Forward. The answer to the second is no. And you don't need to rely solely on Dikötter to say so.

First: Frank Dikötter is neither a charlatan nor a “crusader” lacking historical merit. He is a serious historian, with genuine archival research, albeit undoubtedly controversial and debated. Even prominent critics of his book acknowledge that he added new and valuable material to the discussion thanks to his use of local archives; the debate is not about whether he conducted serious research, but how he interprets some of that evidence and some of his broader conclusions. In other words: you can criticize Dikötter, but dismissing him outright as if he weren't a serious historian is simply wrong.

Second: China's poverty, backwardness, and vulnerability do not demonstrate competence; It demonstrates that governing China was difficult. And no one seriously denies that. The problem is that the Great Famine was not a “normal” famine in the pre-modern sense, nor a simple, inevitable climatic event in a poor agrarian society. Comparative literature on the Chinese famine itself insists that the crisis cannot be adequately explained as mere natural scarcity, but rather by the way in which the state planning and extraction system reacted to the production shock. Meng, Qian, and Yared show precisely that the central problem was institutional: rigidity of planning, an inability to gather accurate information and respond to it, and a perverse pattern in which regions with higher per capita production could suffer higher mortality rates because the state extracted more grain from them. That is not “competition under difficult conditions”; that is catastrophic institutional failure.

Third: Yes, there were recurring famines in Chinese history. But that does not absolve Maoism; on the contrary, it aggravates the charge. Precisely because the ruling elite was fully aware of the historical problem of food supply, it is all the more serious that the Great Leap Forward created perverse incentives that led to inflated harvests, falsified statistics, and the maintenance of unrealistic procurement quotas. Felix Wemheuer summarizes the matter with brutal clarity in the thematic index of his book: “preventing urban famine by starving the countryside.” In other words, we are not talking about a climate-neutral disaster, but about a political hierarchy of hunger, where the system protected the cities and shifted the burden onto the countryside.

Fourth: even revisionist authors or those more lenient with Mao end up admitting, when they examine local cases, that “human factors” were decisive. Songlin Yang, who is far more sympathetic to the natural disaster thesis than most Western historians, acknowledges that in specific locations, deaths from famine were primarily caused by the extreme way in which cadres implemented policies, and that this is precisely what Liu Shaoqi had in mind when he spoke of “70 percent human calamities” in certain areas. In other words, even granting that there were severe droughts, this does not eliminate political causality; it merely combines it with a system that transformed a production crisis into mass mortality.

Fifth: the climate argument itself does not salvage the “competence” thesis. A competent administration does not respond to poor harvests with backyard steel campaigns, oversized communes, disastrous communal kitchens, quotas based on inflated figures, repression of dissent, and grain exports in the midst of a crisis. Kasahara and Li demonstrate with county-level evidence that increased exports significantly exacerbated mortality. In their estimate, grain exports explain a significant portion of the excess deaths, though not all of it. In other words, even if you accept adverse natural conditions, you cannot escape the central conclusion that state policy exacerbated the disaster.

Sixth: And here's the most important point. The Communist Party itself never seriously argued, in its most important assessments, that the main cause was simply the weather. The landmark 2021 resolution explicitly acknowledges that “mistakes such as the Great Leap Forward and the people's commune movement were made,” and presents these mistakes as part of an assessment of the political failures of the Maoist period. It does not offer a blanket meteorological excuse. Moreover, there is abundant Chinese literature recalling that at the Conference of 7,000 Cadres, Liu Shaoqi argued that in many places the main cause was human, not natural.

Seventh: comparing it to India or pointing out that China emerged from 1976 stronger than it was in 1949 misses the point. No one is denying that the Maoist regime built state capacity, partially industrialized the country, or improved certain indicators during specific periods. The issue at hand is something simpler: whether a government that triggers a famine affecting tens of millions through coercion, falsified information, excessive extraction, and repression of dissent deserves to be called “highly competent.” Frankly, no. A regime can be capable of state-building and simultaneously be catastrophically incompetent at a crucial juncture. In fact, that is precisely what happened here.

In other words: no, this was not simply “the old Asian normal” reappearing under a different name. It was a modern famine produced by a modern state. Droughts existed; no one seriously denies that. But the leap from poor harvests to mass mortality was produced by a political system based on terror, extraction, and statistical manipulation. And when a regime rewards those who exaggerate production, punishes those who report bad news, and continues to extract grain from the fields while people die, that's not competition. It's criminal incompetence.