Hungry Ghosts

By Jasper Becker,

Book cover of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

Book description

Combining years of interviews, extensive research, and painstaking detective work, a journalist exposes the horrible result of Mao Zedong's attempted utopian engineering in China between 1958 and 1962, uncovering a bloody trail of terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder.

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hungry Ghosts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I was shocked when I first came to know this book, the first to unravel the large-scale abnormal death during China’s Great Famine. I was shocked because it was written by a person who was foreign to China and was far away from the famine, not by a person who was from China or someone who lived through the famine.

Also shocking are the book’s many revelations; the most important of which is that the Great Famine was man-made, not due to natural disasters as the Chinese regime always told us.

As a result, this book greatly inspired me to…

From Zhang-Yue's list on understanding China’s great famine.

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