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A window into man's digestion system- literallyAlexis St. Martin: The Man With A Hole In His StomachThe history of medicine isn't pretty. It's full of grisly accidents, inhumane behavior, and ambiguous ethics. The story of Alexis St. Martin and Dr. William Beaumont hits all of those low points, but it completely changed the world of medicine.In 1822, Alexis St. Martin was working as a voyageur[1] — a boatman who shipped furs from port to port — for the American Fur Company.[2] St. Martin and his mates navigated heavily laden canoes through the chilly Canadian waterways, transporting furs and other goods to trading posts along the way. By day, voyageurs paddled for 15 backbreaking hours, negotiating whitewater rapids, and transpirting thousands of pounds of cargo.[3] At night they made camp, filled their bellies, and slept beneath their canoes.The 28-year-old French Canadian was standing in the company store on Mackinac Island in Michigan when the accidental discharge of a shotgun from less than three feet away pierced St. Martin in his lower ribs on the left side.[4] It was a gruesome scene, leaving a gaping hole where fractured rib bones, burnt bits of lung, and stomach tissue protruded.[5] The wound was so bad that his breakfast couldn't even stay in his stomach; it came out of the hole along with everything else.American Fur Company on Mackinac Island where Alexis St. Martin was shot. (American Fur Company - Wikipedia)His companions dressed his wound and called for Dr. William Beaumont, an Army surgeon stationed at Fort Mackinac to the scene.[6] Beaumont, a Connecticut native, never attended medical school and had no background in experimental science but had been apprenticed in Vermont and joined the American Army, where he fought in the 1812 War against Britain as a surgeon’s mate.[7] He was eventually sent to Mackinac Island, a frontier outpost in Michigan, at the lowly rank of Assistant Surgeon.Beaumont after examining the hand-sized wound with the edge of a burnt lung protruding from it, initially decided that treatment was futile. He cleansed the wound, clipping off a bit of a rib with his penknife to ease the lung back inside, then applied a poultice.[8] Beaumont predicted the man wouldn't survive more than 36 hours.[9]I was called to him [St. Martin] immediately after the accident. Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this another protrusion resembling a portion of the Stomach, what at first view I could not believe possible to be that organ in that situation with the subject surviving, but on closer examination I found it to be actually the Stomach, with a puncture in the protruding portion large enough to receive my fore-finger, and through which a portion of his food that he had taken for breakfast had come out and lodged among his apparel. In this dilemma I considered my attempt to save his life entirely useless.~William Beaumont, Fort Mackinac Post Surgeon (1822)[10]Miraculously, St. Martin did survive, despite pneumonia and a dangerously high fever. In the weeks that followed, St. Martin was subjected to repeated cycles of bleeding, followed by cathartics, which spilled out the hole in his stomach.[11] Attempts to feed the patient had similar results, forcing aides to feed St. Martin through anal injections for two weeks[12] , until the wound is healed enough for the hole to be bandaged.With every subsequent doctor's visit, St. Martin recovered and in about 10 months, the wound was healed — mostly. Despite multiple surgeries, the hole wouldn't close. Instead, the tissue healed back on itself to form a fistula.[13] That made it difficult for St. Martin to eat since food easily escaped from his stomach.Alexis St. Martin - WikipediaBut for Beaumont, that hole presented a window into human digestion.. At the time, there were two competing theories about how digestion worked. On one side, digestion was mechanical- food was literally ground up in the stomach. On the other, it was chemical- food was dissolved in the stomach with some sort of gastric juice.[14]For Beaumont, St. Martin's hole presented a window into human digestion literally. Until he published his observations “Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion,” most scientists believed digestion was either mechanical or chemical.[15] The first attributed digestion to a grinding in the stomach, the latter to the solvent properties of gastric juice.[16]To determine the mechanisms of digestion, Beaumont used St. Martin as a human guinea pig, observing human digestion through the open hole in St. Martin's stomach. Vegetables were spooned into the hole, left it there for a while, then siphoned out.[17] Beaumont tied bits of meat to pieces of string and dangled them in the stomach like a fishing lure, pulling them out after various periods of time to see how the meat changed.[18]Digesting The Past | PLOS ECR CommunityHe kept careful records of everything that went into and came out of St. Martin's stomach, and even sent samples of his gastric secretions for analysis — a task that sounds routine these days, but was unheard of at the time.[19] In the end, Beaumont was able to prove that digestion was chemical, due to gastric juices made up primarily of hydrochloric acid.[20]While St. Martin’s gastric fistula was not the first recorded in history, it was the first time one was exploited for scientific research.[21] With encouragement through letters from his friend, Army Surgeon General Joseph Lovell, Beaumont continued to experiment on and in St. Martin’s stomach on Mackinac Island through 1824.[22] Experiments continued intermittently for the next 10 years, at his posts in New York, Wisconsin and Washington D.C.Beaumont demonstrated once and for all that digestion in the stomach was chemical—a product (mostly) of the gastric juice itself which Beaumont surmised, correctly, was composed largely of hydrochloric acid.[23] The discovery lifted the doctor from obscurity, and he became seen as the father of American gastric physiology.[24] The fact that Beaumont made these findings with the barest nuts-and-bolts medical background, in frontier conditions, and with no scientific training is a testament to his keen mind.This Man's Gunshot Wound Gave Scientists a Window Into DigestionWhile examining a patient and recording observations is routine in medicine today, it was uncommon during Beaumont's time. Doctors would often diagnose patients without ever laying eyes on them.[25] Despite being the 1800s, many physicians continued to diagnose patients on the 1,600-year-old medical treatises of the ancient Greek physician Galen.[26]However, a steadily increasing number of scholars and doctors began to realize that observational medicine was a revolutionary approach to syccessful physiology and medicine. Essentially, data was collected on the clinical patient and then diagnoses were based on the physician's conclusions.Dr William Beaumont (Alexis St. Martin: The Man With A Hole In His Stomach)One thing in particular that clouded Beaumont’s rising reputation was his callous insensitivity toward St. Martin. While typical of the age, an 1843 letter from St. Martin to Beaumont explains his unwillingness to travel and reveals, perhaps, the patient’s attempt to remind the doctor of his human condition. “I have not forgot you. I have had some sickness in my family, and lost two of my children, and was unwell myself for the best part of a year.”[27]The doctor showed little concern for St. Martin’s physical or emotional well-being throughout the experiments, which often left St. Martin lightheaded, nauseous, constipated and with a headache.[28] Who knows what other sicknesses the Quebecois’ amazing immune system stanched, as Beaumont freely placed objects of questionable sterility, including thermometers and spoons, into the hole.[29] We know, too, that St. Martin was ridiculed by his peers over his freakish stomach, as his brother, Etienne, also a voyageur, once stabbed another voyageur for taunting St. Martin.[30]It's questionable how much consent St. Martin authorized Beaumont to experiment on his body. Beaumont kept St. Martin a virtual prisoner in his own home, feeding and clothing him for years, but also preventing him from leaving to visit his wife and children.[31] In Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Beaumont housed St. Martin, as well as his wife, Marie, and children.[32] The family was treated as hired hands, and St. Martin was paid as such. Later, Beaumont arranged to have St. Martin enlisted in the army so he could receive a stipend to live on—although St. Martin’s only duty was to present his stomach to Beaumont.[33]A Gutsy Life:By 1834, St. Martin had successfully extricated himself from the doctor. The two never saw each other again, although over the course of the next two decades, Beaumont tried unsuccessfully to lure St. Martin to his home in St. Louis (where he eventually settled) for more experiments.[34] Once, Beaumont sent his son, Israel, to Quebec as an envoy.[35] But Beaumont and St. Martin could never come to terms. St. Martin wouldn’t visit without his family. Beaumont didn’t want the family, and even when he or St. Martin relented on that point, the doctor wouldn’t advance enough money to make the visit happen, for fear the “irresponsible” St. Martin would squander the funds along the way.[36]Although a world apart, the men’s odd relationship haunted both to the end of their days. In 1840, Beaumont was called in as one of several physicians to assist the publisher of a St. Louis newspaper who’d been struck on the head with an iron cane by a politician who his newspaper had maligned.[37] Beaumont performed a trepanning operation—cutting a hole in the patient’s skull to remove the pressure. The publisher died, and the politician went on trial for murder. In their defense, his lawyers accused Beaumont of drilling the hole in the man’s head just to see what was inside, just as he’d left the hole in St. Martin’s side. The politician got of with a $500 fine.[38] While Beaumont then and at other times has been accused of not closing a hole after the wound healed so he could exploit it, many scholars and physicians believed the doctor lacked the means or the knowledge to do so.Beaumont’s later life in St. Louis was comfortable. He was happily married and had three children he adored.[39] While Beaumont’s book never made him much money, it brought him prominence, which translated into a busy physician’s practice.[40] Beaumont died in 1853, about a month after he hit his head on an icy step after visiting a patient.[41]Alexis Bidagan St. Martin (1802-1880) - Find A...St. Martin outlived his doctor by 27 years. In 1856, a charlatan, going by the name of Bunting and masquerading as a doctor, toured St. Martin around 10 cities, treating him like a circus freak.[42] While in St. Louis, the pair visited Beaumont’s widow and son, Israel.[43] Presumably, St. Martin made some money from the tour, but it wasn’t enough to lift him out of poverty in his old age.When St. Martin died in 1880, his family purposely left his body out to decompose in the sun before burying him in an unmarked grave—eight feet deep with rocks on the casket—all to keep the curious from exhuming it.[44]In 1962, St. Martin finally got his due when the Canadian Physiological Society decided it was time to mark his grave.[45] The society’s sleuthing turned up the fact that St. Martin was 28 at the time of the accident, not 18 as had been believed for 140 years—largely because Beaumont recorded it that way. Beaumont, who knew every nuance of St. Martin’s stomach, apparently never bothered to check his subject’s age.Footnotes[1] Definition of VOYAGEUR[2] American Fur Company[3] A Gutsy Life: Reboot[4] Alexis St. Martin Becomes Living X-Ray | History Channel on Foxtel[5] Probing the Mysteries of Human Digestion[6] If You're Going to Mackinac Island, You Have to Visit the Forts – MyNorth.com[7] Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal[8] Frontier Doctor[9] The Canada Medical Record[10] The William Beaumont Papers: A Life in Letters[11] Before Bioethics[12] History and Animal Nutrition and Digestion[13] Intestinal Fistulas[14] Probing the Mysteries of Human Digestion[15] An Elementary treatise on human physiology[16] Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion[17] An Elementary treatise on human physiology[18] DR. WILLIAM BEAUMONT HAD THE STOMACH FOR THE JOB[19] The Retrospect of Practical Medicine and Surgery[20] How Powerful Is Stomach Acid?[21] This Horrifying Experiment Led to Our Understanding of Human Digestion[22] Source Materials and the Library: The Dispersion of the Beaumont Papers[23] ‘Open Wound’ Book Review - Doctor and Patient, Bound Together[24] Dr. William Beaumont: The Accidental Father of Gastroenterology[25] Man With Hole in Stomach Revolutionized Medicine[26] The Doctor's White Coat: An Historical Perspective[27] Alexis St. Martin (1794-1880): The Intrepid Guinea Pig of the Great Lakes[28] Digestive System - Alexis St. Martin's Stomach[29] Medical Sentinel[30] The Journal of the American Medical Association[31] Man With Hole in Stomach Revolutionized Medicine[32] William Beaumont Publishes the First Great American Contribution to Physiology[33] Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America[34] St. Martin And Beaumont[35] Alexis St. Martin collection 1879[36] Full text of "Life and letters of Dr. William Beaumont, including hitherto unpublished data concerning the case of Alexis St. Martin"[37] Frontier Doctor[38] Guinea Pig Zero[39] William Beaumont Biography[40] Dr. William Beaumont's Life and Work[41] William Beaumont Biography[42] All the Guts, None of the Glory: The Story of Alexis St. Martin[43] This Man's Gunshot Wound Gave Scientists a Window Into Digestion[44] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS014067361260498X.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi3t5OYn6LlAhWSd98KHf1DAxAQFjAgegQICxAB&usg=AOvVaw28bH2a_a6Osl16SO9Ie1EK[45] Alexis Bidagan St. Martin (1802-1880) - Find A...

For sheer scale and grandeur, I would say Planet Earth (TV series)Spectacularly stunning visuals and brilliant narration (David Attenborough (broadcaster & naturalist) and Sigourney Weaver (actor)). It's a 'must-have' in your documentary collection.From Wikipedia page1. "From Pole to Pole"The first episode illustrates a 'journey' around the globe and reveals the effect of gradual climatic change and seasonal transitions en route. During Antarctica's winter, emperor penguins endure four months of darkness, with no food, in temperatures of −70 °C (−94 °F). Meanwhile, as spring arrives in the Arctic, polar bear cubs take their first steps into a world of rapidly thawing ice. In northern Canada, the longest overland migration of any animal — over 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) — is that of three million caribou, which are hunted by wolves, and one such pursuit is shown. The forests of eastern Russia are home to the Amur leopard; with a population of just 40 individuals in the wild, it is now the world's rarest cat. This is primarily because of the destruction of its habitat, and Attenborough states that it "symbolizes the fragility of our natural heritage." However, in the tropics, the jungle that covers 3% of the planet's surface supports 50% of its species. Other species shown include New Guinea's birds of paradise, African hunting dogs in their efficient pursuit of impala, elephants in Africa migrating towards the waters of the Okavango Delta, a seasonal bloom of life in the otherwise arid Kalahari Desert, and 300,000 migrating Baikal teal, containing the world's entire population of the species in one flock. The Planet Earth Diariessegment shows how the wild dog hunt was filmed unobtrusively with the aid of the Heligimbal, a powerful, gyro-stabilised camera mounted beneath a helicopter.2. "Mountains"The Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram, PakistanThe second instalment focuses on the mountains. All the main ranges are explored with extensive aerial photography. Ethiopia's Erta Ale is the longest continually erupting volcano — for over 100 years. On the nearby highlands, geladas (the only primate whose diet is almost entirely ofgrass) inhabit precipitous slopes nearly five kilometres (3 mi) up, in troops that are 800-strong: the most numerous of their kind. Alongside them live the critically endangered walia ibex, and both species take turns to act as lookout for predatory Ethiopian wolves. The Andes have the most volatile weather and guanacos are shown enduring a flash blizzard, along with an exceptional group sighting of the normally solitary puma. TheAlpine summits are always snow-covered, apart from that of the Matterhorn, which is too sheer to allow it to settle. Grizzly bear cubs emerge from their den for the first time in the Rockies, while Himalayan inhabitants include rutting markhor, golden eagles that hunt migrating demoiselle cranes, and the rare snow leopard. At the eastern end of the range, the giant panda cannot hibernate due to its poor nutriment of bamboo and one of them cradles its week-old cub. Also shown is the Earth's biggest mountain glacier: the Baltoro in Pakistan, which is 70 kilometres (43 mi) long and visible from space. Planet Earth Diaries demonstrates the difficulty of obtaining the first ever close-up footage of the snow leopards: a process which took over three years3. "Fresh Water"The fresh water programme describes the course taken by rivers and some of the species that take advantage of such a habitat. Only 3% of the world's water is fresh, yet all life on land is ultimately dependent on it. Its journey begins as a stream in the mountains, illustrated by Venezuela's Tepui, where there is a tropical downpour almost every day. It then travels hundreds of kilometres before forming rapids. With the aid of some expansive helicopter photography, one sequence demonstrates the vastness of Angel Falls, the world's highest free-flowing waterfall. Its waters drop unbroken for nearly 1,000 metres (3,000 feet) and are blown away as a mist before they reach the bottom. In Japan, the water is inhabited by the biggest amphibian, the two-metre long giant salamander, while in the northern hemisphere, salmon undertake the largest freshwater migration, and are hunted en route by grizzly bears. The erosive nature of rivers is shown by theGrand Canyon, created over five million years by the Colorado River. Also featured are smooth coated otters repelling mugger crocodiles and the latter's Nile cousin ambushing wildebeest as they cross the Mara River. Roseate spoonbills are numerous in the Pantanal and are prey to spectacled caiman. In addition, there are cichlids, piranhas, river dolphins and swimming crab-eating macaques. Planet Earth Diaries shows how a camera crew filmed a piranha feeding frenzy in Brazil — after a two-week search for the opportunity.4. "Caves"The Lechuguilla CaveThis episode explores "Planet Earth's final frontier": caves. At a depth of 400 metres (1,300 ft), Mexico's Cave of Swallows is Earth's deepest Pit Cave freefall drop, allowing entry by BASE jumpers. Its volume could contain New York City's Empire State Building. In this episode divers explore the otherworldly cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula, appearing to be flying in water as clear as in air, giving a glimpse of the hundreds of kilometers of these caves which have already been mapped. Also featured is Borneo's Deer Cave and Gomantong Cave. Inhabitants of the former include three million Wrinkle-lipped Free-tailed Bat, which have deposited guano on to an enormous mound. In Gomantong Cave, guano is many metres high and is blanketed with hundreds of thousands of cockroaches and other invertebrates. Also depicted are eyeless, subterranean creatures, such as the Texas blind salamander and (bizarrely) a species of crab. Carlsbad Caverns National Park is featured with its calcite formations. Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz is also featured, with its flowing stream of sulphuric acid and snottite formations made of living bacteria. A fish species, the shortfin molly, has adapted to this habitat. The programme ends in New Mexico's Lechuguilla Cave (discovered in 1986) where sulphuric acid has produced unusually ornate, gypsum crystal formations. Planet Earth Diaries reveals how a camera team spent a month among the cockroaches on the guano mound in Gomantong Cave and describes the logistics required to photograph Lechuguilla. Permission for the latter took two years and local authorities are unlikely to allow another visit.5. "Deserts"This instalment features the harsh environment that covers one third of the land on Earth: the deserts. Due to Siberian winds, Mongolia's Gobi Desert reaches extremes of temperature like no other, ranging from -40°C to +50°C (-40°F to 122°F). It is home to the rare Bactrian camel, which eats snow to maintain its fluid level and must limit itself to 10 litres (2.6 U.S. gal; 2.2 imp gal) a day if it is not to prove fatal. Africa's Sahara is the size of the USA, and just one of its severe dust storms could cover the whole of Great Britain. While some creatures, such as the dromedary, take them in their stride, for others the only escape from such bombardments is to bury themselves in the sand. Few rocks can resist them either and the outcrops shown in Egypt's White Desertare being inexorably eroded. The biggest dunes (300 m or 1,000 ft high) are to be found in Namibia, while other deserts featured are Death Valley in California and Nevada, the Sonoran in Arizona, the deserts of Utah, all in the United States, the Atacama in Chile, and areas of the Australian outback. Animals are shown searching for food and surviving in such an unforgiving habitat: African elephants that walk up to 80 kilometres (50 mi) per day to find food; lions (hunting oryx); red kangaroos (which moisten their forelegs with saliva to keep cool); nocturnal fennec foxes, acrobatic flat lizards feeding on black flies, and duelling Nubian ibex. The final sequence illustrates one of nature's most fearsome spectacles: a billion-strong plague of desert locusts, destroying all vegetation in its path. Planet Earth Diaries explains how the hunt for the elusive Bactrian camels necessitated a two-month trek in Mongolia.6. "Ice Worlds"The aurora borealis in AlaskaThe sixth programme looks at the regions of the Arctic and Antarctica. The latter contains 90% of the world's ice, and stays largely deserted until the spring, when visitors arrive to harvest its waters. Snow petrels take their place on nunataks and begin to court, but are preyed on by South Polar skuas. During summer, a pod of humpback whales hunt krill by creating a spiralling net of bubbles. The onset of winter sees the journey ofemperor penguins to their breeding grounds, 160 kilometres (99 mi) inland. Their eggs transferred to the males for safekeeping, the females return to the ocean while their partners huddle into large groups to endure the extreme cold. At the northern end of the planet, Arctic residents includemusk oxen, who are hunted by Arctic foxes and wolves. A female polar bear and her two cubs head off across the ice to look for food. As the sun melts the ice, a glimpse of the Earth's potential future reveals a male polar bear that is unable to find a firm footing anywhere and has to resort to swimming — which it cannot do indefinitely. Its desperate need to eat brings it to a colony of walrus. Although it attacks repeatedly, the herd is successful in evading it by returning to the sea. Wounded and unable to feed, the bear will not survive. Meanwhile, back in Antarctica, the eggs of the emperor penguins finally hatch. Planet Earth Diaries tells of the battle with the elements to obtain the penguin footage and of unwelcome visits from polar bears.7. "Great Plains"]This episode deals with savanna, steppe, tundra, prairie, and looks at the importance and resilience of grasses in such treeless ecosystems. Their vast expanses contain the largest concentration of animal life. Over Africa's savanna, a swarm of 1.5 billion Red-billed Queleas are caught on camera, the largest flock of birds ever depicted.[19] In Outer Mongolia, a herd of Mongolian gazelle flee a bush fire and has to move on to new grazing, but grass can repair itself rapidly and soon reappears. On the Arctic tundra during spring, millions of migratory snow geese arrive to breed and their young are preyed on by Arctic foxes. Meanwhile, time-lapse photography depicts moving herds of caribou as a calf is brought down by a chasing wolf. On the North American prairie, bison engage in the ritual to establish the dominant males. The Tibetan Plateau is the highest of the plains and despite its relative lack of grass, animals do survive there, including yak and wild ass. However, the area's most numerous resident is the pika, whose nemesis is the Tibetan fox. In tropical India, the tall grasses hide some of the largest creatures and also the smallest, such as the pygmy hog. The final sequence depicts African bush elephants that are forced to share a waterhole with a pride of thirty lions. The insufficient water makes it an uneasy alliance and the latter gain the upper hand during the night when their hunger drives them to hunt and eventually kill one of the pachyderms. Planet Earth Diaries explains how the lion hunt was filmed in darkness using infraredlight.8. "Jungles"A Costa Rican tree frogThis episode examines jungles and tropical rainforests. These environments occupy only 3% of the land yet are home to over half of the world's species. New Guinea is inhabited by almost 40 kinds of birds of paradise, which avoid conflict with each other by living in different parts of the island. Some of their elaborate courtship displays are shown. Within the dense forest canopy, sunlight is prized, and the death of a tree triggers a race by saplings to fill the vacant space. Figs are a widespread and popular food, and as many as 44 types of bird and monkey have been observed picking from a single tree. The sounds of the jungle throughout the day are explored, from the early morning calls of siamangs and orangutans to the nocturnal cacophony of courting tree frogs. The importance of fungi to the rainforest is illustrated by a sequence of them fruiting, including aparasite called cordyceps. The mutual benefits of the relationship between carnivorous pitcher plants and red crab spiders is also discussed. In theCongo, roaming forest elephants are shown reaching a clearing to feed on essential clay minerals within the mud. Finally, chimpanzees are one of the few jungle animals able to traverse both the forest floor and the canopy in search of food. In Uganda, members of a 150-strong community of the primates mount a raid into neighbouring territory in order to gain control of it. Planet Earth Diaries looks at filming displaying birds of paradise, focusing mainly on the filming of the six-plumed bird of paradise.9. "Shallow Seas"This programme is devoted to the shallow seas that fringe the world's continents. Although they constitute 8% of the oceans, they contain most marine life. As humpback whales return to breeding grounds in the tropics, a mother and its calf are followed. While the latter takes in up to 500 litres of milk a day, its parent will starve until it travels back to the poles to feed — and it must do this while it still has sufficient energy left for the journey. The coral reefs of Indonesia are home to the biggest variety of ocean dwellers. Examples include banded sea kraits, which ally themselves with goatfish and trevally in order to hunt. In Western Australia, dolphins 'hydroplane' in the shallowest waters to catch a meal, while in Bahrain, 100,000 Socotra cormorants rely onshamals that blow sand grains into the nearby Persian Gulf, transforming it into a rich fishing ground. The appearance of algae in the spring starts a food chain that leads to an abundant harvest, and sea lions and dusky dolphins are among those taking advantage of it. In Southern Africa, as chokka squid are preyed on by short-tail stingray, the Cape fur seals that share the waters are hunted by the world's largest predatory fish: the great white shark. On Marion Island in the Indian Ocean, a group of king penguins must cross a beach occupied by fur seals that do not hesitate to attack them. Planet Earth Diaries shows the difficulties of filming the one-second strike of a great white shark, filmed by Simon King.10. "Seasonal Forests"A stand of giant redwoodsThe penultimate episode surveys the coniferous and deciduous seasonal woodland habitats — the most extensive forests on Earth. Conifers begin sparsely in the subarctic but soon dominate the land, and the taiga circles the globe, containing a third of all the Earth's trees. Few creatures can survive the Arctic climate all year round, but the moose and wolverine are exceptions. 1,600 kilometres (990 mi) to the south, on the Pacific coast of North America, conifers have reached their full potential. These include some of the world's tallest trees: the redwoods. Here, a pine marten is shown stalking a squirrel, and great grey owl chicks take their first flight. Further south still, in the Valdivian forests of Chile, a population of smaller animals exist, including the pudú and the kodkod. During spring in a European broad-leafed forest, a mandarin duck leads its day-old family to leap from its tree trunk nest to the leaf litter below. Bialowieza Forest typifies the habitat that characterised Europe around 6000 years ago: only a fragment remains in Poland and Belarus. On a summer night on North America's east coast, periodical cicadas emerge en masse to mate — an event that occurs every seventeen years. After revisiting Russia's Amur leopards in winter, a timelapse sequence illustrates the effect of the ensuing spring on the deciduous forest floor. In India's teak forests, a langur monkey strays too far from the chital that act as its sentinels and falls prey to a tiger. In Madagascar, mouse lemurs feed on the nectar of flowering baobab trees. Planet Earth Diaries explains how aerial shots of thebaobab were achieved by the use of a cinebulle, an adapted hot air balloon.11. "Ocean Deep"The final installment concentrates on the least explored area of the planet: the deep ocean. It begins with a whale shark used as a shield by a shoal of bait fish to protect themselves from yellowfin tuna. Also shown is an oceanic whitetip shark trailing rainbow runners. Meanwhile, a 500-strong school of dolphins head for the Azores, where they work together to feast on scad mackerel along with a flock of shearwaters. Down in the ocean's furthest reaches, some creatures defy classification. On the sea floor, scavengers such as the spider crab bide their time, awaiting carrion from above. The volcanic mountain chain at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean also sustains life through the bacteria that surround its sulphide vents. There are thought to be around 30,000 undersea volcanoes, some of them taller than Mount Everest. Their sheer cliffs provide anchorage for several corals and sponges. Nearer the surface, the currents that surround these seamounts force nutrients up from below and thus marine life around them is abundant. Ascension Island is a nesting ground for frigatebirds and green turtles. Off the Mexican coast, a large group of sailfish feed on another shoal of bait fish, changing colour to signal their intentions to each other, allowing them to coordinate their attack. The last sequence depicts the largest animal on Earth: the blue whale, of which 300,000 once roamed the world's oceans. Now fewer than 3% remain. Planet Earth Diaries shows the search in the Bahamas for oceanic whitetip sharks.

Mao was against slavery. Although forbidden, there was slavery in Tibet until 1959 when Mao put a stop to it.Mao ended the oppression of the people by the landlords. Famines were common, the people barely survived, and life was hard. Mao redistributed the land and this gave security to millions of people. Former landlords that killed tenants were put on trial by their peers and faced execution. Landlords were not exterminated, but given a chance to also have a piece of land.Mao believed in rehabilitation, not killing during the purges. Mao did not rely on terror.Mao’s reforms led to great successes. He laid the foundation for modern China. The economy grew steadily and he modernized China.Mao enjoyed popular support by the peasants who desperately needed land reform. They lived lives of desperate hunger and poverty. Mao brought the nation together. He brought enormous economic growth and prepared China to become one of the leading economic powers in the world. Mao’s strength was in mobilizing the majority of farmers and peasants to support him. He guided them. He had less power than any U.S. President.The supposed terror of Mao’s rule is total propaganda. In fact the supposed “famine” that he caused turned out to be a period of hunger, and the numbers extolling his supposed 45 million killed are unsubstantiated lies. Most of it comes from bitter members of the CCP who found themselves purged for embracing capitalism and had to do some service work in the country to learn the value of not being antisocial. Mao did not execute his political enemies. He believed in rehabilitation and service work. That is why President Xi’s father and Deng Xiaoping himself were not killed and Deng would eventually become the leader of China.The only landlords that got hurt were the ones who took up arms and violently resisted the land reforms. Landlords that caused deaths or had collaborated with the Japanese invaders would face a trial and if found guilty could be executed.Source: How Mao Greatly Strengthened ChinaThis man has just been given land as part of the land redistribution.Land was given to peasants, who previously were essentially serfsOn collectives food was more abundant than beforePhotos: COMMUNES, LAND REFORM AND COLLECTIVISM IN CHINAMassive irrigation projects improved the landFantastic series of photos of everyday life in Maoist China: Everyday Life in Maoist ChinaWhen the land reforms were announced Mao anticipated there would be resistance from the landlord class, as any privileged class is unlikely to just happily give up their riches for the well being of others. But landlords had the option to abide by the law and be fine. Estimating resistance is not a death sentence. In fact landlords that complied were given land to till and welcomed into the community. They were not exterminated.Source: The Land Reform -- china.org.cnLand is redistributed more equitablyI double checked the Wikipedia account of Mao’s land reform measures, and the citations refer to rabid anti-communist books that are filled with lies. I shouldn’t be surprised. The story of Mao in the West is filled with outright lies.You rarely hear it but the reality was that even though slavery was officially abolished, the practice continued before Mao stopped it. The Dalai Lama had slaves up until 1959. But for Mao this would continue.Source: White Paper on Tibet's March Toward ModernizationSource: Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to Is it true that landlords in China still owned slaves before Mao initiated land reform?The Mao as mass murderer lies began, interestingly, 20 years after his death with cooked numbers. But in the West these lies are entrenched.Monthly Review | On the Role of Mao Zedong Exploring the lies about Maocum monsterMonthly Review | Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to What happened to those who opposed Mao Zedong?Mao’s only screw up was during the Great Leap Forward, in which he tried to go too fast, causing a setback. But this in no way reduces his prior accomplishments. Further, the nation bounced back quickly.Graphs and sources charts from Gwydion Madawc Williams's answer to Considering that China has a great firewall, what level do Westerners know about China and Chinese people know about the West? Who knows more objectively and comprehensively? and Godfree Roberts's answer to Was failure of communism the reason China switched to capitalism?Godfree Roberts:Colleagues, rivals, academics and propagandists East and West have written much nonsense about Mao Zedong yet, when we correct for bias and discard patent falsehoods it becomes clear that, apart from the bloodshed that accompanies wars and revolutions, it’s doubtful that Mao killed anyone and indubitable that he gave life to billions. Indeed, no-one has done so much good for so many–and so little harm; no-one comes close.The obloquy is easy to understand. Foreign powers vilified him for his independence and communism and charged that he had embarked on a chaotic and fruitless quest for a socialist spiritual utopia. Colleagues like Deng Xiaoping (whom Cambridge double blue Lee Kwan Yew called ‘the most brilliant man I ever met’) and Chou En Lai (who wrung from Henry Kissinger the admission that ‘the Chinese are smarter than us’) stood head and shoulders above any Western contemporary and the humblest of them–and father of the current president–was a general at age nineteen and governor at twenty-two.They buried him with faint praise because in life, Mao stood effortlessly, head and shoulders above them all, chastening or dismissing them at will while exhausting them with societal upheavals that required a level of heroic exertion that would have killed or maddened lesser men. That was the thirty percent in their verdict, “Seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong” but the Chinese people never accepted that verdict for reasons that will become obvious in the course of this three-part reconsideration.Mao first came to public attention in 1919 when, aged twenty-six, he published The Death of Miss Chao, a searing account of a girl in his village who committed suicide rather than marry a man she despised: “The circumstances in which Miss Chao found herself were the following: (1) Chinese society; (2) the Chao family of Nanyang Street in Changsha; (3) the Wu family of Kantzuyuan Street in Changsha, the family of the husband she did not want. These three factors constituted three iron nets, a kind of triangular cage. Once caught in these three nets, it was in vain that she sought life in every way possible. There was no way for her to go on living … It happened because of the shameful system of arranged marriages, because of the darkness of the social system, the negation of the individual will and the absence of the freedom to choose one’s own mate”.In 1927, after escaping execution at the hands of Nationalist forces, he remained a tireless campaigner for women’s rights, “A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority: political, family and religious. Women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority, are also dominated by the authority of their husbands. These four authorities–political, family, religious and masculine–are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system”.In 1945 he made colleagues promise that, in victory, they would ‘ensure freedom of marriage and equality between men and women’ and, in 1950, his first official act as head of State was to sign the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, which promised to protect women and children, guarantee gender equality in monogamous marriages, women’s choice of marriage partners, equal pay for equal work, maternity leave and free childcare. (Encountering resistance later, in 1955, he insisted, “Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole”).When Mao stepped onto the world stage in 1945, Russia had taken Mongolia and a piece of Xinjiang, Japan occupied three northern provinces, Britain had taken Hong Kong, Portugal Macau, France pieces of Shanghai, Germany Tsingtao, the U.S. shared their immunities and the nation was convulsed by civil war. China was agrarian, backward, feudalistic, ignorant and violent. Of its four hundred million people, fifty million were drug addicts, eighty percent could neither read nor write and their life expectancy was thirty-five years. The Japanese had killed twenty million and General Chiang Kai-Shek complained that, of every thousand youths he recruited, barely a hundred survived the march to their training base. Women’s feet were bound, peasants paid seventy percent of their produce in rent, desperate mothers sold their children in exchange for food and poor people sold themselves, preferring slavery to starvation. U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart reported that, during his second year there, ten million people starved to death in three provinces.When he stepped down in 1974 the invaders, bandits and warlords were gone, the population had doubled, literacy was 84 percent, wealth disparity had disappeared, electricity reached poor areas, infrastructure was restored, the economy had grown 500 percent, drug addiction was a memory, women were liberated, girls were educated, crime was rare, everyone had food and shelter, life expectancy was sixty-seven and, by several key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably with middle income countries whose per capita GDP was five times greater.Despite a brutal U.S. blockade on food, finance and technology, and without incurring debt,Mao grew China’s economy by an average of 7.3 percent annually, compared to America’s postwar boom years’ 3.7 percent. When he died, China was manufacturing jet planes, heavy tractors, ocean-going ships, nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. As economist Y. Y. Kueh observed: “This sharp rise in industry’s share of China’s national income is a rare historical phenomenon. For example, during the first four or five decades of their drive to modern industrialization, the industrial share rose by only 11 percent in Britain (1801-41) and 22 percent in Japan”. His documented accomplishments are, as Professor Fairbanks says, almost unbelievable. Hedoubled China’s population from 542 million to 956 milliondoubled life expectancydoubled caloric intakequintupled GDPquadrupled literacyincreased grain production three hundred percentincreased gross industrial output forty-foldincreased heavy industry ninety-fold.increased rail lineage 266 percentincreased passenger train traffic from 102,970,000 passengers to 814,910,000.increased rail freight tonnage two thousand percentincreased the road network one thousand percent.increased steel production from zero to thirty-five MMT/yearIncreased industry’s contribution to China’s net material product from twenty-three percent to fifty-four percent.China’s Second Dump Truck, December, 1973But, from Mao’s point of view, that was a sideshow. By the time he retired, he had reunited, reimagined, reformed and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized it after a century of failed modernizations and ended thousands of years of famines. A military genius (Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery compared his greatest battles favorably to Alexander’s and Napoleon’s),strategist and political innovator, master geopolitician, peasant and Confucian gentleman, Mao was a fine poet, even in translation. In 1946, British poet Robert Payne praised his Snow and Mao replied, “I wrote it in the airplane. It was the first time I had ever been in an airplane. I was astonished by the beauty of my country from the air–and there were other things”.“What other things?” Payne asked.“So many. You must remember when the poem was written. It was when there was so much hope in the air, when we trusted the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai Shek]. My poems are stupid–you mustn’t take them seriously”.North country scene: a hundred leagues locked in ice, a thousand leagues of whirling snow.Both sides of the Great Wall one single white immensity.The Yellow River’s swift current is stilled from end to end.The mountains dance like silver snakes and the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants,Vying with heaven in stature.On a fine day, the land, clad in white, adorned in red, grows more enchanting.This land so rich in beauty has made countless heroes bow in homage.But alas! Chin Shih-huang and Han Wu-ti lacked literary grace,And Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu had little poetry in their souls;And Genghis Khan, proud Son of Heaven for a day, knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.All are past and gone!For truly great men? Look to this age alone.He retains the affection of the common people to this day, and ten million of them visit his birthplace each year, dwarfing, by orders of magnitude, the memory of all of history’s heroes combined. Yet we tend to associate his name with famine and chaos which, in our minds, obscure his achievements but, upon inspection, we will see that they are no more valid than the charges of economic mismanagement. They are simply implanted memories and we will examine the first, The Great Famine, in the next instalment.Excerpted from CHINA 2020: Everything You Know is Wrong. Forthcoming, 2018.Source: Mao ReconsideredMao’s generosity of spiritThis letter was written to students during the Cultural Revolution. Notice the generosity of spirit and call for understanding at the end of the letter. This was Mao.[SOURCE: Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought, a Red Guard Publication.]Red Guard comrades of Tsinghua University Middle School:I have received both the big-character posters which you sent on 28 July as well as the letter which you sent to me, asking for an answer. The two big-character posters which you wrote on 24 June and 4 July express your anger at, and denunciation of, all landlords, bourgeois, imperialists, revisionists, and their running dogs who exploit and oppress the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary parties and groupings. You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries; I enthusiastically support you. I also give enthusiastic support to the big-character poster of the Red Flag Combat Group of Peking University Middle School which said that it is right to rebel against the reactionaries; and to the very good revolutionary speech given by comrade P’eng Hsiao-meng representing their Red Flag Combat Group at the big meeting attended by all the teachers, students, administration and workers of Peking University on 25 July. Here I want to say that I myself as well as my revolutionary comrades-in-arms all take the same attitude. No matter where they are, in Peking or anywhere in China, I will give enthusiastic support to all who take an attitude similar to yours in the Cultural Revolution movement. Another thing, while supporting you, at the same time we ask you to pay attention to uniting with all who can be united with. As for those who have committed serious mistakes, after their mistakes have been pointed out you should offer them a way out of their difficulties by giving them work to do, and enabling them to correct their mistakes and become new men. Marx said: the proletariat must emancipate not only itself but all mankind. If it cannot emancipate all mankind, then the proletariat itself will not be able to achieve final emancipation. Will comrades please pay attention to this truth too.Part II of Godfree Robert’s assessment of Mao:Judging from the copious comments, it appears that Part One of this trilogy demonstrated conclusively that Mao Zedong did more good for more people than anyone in history. In Part Two, we examine the common belief that–whether through malice, indifference or incompetence–Mao also did great harm by starving millions of people to death.But before we dive into the details, let’s run a plausibility check: How likely is it that the greatest benefactor mankind has ever known would maliciously starve millions of his fellow countrymen to death and, in so doing, destroy the survivors’ trust in him? How likely is it that a peasant like himself, who knew famine well, failed to notice? How likely is it that the greatest logistician in military history–who for decades fed millions of men on the march while retaining the loyalty of the peasants who fed them–could not manage to share available food among the people he’d previously saved? Not only does Mao’s record suggest the likelihood is almost zero: so does common sense. People with decades of compassionate behavior don’t–even in movies–suddenly become bloodthirsty monsters or indifferent psychopaths. And nor, as we shall see, did Mao.The Great Leap ForwardIt all began with his promise to redivide China’s land. For Mao, real revolutions occur in human hearts and minds; changing the ownership of assets was, he said, cosmetic, “To divide up the land and give it to the peasants is to transform the property of the feudal landlords into the individual property of the peasants, but this remains within the limits of bourgeois revolution. To divide up the land is nothing remarkable. MacArthur did it in Japan. Napoleon divided up the land, too. Land reform cannot abolish capitalism, nor can it lead to socialism”.Nevertheless, he kept his wartime promise and, in 1950, redistributed all of China’s agricultural land to her 300 million peasants and, in 1953, announced a Five Year Plan, the first step on a gradual path to collectivize the country’s semi-subsistence agriculture through cooperative work organizations. The newly-landed peasants gave the plan a mixed reception: a third of villages radically socialized their lives (some, like Huaxi Village, still do so) a third simply went along with it and a third dragged their feet or rejected it outright.The Plan, however, produced insufficient excess to feed the rapidly doubling population and the millions of newly urbanized industrial workers who’d left their farms and worse, it produced new inequalities. Mao told colleagues, “As is clear to everyone, the spontaneous forces of capitalism have been growing in the countryside in recent years, with newly rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty for lack of the means of production, some are falling into debt and others selling or renting out their land. If this tendency goes unchecked it is inevitable that polarization in the countryside will only worsen”. He reminded them that China was in a race against time, “You say China is a big country with a huge population, huge land and socialism, which you say is a superior system. Well then, prove it. If you can’t surpass the U.S. in sixty years, what good are you? China will lose its citizenship of the planet”.Insisting that the way lay forward, not back, he proposed doubling down.Communications were rudimentary, the government inexperienced, goal-setting amateurish and Beijing’s capacity to coordinate implementation was primitive, yet Mao was under relentless pressure. He had already doubled food production and halved the death rate but, by 1958, the birth rate had quadrupled and he was racing to simultaneously modernize the country and feed new mouths while struggling under the West’s crushing food, financial and technology embargo and constant threats of nuclear attack. As a matter of survival, he insisted, China must develop agriculture and industry simultaneously and, to compensate for the lack of capital and technology, combine popular enthusiasm and virtuous exertion in what he termed a Great Leap Forward.Innovative and enormously ambitious it would, he promised, overcome the growing threats of famine and foreign aggression while educating rural people about industrial production. Communalized peasants and workers would share responsibilities, communal child care and kitchens would free women to join the workforce and local, communal development would make reliance on expensive, nationwide infrastructure to transport finished goods unnecessary. Peasants ‘walking on two legs’ would develop light industry in the countryside while simultaneously erecting dikes, building dams and expanding irrigation. Increased agricultural productivity would free up labor for local manufacturing and, in the absence of capital, labour-intensive rural industries would meet local needs: locally produced cement would build local dams that, through locally made irrigation equipment, would water crops in soil enriched by locally made fertilizer.Despite the obstacles, in three years, the Great Leap Forward raised coal production thirty-six percent, textile production thirty per cent, electricity generation twenty-six per cent and fixed national assets by forty percent. Nine of the ten biggest reservoirs in China today were built then. The gigantic Xinfengjiang Reservoir, one of thousands and a source of great national pride, holds ten cubic meters of clean water for every Chinese, has generated billions of kilowatts of electricity, powered rural and urban development and played a vital role in flood control and irrigation for the entire Guangdong and Hong Kong region, which depends on it to this day. Of all the industrial projects China would launch in the next fifteen years, two-thirds were founded during the Great Leap. Even failed experiments like backyard steel furnaces, which did not operate year-around and did not impact farm harvests, did little damage to the economy.The people directly experienced improvements. According the the US National Institutes of Health, the rise in life expectancy under Mao “ranks among the most rapid, sustained increases in documented global history. These survival gains appear to have been largest during the 1950s, with a sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine, that was then followed by substantial progress again during the early 1960s”. Given this extraordinary performance, can Mao be blamed for ‘the sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine’ and, if so, to what extent?But there was a severe famine in China in 1961-62 and the Chinese press called it the most severe since 1879. Grain harvests fell by a third: from two hundred million tons in 1958 to 170 in 1959, to 143 in 1960, to 147 in 1961 and did not fully recover until 1965. The entire Hunan region flooded and the spring harvest in southwest China’s rice bowl been lost to drought, ushering in a three-year El Nino event that would devastate the nation’s cropland. As harvests declined the death rate rose: from twelve per thousand in 1958 to 14.6 in 1959, to 25.4 in 1960, then to 14.2 in 1961.Mao felt the impact personally. In late 1958 his wife, Jiang Qing[1], and the cook prepared a family banquet for their teenage daughter, Li Na, when she came home from boarding school. The girl was so hungry and ate so fast that Mao and Jiang Qing stopped eating and watched as she devoured everything on the table. The cook and Jiang Qing were sobbing and Mao stood up and walked out to the courtyard, lost, not knowing what to say.Yet propaganda officials were reluctant to change their sunny predictions[2] so, as spring planting began in April 1959, Mao wrote directly to provincial, district, county, commune brigades and village production teams begging them not to boast about production ‘for at least ten years as boastful, unrealistic rhetoric, dahua gaodiao, is dangerous because food is the number one priority and food shortages have such widespread effects’.Thanks to ration books and Mao’s logistical mastery, everyone had something to eat every day. Journalist Sidney Rittenberg recalled that Party members were forbidden to stand in line to buy food–they were to let the people go first–and remembered a cadre who broke the rule and repented, “They had a big meeting where she made a self-criticism, weeping, weeping, weeping, saying, ‘I’m not a good communist, I put my children’s health above the health of the masses’. Can you imagine that today? Anything even remotely similar? Today it’s ‘get mine.’”.In an era when life expectancy was still only fifty-eight people over sixty, weakened by lifetimes of famine and disease, suffered cruelly. In Gao Village, Mobo Gao says that, after 1949, the only suicide in his village occurred during the Great Leap, “A woman hanged herself because of family hardship. The Great Leap Forward years were the only time in anybody’s memory that Gao villagers had to pick wild vegetables and to grind rice husks into powder to make food… Throughout my twenty years in Gao village, I do not remember any particular time when my family had enough to eat… as a rural resident, life was always a matter of survival. However, the Great Leap Forward made life even more difficult”.In A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene tells of traveling through China at the height of the famine in 1960, “With the establishment of the new government in Peking in 1949, two things happened. First, starvation–death by hunger–ceased in China. Food shortages, and severe ones, there have been; but no starvation. This is a fact fully documented by Western observers. The truth is that the sufferings of the ordinary Chinese peasant from war, disorder and famine have been immeasurably less in the last decade than in any other decade in the century”.Ridiculing the Great Leap Forward as ‘The Great Leap Backward,’ Edgar Snow, who had seen authentic death from hunger in pre-Mao China, saw no famine, “Were the 1960 calamities actually as severe as reported in Peking, ‘the worst series of disasters since the nineteenth century,’ as Chou En-lai told me? Weather was not the only cause of the disappointing harvest but it was undoubtedly a major cause. With good weather the crops would have been ample; without it, other adverse factors I have cited–some discontent in the communes, bureaucracy, transportation bottlenecks–weighed heavily. Merely from personal observations in 1960 I know that there was no rain in large areas of northern China for 200 to 300 days. I have mentioned unprecedented floods in central Manchuria where I was marooned in Shenyang for a week…While Northeast China was struck by eleven typhoons–the largest number in fifty years–I saw the Yellow River reduced to a small stream…Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials continued to refer to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued to cite no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-Communist visitor to China provides an authentic instance of starvation during this period. Here I am not speaking of food shortages, or lack of surfeit, to which I have made frequent reference, but of people dying of hunger, which is what ‘famine’ connotes to most of us, and what I saw in the past”.What were the effects of food shortages?If we take twelve deaths per thousand–Mao’s proudest achievement to that point–as our benchmark, then famine-related deaths from 1959-61 total 11.5 million. But this seems suspiciously high because average grain production per head remained comfortably above India’s, and China’s peak death rate, 25.4, matched India’s 24.8 that year and India experienced no general famine in that decade.Without communal distribution–which India lacked–the impact would have been worse. And, without the 46,000 communally constructed reservoirs, the effects of later droughts would certainly have been disastrous, as William Hinton remembers in Fanshen, “When this author spent three weeks in China in 1983, visiting several communes–which still existed then–he was told every time, ‘we built our water conservation system during the Great Leap’”.We must also remember that the Great Leap relied on a gigantic migration of the fittest young villagers to new urban industries and the entry of women into the workforce–both of which suppressed the birth rate, which was further suppressed because nutritional deficits also affect fertility: the Dutch famine of 1944-45 and the Bangladesh famine of 1974-75 cut fertility in half, as famine always did in China.Cui Bono?There were influential people, inside China and out, who wished to discredit Mao and who took to exaggerating–and even fabricating–statistics to make a gloomy picture darker. In assembling their arguments, Mao’s critics evidence a population deficit (fewer people around than expected) and impute births and deaths which may not have occurred.Historical famine fabrication is a simple matter, as historian Boris Borisov, employing the same techniques as Mao’s critics, demonstrated in Famine killed 7 Million People in the U.S.A., a horrifying account of American famine deaths during the Great Depression:“Few people know about five million American farmers–a million families–whom banks ousted from their land because of debts during the Great Depression. The U.S. government did not provide them with land, work, social aid, or pensions and every sixth American farmer was affected by famine. People were forced to leave their homes and wander without money or belongings in an environment mired in massive unemployment, famine and gangsterism. At the same time, the U.S. government tried to get rid of foodstuffs which vendors could not sell. Market rules were observed strictly: unsold goods categorized as redundant could not be given to the poor lest it damage business. They burned crops, dumped them in the ocean, plowed under 10 million hectares of cropland and killed 6.5 million pigs. Here is a child’s recollection: ‘We ate whatever was available. We ate bush leaves instead of cabbage, frogs too. My mother and my older sister died during a year’ (Jack Griffin)…The U.S. lost not less than 8,553,000 people from 1931 to 1940. Afterwards, population growth indices change twice, instantly. Exactly between 1930-31 the indices drop and stay on the same level for ten years. No explanation of this phenomenon can be found in the extensive report by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States”.Real famines are difficult to hide. Until Professor Borisov reported it, no-one had heard of a famine during the Great Depression yet, when one million people starved to death in colonial Ireland in 1846-47, the world knew immediately and when three million died in the 1943-44 Bengal famine the news raced around the globe. The idea that eight million died in the USA or thirty-million died in China without anyone’s noticing seems farfetched. After all, China’s weather-related harvests were no secret and China’s El Nino also brought drought throughout the Prairie wheat belt and reduced Canada’s 1961 crop from 490 million to 262 million bushels. Yet nobody starved to death in Canada.Taking advantage of the world wide grain shortage, the United States Government blocked grain shipments to China and assigned the CIA to monitor the success of the embargo. The Agency reported:ECONOMIC SITUATION IN COMMUNIST CHINA. National Intelligence Estimate. Director of Central Intelligence. 4 April 1961. CONCLUSIONS: The Chinese Communist regime is now facing the most serious economic difficulties it has confronted since it consolidated its power over mainland China. As a result of economic mismanagement, and, especially, of two years of unfavorable weather, food production in 1960 was little if any larger than in 1957 at which time there were about 50 million fewer Chinese to feed. Widespread famine does not appear to be at hand, but in some provinces many people are now on a bare subsistence diet and the bitterest suffering lies immediately ahead, in the period before the June harvests. The dislocations caused by the ‘Leap Forward’ and the removal of Soviet technicians have disrupted China’s industrialization program. These difficulties have sharply reduced the rate of economic growth during 1960 and have created a serious balance of payments problem. Public morale, especially in rural areas, is almost certainly at its lowest point since the Communists assumed power, and there have been some instances of open dissidence.PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNIST CHINA: National Intelligence Estimate. Director of Central Intelligence.2 May 1962. CONCLUSIONS: The future course of events in Communist China will be shaped largely by three highly unpredictable variables: the wisdom and realism of the leadership, the level of agricultural output, and the nature and extent of foreign economic relations. During the past few years all three variables have worked against China. In 1958 the leadership adopted a series of ill-conceived and extremist economic and social programs; in 1959 there occurred the first of three years of bad crop weather; and in 1960 Soviet economic and technical cooperation was largely suspended. The combination of these three factors has brought economic chaos to the country. Malnutrition is widespread, foreign trade is down and industrial production and development have dropped sharply. No quick recovery from the regime’s economic troubles is in sight.Forty-five years later, a miracle happened: A sensational book, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, claimed to have discovered forty-five million famine deaths. Reviews in the Western media were ecstatically horrified: Must rank as one of the most powerful, moving and yet frightening insights into The Great Leap Forward. Readers cannot help but be distressed by this book for when one tragedy leads to another and then another you cannot read this historical truth without being moved. Of course the tragedies that are revealed involved tens of thousands of citizens leading to the largest human disaster of all time.But when a curious reader asked why the author had photoshopped a wartime 1946 Life Magazine photo on his book cover to portray a famine that occurred fifteen years later, he confessed that he could find no photographs of a Great Leap famine.Then another reader observed that the crucial quote the author attributed to Mao seemed utterly unlike Mao’s known statements: “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill”. An archive check revealed it was from the transcript of a meeting convened to cut the number of ambitious Great Leap enterprises in half and the ‘people’ who would starve were not people at all, but large industrial projects.The book insisted that, had Mao maintained his 1953 growth rate, China’s population would have been twenty-seven million higher in 1961 and attributed the gap to famine deaths. But University of Chicago demographer Ping-ti Ho pointed out that the 1953 figures are not from a census, but from provincial estimates showing a highly dubious population increase of thirty percent between 1947 and 1953–a period of warfare, famine and intense revolutionary struggle–suggesting that the twenty-seven million ‘missing’ people probably never existed.As Professor Borisov’s article demonstrates, historical demography is more art than science and the claims of tens of millions of famine deaths are based, as British historian Gwydion Madawc Williams suggests, on ‘comparing Mao to Mao in order to condemn Mao’ by using leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief. The process works like this:Use the lowest death rate attributed to Mao as the baseline but don’t tell readers that the baseline was Mao’s accomplishment.Note the increased death rate during the Three Bad Years.Ignore the fact that people were better off in 1961 than in the previous 100 years.Ignore the weather.Ignore the fact that life expectancy was fifty-six and almost all the dead were over sixty.Ignore the exodus of workers moving to cities.Ignore the fall in birth rates when women join the labor force.Ignore the fall in fertility that accompanies food shortages.Ignore universal food rationing.Ignore the USSR’s withdrawal of aid in 1960.Ignore the fact that the peasants, armed for the first time in history, showed no discontent.Ignore the grain embargo.Mistranslate the key statement attributed to Mao.Select an evocative famine image from a previous era.Fit a linear time trend to the falling death rate.Claim deaths should have continued to decline steeply.Blame famine for the difference.Blame Mao for the famine.Victor Marchetti, formerly of the Office of the Director of the CIA, testified that the Agency provided eighty-million dollars annually to The Asia Foundation for ‘anti-communist academicians to disseminate a negative vision of mainland China’. The academician author of Mao’s Great Famine received $2 million from the US and UK Governments.ConclusionHowever severely his critics judge Mao, he did not initiate the Great Leap with the aim of killing anyone and claiming that he did obscures his accomplishments and even a superficial investigation like the present one demonstrates the opposite. Historian Han Donping, who lost two grandparents during the Great Leap, later traveled through Shandong and Henan provinces, sites of the worst shortages. Yes, farmers told him, the apparent abundance in 1958 led to carelessness in harvesting and consuming food and, insidiously, to the assumption that the government had absolved them of responsibility for their own food security. “I interviewed numerous workers and farmers in Shandong and Henan and never met one who said that Mao was bad. I talked to a scholar in Anhui who grew up in rural areas and had done research there. He never met one farmer that said Mao was bad nor a farmer who said Deng Xiaoping [Mao’s successor] was good”. As Gwydion Williams dryly observes, had the peasants’ faith in Mao been shaken, “Would the survivors have shown the enthusiasm for Mao’s Cultural Revolution that they demonstrated from 1966 onwards?”In reality, China’s population increased from 650 million in 1958 to 680 million five years later, so Mao’s actions cannot be compared to the vengeful murder of 10 million Congolese by the armies of King Leopold, nor the death of 35 million Chinese at the hands of Japan’s imperialist armies during 1937-45, nor the policy-driven famines created by the civilised British administrations in India, Ireland and Persia. But the narrative of ‘Mao the monster’ is assiduously cultivated, and at great expense, to prove that socialism is a failure. But direct, comparisons suggest precisely the opposite.In their Hunger and Public Action, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze wrote, “Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying the difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.” [my emphasis]. Sen and Dreze conclude, “Starvation deaths and excessive deprivation are newsworthy in a way the quiet persistence of regular hunger and non-extreme deprivation are not”. In democratic India today, two million children starve to death every year and nobody notices.Instead of ‘How Many People Died Because Of Mao?’ it is fairer to ask, ‘How Many People Lived Because Of Mao?’ If it’s reasonable to attribute all unnatural deaths in China since 1949 to him, then it’s reasonable to attribute the billions of lives beyond the 1949 life expectancy to him, too. In reality, bad weather, famines and the US embargo caused most of the deaths and even today’s neo-liberal globalization is inflicting more death and suffering world wide than the Great Leap.Notes[1] Gao, Mobo. The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (pp. 89-90). Pluto Press. Kindle Edition.[2] Wu Faxian (2006), (Difficult years: Wu Faxian memoirs, volume 2), Hong Kong: 2006. Chairman Mao: several important historical events and episodes that I was personally involved in), Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe. In Gao, Battle for China’s Past.Source: Mao Reconsidered, Part Two: Whose Famine?