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I think this is one of the biggest thing people forget about China. Their wealth is extremely new found. A lot of people alive today still had some sort of relative that has starved to death, particularly in the same age as our baby boomer generation. That's why the Chinese government is extremely strict and the citizens are willing to be "subjugated". Time were extremely tough for them not even two-three decades ago.

Side note, I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made. They are either created or mitigated poorly because of ignorance.

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This explanation sounds nice until you start thinking about other countries which experienced famine in the last century and don’t look anything like china...

A great many famines in the 1900s were caused by war, unrest and "political stuff" (including forced relocation and creation of work camps / collective farms / prison farms, whatever you want to call them). There were some famines directly related to drought, but they look relatively minor compared to the ones with obvious human agency.

What famines were there where not either the government caused or ignored the problem, a colonial power ignored or caused the problem or a war was going on?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine

Here's a cut n paste

Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 instances of famine from 108 BC to 1911 in one province or another—an average of close to one famine per year.[50] From 1333 to 1337 a terrible famine killed 6 million Chinese. The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed no fewer than 45 million people.[51]

Japan experienced more than 130 famines between 1603 and 1868.[52]

That's not even close to answering the question. People dying in a regional famine is the fault of the government.

More widely crop failure and famine are very different things. Consider, Ireland was exporting food during the Irish potato famine.

Most of those countries, like Uganda, look worse (in the sense that the average Chinese wouldn't pick to live in Uganda over China, nor it would give them more wealth or political freedom).

As for the others, the famines there were usually caused by external forces that have stopped being (e.g. foreign occupation, etc), so not the same.

The grandparent post makes two unrelated claims:

(1) China's recent famine is why it is extremely strict.

(2) Modern famines are man-made.

The parent post seems to be responding to (1).

Sibling posts appear to think the parent post is addressing (2)?

I'm thinking about my grandma, who I see everyday, whose parents came from Ukraine in the beginning of the last century; their 3 month old daughter along with them in a cargo ship.

This is not even wrong. The CCP did not passively deal with a famine - it caused a famine, and used it to kill millions of people. This is not remotely disputable.

The CCP is strict because the only thing that really matters is holding on to power.

That same party is still in power today, and currently putting millions of Muslims into concentration camps. The lucky ones get a modified house arrest, with non-Muslim minders living with them and monitoring them at all times.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m...

When a lighter touch is all that is required, they'll use social credit points to allow someone to live their lives or not:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/beijing-t...

Edit: yep - looks like the brigades are definitely out in force on this thread today.

There is a narrative by politics scholar that the current CCP is a reaction to Mao's CCP and is radically different. Mao was an anti-intellectual and a lot of the problems of the Great Leap Forward policy came from the decision to put uneducated people in charge and replacing knowledge by ideology.

This was such a disaster, and it harmed so much of the former elite (who ended up working in the fields and, predictably, sucked at farming) that they manage to unite and take over the CCP instances.

Nowadays, CCP leaders are highly technocratic and having a strong education is mandatory to rise in the hierarchy.

> That same party is still in power today, and currently putting millions of Muslims into concentration camps.

Yes, and even if they don't have an extermination policy that looks at least like STASI policies there.

The reason (and I only state a reason, not an excuse there) why China is so sensitive about religion is because it caused the most deadly civil war in human history, the revolt of the Taiping, when a guy believing he was the brother of Jesus brought half the country to worship him and fought the emperor.

They started their anti-muslim policy when ISIS was starting to have antennas in several countries. Religious movement triggers alarm in them in the same way as nazis do to Europeans: they know they can lead to 20 million death.

> Religious movement triggers alarm in them in the same way as nazis do to Europeans: they know they can lead to 20 million death.

I don't think that's quite right. They're sensitive because religion causes Chinese people to organize themselves outside Communist hierarchy, which they see as a threat to Communist power. They're sensitive to all similar kinds of organization, not just religiously motivated ones.

The Chinese "Communist" Party has even started persecuting Marxists who organize outside their control.

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

Economist Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in part for determining this is in fact the case.

I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made.

++ for Amartya Sen. I think he first covered this in the book Poverty and Famines, where he drives home the point that famines can happen even if food is available and even if food prices have not been driven up sharply. Modern famine is a failure of government (war is an obvious cause, but not the only one.)

http://www.worldcat.org/title/poverty-and-famines-an-essay-o...

I wonder if future famines driven by climate change will be considered "man-made" or not?

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