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EATING BITTERNESS: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine. Contemporary Chinese Studies. Edited by Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. viii, 321 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W illus., B&W photos.) C$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7748-1727-1.
Eating Bitterness is a collection of articles on the Great Leap Forward Movement (GLF) and famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s China. It consists of eleven chapters, and each chapter is an independent article written by a scholar from China, Canada or the United States. With new sources and perspectives, this volume is a cutting-edge contribution to studies of the GLF and famine as well as the early history of the People's Republic in general.
The GLF and famine remains a politically sensitive topic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has imposed strict control over related archives. Only in recent years have scholars begun to publish books on this event based on newly available materials. Therefore, it is exciting to see that many authors of Eating Bitterness made laudable progress in exploiting new sources, particularly primary archives, inner-Party publications and oral interviews, to reveal more details of the GLF and famine. For example, Xin Yi examines the distribution system of large-scale communes, showing that the management of communes was anything but sophisticated or effective (chapter 5). In a case study of Macheng County of Hubei Province, Wang Yanni describes how communization was carried out in a coercive manner by demolishing or requisitioning farmers'...