China: Deja vu all over again

China’s Summer Grain Acquisitions Fell, but State Reported Grain Harvest Was “Highest in History”
Chinascope

A government report showing the progress of summer grain acquisitions, released on Wednesday August 12, showed that wheat purchases in regions including Hebei, Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, and Henan dropped by 18 percent. However, the state media in Jiangsu and Henan announced “good news.” The media claimed that the summer grain harvest “stayed at the highest level in history.”

In the past few months, disastrous events have occurred in major agriculturally productive regions in China and crops have seen severe damage. However, Zhou Xuewen, the deputy Minister of Emergency Management and deputy Minister of Water Resources, boldly predicted at a recent press conference that the year 2020 will be a great year of harvest. He stated, “The year of flooding is often the year of harvest and will be the harvest of (double-crops and) late rice. Why? The water conditions are better, and the soil is fertile. Our disaster relief measures and our post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, along with our strengthened restoration and planting management, as well as some technologies being used, mean that I don’t think food will be affected this year.”

The website of the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration published the progress of the summer grain purchases. As of August 5, the total purchase of wheat in the main producing areas was about 42.85 million tons, a drop of about 9.38 million tons, or 18 percent, on a year-on-year basis.

chinascope.org/archives/24227

The CCP has always made use of Party agendas to control the population, and during the Cultural Revolution this resulted in catastrophic starvation while the Party claimed historic grain yields. Do you hear the echo?

“The Great Famine was falsely labeled a “Three-Year Natural Disaster” by the CCP. In fact, those three years had favorable weather conditions without any massive natural disasters like flooding, drought, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, frost, freeze, hail or plague of locusts. The “disaster” was entirely caused by man. The Great Leap Forward campaign required everyone in China to become involved in steel-making, forcing farmers to leave their crops to rot in the field. Despite this, officials in every region escalated their claims on production yields. He Yiran, the First Secretary of the Party Committee of Liuzhou Prefecture, fabricated all by himself the shocking yield of “65,000 kilograms of paddy rice per mu [14]” in Huanjiang County. This was right after the Lushan Plenum when the CCP’s anti-rightist movement spread out to the entire country. In order to demonstrate that the CCP was correct all the time, the crops were expropriated by the government as a form of taxation according to these exaggerated yields. Consequently, the grain rations, seeds and staple foods of the peasants were all confiscated. When the demand still could not be met, the peasants were accused of hiding their crops.

He Yiran once said that they must strive to get first place in the competition for highest yield no matter how many people in Liuzhou would die. Some peasants were deprived of everything, with only some handfuls of rice left hidden in the urine basin. The Party Committee of Xunle District, Huanjiang County even issued an order to forbid cooking, preventing the peasants from eating the crops. Patrols were conducted by militiamen at night. If they saw light from a fire, they would proceed with a search and raid. Many peasants did not even dare to cook edible wild herbs or bark, and died of starvation.

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from Commentary 7: On the Chinese Communist Party’s History of Killing

www.ninecommentaries.com/english-7

From the national archives of Russia.

Revelations from the Russian Archives
UKRAINIAN FAMINE
The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932–1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants’ will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government’s quota was met. Stalin’s decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain. Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported.
www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ukra.html

Even though the harvest would have been adequate to meet former quotas, the quota demanded by Stalin threw the country into famine, killing millions.

An early case of starvation as a tool of oppression by a Communist government.

 

 

h/t Lily

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