ABC: Chinese Migrants who Survived Mao’s Great Leap Forward can Help Us Learn Sustainability

Chairman Mao reading the People’s Daily. By Unknown Author (Link).

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to the Australian Government ABC, Chinese migrants who survived a brutal famine caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward can teach us how to survive in the coming age of sustainability.

Planting seeds of change

Migrants are no strangers to adaptation, as making a new home is no small feat. But now they’re being challenged to adapt again as Australia’s changing climate throws up new pressures. And there are lessons for all Australians.

阅读中文版本 | Dalam Bahasa Indonesia

By Samuel Yang and Prianka Srinivasan
Updated 29 Aug 2020, 8:08am
Published 29 Aug 2020, 6:06am

China remains the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, releasing 10.06 gigatonnes in 2018 — a gigatonne is equivalent to a billion tonnes — according to figures from the International Energy Agency.

This is a marked contrast with China of the last century, where sustainability was also a part of life, albeit not by choice. 

By the late 1950s, tens of millions of people had died in the Great Chinese Famine.

The need to be sustainable grew to become a lifelong habit, and something she brought to Australia.

“During the summer, we raised dozens of chickens,” Ms Chen said. 

“I composted the chicken manure and the unwanted weeds or grass to fertilise the vegetables in the garden, they actually grew very well.”

Limiting waste is a habit she’s passing on to her grandchildren.

“When my grandchildren waste food, for example they eat the bread but don’t eat the crust, I’d educate them … I sometimes ate their leftovers,” she said.

For some migrants, the idea of climate change hindering Australia’s safety and prosperity may be a foreign one, particularly for those who emigrated in search of a higher quality of life. 

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-29/climate-change-australia-migrants-global-warming-migration/12568456

I guess we should thank the Government owned ABC for being so open about the skills we shall need to master, and the life lessons we should embrace, to survive a Green New Deal future which emphasises sustainability over prosperity.

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commieBob
August 30, 2020 6:16 pm

People who survived and watched other people die, generally aren’t proud of what they did to survive. Just saying.

Scissor
Reply to  commieBob
August 30, 2020 8:03 pm

Yeah, and tens of millions dying isn’t very sustainable.

fred250
Reply to  Scissor
August 30, 2020 8:21 pm

I think they used the wrong wording

Survival, or subsistence… barely, would be a better term to use.

Its what the marxist left want.. bare subsistence and subservience.

Reply to  fred250
August 31, 2020 6:19 am

To understand the Chinese Communist Party and its philosophy, read these comments. This is the political system that Trudeau admires and stated that he wants for Canada. The Marxist Dems in the USA have the same dark objectives – totalitarianism and dictatorship.

Posted 2019:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/forced-organ-harvesting-overseas-patients-flocking-to-china-for-transplants_2816817.html

FORCED ORGAN HARVESTING: OVERSEAS PATIENTS FLOCKING TO CHINA FOR TRANSPLANTS
Legislation to curb transplant tourists receiving illicit organs can have a big impact, says rights lawyer
By Joan Delaney February 26, 2019 Updated: June 18, 2019
[excerpt]
China’s organ transplant industry grew exponentially in the early 2000s and today, China is the go-to country for transplant tourists from around the world. Despite the fact that organ donation is minimal in China, organs are plentiful, and the wait-times range between a few days and two months—something out of the question in any other country.
__________________________________________

Posted 2012:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/13/warming-in-the-ushcn-is-mainly-an-artifact-of-adjustments/#comment-811587

Gail Combs says: April 14, 2012 at 5:28 am

There is also the question of how good the data is during the time of Red China’s “Purges” where up to 80 million were killed.

paulbogdanor.com/left/china/deaths2.html

Thank you Gail for remembering these tortured millions. Below is an excerpt from that article.

The CAGW scam is not, as many of us originally believed, the innocent errors of a close-knit team of highly dyslexic scientists. The evidence from the ClimateGate emails and many other sources, and the intransigence of these global warming fraudsters when faced with the overwhelming failures of their scientific predictions, suggests much darker motives.

The lesson of Mao, Hitler and Stalin is that one should not trust, and one should never cede power to those who have no moral compass.

Best regards, Allan

SCHOLARS CONTINUE TO REVEAL MAO’S MONSTROSITIES
Exiled Chinese historians emerge with evidence of cannibalism and up to 80 million deaths under the communist leader’s regime.
Beth Duff-Brown,
Los Angeles Times,
November 20, 1994

Gong Xiaoxia recalls the blank expression on the man’s face as he was beaten to death by a Chinese mob.

He died without a name, becoming another statistic among millions.

“I remember him so vividly, he really had no expression on his face,” Gong said. “After about 10 or 20 minutes, God knows how long, someone took out a knife and hit him right into the heart.”
He was then strung on a pole and left dangling and rotting for two months.

“I think the most terrible thing, when I recall that period, the most terrible thing that struck me was our indifference,” said Gong, today a 38-year-old graduate student at Harvard researching her own history.

That terrible period was China’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. The blinding indifference was in the name of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the Communist Party.

Gong is among a new wave of scholars and intellectuals, both Western and Chinese, who believe modern Chinese history needs rewriting.

While the focus of many books and articles today is on China’s successful economic reforms, dramatic new figures for the number of people who died as a result of Mao Tse-tung’s policies are surfacing, along with horrifying proof of cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution.

It is now believed that as many as 60 million to 80 million people may have died because of Mao’s policies-making him responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined.

Gong said killer is not a strong enough word to describe Mao. “He was a monster,” she said.

*******************

commieBob
Reply to  ALLAN MACRAE
August 31, 2020 7:27 am

I take anything the Epoch Times says with a grain of salt. It’s the propaganda arm of Falun Dafa.

Occasionally Pravda would print something true that wouldn’t be printed anywhere else. In that regard, the Epoch Times is similar.

MarkW
Reply to  Scissor
August 31, 2020 7:15 am

Remember, these are the same people who want to reduce the human population to under 100 million.

John Tillman
Reply to  MarkW
August 31, 2020 1:47 pm

And they already want us to eat bugs.

Can Soylent Green (!) be far behind?

Krishna Gans
Reply to  Scissor
August 31, 2020 10:25 am

Depends of the point of view….
As some people think, to many people live on earth…..

Reply to  Scissor
August 31, 2020 11:48 am

Actually, it is, more the better in left-think

commieBob
Reply to  commieBob
August 31, 2020 5:43 am

The secret to surviving a famine is to make sure you have something to eat and to be able to ignore all those starving to death around you. Most of the survivors won’t be willing to talk about that.

Samuel Yang and Prianka Srinivasan are flat out idiots. Do they have even a quarter of a clue about what happened during the Great Leap Forward.

Frank Dikötter writes that beatings with sticks was the most common method used by local cadres and roughly half of all cadres regularly pummeled or caned people. Other cadres devised harsher means to humiliate and torture those who failed to keep up. As mass starvation set in, ever greater violence had to be inflicted in order to coerce malnourished people to labor in the fields. Victims were buried alive, thrown bound into ponds, stripped naked and forced to labor in the middle of winter, doused in boiling water, forced to ingest excrement and urine, and subjected to mutilation (hair ripped out, noses and ears lopped off). In Guangdong, some cadres injected salt water into their victims with needles normally reserved for cattle.[30] Around 6 to 8% of those who died during the Great Leap Forward were tortured to death or summarily killed.

The lesson we can learn from the Great Leap Forward is that Marxism is pure evil. Anyone who thinks we could have a kinder gentler version of Marxism just has to look at the behavior of the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) and the ‘woke’ generally and imagine what they would do if they were given free rein.

Latitude
Reply to  commieBob
August 31, 2020 6:44 am

you know….this is what brought us to eating bats

Fran
Reply to  commieBob
August 31, 2020 8:53 am

Many years ago I inherited a Chinese postdoc. He claimed refugee status based on the Tiamin Square ‘massacre’. Over the next couple of years the things he would not talk about said a lot about his background. The eldest of 8 children, I think he joined the cadres and got his MD as a reward for service – none of the others could read. He married ‘up’, and a rather sad marriage it seemed. He was very smart and capable, but I kept a pretty close eye on him in the lab. Funnily enough, he grew up with the same Indian movie music I did, as the Chinese then dubbed the dialogue but left the song and dance in Hindi.

Capable and ambitious immigrants like him don’t want to go back: they want to live like we do.

Dean
Reply to  commieBob
August 31, 2020 7:38 pm

Does this mean we have to kill all the sparrows?

And sell children?

And eat mud and bark from trees?

Zig Zag Wanderer
August 30, 2020 6:24 pm

This is true. They learned how to survive with very little food and resources and a totalitarian government. This is precisely what we are facing if this green ecolunacy grows as intended.

John
August 30, 2020 6:27 pm

There is nothing sustainable about the Green New Deal. Even the Chinese Communist Party admits the Cultural Revolution as the worst period in the Party history. What is sustainable under the New Green Deal is a population decrease of 6 billion which may actually be the final objective if fully implemented.

Hivemind
Reply to  John
August 30, 2020 6:39 pm

Some green leaders have openly admitted to wanting to cut the world population to 1 billion, even as low as 100 million.

n.n
Reply to  John
August 30, 2020 7:04 pm

Planned Populations is a recurring choice in left-wing ideological progressions.

Reply to  John
August 30, 2020 7:35 pm

John,
As usual any idea, law, program, transformation, etc that the liberal-Progressives come up with is always given a name or title that is absolutely, diametrically, the opposite of what it is or does.

August 30, 2020 6:36 pm

“Chinese migrants who survived a brutal famine caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward can teach us how to survive in the coming age of sustainability”

Translation

People who survived communist governance failure can help us survive climate governance failure.

The near death experience of Mao’s China and its desperation to right those wrongs and re-emerge as the powerful economy it once was are mere details.

It’s been a trip to hell and back that cost millions of lives. But let’s do it again eh?

https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/04/wbm2001enterprise-reform-in-china/

Reply to  Chaamjamal
August 30, 2020 6:50 pm

There is something about communism and climate. A deep and fundamental connection. A yearning of some kind.

jorgekafkazar
Reply to  Chaamjamal
August 30, 2020 7:11 pm

Ultimately, the connection between the Communist Party and climate is their inherent desire to control the entire world, replace God, and be worshiped as such. This will end badly for everyone.

gbaikie
Reply to  jorgekafkazar
August 30, 2020 8:43 pm

Well, yeah, but that the politicans which “naturally” crave power.
But the communism and climate comes from the primitive animal “instincts” Or roughly speaking, it comes from stupidity.

ACParker
August 30, 2020 6:42 pm

How will we be able to grow our own food when we will be restricted from doing so in order to limit nitrous oxide and methane output? That, and we will have to relocate to high-rise efficiency blocks of government housing, as the countryside will be turned over to Guaia — or solar and wind farms.

Dodgy Geezer
Reply to  ACParker
August 30, 2020 9:04 pm

You don’t need to go to China. The experiences of both German and British citizens during WW2, when each side was blockading the other, were similar….

Reply to  Dodgy Geezer
August 31, 2020 2:41 am

Don’t know the German equivalent of “Dig for Victory” and “Make do and mend” were but I’m sure they had them.

Richard P
August 30, 2020 6:47 pm

Well, they have at least admitted that if their plans were put into action, the result would be as bad as the Cultural Revolution. So now they agree with those with some understanding that to implement the NGD would be disastrous.

Progress is progress.

Reply to  Richard P
August 30, 2020 7:07 pm

“Well, they have at least admitted that if their plans were put into action, the result would be as bad as the Cultural Revolution”

Brilliant observation and succinctly stated. Says it all.

Thank you Richard P.

MarkH
Reply to  Richard P
August 30, 2020 11:10 pm

The difference is, they think that’s a good thing.

MarkW
Reply to  MarkH
August 31, 2020 7:21 am

Most of them think the Cultural Revolution didn’t go far enough.

AlexS
August 30, 2020 6:48 pm

Yes a new Marxist Famine is in making. It is being designed.

Craig from Oz
August 30, 2020 6:57 pm

I am just surprised the ABC admitted that China is the big bad CO2 producer.

Also the elephant in the room is that Ms Chen no longer lives in China. Muse on that point.

Terry Bixler
August 30, 2020 7:09 pm

Made up problems with made up solutions. Just send me your money so that I can help you live during these perilous times.

pat
August 30, 2020 7:21 pm

url reverts to home page address after I link to a thread! this is being posted as a response to “ABC: Chinese Migrants” thread, as it just happened in Australia.

the only mention of this I can find so far. presumably, this press conference took place about an hour ago. read for details:

31 Aug: Michael Smith News: Senators Pauline Hanson & Malcolm Roberts press conference – call for CSIRO chief to go over ‘discredited’ climate change papers
https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2020/08/senators-pauline-hanson-malcolm-roberts-press-conference-call-for-csiro-chief-to-go.html

d
August 30, 2020 7:35 pm

“When my grandchildren waste food, for example they eat the bread but don’t eat the crust, I’d educate them … I sometimes ate their leftovers,” she said.

Grandchildren? Plural? Obviously this poor woman and/or her descendants escaped the one child policy.

Scissor
Reply to  d
August 30, 2020 8:02 pm

Many rural peasants were granted exceptions for farm productivity purposes.

August 30, 2020 8:13 pm

Mrs. Chen sounds like my grandmother. She raised a garden, composted, canned her vegetables and fruit, baked her own bread, etc. But her great-grandchildren waste more food than they eat per meal. Abundance breeds waste. We should all learn from Mrs. Chen about conserving resources, but climate ain’t got nothing to do with it.

sky king
August 30, 2020 8:24 pm

ABC to viewers: See, if they can survive Mao’s Cultural Revolution, you can survive what we have planned for you!

yarpos
August 30, 2020 8:34 pm

Routine leftist logic, look backwards and be destructive

David Blenkinsop
August 30, 2020 8:41 pm

Some say we are “addicted’ to fossil fuels. This, apparently, is a reason to get rid of our addiction, despite the obvious necessity of access to reliable energy. Food is a necessity, therefore an addiction too in these terms, so depriving people of it is a good thing?

August 30, 2020 8:58 pm

This highlights why Climate change policy is the real threat to humanity. Not Climate Change.

Climate change policy is nothing but Bolshevik-style Marxism hidden inside a Green wrapper.

John F Hultquist
August 30, 2020 9:54 pm

as Australia’s changing climate

Axiom: taken to be true

I haven’t accepted the axiom that there is a problem.
The word “climate” is used when they mean unnatural atmospheric warming.
Climates [note the plural] are varied, many, and only partly determined by temperature. For example, there are mountains between me and the ocean. Moisture in the air coming off the ocean is removed on the west-facing sides of the mountains. Here on the lee side, we get zilch moisture. Should the temperature of the atmosphere go up or down a couple of degrees our area will remain dry; and have hot summers and cold winters.

Bottom line: reject the axiom, reject the puff piece, and move on to something useful.
_ _ _
Oh! Let the grandchildren eat cake. Seriously, just give them half a slice of bread.

Serge Wright
August 30, 2020 10:13 pm

“But now they’re being challenged to adapt again as Australia’s changing climate throws up new pressures”

I’ve been a resident of Australia for over 50 years and I can’t identify one single new pressure caused by the climate. Long term studies of the climate show that rainfall has increased overall and the number of cyclones has reduced overall, which are positive outcomes.

Of course there are many new pressures being imposed by CC policy, such as high cost of electricity, water rationing when dams are 100% full- due to lack of government planning, loss of blue collar jobs due to offshoring of energy intensive industry, prohibitive local council rules on coastal development – based on fake sea level rise projections and in the absence of any noticeable sea level rise, dealing with infra-sound in rural communities and their associated health impacts, cost to taxpayers to fund big Green, water buy-backs from farmers to help lower salinity of the oceans, and so on …

Of course all of these CC related policy impositions can be erased with the stroke of a pen and normal live resumed instantly. You only need to reference Mao if you have plans to create more harsh policy and further punish the public.

griff
Reply to  Serge Wright
August 31, 2020 1:41 am

Except for the droughts alternating with the stronger cyclones and the fires?

and the heatwaves causing the bats to drop out of the trees?

and the change to coral reefs and Tasmanian kelp forests?

None of which are actually happening you will now proceed to tell me.
(How long can you keep your head in the sand?)

Patrick MJD
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 3:21 am

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, as usual.

fred250
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 3:48 am

“Except for the droughts alternating with the stronger cyclones and the fires?”

You mean NORMAL WEATHER. !!

“and the heatwaves causing the bats to drop out of the trees?”

Happened several time in Australian history. (there you go again, thinking your IQ in years is a long time. 40-50 years is not a long time).

Why don’t you care about the horrendous death of bats by wind turbines, griff?

SSTs around Australia only slightly warmer in small patches compared to 1981-2005

https://www.surf-forecast.com/breaks/Park-Beach-1/seatemp

Australia coral reefs are doing just fine after the bleaching by the LOW TIDES of 2015 and 2016

Again, you comments are based on manifest MIS-INFROMATION

Poor griff.. NEVER correct !

LdB
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 7:12 am

No-one could tell you anything Griff you are a pathological liar and troll.

MarkW
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 7:26 am

In Australia, droughts have always alternated with cyclones. There is no evidence that either is getting worse.
In Australia, there have always been fires. Except in those places where counter measures are no longer permitted, there is no evidence that they are getting any worse.
In Australia, there have always been heat waves, there is no evidence that they are getting worse.
There have always been changes to coral reefs and kelp forests, there is no evidence that these changes are any worse than those of the past.

One constant with trolls, they are psychologically incapable of dealing with the actual arguments others have made, so they make up straw men so that they can have someone they are capable of beating.
A grand total of nobody has said that there are no changes, what we quite accurately keep pointing out, is that these changes are well within the range of normal.

griff
August 31, 2020 1:44 am

On a similar note UK supporters of Brexit say the UK can survive the expected food price rises and shortages from a no deal Brexit because we survived rationing in WW2.

(I’ve seen the detailed research which shows that there must be delays to UK food imports on a no deal exit – indeed leaked govt plans show the same)

Reply to  Eric Worrall
August 31, 2020 11:08 am

Perhaps Griff is anticipating that his Eurofascist comrades will be restarting U-boat production.

@Eric, you did leave out South America – plenty of beef and other products from some of the countries there.

Patrick MJD
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 3:27 am

Everything was rationed in WW2, unless you knew someone wearing a white helmet. But more so after WW2. It’s why Land Rover and RouteMaster bodies were made of aluminium, steel was in limited supply. As it turned out, rationing lead to a period in UK health history that had the healthiest population. Low volumes of high quality food along with physical exercise.

Reply to  Patrick MJD
August 31, 2020 10:46 am

Recently read “The German War”, WW2 from german perspective, incredibly interesting.
A point regarding the above, it pointed out that german nurtition decreased during the war but English got better.
Because of shortages of grain they had to make whole grain bread instead of the crappy white stuff and so overall nutrition increased.

fred250
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 3:49 am

You’ll be right so long as they keep paying your disability pension, griff. !

MarkW
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 7:29 am

So the EU is planning on punishing the people of Britain by cutting off their food supply.
And you seem to be happy about this.

Krishna Gans
Reply to  griff
August 31, 2020 10:41 am
Philip Mulholland
August 31, 2020 3:17 am

My parents, like countless others of their generation, survived the rationing of World War II, my grandparents survived the privations of World War I, my great grandparents survived the poverty of the Victorian age, my great great grandfather escaped from Irish poverty.
My nan (Liverpudlian for grandmother c.f. nain – welsh) was so frugal she only ever had strips of newspaper in the outdoor privy of her rented 2 up 2 down in Bligh Street. I have see sustainability (aka poverty) and it sucks.

August 31, 2020 5:35 am

“This is a marked contrast with China of the last century, where sustainability was also a part of life, albeit not by choice.”

Slipping a buzz word in here, “sustainability”, is quite frankly shameful.

When as Ms Chen says “I was always hungry because there wasn’t enough food,” then it is “survival” that becomes a part of your life, not sustainability.

30 million + people didn’t die because their lives were sustainable.

Bill S
August 31, 2020 5:41 am

The bottom line is that if we sign up for the Green New Deal type governmental programs we will all definitely be mired in poverty under a dictatorial government that will tell us what we can and cannot do based on the excuse that their dictats are necessary to prevent global warming. The ABC is at least honest enough to tell us to expect the Cultural Revolution level poverty and total governmental dictatorial rule.

The proof of this is the aspiring dictator in chief Elizabeth Warren and many others like her who do not want to hear opposing views about Climate Change, because the issue is actually not climate change, but the acquisition of dictatorial ruling power.

Or, we can defeat the propaganda of Climate Change, adapt as necessary as man has for millennias, and have a reasonable opportunity for continuing prosperity.

August 31, 2020 6:01 am

One time I was standing outside of a Church with the two ministers of that church. A car drove up and the people in it asked for money for gas. They said something about needing gas because of some emergency. The young pastor says follow me to the gas station and I’ll put gas in your car. They drove off. If someone offers you a solution to a problem and you don’t accept it then you’re lying about the problem. The solution to sustainability is nuclear power. With cheap energy we can take all the water and minerals we need from the sea. The fact that the left doesn’t want that solution means they are lying about what they want. What they really want is for people to be poor and miserable.

Reply to  star man
August 31, 2020 2:18 pm

or dead.

Auto

Curious George
August 31, 2020 7:20 am

Imagine the city of Paris, where every family raises 12 chickens in their apartment. After 12 weeks, rinse and repeat.

August 31, 2020 7:44 am

When allowed freedom, people will prosper.
Under authoritarian experiments they starve.
However, there is an account that is amusing and instructive. We were living in Vancouver.
I was 9 at the end of WW2 and was often chastised with “Robert –clean up your plate.Think of the thousands of starving people in China.”
All mothers said it.
Much later I met a guy who lived as a young boy in Shanghai in the early 1930s. His father was an executive with a British financial company.
Living in luxury, with servants he would be reprimanded with:
“Arthur–clean up your plate. Think of the thousands of starving people in Honan Province/”

Chris Hoff
August 31, 2020 8:15 pm

Where I live half the community is Chinese migrants. They can teach us way, way more about how to survive the current cultural revolution, not to mention political correctness, progressives and SJW’s. An example, the mayor installed parking meters everywhere and then hired 200 meter checkers. That in itself reminds me of a verse from the song ‘Thunder Road’ by Robert Mitchum, ‘he sent 200 agents, covering the state, whichever road he tried to take they’d get him sure as fate’. They ended up collecting almost zero parking violation revenue. The Chinese have seen all this Cultural Marxist BS before, they aren’t fooled by it, they aren’t buying any of it, totally immunized already.

ResourceGuy
September 1, 2020 11:02 am

Also ask the survivors of the Cultural Revolution who were sent off to spend 10 years laboring in a coal mine for the crime of having some university education. There are many more lessons in China about surviving heavy handed leadership than climate change.