Except for Soviet citizens, no people in this century have
endured so much mass killing as have the Chinese. They have been
murdered by rebels conniving with their own rulers, and then, after
the defeat in war of the imperial dynasty, by soldiers of other
lands. They have been killed by warlords who ruled one part of
China or another. They have been executed by Nationalists or
Communists because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes or were
simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In China's Bloody
Century, R.J. Rummel's careful estimate of the total number of
killings exceeds 5 million.
How do we explain such killings, crossing ideological bounds and
political conditions? According to Rummel, the one constant factor
in all the Chinese mass murder, as it was in the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany, is arbitrary power. It was the factor that united
warlords, Nationalists, Communists, and foreign armies. The author
argues that whenever such undisciplined power is centralized and
unchecked, the possibility exists that it will be used at the whim
of dictators to kill for their own ends, whether the aim is
ethnic-racial purity, national unity, development, or utopia.
The book presents successive periods in modern Chinese history,
with each chapter divided into three parts. Rummel first relates
the history of the period within which the nature and the amount of
killings are presented. He then provides a detailed statistical
table giving the basic estimates with their sources and
qualifications. The final part offers an appendix that explains and
elaborates the statistical computations and estimates.
While estimates are available in the literature on the number of
Chinese killed in Communist land reform, or in Tibet, or by the
Nationalists in one military campaign or another, until this book
no one has tried to systematically accumulate, organize, add up,
and analyze these diverse killings for all of China's governments
in this century. For the first time in one place, hundreds of
published estimates of Chinese genocide and mass murder are listed
with sources, analyzed, and their historical context presented.
This book will be of central interest to Sinologists,
Sovietologists, and those interested in comparative politics and
society.
General
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