| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Monday, March 30, 2015 | 3:00PM - 5:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place M5S 3K7 416-946-8900 |
East Asia Seminar Series
Since the last years, the Great Leap Forward Famine (1959-1962) has become a “hot topic” in the China Studies. Felix Wemheuer will show that we can learn about the Chinese case by comparing it to the Soviet famine under Stalin (1931-33). He will analyze the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. Furthermore, he will examine the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Felix Wemheuer is professor for Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne. This last book “Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union” was published with Yale UP (2014). He published several journal articles on the Great Leap Forward and coedited the volumes Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and the Famine (2011) and Hunger and Scarcity under State-Socialism (2012). He is also the author of two popular books in German: a biography of Mao Zedong (2009) and The Great Hunger: Famines under Stalin and Mao. From 2000 to 2002, he studied Chinese and “History of the Communist Party of China” at the People’s University in Beijing. During various field studies in China, he held oral history interviews with older peasants, intellectuals, and local cadres on the Great Leap Forward famine. In 2006, he received his PhD from the University of Vienna for his thesis on rural memories of the famine in Henan Province. From 2008 to 2010, Felix Wemheuer was a visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center.
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