Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.
There has certainly been a lot, but my gut still says China or maybe Soviet Union.
It really depends on how far back you are going and what criteria you're using to ascribe responsibility for any given type of death.
For example, if a CCP guard kills a Uyghur prisoner in one of the camps that's obviously a death under the CCP, but if China creates an economic crisis in some country via its Belt and Road debt colonialism campaign and someone there subsequently dies due to hardship stemming from those economic issues is the CCP responsible?
More than the US? The country that maintained slaves for many generations, on land taken from slaughteted and genocided indigenous peoples? The country that is to this day actively supporting genocide purely to protect its economic interests via Imperialism?
I'd think so, yeah, the CCP alone has pretty insane numbers, which is saying a lot.
You have to keep in mind that there's something like a million Uighurs in China that got scooped up and put in concentration camps 2010s. There's Tianamen, Tibet, the purges during Xi's rise to power, the brutalization of HK and the literal millions dead under Mao through both intentional acts to purge the party and punish dissidents and simply the incompetance of the the failed economic theories.
However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let's just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.
This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City's biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.
According to Wikipedia, "The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000." Let's assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?
Let's do some math:
Rikers Size
Rikers Prisoners
One Million Uyghurs Size
413.2 acres (0.645 square miles)
10,000 to 15,000
43 to 64 square miles
In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.
For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You'd literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It'd be like looking at a map of California. There's Los Angeles. There's San Diego. And look, there's San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.
Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he's the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I'm talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it's clear that the methodology of his "research" doesn't pass any kind of muster when examined closely.
It's also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here's George Bush's chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here's an excerpt:
It's also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.
Stalin's 20 million and Mao's 70 million both come from a book called 'The Black Book of Communism' where th authors tried to inflate all the numbers as much as possible to arrive at 100 million deaths under communism in the end. The really high numbers come from taking the difference between the population decades later and what the population would have been if the borth rate hadn't dropped (even though lower birth rates are an indication of better living standards).
Also, if you leave out the USSR's purges (Soviet archives revealed around 800k), almost all of the deaths come from 'man made famines'. Completely disregarding that in both China and Russia there have been famines all the time before their revolutions. Both countries were among the poorest and most backward in the world. No government on earth could have prevented all famines immediately. After some years after Mao's and Stalin's reorganizations of agriculture, famines were eliminated (except for during WW2). Life expectancy doubled within 30 years under communist China. Very quickly in the Soviet Union as well.
Of course you can argue about the governments having been able to do it better in hindsight, but even then the deaths certainly weren't cold blooded murder.
Considering this, you certainly won't arrive at the tens of millions of people killed just by the US military. Many, many more if you factor in indirect deaths (by embargoes, sanctions, refusing to allow other countries to produce their vaccines, etc.).