What did the West know about the situation in China during the Great Famine? 45 million dead, it is hard to imagine.
Not too much while it was happening. During the GLF, foreign journalists were invited to come see the people's communes and to look at the wonders of the Great Leap Forward. The problem was, the villages that were shown to foreign journalists... well... happened to be prepared in advance for the visitors.
To shape international public opinion, the Chinese government invited "friends of China" to visit and see for themselves, in the hope that they would write reports that "clarified the facts and truth." The government meticulously planned every step of a visitor's itinerary, including which places he would visit, the people with whom he could come in contact, and the lines people should recite when receiving the guests. Foreign guests were kept segregated from ordinary people, and well-fed and well-clothed individuals were sometimes put on display.
Fang Shi, at the time deputy director of Xinhua's domestic news service, was tasked with accompanying foreign guests on tours of Anhui Province. He later told me how the Anhui provisional party committee deceived foreign visitors, who then published "eyewitness" reports praising China's "great accomplishments" and saying people were well fed and well clothed.^1
Journalists like Edgar Snow and Felix Greene would attest that they never saw mass starvation in China as a result of such scheduled visits. (I've heard that Snow later regretted saying this, but as the one source I've seen for this was a blog, I'm going to leave that up for questioning and some time on JSTOR later.)
This is not to say that no one knew. Dikötter attests that some refugees fleeing starvation were able to head to Hong Kong or to Burma or Vietnam or the Soviet Union.^2 Undoubtedly, some of these people talked to journalists trying to get the word out. But these reports were often dismissed, ignored, or, within China's borders, suppressed.
Thank you. You mentioned all my hot buttons. Snow was an amazing apologist, but was back in the US (I think) during the GLF.
Seriously, what was wrong with that dude?
I wanted to read Tombstone, but is not available for Kindle. I got Mao's Great Famine for holiday reading instead.
Amazing how often intelligence agencies fail.