A Massacre of History

"If we are to have relations with Red China," Mississippi Democrat James O. Eastland declared in Washington last week, "let us do so with our eyes open." The conservative Senator's personal contribution to the effort seemed more calculated to make eyes pop. A 46-page study published under the imprimatur of Eastland's Senate Internal Security subcommittee last week blames Mao Tse-tung and his comrades for the deaths of anywhere from 34,300,000 to 63,784,000 Chinese since Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists began fighting Mao Tse-tung's Communists in 1927.

Last month, after Richard Nixon announced his plans to travel to Peking, Eastland ordered the report released. Titled The Human Cost of Communism in China, it is the work of Dr. Richard L. Walker, a University of South Carolina scholar known among his fellow Sinologists as a staunch supporter of the Chinese Nationalists. By Walker's reckoning, as many as 3,034,000 were killed in the civil war, the Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War. "Several million landlords" died during the 1949-52 land reform, up to 2,000,000 Chinese during the 1958-61 Great Leap Forward, 500,000 during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, as many as 1,000,000 as a result of efforts to suppress minorities in Tibet and other areas, perhaps 25 million in forced labor camps, and up to 30 million in political liquidation campaigns from 1949 to 1958.

Classic Examples. Walker cites many sources--including such Internal Security subcommittee favorites as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Radio Moscow--for his figures. Conceivably his tabulations could be close to the truth, though most Sinologists doubt it. Mao himself once guessed that 800,000 died during the land seizures of 1949-52, which saw the last mass executions known to have occurred in China. But Sinologist Stuart Schram reckons that the true toll might have run as high as 3,000,000. How many Chinese have been executed, starved or otherwise killed during the years of turmoil since the regime triumphed in 1949? Columbia University China Expert Donald Klein places the total as low as 2,000,000; others say 6,000,000 or 8,000,000. Of course, those figures are all classic examples of the unverifiable statistic (TIME ESSAY, Aug. 2), but then so are most of Dr. Walker's.

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