Talk:Great Leap Forward

References and notes format

Would anyone mind terribly if I renamed the "References" section to "Notes" and used abbreviated citations (e.g. Hinton 1984, pp. 234–240, 247-249) and put the full citations in a separate "references" section? This would be similar to the format in Incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China. (I would also rename the "Bibliography and further reading" section to "Further reading"). It would make the notes section much less bulky and make adding new citations from works already cited quicker.--Wikimedes (talk) 02:55, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I am not big on the 'standardization' of reference formatting. I think you should just use whatever works. Often it is good practice to list out the first reference in full and then subsequent references with just "author, page number". This saves the trouble of compiling a separate list, but can be cumbersome when you are 'section-editing' only. Colipon+(Talk) 00:59, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Done. Your suggestion about writing the first reference in full, etc. worked best; after listing all the references I could see that there were about 50 of them for 75 citations, so copying them all to the bibliography section wouldn't have saved any space.--Wikimedes (talk) 03:38, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Becker’s death toll estimate and Wemheuer’s citation

I’ve been reading Jasper Becker and he takes Banister’s 30 million as “the most reliable estimate we have” (p.270) and uses it (p.274) to calculate the percentage of China’s population lost to the GLF. While he does mention Chen Yizhe’s recollection of an internal investigation of the Chinese government arriving at 43-46 million deaths (p.272) Becker did not yet accept these figures because they have not been publicly released so it is impossible to tell whether they represent total or excess deaths and whether they take into account internal migrations (p.272-273).

Wemheuer’s citation contains at least 2 other errors: Although Wemheuer writes in 2010, he uses Ansley Coale’s 1981 estimate of 16.5 million excess deaths instead of Coale’s more recent 1984 estimate of 27 million. He also claims that Peng Xizhe estimates that 14 million excess deaths occurred in 14 provinces, when in fact Peng estimates 14.2 million excess deaths in 14 provinces, which Peng then extrapolates to 23 million excess deaths in all of China (p.649).

So I corrected Becker’s estimate in the table, and changed the range of death toll estimates accordingly. This (along with earlier changes by me) leaves nothing that uses Wemheuer’s citation as a reference, which is probably for the best.--Wikimedes (talk) 22:54, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Caught by surprise?

Did the "droughts, floods, and general bad weather" really catch the leadership by surprise? Given the frequency of such disasters in China prior to the Great Leap, this is difficult to believe.--Wikimedes (talk) 22:07, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

recent addition to lead moved here for later inclusion in article

The following text was recently added to the 2nd paragraph of the lead:

After the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, later President, Li Xiannian, got the toughest task of rescuing the economy. Li is strongly in favor of liberal reforms, but because Mao strict about this issue, Li failed to "squeeze" the reform and save people from starvation.Li Xiannian was sharply criticized Mao's ideas and call them bad and utopian.This his words cost him dearly in the Cultural Revolution when he was constantly criticized and eventually removed, but on the instigation of Zhou Enlai,Mao returned Li to the same core of leadership in 1973.

This level of detail probably belongs in a separate section on how the GLF ended or its aftermath rather than the lead. Since no such section currently exists (I'm sporadically working on them), I've put it here until such a section exists. One thing I'm curious about, does this information also come from the Dwight Perkins reference?--Wikimedes (talk) 11:11, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

The section in question was added by a sock puppet (see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Ana Sušac) in an attempt to evade prior blocks. The sock master and its puppets have been responsible for a large swath of non-neutral editing about Li throughout Wikipedia. Li's role in the aftermath of the GLF may or may not have been significant, but based on the editor's prior edits, it is unlikely that this information was sourced from the same Perkins source, but rather more likely that it is the editor's own interpretation of events. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 13:20, 12 March 2012 (UTC)