A famine in China from 1958 to 1960 estimated to have killed about twenty-five million people. The reason why that’s called a political crime-an ideological crime-which was discussed in most detail by Amartya Sen: it’s part of the work for which he won the Nobel Prize. Sen is an economist who treated this as an ideological crime for food reasons. He said it wasn’t a matter of intent: they didn’t intend to kill anybody. It’s just that the ideological instructions were such that it happened. It was a totalitarian state where no information about what was happening ever got back to the center. They couldn’t take any action because that’s what happens in a totalitarian state. So it was a reflection of the totalitarian instructions, a huge massacre that wasn’t intended. They didn’t intend to kill twenty-five million people, but it was still a major massacre, and it’s correct to call it one of the major atrocities of the twentieth century. and the worst single component of the crimes of Communism.
What period did the famine in China, described in the passage, occur?
