this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Those citations from that page come back to a book written by Jasper Becker, a right-wing journalist expelled from Hong Kong in the 90s and who became a Tory Councillor in the 2010s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Ghosts:_Mao%27s_Secret_Famine
His book plays fast and loose with statistics, and the margins of error are huge - somewhere between 15 and 55 million people died in the famine but this citation seemingly suggests 65 million died, above that even cited in the books Wikipedia article. Reading the citations in the book's article leads you to a number of American (and American Chinese) authored articles that all pluck various numbers from this vast range.
Even a cursory amount of research and poking around links those various citations led to makes the presented state of affairs that seemed so ironclad and clear cut almost melt into meaningless. What else can be expected from anti-communist hit pieces so readily shared by idiots hoping to spread atrocity propaganda.