h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ben, the figures for China, do they include the Sino-Japanese War from 1931 onwards or is it just for the period of 1941 to 1945 when China officialy became involved in WW2? Really interesting entry, I was really surprised Luxembourg lost so many citizens, I thought it had been largely ignored in both conflicts

Fords, I would appreciate any links. The discrepencies are inevitable, because the stats for each country were collected in different ways, but the discrepencies themselves are interesting.

It is the gaps between the information which force us to think.

Iago - I don't know whether the Chinese figures include the Sino-Japanese war, just as I don't know if they include the holocaust deaths.

This has scope for being a very interesting entry: one showing the stats, and one which ALSO shows the ommissions and elisions.

Two things I loathe are making statements without an understanding of the facts, and assuming that statistics are true.

"47% of statistics are made up - including this one"



Ben

Oh well, just thought I'd ask. I've read estimates that put the total number of Chinese casualties between 1931 and 1945 at around 100 million people and this is just staggering, plus I'm not sure the source was entirely trustworthy. 10 million is bad enough though

ChaiWallah might know, Iago.

I confess to becoming increasingly curious about the whole subject.

Ben

Just a niggling spelling point - isn't it combatant, not combattant?

You are right, it is. But I have changed the entry itself. And the thread title.

B

Iago,

I've never heard of such high figures for Chinese deaths. As I said earlier, the total number of deaths directly due to Mao's manias is about 100 million between 1929 and his death in 1976.

The only other staggering statistic in relatively recent Chinese history is the death toll of the Taiping Rising in the 1850's, which is estimated at 20 - 40 million, making it the bloodiest civil war, and one of the bloodiest wars ever.

The Taiping Rising was directed against the Manchu Qing dynasty, led by a Hakka Christian convert, Hong Xiuquan, from Guangdong, who revealed himself as the reincarnated Melchizedek, (the Old Testament prophet who heralded King David's rule.)

He preached against the decadence of the Manchu Qing court and its minions, against decadent Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. With an army of zealous followers, he captured the old Ming capital, Nanjing, in 1853, and proclaimed it the "New Jerusalem." The Ten Commandments became his battle hymn, and interestingly, he proclaimed equal rights for women, the abolition of foot-binding, arranged marriage, prostitution and concubinage.

He condemned addiction, particularly to opium, condemned private property and called for global equality(taiping), not just of Hakka and Han Chinese, but also with the "brothers and sisters of all nations under God." His religious beliefs were a mixture of Fundamentalist Baptist protestantism and Hakka shamanism. One of his leaders was a Hakka charcoal-burner, a shaman who had daily visions of God, Jesus and the prophets to keep the followers inspired.

Eventually a falling out between different theological visionaries weakened the Taiping forces just as the Qing rulers decided to retaliate seriously. Well-trained Chinese troops backed by Western forces and materiel flattened the Nanjing New Jerusalem. Western governments, particularly the British, were very concerned that the opium trade might be lost under Taiping influence. Nanjing fell in 1864, and the mopping-up operation continued for another two years after that. Hong's egalitarianism directly inspired Sun Yat-Sen's first Republic of China. Deng Xiaoping, Mao's hit-man for years before becoming "emperor," was also Hakka.

Given that Chinese tradition holds that the end of a dynasty is heralded by both natural disasters and "heretical beliefs," it's no wonder Jiang Zemin, and now Hu Jintao have suppressed Falun Gong with such savagery. It has long been thought that the CCP dynasty of Mao, Deng, Jiang has lost "the mandate of heaven," while Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Dafa, is just the sort of eclectic cult-maker that Chinese dynasts fear.

Li claims to be in touch with alien enlightened "masters," one of the weirder aspects of Falun Gong his followers don't publicise as much as their adherence to "Zhen, Shan Ren," truth, forbearance and compassion. But with deaths in custody running into the thousands over three years, the Falun Gong are a genuine "army of martyrs" who are happy to protest their faith in public, knowing the fate that awaits them in prisons and labour camps across China.

Oops, hadn't noticed the spelling corection in the title line.

Chai

Er, make that "correction!"

What is the collective noun for a group of Chinese prison warders?











... wait for it ...







"A correction"



B

Whilst I can see the appeal of an endspiece, the sheer banality of figures can sometimes make on look at things in a different light.

What about an alternative statistic to put things in proportion ? Say number killed in Gulf War, or The Falklands, or 9/11 conflicts and caualties the modern day people are familiar with.

The horrifying thing about those wars is the disproportion of the deaths. The previous gulf war was a case in point.

*sigh*

B

Decided that as we're in the mood to get informed on man's atrocities to man, I re-vamped the bit on the Taiping Rising, filled in some of the details, and have put it up as a Guide Entry.

Link: A2257670

Ben, I have seen some awfully high Chinese numbers, though I expect a lot of them may have been more internal problems than war related. 35 million, or more, were said to have died from starvation??

Here are some possibly helpful links you requested:

This appears to be an Australian set of Stats.
http://au.geocities.com/thefortysecondinww2/level2/asstd/stats-wwii.htm

Here is Japanese site's comparison of textbooks from Japan and Singapore that disagree.
http://www.ipc.hokusei.ac.jp/~z00323/classes/history/topics/war/ww2deathscomp.html

This PBS site shows the relative deaths of combatants and non-combatants from several wars and conflicts. Note that in WWI, there were more non-combatant deaths!
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/ewwii.htm

This site had a particularly riveting breakdown (religions, gays, etc.) of non-combatant deaths, and even some on rapes.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/~rjg/deaths.shtml

Here is the D-Day PDF link
http://www.ddaymuseum.org/pdf/edu_lp_numbers.pdf

Another site with a different number of U.S. deaths
http://www.veteranshour.com/facts_of_the_matter.htm

Another decent set of Stats, but still shows 0 U.S. civilian deaths
http://www.valourandhorror.com/DB/BACK/Casualties.htm

This one places U.S. civilian deaths at 6,000 (probably close enough); LOTS of good lists here:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-World-War-II-casualties-by-country

Hello Ben,

I am overwhelmed by the responses on here – so much information that I have bookmarked the page to digest it properly when I have time.

I think the article needs sources – are these numbers coming from different sources? How did you then correlate to the presented conclusions?

I have no difficulty understanding how each country might show different stats for their own, this is the way home history has been written for too long, yet I would be unhappy to accept the figures without some idea of where they originate, in the report.

As someone who has also written a somewhat political article, I would be interested to know your take on whether this article should be in Peer Review or in The Post or somewhere else – as was suggested for my own article. I feel both could be accommodated here in this forum, but then I am biased towards newsworthy articles. What’s your opinion?

Amused0

A bit hard to take all the numbers in. Agree some sources would be useful, so what and who are being counted (or not counted) is more understandable.

One minor typo: either a misplaced commas or errant zero in the figure for the Jewish population of Europe - is it 80,000,000 or 8,000,000?

Pimmsaloonie

I notice that the Chinese lost 10m in WW2. I didn't know they lost any - do you know how and why they died, Ben?

That would be the Japanese laying waste to much of Manchuria from 1932 onwards, and their subsequent invasion of the rest of China from (I think) 1937.

Ben, I've just noticed HonestIago's question and your answer. I'm still wondering about the answer though.

One of my purposes in writing this entry is to enable individuals to look at the way in which they read statistics, ad to gain an understanding of how many gaps there are in the information which we are given when we are given statistics.

Stats sound so complete and definite, but they are not. Hopefully this entry will help to change the way in whcih people respond to stats, and will help them gain a habit of challenging data and the providers of data with questions.

Pretentious? Moi?

Manipulative? Never!

Ben