Why did this famine happen? Using surreal production figures, party officials removed a purely notional grain surplus (and much of the country's livestock) in order to feed select urban industrial workers and to pay for Russian arms and capital goods. Ruthless competition spread to the socialist camp. The suspicions that characterised the Sino-Soviet relationship are a sub-theme of Dikötter's book, with the strong swimmer Mao almost allowing Khrushchev to drown as he flailed around in a rubber ring in a pool. After his definitive break with Khrushchev, Mao rapidly tried to amortise China's enormous debt to the Soviets while assuming the role of aid-giver in chief to the wider communist world. While Chinese peasants ate mud, the Albanians or Cubans consumed their pork and rice. 

At the end of this fine book, I wondered why the death of 45 million people in four years had made such slight impression on the world's consciousness. The term "genocide" is too specific to be of much use. The word "famine" conceals more than it reveals, as if this was an act of nature. The term "peasant" also distances us from the victims, it being "easier" to empathise with the mainly urban victims of the later Cultural Revolution — killed, Dikötter says, partly to obliterate anyone who had criticised Mao's responsibility for the famine. Similarly, Stalin's 1930s purges of 600,000 party members have eclipsed the earlier terror famine waged against seven million Ukrainian farmers and Kazakh herdsmen. Dikötter tells me: "A strong Orientalist streak implies that loss of life in China matters less than elsewhere." 

But as the Archbishop of Canterbury's crass intervention also reveals, a naive, residual belief that the aims were worthy, or the goals progressive, seems to excuse much, too — 45 million or 55 million lives too many in this case. Perhaps we should pulverise Lambeth Palace and Canterbury Cathedral into aggregate for the roads and feed senior clerics a diet of mud since their imaginations are so lacking?