LogFAQs > #910750082

Darkman124 posted...

Damn_Underscore posted...

Darkman124 posted...

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people

Yeah, that's why I asked that question.

Also I wanted to discuss these two events which I personally never heard about in school.

the 1994 taiwannese film, To Live, provides a useful contextualization of each event.

fwiw, I voted Cultural Revolution, since your question was about morality, and not net human impact. The Great Leap Forward definitely caused more human suffering.

I voted the Cultural Revolution too, for this reason. If you're making moral judgments, then intent matters quite a bit. Particularly, the Great Leap Forward was partly modeled off of Stalin's Five-Year Plans, the sheer brutality of which was not nearly as well appreciated at the time(and likely would have been dismissed by the CCP as Western propaganda, in any case). What made the Great Leap Forward so disastrous was profound ignorance, a lack of communication/trust and stubbornness. It wasn't malicious in any way, whereas the Cultural Revolution was essentially Mao's way of muscling out and punishing everyone who had (in his mind) slighted him and cut him out of the loop(mostly as a result of the Great Leap Forward). It was 100% malicious in intent.