User:Arilang1234/Sand box/Chinese Holocausts

Holocaust (sacrifice), a burnt offering, from Greek holo-kauston "all burnt". The original sense, referring to a completely-burnt sacrifice. By extension the word is being used in English to refer to other acts of obliteration by burning (or massacres in general). For example:Nuclear Holocaust, American Holocaust and Black Holocaust.

Since the mid-19th century, the word has been used by many authors to refer to large catastrophes and massacres, particularly those caused by immolation. According to the OED, the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it became common in the 19th century.

Pre-modern time holocausts

Destruction under the Mongol Empire

Destruction under the Mongol Empire is considered very significant in many historical sources, ranging to around 40 million or more deaths caused by the Mongol invasion as a result of direct casualty and disruption of farming resulting in famine, flooding and diseases. This casualty amount is considered to be from early 1200s to mid 1400s.

Mongols' raids and invasions are generally ranked as one of the deadliest to human life .

Modern time holocausts

Nanking massacre

The 'Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing (Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted at least until early February 1938. Estimates of the death count vary, with most reliable sources holding that 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were massacred in this period.

Great Chinese Famine

The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饑荒), officially referred to as the Three Years of Natural Disasters(Chinese:三年自然災害), was the period in China between 1958 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine, during which time the national harvesting of grains was normal, and the government was exporting grains. According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in this period. Unofficial estimates vary, but are often considerably higher. Yang Jisheng, a former Xinhua News Agency reporter who spent over ten years gathering information available to no other scholars, estimates a toll of 36 million. His published book on this human disaster is called Tomb Stone

Anna Applebaum of The Washington Post wrote:

“ A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people. ”

Tiananmen Square Massacre

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre (referred to in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident, to avoid confusion with two other Tiananmen Square protests) were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in the People's Republic of China (PRC) between 15 April and 4 June 1989. They were mainly led by Beijing students and intellectuals. The protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of Socialist governments around the world.

External links

Category:Massacres Category:Famines in China Category:War Category:Japanese invasion of China Category:Japanese armies