p53 mutante y el aumento en la supervivencia

First of all, in order to investigate whether my hypothesis has been proven or not, I formulated the following research questions, which I tried to find the answers to:

1. To what extent is it written in the newspaper People’s Daily in 1960 about the on-going famine?

2. If there are articles containing the words searched for, do they concern the on- going famine in China? If not, what are they about?

The answers to these questions are, to put it in a very brief manner, both yes and no. The newspaper People’s Daily did actually write that there were some famine related matters going on in China at the time, as is evident from the results, with the word

zaihuang as a clear example. On the other hand, as mentioned in the discussion, the

majority of the hits containing famine-related words and expressions are either about famines and starvation abroad or famines that occurred in the past. In short, what was written in the People’s Daily in 1960 suggested that famine, starvation and serious hunger problems mainly happen outside of China, or in the past.

There are some articles that mention that there are contemporary problems in the provinces in China, and even a small number of articles mention that there have been some natural disasters which have led to hunger and shortages of food issues in certain areas. The percentage is however fairly small in comparison to the rest of the result. Merely 5% of the hits are mentioning famine in a contemporary setting within the Chinese border. On the other hand, 5 % is definitely more than none at all. Furthermore, several hits, albeit they have the positive approach of people helping each other and fighting disasters and disasters nowadays are nothing like the ones in the past, all together confirm indirectly that there is indeed some problems with shortages of food present.

The newspaper simply concealed the truth, for various reasons. One reason could be the culture of not wanting to lose face, a phenomenon discussed earlier in the part with the results. The Party might not have wanted to admit to be contributing to a famine of this magnitude while it was occurring, without having a scapegoat in mind.

If they did admit it, it would also mean that they would have to admit how much they had wronged the people by driving them to starvation. There are two speeches, or statements, made by Mao Zedong that are worth mentioning in this context: In a speech in 1959 Mao actually admitted that he was not perfect and said that everyone makes mistakes, even Confucius, Lenin and Marx made them, so why was it not natural that he also could make them? (Spence, 1999). On another occasion in 1962 Mao actually took formal responsibility in the name of the central government for the Great Leap Forward and the consequences that occurred afterwards (Wemheuer, 2010). It is worth pointing out that the blame, however, managed somehow to mainly land on thousands of local cadres who were then charged and punished (Wemheuer, 2010).

As a final conclusion, I want to specify that the newspaper People’s Daily does to some extent mention hints about problems with shortages of food, but the number of hits doing so is fairly small. The ones that do mention it are vague in the specification of why and how this could occur, and the magnitude and spread of the famine is most definitely not clearly specified. After reading the articles, the general feeling is that there are some small troubles of shortages of food occurring, but since it is all caused by natural disasters and the numbers of victims is manageable and confined to the countryside, it is nothing to worry about: there is always a little famine going on.

7.1 Further Research

One of the more obvious choices for possible further research is that more than a single year could be investigated. Even if there are valid reasons for only focusing on 1960 in this thesis, it would definitely be valuable to study what was written in the

People’s Daily during 1959, 1961 or even 1962 in order to get a broader perspective

and be able to make key claims even more confidently. Maybe more famine related articles were published in 1961?

Secondly, the list of words and expressions could be made longer. While the focus in this thesis has been to find out if and how the newspaper People’s Daily wrote using

words and expressions connected to famine, it could be interesting to investigate what the newspaper actually wrote about instead. As mentioned before, there are for example words connected to natural disasters, such as: 自然灾害 ziran zaihai or 天灾

tianzai, both meaning natural disaster; 旱灾 hanzai meaning drought; 洪灾 hongzai

meaning flood; or 受灾 shouzai meaning to be hit by a natural disaster. In the part about limitations it is explained that this thesis is investigating whether or not the newspaper wrote specifically about famine and starvation: therefore hits containing the words meaning natural disasters, but in which these are not appearing in combination with the selected words directly linked to famine, hunger or starvation, are not discussed in this thesis. Also mentioned before, it could be interesting to investigate words such as 歉收 qianshou which means crop failure or 食物中毒

shiwuzhongdu which means food poisoning. All of these words would provide angles

to explore further in the future, and I am personally convinced it would help to give a much broader and clearer picture of what the People’s Daily – and by extension the Communist Party media – actually wrote about during these years of distress.

In order to deepen our understanding of the spread of news in China at the time, one could for further research focus more in depth on which parts of the news that were published for the public and which parts that were strictly published for the closed elite within CCP. Moreover, an investigation about what smaller newspapers wrote about the happenings and events across the country could also be interesting. Did all of them follow the directives from the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and often simply copied the news published in People’s Daily? Or did some of them write more openly about the famine, and maybe even discussing the underlying causes? Both of these angles, however, are slightly more difficult to investigate, since neither the closed audience material nor local newspapers from the 1960’s are easily available to foreign scholars due both to secrecy and the lack of digitalised material or lack of funding for purchasing these.

Another interesting angle would be to compare the news about the famine published in People’s Daily to other contemporary sources from across the globe. What did the British write about the famine in China? Was it discussed in Japanese newspapers? Was the Swedish population even aware of the famine occurring at the time? Even if

all of these questions are very interesting, it is a slightly too overwhelming task to answer them all in this thesis. However, it is definitely an idea for further research.