Starvation
in the Rice Fields: The Famine of 1945 in Northern Vietnam
Hue Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
In
this talk, I will discuss issues that have arisen in my work in progress,
a study of the famine of 1944-1945 in northern Vietnam.
When is a famine a famine? What were the causes of the famine? How many
died? Why were peasants the chief victims of famine? What do available
sources, ranging from contemporary press accounts and official documents
to oral histories, tell us or fail to tell us? What consequences did the
famine have for Vietnamese politics in the 1940s and 1950s?
Hue-Tam Ho Tai is the Kenneth t. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese
History at Harvard University. She is the author of Millenarianism
and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (1983) and Radicalism and the Origins
of the Vietnamese Revolution (1992). She also edited The Country
of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (2001). Her
current work on the famine of 1945 in northern Vietnam builds on her work
on commemoration and public memory and on her field work in northern villages.
Prof. Tai was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
1983.
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