Mass killings

The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign nation against the government of another is that of 26.3 million Chinese between 1949 and May 1965, during the regime of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung, 1893-1976). This accusation was made by an agency of the Soviet government in a radio broadcast on 7 April 1969. The broadcast broke down the figure into four periods: 2.8 million (1949-52), 3.5 million (1953-7), 6.7 million (1958-60) and 13.3 million (1961-May 1965). <br /> The Walker Report, published by the US Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971, placed the parameters of the total death toll within China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Jean-Pierre Dujardin in Figaro magazine of 19-25 Nov 1978. <br /> In the 13th-17th centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre in China. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figure put on the Mongolian invasions of northern China from 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both of the order of 35 million, while the number of victims of the bandit leader Zhang Xianzhong (c. 1605-47), known as the `Yellow Tiger', from 1643 to 1647 in Sichuan province has been put at 40 million. <br /> Scholarly estimates for the number of human casualties of Soviet communism focus on some 40 million, excluding those killed in the `Great Patriotic War'. Larger figures are claimed in Moscow today, but these are not necessarily more authoritative. Nobel-prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 11 Dec 1918) put the total as high as 66,700,000 for the period between October 1917 and December 1959.