The Party makes sure the great famine is officially referred to as a ‘difficult period lasting three years’, as though politics had nothing to do with it. (In the eighties and earlier, the official term was the ‘three years of natural disaster’.) It admits that the Cultural Revolution, which followed soon after, in 1966, and lasted for ten years, contained disastrous mistakes, but then twists the debate to its advantage by asserting that the Party is the only organ that can prevent such instability in the future.
