Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. When his body was transported, many people ran on the streets, shouting to the cars. Here's a video: https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1396454905200533509
For context, in an event like this honking car horns is a sign of respect. Same as the remembrance of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake when all traffic stopped and blew their horns.
I wish there was a reference for this statement in wikipedia:
>>> In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China.
> IRRI ... halted its research the following year, only restarting it in 1979 after China had fired up international interest by commercializing the technology.
The International Rice Research Institute is an international nonprofit research and educational institute headquartered in Philippines, not “a Philippine company”.
This guy is cool: being raised by teachers, spending time in nature and avoiding politics is pretty astute. What a shame he didn't live to see the era where open source observations on iNaturalist et al could allow him to do international field work by proxy in his old age. I think we will hang a picture of him in our company office (foodtech robotics in China).
He really picked an interesting retirement spot: Hainan is a tropical island known for surfing, sailing, obtaining US spy planes, former cultural and ethnographic diversity including Austronesian and Tai, an influx of Russians to the point where the street signs are in bizzarro alt-Blacksea cyrillic, and alleged tests of GFW-free internet in China. The powers that be are giving lip service to setting it up as an HK-alternative investment gateway to China with proximity to SEA, perhaps largely just to spite HK.
The Uncle Ben brand is intended for the US market and as such is treated so that the grains are less likely to stick together. This isn't the kind of thing that Dr. Longping was interested in.
He (or his work) was adapted for India spurring the “Green Revolution” which was responsible for ending chronic food shortages in India. Absolutely massive impact made by one man.
I do wonder, it seems like a lot of his most important experiments and hybridization attempts were quite low tech compared to what I would have expected.
I wonder if it would be fairly accessible to making ones own hybrids in a backyard garden type scenario?
Does anyone have any experience knowledge on that sort of thing?
However, the fact that you can't replant hybrid rice, and are dependent on contiuous breeding of first-generation hybrids, makes it potentially problematic politically. A state or privately-owned source of hybrids can have rice cultivating farmers "by the balls" so to speak.
You know the ideological crusaders has gone overboard when there are this amount of controversy when a scientist that works on rice has died.
It's ridiculous, he isn't even a CCP member. Y'all should be ashamed of yourself to put any amount of ideology to someone whose whole work in life is to produce more food, so people don't starve.
I agree with you that the commenters who took the thread into nationalistic and ideological flamewar have broken the site guidelines shamefully, but this does not characterize the thread, and certainly not the community. The opposite is the case, which is how a comment like yours, castigating the comments, ends up in an ironic position at the top of the thread. There are many explanations at the above link. I'm going to mark this subthread off topic now.
Why the downvotes? The Wikipedia link confers a degree of assumption of neutrality even though it reads exactly like the content in one of those `.cn` posts. So, why not go to the source.
You were correctly downvoted because you took the thread straight into flamewar—nationalistic and ideological. We don't want that here. It's predictable, and therefore tedious, and therefore off topic on HN. Also, it invariably turns nasty, which is destructive of the respectful spirit we want here.
Edited to add: In theory, one might think there ought to be a difference between an obituary and a encyclopedia entry. This is more shrine to a person as opposed to a less propagandist, more objective account.
The implications of the CCP line, the Wikipedia article, and the tone here is that better rice was what was needed to avoid famine.
The reality is with property rights, proper prices, without central planning, there would not have been a famine.
Maybe he is as great as people claim ... Or, maybe his reputation is manufactured _ex post facto_ to diminish the role of the ideology in causing the disaster.
As for saving people from hunger elsewhere, people in the Sudan or Yemen or Ethiopia have not been dying because they planted the inferior crop.
Not sure why others are down voting you, and I so far can't down vote anybody.
As a Chinese, I never considered myself as a communist-lover, and I probably saw more shady things happened in the country than probably most foreigners here. But, I assume that's not why people clicked this thread.
Yuan Longping is an icon. A scientist who dedicated almost his entire life to improve the life of the others through his research and groundworks, which saved billions of people from starvation across the world. This alone deserve some praise, regardless which political party you're in.
Now, if you're still unconvinced, think about this: He increased the yields of rice, and rice is a kind of food people eat. The only way rice could hurt people is through probably obesity, you can't even make or launch nuclear bombs with it. So why feel triggered?
Icons can be and are used by governments for propaganda, to improve the sentiment of nationalism, when great achievements of people is shown as achievement of the nation. This has been done by almost every governments, regardless of political leaning.
Reading others comments in the whole page, it appears that's what people see in that news, as they can't filter the propaganda from the achievements of a great man.
That's trivially disprovable by a few seconds' acquaintance with the search box at the bottom of every page.
Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes, insinuating brigading when you have zero evidence, or posting nationalistic or ideological flamewar comments to HN. We ban accounts that do these things.
Edit: we actually banned you for nationalistic flamewar a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25985852. I'm not sure why we unbanned you after that, but it looks like it was by mistake. I won't punish you for our mistake by banning you again without a warning, but I do have to tell you: please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN, or we will ban you again. Those things are not what this site is for. That goes double for ideological battle comments and triple for nationalistic battle comments.
It's not what you say, it's the way you say it, the way you go about it, and the thread you choose to say it in. That's why me and many other people downvoted and flagged you.
> The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饥荒, "three years of great famine") was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine.[1][2][3][4][5] Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962.[6][7][8][9] The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).[3][4][5][10][11][12][13][14][15]
> The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, such as inefficient distribution of food due to the planned economy, requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques, the Four Pests Campaign that reduced bird populations (which disrupted the ecosystem), over-reporting of grain production (which was actually decreasing), and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.[3][5][7][12][14][16] During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, the second Chairman of the PRC, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").[7][17][18] After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.[1][2]
Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewar or ideological flamewar will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. What you posted here was particularly lame and shallow.
I didn't want to make any flamewar, nationalistic or ideological. I was simply pointing out the fact that he had nothing to do with the great famine. The back and forth from others was not my intention. Anyway.
If you really just meant to point out that he had nothing to do with the great famine, then I definitely did not understand your intention, and I dare say almost no other readers did either. That was super unclear!
As for the back and forth, I understand completely how when people start feeling mutually provoked, the discussion tends to spiral downward in a tit-for-tat way that is incredibly hard to resist. We all need to work on that (me included).
So what? Famine has been a thing long before and long after the birth of any modern day ideology. (I say “modern day” because I’m not sure if the very first hunter-gatherers had ideologies.) Even if famine was never a thing, increasing crop yields is still worthwhile research that directly benefits mankind, and it goes beyond boundaries.
A scientist who devoted their entire life to ending hunger just passed away and all you can do is post some generic ideological bait. Somewhere along your ideological quest a line of basic human decency is crossed.
Ever since introduction of potato to China large scale famines disappeared in China except for those caused by war, and by army and government seizing foods. Those modern famines are notable for their scale, duration, and entirely man-made political causes. CCP absolutely insists on calling them "natural disasters," precisely because they are unnatural. That is what!
Not sure what you are trying to say here. As mentioned in the tweet, he is revered because his research truly did improve agriculture. As opposed to the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine.
"the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine"? What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean "agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward"?
The OP said "fighting famine", not "fighting the famine". Without the definite article "the", their sentence can (and arguably should) be read as referring to famine as a class of calamities, not to a particular one.
As a further example, the job of a firefighter is to fight fires as they happen, not to help the UK forever recover from The Great Fire of London.
And? Should people hate him for what he did? What is the dispute here? Would you not feel grateful for his contributions, regardless of what end of the political spectrum you're on?
Please do not perpetuate flamewars on HN. I realize you didn't start it, but if people didn't perpetuate these things, they'd die out quickly, which is what they deserve.
Edit: I just noticed what you wrote in your profile about having an account only for Chinese topics. I appreciate the transparency, but single-purpose accounts like that are not allowed on HN, and especially not on flamewar topics. It's not in keeping with the intended spirit of this site, which is thoughtful, unpredictable conversation on a wide range of curiosity-driven topics.
You can see from the many past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that we're aware of the pressure that HN's Chinese users (or those with a background connected to China - for example, family or work) experience on a majority-Western forum like HN. That's an inevitable consequence of geopolitical trends. We can't do anything about that, but we can, and do, insist that HN users follow the site guidelines and treat each other respectfully. When someone else is breaking the rules egregiously, please don't reward them by replying. Instead, flag the comment, and in particularly bad cases please give us a head-up at hn@ycombinator.com.
