Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

by Frank Dikotter

  By 1960, the situation in the countryside had become so desperate that farmers ate the cotton seeds. In Cixi county, Zhejiang, some 2,000 villagers were poisoned in a single month by eating cakes made of seeds, an indication of the extent of despair reached in one of the most sheltered provinces of China. In Henan they poisoned over 100,000 people in the region around Xinxiang alone, killing more than 150.48 Across the land desperately hungry villagers ate anything they could get their hands on, from leather belts and straw roofs to cotton padding. Spending a month travelling through some of the most devastated regions along the Huai River in September 1961, Hu Yaobang, a party chief and associate of Deng Xiaoping who would soar to pre-eminence decades later by steering the country away from orthodox Marxism, reported seeing women and children stark naked. Many families of five or six shared one blanket. ‘It is hard to imagine if you do not see it with your own eyes. There are several places where we should urgently address this issue, to avoid people freezing to death.’49 Throughout the country those who died of starvation often did so naked, even in the middle of the winter.

  Although slaughtered in significant quantities during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, over the years poultry, pigs and cattle mainly succumbed to neglect, hunger, cold and disease. Numbers give a sense of the extent of the devastation. Whereas some 12.7 million pigs were rooting about in 1958, a mere 3.4 million scrawny animals were alive in 1961 in Hunan province (Table 8). Hebei had 3.8 million pigs in 1961, half of what the province boasted five years earlier. A million cattle had also vanished.50 Shandong lost 50 per cent of its cattle during the famine.51

  Neglect was widespread, as incentives to look after livestock were removed once all the animals had been turned over to the people’s communes. In Huaxian, just outside Guangzhou, pigs stood in a foot of excrement. In some villages the pig sheds were destroyed for fertiliser, leaving the animals exposed to the elements.52 Routine quarantine measures broke down, as veterinary services lay in disarray. Rinderpest and swine fever spread; chicken flu was common.53 The winter exacted the highest toll. Tens of thousands of pigs died of hunger in Cixi county, Zhejiang, in a single winter month.54 In December 1960 alone 600,000 pigs died in Hunan province.55

  Even more revealing are the disease rates, which rocketed sharply. In Dongguan, Guangdong, the death rate for pigs was just over 9 per cent in 1956. Three years later a quarter of all pigs died, and by 1960 well over half of all pigs perished. The county was left with a million pigs where more than 4.2 million had existed a few years earlier.56 In Zhejiang, the death rate in some counties was 600 per cent, meaning that for every birth six pigs died; the entire herd was soon eliminated.57 In all of Henan the situation with livestock was better in 1940, in the middle of the war against Japan, than it was in 1961 – according to Zhou Enlai himself.58

  Before the pigs died of hunger they turned on each other. More often than not livestock was not segregated by weight, meaning that they were all locked up in a common space where the smaller ones were pushed aside, trampled on, mauled to death and devoured. In parts of Jiangyin county, for instance, many of the pigs froze to death, but quite a few were cannibalised by larger hogs.59 When large numbers of pigs are thrown together in a harsh environment, apparently no pecking order develops, and each animal regards all others as its enemy. In Beijing’s Red Star commune, where the death rate for livestock was 45 per cent, villagers noticed that hogs ate piglets, as all were confined together indiscriminately.60

  A small proportion of the deaths were caused by innovations in animal husbandry. Like close cropping and deep ploughing, these were supposed to propel the country past its rivals. All sorts of experiments were carried out to increase the weight of pigs, some of them inspired by the fraudulent theories of Trofim Lysenko. A protégé of Stalin, Lysenko rejected genetics and believed that inheritance was shaped by the environment (Lysenko, it might be added, openly expressed his contempt for the Great Leap Forward in 1958, to the great irritation of the leadership in Beijing).61 Just as seeds of hybrid varieties were developed for greater resistance, hybrid breeding of livestock was envisaged by senior leaders. Jiang Hua, party secretary of Zhejiang, thus asked the county leaders to take steps to ‘actively shape nature’: he suggested cross-breeding sows with bulls to produce heavier piglets.62 Local cadres, eager to fulfil impossible quotas for meat delivery, also artificially inseminated animals that had not even reached maturity, including ones weighing a mere 15 kilos (a healthy adult pig should weigh between 100 and 120 kilos). Many of the animals were crippled as a result.63

  Despite a precipitous decline in livestock, state procurements were relentless. In Hebei and Shandong a ban on the slaughter of animals was imposed in the countryside for a period of three months in early 1959. As we have seen, Mao applauded the ban, going so far as to suggest that a resolution be passed that nobody should eat meat: all of it should be exported to honour foreign commitments.64 Mao did not quite get his way, although the rations for the urban population were slashed several times. Even in Shanghai, a city where on average each person consumed some twenty kilos of meat annually in 1953, a mere 4.5 kilos in ration tickets were allocated by the plan in 1960, although in reality much less was available.65 But party members continued to receive a regular supply of meat. Guangdong was thus ordered in 1961 to deliver 2,500 pigs to the capital, all earmarked for state banquets and foreign guests: this was in addition to the more regular state procurement quotas.66

  The fishing industry was also badly damaged by collectivisation, as the equipment was either confiscated or poorly maintained. In Wuxing, a district of the prosperous silk city of Huzhou situated on the south of Lake Tai, one in five boats was no longer seaworthy because of insufficient tong oil to repair sprung seams. The number of leaks steadily increased, since the marine nails were no longer being made of forged iron.67 The overall catch tumbled. On Chaohu Lake, Anhui, a single team of fishermen routinely caught some 215 tonnes of fish in 1958. Two years later no more than 9 tonnes were hauled aboard, as boats and nets rotted away without any care being taken. Many fishermen abandoned the trade because of a lack of incentives.68

  Ploughs, rakes, sickles, hoes, shovels, buckets, baskets, mats, carts and tools of every kind were collectivised, but which collectivity actually owned them? A tug of war began between teams, brigades and communes, with mutual recriminations and random repossessions, the result of which was that in the end nobody really cared. Some villagers would simply throw their ploughs and rakes aside in the field at the end of the day. Whereas in the past a good tool could last up to ten years – some ploughs managing to survive for sixty years with careful repairs – they no longer lasted for much more than a year or two. A mat used to dry millet, when carefully maintained, might only have to be repaired after ten years, but with the advent of the people’s communes most were worn out after one season. Some rakes, it was reported by a team of investigators from Shanghai, had to be repaired after a day.69

  And those were the tools that had not been devoured in the backyard furnaces during the frenzied iron and steel movement in 1958. At the Lushan plenum held in the summer of 1961, Li Yiqing, secretary of the south-central region, told the party leaders that 140,000 tonnes of farming tools had been thrown into the fires in the model province of Henan.70 When these losses were tallied with what was destroyed through neglect, the total varied from about a third to half of all equipment. In Shandong a third of all tools were useless within a year of the Great Leap Forward.71 In the Shaoguan region, Guangdong, 40 per cent of all necessary equipment was gone by 1961, meaning a loss of some 34 million tools. A third of what was left was broken.72 The number of waterwheels in Hebei was halved, while carts were also reduced by 50 per cent.73 In Zhejiang province half of all water pumps, over half of all planting machines and more than a third of all threshing machines were damaged beyond recovery.74

  Besides the fact that there were few incentives to repair tools that belonged to everybody in general and nobody in particular, other reason
s stood in the way of recovery. Widespread shortages of natural resources, especially timber, meant galloping inflation – despite the fixed prices of the planned economy. In Zhejiang, for instance, bamboo was 40 per cent more expensive than before the Great Leap Forward, and the iron allocated to the countryside for tool production was of inferior quality.75 Their homes already stripped of cooking utensils and agricultural implements to feed the backyard furnaces, the villagers were then handed back useless ingots of brittle iron. Half the metal allocated to villages in Guangdong in 1961 was defective.76 Tool production in state enterprises, as we shall see, did not fare any better.

  18

  Industry

  Ever greater output targets were assigned to factories, foundries, workshops, mines and power plants all over China. How a production unit was rewarded was determined by the percentage of the quota it managed to fulfil. The output total was the magic number that determined the rise and fall of any one factory. And just as cadres in the people’s communes pledged ever increasing amounts of grain, all over the country factories tried to outperform each other in fulfilling the plan. Lists of output figures were broadcast on a daily basis by the propaganda machine, reproduced on chalkboard messages and wall newspapers for everybody to see. Charts and diagrams with growth projections were displayed in factory shops. Photos of model workers were enshrined under glass on a ‘board of honour’, while posters, stars, ribbons and slogans adorned the walls of every workshop. Underachievers were identified at factory meetings, while workers who overfulfilled the targets were commended, some of them attending mass meetings in Beijing reviewed by the Chairman himself. Above the hissing molten metal, the clang of crucibles and the whistling steam an incessant racket would come from loudspeakers, spewing out propaganda and radio programmes to encourage workers to increase production.1

  As the supreme goal of the red factory was output, the cost of input was often neglected. In the sprawling bureaucracy in charge of industry, from the central economic ministries to the different administrative departments within the factories, nobody quite managed to keep track of the staggering amount of equipment ordered from abroad. Even Zhou Enlai, who so ruthlessly pressed for the extraction of foodstuffs from the countryside to meet export targets, seemed unable to curb the import of machinery effectively. Enterprises also borrowed money to fund constant expansion, build prestige buildings and purchase more equipment. In the case of the Luoyang Mining Machinery Factory, the monthly interest owed to the bank was equal to the factory’s entire wage package.2

  But, once installed, the new equipment was subjected to poor maintenance and relentless maltreatment. On a visit to a wharf in Shanghai in 1961, the otherwise sympathetic delegation from East Germany were taken aback by the state in which they found imported machinery. New materials like sheet metal, tubes and profile iron rusted in the open.3 The Iron and Steel Plant in Wuhan, inaugurated with much fanfare by Mao at the height of the Great Leap Forward in September 1958, gave a similar impression of extreme neglect, a mere two out of six Siemens-Martin furnaces operating at full capacity by 1962.4 More detailed reports by investigation teams confirmed that materials, tools and machinery were neglected or even deliberately damaged. In the Shijiazhuang Iron and Steel Company, for instance, half of all engines broke down frequently.5 A culture of waste developed. In Luoyang, three factories alone had accumulated more than 2,500 tonnes of scrap metal that went nowhere.6 In Shenyang, sloppy streamlets of molten copper and nickel solutions ran between heaps of scrap metal.7

  Waste developed not only because raw resources and supplies were poorly allocated, but because factory bosses deliberately bent the rules to increase output. The brand-new iron and steel plant in Jinan, according to a team of auditors, wasted a fifth of total state investment, or 12.4 million yuan, in its first two years by adding sand to hundreds of tonnes of manganese ore, resulting in a useless mixture which had to be discarded.8

  As everyone worked feverishly towards higher production levels, mountains of substandard goods accumulated. Many a factory spewed out inferior goods as corners were cut in the relentless pursuit of higher output. The very fabric of material culture was shot through with shoddy goods, from ramshackle housing, rickety buses, wobbly furniture and faulty electric wiring to flimsy windows. The State Planning Commission found that a mere fifth of all the steel produced in Beijing was first rate. Most was second or third rate, and over 20 per cent was classified as defective. In Henan more than half of all the steel produced in factories was third rate or worse. Inferior material churned out by the steel-producing giants had a knock-on effect for a whole range of related industries. At Angang, the sprawling steel and iron complex in Anshan, the rails produced in 1957 were generally of first-rate quality, but by 1960 a mere third corresponded to the requisite standards. As the quality of the rails suffered, several sections of the railway network became too dangerous for heavy traffic and had to be closed down; a few collapsed altogether.9

  Not only did the quantity of inferior goods increase, but larger proportions of them found their way into society. In Henan only 0.25 per cent of the cement which did not fulfil production criteria actually left the premises in 1957. This ballooned to over 5 per cent in 1960, as large quantities of substandard material were used on building sites. A survey of a whole series of industries in Kaifeng, Henan, reached an even more astounding conclusion: more than 70 per cent of all the output consisted of reject products.10

  And just as faulty rails, warped beams and fake cement perilously weakened the material structure of everyday life, inferior consumer goods became part and parcel of socialist culture. In Shanghai clocks sounded the alarm at random, enamel basins were sold with splits and bubbles on the surface, while half of all knitwear and cotton goods were defective.11 In Wuhan zips jammed, knives bent and blades broke off the handles of agricultural tools.12 Sometimes factories cut costs by churning out products without any identifying label. This was the case with a fifth of the tinned meat sold in Beijing. Sometimes the labels were wrong, for instance when fruit was substituted for pork, leading to large amounts of rotten goods.13 Even more worrying were problems caused by the addition of chemicals to processed food. In one year a Beijing dye factory sold 120 tonnes of harmful pigments specifically designed as food additives. Many of these were banned, for instance Sudan yellow, a dye used in inks. Lax procedures over quality control also meant that contaminated food and medicine were allowed to leave the factory floor, one example being a batch of 78 million bottles of penicillin gone bad. A third was sent out from a Shanghai factory before the problem was even spotted.14 Mao scoffed at the very notion of a defective product: ‘there is no such thing as a reject product, one man’s reject is another man’s grain’.15

  Mao may have dismissed concerns about quality, but a reject culture damaged the country’s reputation on the international market. As we have seen, the cost of making good on the leaky batteries, contaminated eggs, infected meat, fake coal and other tainted merchandise delivered in 1959 alone amounted to 200 or 300 million yuan. But reject culture also corrupted the inner workings of military industry. As a report by Marshal He Long showed, it was not only assault rifles that failed to fire, but also nineteen jet fighters produced in Shenyang that were substandard. In Factory 908 well over 100,000 gas masks were unusable. Nie Rongzhen, who ran the nuclear weapons programme, in turn complained about the poor quality of wireless devices and measuring gauges, which were often unreliable because of dust particles trapped inside. Even in top-secret factories rubbish was found everywhere, and the slightest breeze blew the dirt resting on propaganda banners hanging on the wall on to sensitive equipment: ‘The Americans doubt that we can make guided missiles because the Chinese are too dirty.’16

  Living conditions for workers were appalling. Stupendous imports of foreign machinery were meant to catapult the country forward, as gleaming new plants, from steel mills and cement kilns to oil refineries, were purchased from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But very
little was invested in the housing and feeding of ordinary workers and their families – despite the fact that the workforce exploded with the arrival of millions from the countryside.

  Take the iron and steel plant in Jinan, the capital of Shandong. Established at the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 with the most technologically advanced equipment, it should have been a haven for its new recruits. But conditions deteriorated rapidly. There were inadequate toilet facilities, so workers urinated and defecated directly on the factory floor. Filth and stench permeated the premises, lice and scabies were common. Chaos reigned on the ground. Scuffles were a frequent occurrence, windows were broken and doors smashed in. A pecking order emerged in which the strongest workers grabbed the best beds in the dormitories. Fear was pervasive, in particular among women, who were commonly teased, humiliated and abused by local cadres in their offices, in their dormitories or sometimes on the factory floor in full view of other workers. None of them dared to sleep or go out on their own.17

  A similar scene could be found in Nanjing. When the Federation of Trade Unions looked into the lives of iron, steel and coal workers in 1960, they found filthy canteens infected with insects and rodents. Queues were interminable, up to a thousand workers lining up in front of a single canteen window at the Lingshan Coal Mine. As the canteen was open for only an hour, workers would tussle and wrangle for space, sometimes coming to blows. In the Guantang Coal Mine, miners who were late were deprived of their meal, and had to go down the shafts for a ten-hour shift on an empty stomach. Dormitories were cramped. On average each worker had a space of 1 to 1.5 square metres, although some slept on boards jammed between beds or against the pillars. Many rested in shifts, having to share a bed. Straw roofs would leak, forcing some of the workers to move their bunk beds around the dripping pools. Others slept under an umbrella. Protective equipment was either lacking or wholly inadequate. Many miners had no shoes and had no alternative but to go down the shafts barefoot. Those made to hew coal in open pits were drenched when it rained, their jackets soaked with water. In the dormitories there were no blankets, and the humidity was so high that clothes would never quite dry. Some of the steel workers who had to work in front of blast furnaces burned their feet because they had no shoes.18