Not only were local brigades powerless to stop depredations of natural resources, but they were often complicit in them. When walking through the gates of Sihai commune in Yanqing county, up in the mountains just outside Beijing, a visitor in March 1961 was met with the sight of some 180,000 stumps of trees – linden and mulberry – cut an inch or two above the ground. This was the work of a mere two units.10 Farmers were so desperate for warmth that they even cut down fruit trees in the middle of the winter. As the Forestry Bureau from Beijing reported, 50,000 apple, apricot and walnut trees were hacked down by one village in Changping, while a brigade used a tractor to uproot 890,000 plants and seedlings for fuel.11 More often than not, communes would send teams to poach from neighbours: from Huairou a hundred farmers were dispatched across the county border to Yanqing, where they cut down 180,000 trees in less than three weeks.12 Closer to the capital, trees along the railway were felled, 10,000 vanishing along the line in Daxing county.13 Further south even telephone poles were taken down for fuel.14 Far inland, in Gansu, a single brigade destroyed two-thirds of all 120,000 varnish trees, crippling the local economy, while another team managed to fell 40 per cent of the tea-oil trees on which local villages had depended for their livelihoods.15
People were desperate for kindling. Some villages burned not only their furniture but even some of their houses after cutting down the trees: ‘What is under the pot is more scarce even than what is in the pot,’ farmers lamented.16 Even in Panyu, Guangdong, surrounded by subtropical vegetation, two-thirds of all households had no fuel to start a fire, some even lacking a match. Fire had to be borrowed from neighbours. Once started, it was guarded like a precious commodity, as entire villages sank back into a primitive barter economy.17
In cities too trees were felled, but for different reasons. As we have seen, many companies used the Great Leap Forward to expand their facilities, often out of all proportion to their actual needs. One arm of the Commercial Bureau of Nanjing destroyed a fruit yard with 6,000 cherry, peach, pomegranate and pear trees. The cleared field remained empty. Such destruction was common in Nanjing. As an investigation at the end of 1958 showed, a few dozen units were responsible for illegally hacking down 75,000 trees. Most were factories in need of timber, but some sold the wood on the black market to raise much-needed income.18
Although there were periodic campaigns to turn the denuded countryside green – barren deserts would be transformed into lush forests – widespread famine, poor planning and a more general collapse of authority combined to defeat efforts at afforestation. Trees that had just been planted instantly disappeared. In 1959, for example, Beijing sent thousands of people to plant 2,600 hectares of protective greenery at the Ming Tombs Reservoir. The local commune destroyed more than half within a year. Outside Beijing between a third and four-fifths of all reforestation and seedling projects were lost. The damage in regions further removed from the seat of power must have been even greater.19 In Heilongjiang, with its mountains clad in dense forest harbouring virgin larch, purple linden and Manchurian ash, one-third of all seedlings in new shelter forests died because they were poorly managed.20 In Hubei, some 15,000 trees planted to stabilise the banks of a dam in E’cheng were illegally felled as soon as they were put in the ground. They were replanted, but the job was carried out so badly that most simply tilted over and dried out.21
To the many causes of denudation must be added fire, cases of which soared as a result of greater human activity in forests and a collapse in effective forestry management. Some 56,000 hectares were destroyed in thousands of fires in Hunan during the first two years of the Great Leap Forward.22 In the arid northern plains of Shaanxi and Gansu, where forest was already rare, 2,400 fires claimed more than 15,000 hectares in the spring of 1962.23 Fires could be accidental, but often the forest was burned on purpose to produce fertiliser or hunt down wildlife. As fire advanced and the forest receded, so the animals were slaughtered. Even rare species were fair game for hunters, and some of them – golden monkey, wild elephant and sable – were driven to the edge of extinction.24
Fire was also used to clear the land for cereal grain, although most of the reclamation took place in pastoral areas. Elsewhere the cultivated surface actually shrank since collectivisation was supposed to bring about such astonishing jumps in productivity that a third of all fields could be abandoned. In the Gansu corridor and the Ningxia plain, for instance, winter wheat intruded on the steppes, hastening desertification. The county of Yanchi – to take but one example from Ningxia – doubled its farmland to 50,000 hectares during the Great Leap Forward, cutting away the highland grasses and driving the sheep up the hills to graze: the county now faced the sand. Further to the west, in the arid Qaidam basin, a bleak expanse pockmarked by salt marshes and surrounded by mountains so cold that little could grow, communes destroyed 100,000 hectares of shrubbery and desert vegetation to make way for grain cultivation. The risk of being buried by drift sand then forced several collective farms to move.25
The extent of forest coverage lost during the famine is difficult to estimate.26 Up to 70 per cent of the shelter forest was destroyed in some counties in Liaoning province. In east Henan, 80 per cent of all shelter forests vanished; in Kaifeng it had gone altogether, and some 27,000 hectares were given up to the desert.27 Throughout the immense expanse of the north-west – from Xinjiang to Shanxi – a fifth of all trees were cut down.28 In Hunan half of the forest was felled.29 In Guangdong just under a third had disappeared.30 Yu Xiguang, an expert on the famine, claims that 80 per cent of the forest coverage went up in smoke, although that may be an overestimate.31 The damage varied from place to place, and even in the archives statistics are political artefacts rather than objective reflections of reality. What is certain is that never before had such a large diversity of forests, from the bamboo groves in the south to the alpine meadows and boreal stands of fir and pine in the north, suffered such a prolonged and intense attack.
After dark clouds filled the skies, thunder and rain exploded over Hebei in the early summer of 1959. As the torrential downpour continued unabated, the drainage system choked with mud, excrement and foliage, irrigation canals caved in, streets turned into rivers and the region north of the capital flooded. The monsoon dissolved the houses made of mud and destroyed the fields, either waterlogging them or washing away the topsoil. Streets were coated with silt and heaped with wreckage. A third of all farmers in Tongzhou were affected, as homes collapsed, crops were lost and animals drowned.32 Other catastrophes besieged China during the summer. Heavy rain lashed Guangdong. Typhoons pummelled the coast further north. Extreme variations in the weather had unforeseen consequences, causing the worst drought in Hubei in several decades.33 Much was made of the impact of nature on the economy, as the leadership deflected attention away from politics by attributing economic setbacks to these calamities. The exact proportion of blame to be assigned to nature became a point of contention, and Liu Shaoqi would later get into trouble by openly claiming that only 30 per cent of ‘difficulties in production’ were caused by natural disasters, the remaining 70 per cent being due to man-made factors.
But Liu’s explanation, while quite common, reproduced rather than challenged the notion which lay at the root of environmental degradation in China at the time, namely that humans were an entity separate from nature altogether.34 Both were intertwined, as detailed studies carried out on ‘natural calamities’ at the time show. When an investigation team revisited Tongzhou the following summer, they found extreme destitution, as the state had all but abandoned the villagers, who barely survived without adequate food, clothing or shelter.35 Traditional coping mechanisms in times of disaster – private charity, state assistance, mutual help, family savings and migration – had failed to take effect, and the flooding had a far more profound and prolonged effect as a result of collectivisation. But none of this explained why Tongzhou had been hit so badly. Did it rain more over that part of the region? The answer came a year later, after Liu Shaoqi
pointed out the marginal role played by catastrophes in a speech attended by thousands of top cadres. In the more open political climate of 1962, the Water Conservancy Bureau started taking stock of how the Great Leap Forward had affected the irrigation system. It singled out Tongzhou for special attention. The conclusion was unambiguous: poorly conceived irrigation projects, hastily implemented during the water-conservancy movement of 1957–8, had disturbed a carefully balanced natural water system. Combined with a huge extension of agriculture, more water than ever before was forced to go underground. When the clouds burst over Tongzhou in 1959 the water had nowhere to go, inundating fields and villages.36
The same happened all over the country. In Hebei, the Cangzhou region was so devastated by a typhoon in July 1961 that a team of twenty-four men was immediately sent from the provincial party committee. They spent ten days in the region, where close to half of all the fields stood under water. The team quickly realised that the natural drainage system had been destroyed by irrigation work undertaken since the Great Leap Forward. Poorly designed reservoirs, canals and ditches contributed to the disaster, but increased cultivation made it worse, as big, square fields had replaced the small and uneven plots that traditionally followed the topography of the terrain. Even villages which had never suffered from inundation now stood waterlogged. Mud houses topped by heavy stone roofs caved in on their inhabitants. As the team noted, nature and people paid the price of past policies: everything was ‘emaciated’ (shou): ‘people are emaciated, the earth is barren, animals are skinny and houses are thin’.37
Tongzhou and Cangzhou are two well-documented examples, but even greater belts of starvation ran along the Huai River and Yellow River plains: from Shangqiu in Henan to Jining in Shandong, from Fuyang in Anhui to Xuzhou in Jiangsu, Hu Yaobang spent a month travelling some 1,800 kilometres inspecting the devastation caused by heavy rain in September 1961. As we shall see, many of the sites of horror where the death rate was at least 10 per cent were located in those two areas. Some of these names – Fengyang, Fuyang, Jining – have since become symbols for mass starvation. The first thing Hu Yaobang observed was that the rainfall that autumn had hardly been exceptional. In some of the most devastated counties such as Fengyang ‘the rainfall was basically normal’. Further enquiries revealed that the main reason these regions were devastated by inundations of no more than 700 millimetres was the extraordinary extent of water-conservancy projects carried out since the autumn of 1957. These vast irrigation networks trapped the water, then silted up and became ‘an evil dragon turning the land into a sea’. So bad was the situation that any rainfall exceeding 300 millimetres could cause devastation. The local villagers deeply resented the canals and channels built over the past few years, seeing them as the main reason for the inundations. Hu noted that ‘some of the cadres are honest and are learning the lesson, but others are confused, some even insisting that it is a natural catastrophe’.38
Throughout the country the irrigation projects, built by hundreds of millions of farmers at great human and economic cost, were for the main part useless or downright dangerous. Many violated the laws of nature, resulting in soil erosion, landslides and river siltation. We saw how in Hunan, a province blessed with fertile soil, river valleys and terraced fields, lush mountains covered with primeval forest were defaced by local communes during the steel drive. The denuded mountains were washed bare by torrents, since there was no longer a canopy to intercept rainwater. As the capacity of forests to retain water was degraded, natural hazards were amplified into disasters. Large irrigation projects that had disrupted the natural flow of water with stopbanks, culverts, reservoirs and irrigation channels only aggravated matters. Accumulated deposits heightened the bed of local rivers in Hunan by up to 80 centimetres, so that water threatened to spill over and flood the neighbouring villages.39
Local reclamation projects made things worse. Launched by the state and local communes in response to food shortages, they showed little sense of stewardship of nature. In Hunan over 100,000 hectares were opened up, much of it on steep mountain slopes. The rain then flushed the soil and took it to the newly built reservoirs, choking them with sediment. One team in Longhui reclaimed ten hectares on a gradient against the mountain: the runoff from torrential rain in May 1962 took enough soil to silt up thirty dams and five roads.40
Shortages of different goods also tended to reinforce each other in a vicious circle of want. Once all the fertiliser had been squandered in the Great Leap Forward of 1958, the fields turned barren. Paths between the rice paddies were poorly maintained, as farmers lost control over the land and crops were randomly planted and frequently changed. Close cropping and deep ploughing further stripped the farmland, as the soil was played out. In the past a field could retain carefully irrigated water for four to five days, but by 1962 the water seeped through the earth in less than seventy-two hours. This meant that twice as much water was needed, precisely as the system was silting up.41 The Bureau for Water Conservancy and Hydroelectricity in Hunan concluded that some 57,000 square kilometres suffered from soil erosion, including most of the river basin of the Yangzi and between a quarter and a third of the Xiang, the Zijiang and the Yuanjiang – three of the four largest rivers in the province. Up to half of all devices for water and soil conservation had silted up and been washed away. In the wake of the irrigation campaign the amount of soil erosion had increased by 50 per cent.42
Shabby workmanship, carried out by starved farmers without much planning and often in disregard of expert opinion, also marred new irrigation projects. In Hunan, by the end of the famine, less than half of all pumps actually worked. Many were broken, others simply stopped working in the absence of any supervision.43 In the Hengyang region, two-thirds of all medium-sized reservoirs and a third of all small dykes were dysfunctional, as water was lost through leaks and seepages.44 In the province as a whole, a tenth of all medium reservoirs were described as completely wasted projects, and they were abandoned halfway through. None of the ten large ones had much of an impact, as they submerged large cultivated surfaces but actually irrigated very little, causing great anger among local people who had been forced to resettle.45 In many cases the building material was so brittle that the movement of the waves inside the reservoirs created grooves of a depth of fifty to seventy centimetres inside the dam.46 The use of dynamite by hungry farmers to fish near dams and sluices did not improve the situation.47
Hunan was no exception. In neighbouring Hubei, during the drought of 1959 which the party leadership identified as one of the catastrophes to have ravaged the country, water from the mighty Yangzi could not be diverted into the fields because more than three-quarters of all new sluices were too high. The river passed along arid fields, as people and cattle went thirsty.48 Along the 100-kilometre stretch between Jianli and Jingzhou, in the midst of the drought, farmers dug holes into local dykes to irrigate the fields, but later these were flooded during heavy rains.49 By 1961 an estimated 400,000 small reservoirs were in a state of disrepair; roughly one in three either collapsed, silted up or leaked dry.50
But as in other parts of a country in the grip of gigantism, large projects also mushroomed. In Hubei they swelled from a few dozen before 1957 to well over 500. Once these were completed they were often simply abandoned to local communes, many of which failed to provide any supervision whatsoever. Stones were carted away from embankments, aqueducts were left to silt up, holes were dug in retaining walls, and cowsheds, pigsties and even entire houses were built on top of dams. The rubber used to seal sluices hermetically was cut away, while the telecommunication equipment from unmanned sentry posts was stolen.51 The conclusion was inescapable: despite the huge efforts devoted to irrigation schemes with the forced enlistment of millions of farmers throughout the province, by 1961 less than a million hectares were irrigated, in contrast to the 2 million in 1957.52 The position in Hunan was only marginally better: after massive investment in water conservancy the overall irrigated surface in the provi
nce increased from 2.66 million hectares in 1957 to about 2.68 million in 1962, or less than 1 per cent.53
Dams throughout the country lacked spillways, used shoddy material and were built without regard for the local geology. Many collapsed. In Guangdong, the dam at Fenghuang, Chao’an county, burst in 1960, followed by another at Huangdan, Dongxing county. These were large reservoirs, but medium-sized and small ones also caved in, for instance in Lingshan, Huiyang and Raoping.54 Nationwide, 115 large reservoirs, or 38 per cent of the total, were unable to hold back the floodwaters during the rainy season.55 According to a report from the central leadership, three large, nine medium and 223 small dams or reservoirs collapsed in 1960 because they were badly built.56
While many of those erected with earth collapsed almost immediately, some were dangerous time bombs ticking away for decades. This happened with the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in Zhumadian, Henan, built as part of the ‘Harness the Huai River’ campaign in 1957–9, as we have seen in an earlier chapter. When a typhoon hit the region in August 1975, these dams broke, unleashing a tidal wave which drowned an estimated 230,000 people.57 By 1980 some 2,976 dams had collapsed in Henan. As the chief of the provincial Bureau for Water Resources later put it, referring to the Great Leap Forward, ‘the crap from that era has not yet been cleared up’.58
Interference with nature increased the alkalisation – also known as salinisation or sodification – of farmlands, although this was a phenomenon more commonly associated with the semi-arid plains of the north. Alkalisation is often seen as a drawback of irrigation in dry regions where a lack of rainfall allows the soluble salts contained in water to accumulate in the soil, severely reducing its fertility. New irrigation schemes had a disastrous effect on the alkalisation of the North China Plain. In Henan, some two-thirds of a million hectares of soil turned into alkaline land.59 In Beijing and the surrounding suburbs, as the Water Conservancy Bureau found out, the amount of soil lost to alkalisation had doubled to 10 per cent during the Great Leap Forward.60 But along the coast, too, salinisation increased through the intrusion of marine water, a consequence of the half-baked schemes of local cadres courting the attention of their superiors. In a Hebei commune located twenty kilometres from the sea, tradition was brushed aside in the pursuit of a vision of symmetry, as grand canals were dug to criss-cross square paddy fields rebuilt from uneven plots that customarily hugged the contours of the land. The crop plummeted as the proportion of alkaline land doubled.61 Throughout the province the amount of alkaline land jumped by 1.5 million hectares.62
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Page 21