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

by Frank Dikotter

  Some wronged villagers were confident enough to appeal to the law. In Liuhe, near Nanjing, a cadre snatched and later ate the chicken an old woman was trying to sell. Incensed, she went straight to court and lodged a complaint.39 But more often than not litigation was meaningless, all the more so since the judicial system had crumbled under political pressure – even leading to the abolition of the Ministry of Justice in 1959. Politics was in command, curtailing formal justice – as well as formal recourse. In Ningjin county, for instance, the number of cadres in charge of the police, the inspectorate and the courts was halved in 1958. The local courts were overwhelmed with civil cases brought by ordinary people.40

  In response, many turned instead to a tradition of complaint in the form of letters and petitions. As misinformation proliferated within the party bureaucracy, every level feeding false reports and inflated statistics to the next one up, the state security tried to bypass official organs and reach straight down to street level. It paid close attention to popular opinion and encouraged anonymous letters of denunciation.41 Class enemies, after all, could worm their way into the ranks of the party, while spies and saboteurs were lurking among the masses. Popular vigilance was necessary to ferret them out: the people monitored the party. Even the most insignificant nobody had the power to put pen to paper and bring down a mighty cadre, a negligent local official or an abusive bureaucrat. Arbitrary denunciation could strike at any time up the ladder of power. And people wrote furiously, sending bags of letters each month to beg, protest, denounce or complain, sometimes coyly and humbly, occasionally vociferously. Some denounced their neighbours over a trifle, others merely sought help in changing jobs or moving house, and a few went into a long tirade against the entire system, peppering their letters with anti-communist slogans. They wrote to newspapers, the police, the courts and the party. Some wrote to the State Council, and not a few addressed their letters to Mao Zedong personally.

  In Changsha the provincial authorities received some 1,500 letters or visitors a month. Many wrote to seek redress from a perceived injustice, and a few even ventured to write letters critical enough to be deemed ‘reactionary’. Those who presented a specific case with a concrete request had a chance of receiving an answer. After all, within the huge monitoring system of the party bureaucracy, local authorities had to show that they acted on ‘requests from the masses’.42 By March 1961 in Nanjing, around 130,000 letters had been received since the start of the Great Leap Forward. The majority of complaints concerned work, food, goods and services, but a more detailed analysis of 400 letters ‘by the masses’ showed that one in ten made a direct accusation or threatened to sue.43 In Shanghai the bureau for handling letters from the public received well over 40,000 items in 1959. People complained about lack of food, poor housing and work conditions, with a few attacking the party and its representatives.44 The point of a denunciation was to prompt an investigation, and some letters carried enough conviction to spur the authorities into action. After a complaint was sent to the provincial governor of Guangdong alleging that the Institute for Nationalities included dozens of fictitious students on its roster to increase its grain allocation, a local security team was dispatched, and managed to extract several confessions and an apology from the Institute’s leaders.45

  Some readers sent letters to the People’s Daily. Few of these were published, but their contents were summarised and circulated among the leadership. Coal miners from Guangxi province, for instance, wrote to complain that some of them fainted on the job because the food rations had been slashed even though their working hours had increased.46 The State Council received hundreds of letters each month. Some writers were bold enough to attack the policies of the Great Leap Forward and lament the export of grain in the midst of hunger.47 Some wrote directly to the top leaders. In doing so they reproduced a long-standing imperial tradition of petitioning the emperor, but they also demonstrated their belief that abuses of power were local, not the result of a campaign of collectivisation initiated by Mao himself: ‘if only Mao knew’. Justice, surely, had survived in the capital. Letters offered hope. Xiang Xianzhi, a poor girl from Hunan, had a letter addressed to the Chairman stitched inside her coat for a full year before handing it over to an investigation team sent by the provincial party committee.48 ‘Dear Chairman Mao’ was a standard opening greeting, for instance in the case of Ye Lizhuang’s letter about the starvation and corruption in Hainan. His appeal worked. It led to a lengthy investigation by a high-powered team, which brought to light ‘oppression of the people’ by local party members.49

  But many letters never reached their destination. After Liu Shaoqi personally complained to the minister of public security, Xie Fuzhi, that letters sent to him by fellow villagers had been opened by the local police (see Chapter 16), the full extent of the abuse came to light. In Guizhou the post office and the Public Security Bureau routinely opened the mail, which led to the arrest of the authors of denunciations for ‘anti-party’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities. When a cadre wrote about mass starvation in Zunyi, he was interrogated for several months and sent to work in a kiln factory.50 More than 2,000 letters were opened by the police every month in Gaotai county, Gansu. Anonymity, apparently, offered little protection. In one case, He Jingfang mailed eight unsigned letters, but the local police still managed to track him down, extract a confession and send him off to a labour camp.51 In Sichuan, Du Xingmin’s letter denouncing party secretary Song Youyu led to a frantic search throughout the brigade in which writing samples were compared. Du was unmasked and accused of being a saboteur. But before being handed over to the Public Security Bureau, Du had both his eyes gouged out by an enraged Song. He died a few days later in prison.52 No wonder some people turned to violence instead.

  26

  Robbers and Rebels

  Violence was an act of last resort, as desperate farmers assaulted granaries, raided trains or plundered communes. After Cangzhou, Hebei, had been hit by a typhoon in 1961, some villagers armed themselves with sickles to steal the corn from the fields. One party secretary took charge of a brigade and organised raids against neighbouring villages, plundering dozens of sheep and several tonnes of vegetables.1 Some of these incursions were armed: in one incident a leader in Shaanxi provided the rifles with which a hundred villagers ransacked an adjacent commune and hauled away 5 tonnes of grain. Another local leader headed an armed gang of 260 men who slept rough in the daytime and pillaged at night.2 In parts of the countryside, large groups would assemble along county and provincial boundaries and make forays across the border, leaving behind a trail of destruction.3

  But more often than not the target of peasant violence was the state granary. The scale of the attacks was staggering. In one Hunanese county alone thirty out of 500 state granaries were assailed in two months.4 In the same province the Xiangtan region witnessed over 800 cases of grain theft in the winter of 1960–1. In Huaihua farmers forced open a whole series of barns, taking several tonnes of millet.5

  Raids on trains were also common. Farmers would gather along a railway and rob freight trains, using the sheer weight of their numbers to overwhelm the guards. This became increasingly common from the end of 1960 onwards, as the regime started to realise the extent of mass starvation and launched a purge of some of the most abusive party members. After provincial boss Zhang Zhongliang had been demoted in Gansu province, some 500 cases of train robbery were reported by the local police in January 1961 alone. The total losses were estimated at roughly 500 tonnes of grain and 2,300 tonnes of coal. And with each assault the crowds grew bolder. At the Wuwei railway station, only a few dozen people caused trouble in early January, but as others joined the fray the crowds swelled into the hundreds. Then, by the end of the month, 4,000 villagers ran amok, bringing to a halt a train from which every detachable portion of property was removed. Elsewhere, near Zhangye, a granary was pillaged from dusk to dawn by 2,000 irate farmers, who killed one of the guards in the process. In another case military
uniforms were stolen from a wagon. On the prowl days later, the villagers were mistaken for special forces by the guards in charge of a warehouse and given access to the grain unopposed.6

  All along the railway line, granaries were attacked, livestock stolen, weapons seized and account books burned. Armed forces and special militia had to be sent in to establish order.7 Some of the train robberies had diplomatic repercussions, for instance when the assailants of a freight train burned the exhibition goods that were in transit from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the People’s Republic of Mongolia.8 To the credit of the Ministry of Public Security, nobody was ordered to shoot into the crowds, and the police were instructed instead to focus on the ‘ringleaders’.9

  Violence begets violence: sometimes the protective shield outsiders mistook for passivity and submissiveness broke down, and villagers erupted in a blind fury. In heated meetings at which higher quotas were introduced, farmers accused their leaders of starving them to death, some of the more disgruntled ones going so far as to assault and kill local cadres with cleavers.10 Others armed themselves with sticks and chased cadres suspected of skimming public funds. In Yunyang county, Sichuan, local people unleashed a collective anger upon their leader, who jumped into a pond to his death together with his wife.11 In the mountainous county of Tongjiang, local team leader Liu Funian was made to kneel on stones and was beaten with a flagpole.12 But such examples were unusual. Ordinary people may have pilfered, stolen, lied and on occasion torched and pillaged, but they were rarely the perpetrators of violence. They were the ones who had to find ways of ‘eating bitterness’ – the Chinese saying for enduring hardship – by absorbing grief, accepting pain and living with loss on a devastating scale.

  Less overt but equally destructive was arson, although it was not always possible to distinguish between fires started accidentally, for instance by poor villagers trying to stay warm during the winter, and those ignited deliberately as a form of protest. The Ministry of Public Security estimated that at least 7,000 fires caused 100 million yuan worth of losses in 1958 – although it was unable to tell what proportion should be attributed to intentional burning.13 Dozens of cases of arson were reported every year by the public security organs in Hebei.14 Towards the end of 1959 there were three times more fires in Nanjing than there had been the previous year. Many were caused by neglect, but not a few were attributed to arsonists. Zhao Zhihai, for instance, started a fire in the dormitory of his factory as a form of protest.15 Xu Minghong burned four haystacks and was shot dead by the local militia.16 In Songzi, Hubei, the house of a party secretary was torched.17 Elsewhere in the province angry farmers doused a statue of Mao with petrol and set it ablaze.18 In Sichuan, Li Huaiwen set fire to the local canteen, which had once been his home, shouting: ‘Get the hell out of here, this canteen belongs to me!’19

  By 1961 pyromania possessed the countryside. Around Guangzhou, hundreds of fires flickered at night in the weeks following the Chinese New Year, many started by farmers demanding their own private plot.20 In Wengyuan county the villagers scribbled a message on a wall near the granary they had just torched, proclaiming that the grain that was no longer theirs might as well be burned.21

  As starvation sets in, famished people are often too weak and too focused on their own survival to contemplate rebellion. But inside the vaults of the party archives is plenty of evidence of underground organisations springing up in the last two years of the famine. They never posed a genuine threat to the party and were easily crushed, but they did act as a barometer for popular discontent. Many of these organisations never even got off the ground. In Hunan, for instance, 150 people along a county border armed themselves for rebellion in the winter of 1960–1, but were immediately swept up by local security forces. Near the provincial capital a Love the People Party was set up by a few disgruntled farmers in favour of the freedom to cultivate and trade in agricultural products. They too never stood a chance.22

  But more credible challenges came from the provinces near Tibet, where an armed uprising in March 1959 was quelled with heavy artillery, resulting in the Dalai Lama’s flight to exile. In Qinghai in 1958 open rebellion continued for months on end, at places ranging from Yegainnyin (Henan), close to the Gansu border in the east, to Gyêgu (Yushu) and Nangqen (Nangqian) up in the Tibetan plateau. Some of the rebels were inspired by Lhasa, others were fuelled by Islam. The armed forces in the province were insufficient to deal with the uprisings, and the army initially focused on regaining control of all vital highways.23

  The region continued to be rocked periodically by local uprisings. In the autumn of 1960, villagers in Xuanwei county, Yunnan, rebelled, an act of subversion that rapidly spread to several communes. The movement was backed by local cadres, including party secretaries in the higher echelons of power. Weapons were seized, and hundreds of discontented villagers rallied around slogans promising the abolition of the people’s communes, a free market and a return of the land to the farmers. The army swiftly intervened, capturing and eliminating all but one of the leaders. In his report to Zhou Enlai, top security boss Xie Fuzhi mentioned a dozen similar incidents in the south-western provinces that year.24 To this had to be added over 3,000 ‘counter-revolutionary groups’ detected by the public security forces: Yunnan alone harboured a hundred groups that referred to themselves as a ‘party’ (dang).25

  Secret societies were ruthlessly crushed after 1949, but a long history of state suppression had prepared them for survival against all odds. A survey of one northern province gives an indication of the extent of their continued influence – although the numbers may have been inflated by overzealous cadres keen on more resources to fight the counter-revolution. In Hebei province about forty groups dubbed ‘counter-revolutionary’ were unmasked within the first few months of 1959. Half of these belonged to secret societies the party had tried to extirpate. Huanxingdao, Shengxiandao, Baguadao, Xiantiandao, Jiugongdao – there were about a dozen popular religious sects and secret societies active in the province. In Ningjin county alone, close to 4 per cent of the local population was thought to belong to one sect or another, many of them swearing allegiance to the Yiguandao.26 Some of these societies extended their influence across provincial boundaries. Despite restrictions on the movement of people from the countryside, followers would travel from Hebei to Shandong to pray at the grave of a leader of a village sect called the Heaven and Earth Teaching Society.27 Everywhere people turned to popular religion, despite party strictures against ‘superstition’. In Guangdong, where a ceremony to mark the birthday of the Mother Dragon remained popular, some 3,000 worshippers gathered for the occasion in Deqing in 1960. Even students and cadres joined in.28

  But nothing could destabilise the regime even in its darkest hour. As in other famines, from Bengal and Ireland to the Ukraine, most villagers, by the time it became clear that starvation was there to stay, were already too weak even to walk down the road to the next village, let alone find weapons and organise an uprising. In any event, even a mild form of opposition was brutally repressed and severely dealt with: leaders of riots or uprisings faced execution, while others were given an indefinite sentence in a labour camp. What also prevented the country from imploding, even as tens of millions perished, was the absence of any viable alternative to the communist party. Whether they were dispersed secret religions or poorly organised underground parties, none except the regime could control this huge expanse of land. And the potential for a coup from within the army had been averted by extensive purges carried out by Lin Biao after the Lushan plenum in 1959.

  Yet something more tenacious than mere geopolitics prevented the appearance of a credible threat to the rule of the party. The most common technique of self-help in times of mass starvation was a simple device called hope. And hope dictated that, however bad the situation was in the village, Mao had the best interests of his people at heart. A common conviction in imperial times was that the emperor was benevolent, but his servants could be corrupt. Even mo
re so in the People’s Republic, the population had to reconcile a vision of utopia trumpeted by the media with the everyday reality of catastrophe on the ground. The belief that cadres who were abusive failed to carry out the orders of a beneficent Chairman was widespread. A distant entity called ‘the government’ and a semi-god called ‘Mao’ were on the side of good. If only he knew, everything would be different.

  27

  Exodus

  The most effective strategy of survival in times of famine was to leave the village. Ironically, for millions of farmers the Great Leap Forward meant departure to the city rather than entry into a commune. As targets for industrial output were ceaselessly revised upwards, urban enterprises started recruiting cheap labour from the countryside, creating a migration of tidal dimensions. More than 15 million farmers moved to the city in 1958 alone, lured by the prospect of a better life.1 From Changchun, Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai to Guangzhou, cities exploded as, according to the official census, the total urban population ballooned from 99 million in 1957 to 130 million in 1960.2

  The great outflow from the countryside happened despite formal restrictions on the movement of people. The household registration rules described in Chapter 22 were brushed aside in the rush to industrialisation. But few migrants managed officially to change their place of residence from the village to the city. A great underclass was created, relegated to dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous jobs on the margins of the urban landscape, and facing discriminatory barriers against assimilation in their place of work. Migrant workers were deprived of the same entitlements accorded city dwellers, for instance subsidised housing, food rations and access to health, education and disability benefits. Most of all they had no secure status, dwelling in a twilight zone of legality and risking expulsion back to the countryside at any time.