In the countryside, following an established tradition the communist party could do little about, children were sold or given away when they could no longer be supported by their own families. In Neiqiu county, Hebei, Chen Zhenyuan was strained to the limit by his family of six, and he gave his four-year-old son to a fellow villager. His seven-year-old was handed over to an uncle in a neighbouring county.33 In Chengdu, Li Erjie gave one of her three daughters to her sister. But other family members did not like the child, and the mother-in-law was a fierce woman who openly favoured her own grandson: ‘We have no food for ourselves, why should we keep another little bitch?’ she complained. She took away all of the food earmarked for the adopted child. The girl, who was only four years old, was also sent to fetch vegetables from the canteen every day, having to deal with adults pushing and shoving in the queue. She often fainted from hunger. She was neglected by her adoptive family and was found covered in lice a few months later, when she was taken back by her mother.34
Few families were willing to take on an extra burden in the famished countryside, prompting some people to abandon their children. The lucky ones were left behind in a city, some families making a great effort to break through the cordon fencing off the countryside. In Nanjing over 2,000 children were found abandoned in 1959, four times more than in the entire decade of communist rule up to the Great Leap Forward. Six out of ten were girls, and about a third were aged three or older; most were sick, a few blind or handicapped. Judging by the accents of those able to speak, many came from Anhui province, others from villages neighbouring Nanjing. Some of the families were interviewed by community workers. The most common rationale was the very logic of collectivisation, as some villagers gave official propaganda a twist by arguing that ‘children belong to the state’. Utopian images of abundance beyond the village, of wealth and happiness ensconced behind city walls, were also important. A common folk notion in the countryside was that a child could ‘enter town and enjoy a happy life’, as it would be brought up in prosperity.
But more tragic stories lurked behind such rationalisations, for instance in the case of a thirteen-year-old boy called Shi Liuhong. He was taken on a trek across the mountains from his home village in Hujiang. Tired and hungry, he fell asleep by the side of the road, only to find that his mother had gone when he woke up. This was one of the most common ways of ‘losing’ a child. The verb ‘lose’ (diu) was often used as a euphemism for abandonment. As a thirteen-year-old girl recounted, her father had died three years earlier and there was no food in the village. Her mother had first ‘lost’ her blind brother, aged fourteen; then her younger brother and sister were ‘lost’ in the mountains, before she too was left behind.35
As the last example shows, some children were abandoned in pairs, perhaps because the parents hoped that they might stay together. On the streets of Nanjing a six-year-old was thus found crying for his mother and holding on to two younger toddlers. But other reasons also accounted for the abandonment of siblings. Some were left on the streets because women from the countryside – desperate for food and shelter – ‘remarried’ men in the city who did not welcome children.36 Some had their date of birth scribbled on a piece of paper pinned to their clothes, others carried a written note in a pocket. In a few rare cases, desperate mothers took their children straight to the police station.37
There are no reliable statistics on the number of abandoned children, but in a city like Nanjing several thousand were found in a single year. In Wuhan, the capital of Hunan, four or five were picked up by the authorities each day by the summer of 1959.38 In the province as a whole some 21,000 children were placed in state orphanages by the summer of 1961, although many more were never recorded by the authorities.39
But in most cases children stayed with their parents to the very end. Across the countryside, in countless villages, starving children with swollen bellies and pipe-stem limbs, their heavy heads wobbling on thin little necks, were left to die in peasant huts, by empty fields or along dusty roadsides. In some villages in Jinghai county, Hebei, children aged four to five were unable to walk. Those who could wore nothing but an unlined garment, shuffling barefoot through the snow in the winter.40 Even in cities such as Shijiazhuang half of the babies died because their mothers had no milk.41 In some cases, children were almost the only ones to die. In a small village in Qionghai county, Guangdong, forty-seven people, or one in ten, died in the winter of 1958–9: of these, forty-one were infants and children, six were elderly.42
Yet, against all odds, sometimes the children were the ones who survived. In Sichuan it was estimated that 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of the rural population were orphans – meaning roughly 180,000 to 200,000 children without parents. Many roamed the villages in ragged groups, unwashed and unkempt, surviving on their wits – which, most of the time, meant theft. Children on their own were easy prey, stripped of their meagre belongings – cups, shoes, blankets, clothes – by their guardians or neighbours. Discarded by acquaintances once they had robbed her of her every possession, Gao Yuhua, a girl aged eleven, slept on a hay bed and had a mere loincloth to cover herself. She stayed alive by crushing grains of millet which she ate raw, and was described by an investigation team as resembling a ‘primitive child’ from the Stone Age.43 Xiang Qingping was adopted by a poor farmer in Fuling, but after the twelve-year-old had complained to neighbours that the man abused him and gave him mud to eat, his head was bashed in. Elsewhere in the county an orphan had his spine broken by angry villagers who caught him stealing from the fields.44 When siblings survived it was not uncommon for them to turn on each other. Among many reported cases, Jiang Laosan, aged seven, was beaten and robbed by his brother aged sixteen, dying a few months after becoming an orphan.45
Some of the orphans showed extraordinary resilience, as the story of Zhao Xiaobai, a soft-spoken woman with sad eyes, shows. A few years before the Great Leap Forward her family left their native village in Henan to join a migration programme encouraging farmers to settle in Gansu province. Her father was made to break ice in the mountains but died of hunger in 1959. Her mother was too ill to work. One of the local cadres came to the house, banging on the door to announce that slackers would not be fed. Another local bully came at night, pestering her mother for sexual favours. In the end, exhausted, she seems to have given up. In the middle of a freezing night in January 1960, she got up and went to the toilet. Her daughter Zhao Xiaobai, aged eleven, woke up and asked her mother where she was going. Then she fell asleep again, but two hours later her mother was still in the toilet. ‘I called out to her, but she did not answer. She just sat there, with her head towards one side, but she said nothing.’
Surrounded by strangers speaking an alien dialect, Zhao and her sister aged six ended up living with an uncle, who had also migrated to Gansu. ‘He was reasonable towards me, because I was old enough to go out and work. But he was not nice to my sister. You know in Gansu, it was very cold, minus 20 Celsius. He asked my sister to go out looking for kindling in such freezing weather. How could she find any wood? One day, as it was freezing, she came home empty-handed. So he beat her on the head, and she bled pretty badly.’ To protect her sister from her uncle’s abuse, Zhao took the six-year-old with her as she went to work like an adult, digging canals and ploughing fields. Here too she was unsafe. ‘Once, as I was working, I heard my little sister crying, and I saw somebody hurting her. Somebody was using sand balls to hit my sister, and she was surrounded by clumps of sand. Her eyes were covered in grit, and she just cried and cried.’ Zhao found a couple who were planning to return to Henan. She sold everything they had and bought two tickets at ten yuan. Back in Henan, at last, they found her grandmother who took the two girls under her wing. When asked how she had become the woman she is now, Zhao Xiaobai answered without hesitation: ‘Through suffering.’46
Some children never found anybody willing to look after them and were placed in orphanages, where conditions – rather predictably – were appalling. Physical punishment was
common, for instance causing a dozen to die at the hands of their guardians in one commune in Dianjiang county, Sichuan.47 In Hubei orphans were sheltered in ramshackle buildings with leaking roofs and left to survive the winter without padded cotton clothes or blankets. Medical care was non-existent. Many thousands died of disease.48
Although infants died in disproportionate numbers, fewer of them were actually born during the famine. Demographic experts have relied on the published census figures of 1953, 1964 and 1982 to try to piece together the decline in births during the famine, but much more reliable figures are available from the archives, as in a command economy local authorities had to keep track of the population. In the Qujing region, Yunnan, where the famine appeared in 1958, births dropped from 106,000 in 1957 to 59,000 the following year. In Yunnan as a whole the number of births plummeted from 678,000 in 1957 to 450,000 in 1958.49
Another way to look at it is to find age-related statistics compiled after the famine. In Hunan, a province which was not among the worst-hit regions, a very clear gap appears among children aged three in 1964, that is born in 1961: there were some 600,000 fewer of them than six-year-olds, although they too must have suffered. On the other hand there were four times more children aged one, and four times more children under the age of one.50 But none of these statistics recorded what must have been countless unreported cases of infants dying within weeks of being born: who had any incentive to count the deaths of newborns whose births had not even been recorded in the middle of starvation?
29
Women
Collectivisation, designed in part to liberate women from the shackles of patriarchy, made matters worse. Although work patterns varied hugely from one end of the country to the other, in most of the north women rarely worked in the fields before the Great Leap Forward. Even in the southern regions, it was often only the poor who joined the menfolk outdoors. Besides taking care of domestic work, women and even children usually engaged in other occupations, making handicrafts in their spare time to supplement the family’s income. Entire villages sometimes specialised in producing a defined range of commodities for local markets, from paper umbrellas, cloth shoes and silk hats to rattan chairs, wicker creels and twig baskets, all from the safety of the household.1 Even in more isolated villages, women by custom worked from home, weaving, spinning and embroidering for family and for cash.
As women who had never worked in the fields were mobilised in the rush to modernise, they were required to turn up every day at the sound of the bugle, and march off in teams to plough, sow, rake, weed and winnow. But despite full employment in communes, women were paid less than men, no matter how hard they toiled. The work-point system devised by the communes systematically devalued their contribution, since only strong men were able to reach the top of the scale. And as women joined the collective workforce, the state did very little to lighten the load at home, as there was no shortage of domestic tasks which still needed to be carried out, from mending clothes to raising children. Kindergartens, for instance, were supposed to help with babysitting, but, as we have seen, many were far from adequate, which meant that women often had to juggle childcare with full employment.2 As family life was buffeted by constant campaigns, the exigencies of mobilisation took a heavy toll on women, exhausting many even before famine began to bite. In those villages drained of able-bodied men who joined the exodus to the city, women were left to look after relatives and dependants.
Most of all, women were vulnerable because in a regime which mercilessly traded food for work every weakness led to hunger. In the relentless drive to achieve ever higher targets, at the furnace, in the field or on the factory floor, menstruation was widely seen as a flaw. Menstrual taboos of popular religion, which feared the polluting potential of women during their periods, were swept aside seemingly overnight. Failure to come out to the field was punished, the most common form of retribution being a reduction of work points for each day of absence. Some male cadres abused their positions of power, humiliating those women who asked for sick leave. Xu Yingjie, party secretary of the Chengdong People’s Commune in Hunan, forced those who requested a rest on the grounds of menstruation to drop their trousers and undergo a cursory inspection. Few were willing to undergo the humiliation, and many became ill as a result, several dying under the strain of labouring while suffering severe menstrual pain or gynaecological problems.3 Expectant mothers were also compelled to work, often until the last stage of pregnancy, although they too were commonly penalised. In one district in Sichuan alone twenty-four women miscarried after being compelled to work in the fields. Chen Yuanming, who objected, was kicked between her legs by the cadre in charge and crippled for life.4
Where abusive cadres assumed power unopposed, punishment could go much further. In the same Hunan commune just mentioned, pregnant women who did not appear at work were made to undress in the middle of the winter and then forced to break ice.5 In Qingyuan, Guangdong, hundreds of villagers at a time were made to work in the middle of the winter without cotton-padded clothing; no exceptions were made for pregnant women or those with small children, and people who protested were deprived of food.6 In Panyu county, just outside Guangzhou, a cadre grabbed seven-months-pregnant Du Jinhao by her hair and forced her to the ground for not working sufficiently hard. He kept her pinned down and shouted abuse at her until she passed out; her husband cried with fear but was powerless to intervene. After she regained consciousness she staggered back home looking dazed, then sank to her knees, collapsed and died.7 Some women were so desperate that they preferred to die: Liang Xianü, pregnant yet obliged to work in the winter, jumped to her death in a cold river.8
Exhausted and hungry, women became so weak that they stopped menstruating altogether. This was common everywhere, even in the cities, where women were given some medical care. In the Tianqiao district, to the south of Beijing, half of all female workers in a metallurgy factory suffered from lack of menstrual periods, vaginal infections or a prolapsed uterus. As the only available washroom was always occupied, some of the women went for months without ever washing. When combined with endless hours in a poorly ventilated environment, even political activists like Yuan Bianhua would spit blood and sometimes even lacked the strength to stand up on their own.9 Other studies, conducted by the Women’s Federation, made similar observations. In the Beijing Electron Tubes Plant, for instance, half of all 6,600 women had some form of gynaecological disorder. Wu Yufang, aged twenty-five, had arrived at the factory as a sturdy young girl in 1956 but in 1961 suffered from headaches, irregular menses, sleeplessness, irritability and lack of strength. Married for five years, she was still without children – a medical examination showed that she, like many of the other workers, had mercury poisoning.10
The physical decline among rural women was so extreme that many suffered from a prolapsed uterus, meaning that the womb, held in place inside the pelvis by muscles and ligaments, collapsed inside the vaginal canal. Even without overwork and lack of food, weakness can cause the uterus to sag or slip out of its normal position. This happens when women experience a difficult childbirth or suffer from a loss of oestrogen. But the term refers to a variety of different stages, from a drooping cervix to the uterus coming completely outside the vagina: the latter was the syndrome observed again and again by medical authorities. The statistics they provided – even if classified – could not possibly reflect the reality, and varied from 3 to 4 per cent of women in the countryside just outside Shanghai to one in every five working women in Hunan.11 The real incidence must have been much higher, given that many women would have felt too ashamed to report the condition, many cadres would have been reluctant to report medical disorders associated with starvation, and too few trained doctors actually existed in the countryside to have even a rough idea of what was happening.
A prolapsed uterus was difficult to cure because the underlying causes – lack of food and lack of rest – were hard to remedy in times of famine. Even if they had money to pay the fees, m
any women simply did not have the time to leave their children and their work to visit a hospital, which were few and far between in the countryside. Many villagers also feared hospitals, and they resorted instead to local treatments. In Hubei, female healers used a variety of recipes, some handed down from generation to generation, to assist women suffering from gynaecological problems, heating and grinding ingredients into a powder that was smeared on to the vaginal walls and mixing medicinal herbs to cure menstrual disorders. Aunt Wang, as she was known in a village in Zhongxiang county, helped hundreds of women, her house often harbouring four or five patients being nursed back to health as her husband went foraging for leaves and roots in the forest.12 But such traditional remedies were rarely tolerated under forced collectivisation, and in the absence of effective medical care most women simply had to bear their condition and labour on.
Women were vulnerable in other ways. Socially marginalised in what remained, after all, a tough, male-oriented world, they were prone to sexual abuse. Huge power was given to local cadres, while famine gradually eroded the moral fabric of society. As if this combination were not bad enough, many families were separated or broken up as menfolk joined the exodus, enrolled in the army or laboured on distant irrigation projects. As the layers of social protection surrounding women gradually crumbled, they were left almost entirely defenceless to confront the naked power of the local bully.
Rape spread like a contagion through a distressed moral landscape. A few examples will suffice. Two party secretaries of a commune in Wengcheng, north of Guangzhou, raped or coerced into sex thirty-four women in 1960.13 In Hengshui county, Hebei, three party secretaries and a deputy county head were known to have sexually abused women routinely, one of them having had sex with several dozen.14 Further north, a secretary of Gujiaying village raped twenty-seven women, and an investigation showed that he had ‘taken liberties’ with almost every unmarried woman in the village.15 Li Dengmin, party secretary of Qumo, raped some twenty women, two being under age.16 In Leiyang, Hunan, girls as young as eleven or twelve were sexually abused.17 In Xiangtan, a cadre set up a ‘special team’ (zhuanyedui) of ten girls whom he sexually abused at whim.18
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Page 29