Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
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And even if women were not raped, they were subjected to sex-specific humiliations, as collectivisation swept aside the customary moral values of sexual restraint and bodily propriety. China was undergoing a revolution, turning upside down moral codes of behaviour passed down from generation to generation, which led to perversions that would have been unthinkable before 1949. In a factory in Wugang county, Hunan, local bosses forced women to work naked. On a single day in November 1958 more than 300 went about their jobs in the nude. Those who refused were tied up. A competitive system was even devised by which the women most eager to strip were granted a reward, the top gift consisting of cash to the value of fifty yuan, more or less equivalent to a month’s salary. While some women may have embraced the opportunity to advance their careers, many were no doubt repelled, although nobody dared to speak their mind. But a few did write. After some of the women fell ill – Hunan can be bitterly cold during the winter – a series of anonymous letters were sent to Mao Zedong. Whether he actually read these letters we do not know, but someone highly placed in Beijing phoned the provincial committee in Changsha and demanded an inquiry. The factory leaders, it came to light in the course of an investigation, had apparently ‘encouraged’ the women to take off their clothes in a ‘spirit of emulation’ which aimed to ‘break feudal taboos’.19 Seemingly anything could be justified in the name of emancipation.
Equally crude and humiliating were the nude parades, which happened across the country: women, occasionally men, were made to march through the village entirely naked. In Suichang county, Zhejiang, men and women accused of larceny were stripped naked and paraded. Zhou Moying, a grandmother aged sixty, was forced to undress and then lead the procession by beating a gong – despite the pleas for pardon from fellow villagers.20 Some of the abused women felt too ashamed to return to their homes. Twenty-four-year-old Zhu Renjiao, stripped and paraded for petty theft, ‘felt too ashamed to face people’ and asked to be moved to another village. She killed herself when her request was turned down.21 In another small village in Guangdong, the militia stripped two young women and tied them to a tree, using a flashlight to explore one of the girl’s private parts, and drawing a large turtle – symbol of the male organ – on the other woman’s body. Both committed suicide.22
Less often mentioned in the archives or in interviews, but part of a distinct social trend in any famine, was the trade in sex. Women provided favours for almost anything, from a morsel of food and a better job to a regular but illicit relationship with a man who could offer some sense of security. Most of these transactions went on undetected, but there was also a whole underworld of prostitution which the authorities tried to monitor. One correctional facility in Chengdu kept well over a hundred prostitutes and delinquent female children. More than a dozen were sex workers who had been ‘re-educated’ after the communist victory in 1949, but refused to reform themselves. Wang Qingzhi, who went by the nickname of ‘Old Mother’, in turn introduced other women to the trade. Some of the new sex workers formed bands with male thieves and roamed the country, travelling to Xi’an, Beijing and Tianjin to make a living. A few worked independently, one or two even regularly handing over money to their parents – who turned a blind eye to the source of the income.23
Village women also offered their bodies for food after escaping to the city, as we have already seen. The logical extension of this trade in sex was bigamy, as country girls lied about their age or their marital status in order to secure a husband in town. Some were only fifteen or sixteen, well below the legal age of marriage. Others were already married but committed bigamy to survive. A few were prepared to abandon their children from a previous marriage, but not all of them deserted their families: some returned home only a few days after the wedding had taken place.24
Trade in sex flimsily disguised by the pretence of marriage was even more common in the countryside. In one closely studied Hebei village the number of weddings increased seven-fold in 1960, the worst year of the famine. Women poured into the village from distressed areas, marrying for goods, clothes or food for relatives. Some were as young as sixteen, others left soon after the wedding. A few of the women introduced other family members to the groom, resulting in half a dozen cases of bigamy.25
And then there was trafficking in women. From Inner Mongolia, for instance, teams spread out over the country, hauling back hundreds of women every month. Most came from famished Gansu, a few from Shandong. Some were mere children, others were widows, although married women were also trafficked. The victims ranged across all social categories, including students, teachers and even cadres. Few came voluntarily, and some were traded several times. Forty-five women were sold to a mere six villages in less than half a year.26
Always marginalised, sometimes humiliated, invariably exhausted and often abandoned by the men, women, in the end, were the ones who had to make the most heart-rending decision, namely how the meagre food ration should be divided. This was not so at the onset of famine, as men were normally in charge and demanded to be fed first. In the same way that women were systematically given fewer work points than men under collectivisation, a patriarchal society expected that priority be given to the feeding of all male members of the household. As men provided, women abided, a cultural imperative that dictated that even in normal times women were given a smaller share of the food. And as famine took over, women were deliberately neglected in the interests of male survival, a choice that was justified on the grounds that the entire family ultimately depended on the ability of men to go out and find food. But once the men were gone, women had to endure the agony of their starving children without being able to help. Not all could live with the constant crying and pleading for food by their children, made so much more unbearable by the stark choices they had to make about the distribution of scarce resources. Liu Xiliu, deprived of food for six days as punishment for being too sick to work, finally succumbed to the pangs of hunger and devoured the ration allocated to her child, who soon started crying of misery. Unable to suffer the torment she swallowed caustic soda to put an end to her life.27
There is no doubt that the emotional distress and physical pain – to say nothing of the self-abasement and humiliation many had to endure – were enormous, and much of this was a direct consequence of sex discrimination. But historians have shown that in many other poor, patriarchal societies women did not die in much greater numbers than men, however problematic recorded rates of mortality may be. In the Bengal famine, male mortality even exceeded that of females, leading the historian Michelle McAlpin to write that ‘females may be better able than males to withstand the trials of a period of famine’.28 As we have seen in previous chapters, women excelled at devising everyday strategies of survival, from foraging in the forest and preparing substitute foodstuffs to trading on the black market. In the end, the greatest victims of the famine were the young and the elderly.
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The Elderly
Life in the countryside has always been tough in China, and strict observance of traditional notions of filial piety would simply have been beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest households before the communist take-over. Proverbs suggested the limits of respect for the elderly in traditional society: ‘With nine sons and twenty-three grandchildren, a man may still have to dig a grave for himself.’1 Even if children were the family pension, the elderly continued to rely for the most part on their own work to eke out a frugal life. And while some prestige may have been associated with old age, in a society that heavily emphasised earning power many people must have felt a decline in respect when moving into old age. As elsewhere, the elderly feared loneliness, impoverishment and abandonment, in particular those who were more vulnerable than others – the ones without family. But in most cases, before 1949, they could count on a measure of care and dignity: their mere survival commanded respect.
Yet by the time of the Cultural Revolution a completely different set of values seemed to dominate, as young students tortured
their teachers and Red Guards attacked elderly people. When did the moral universe turn upside down? While the party was steeped in a culture of violence, fostered by decades of ruthless warfare and ceaseless purges, the real watershed was the Great Leap Forward. As villagers in Macheng complained, the people’s communes left children without their mothers, women without their husbands, and the elderly without relatives:2 these three family bonds were destroyed as the state was substituted for the family. As if this were not bad enough, collectivisation was followed by the agony of famine. As hunger stalked an already distressed social landscape, family cohesion unravelled further; starvation tested every tie to the limit.
The prospects for the elderly without children were particularly grim, so much so that many traditionally tried to join monasteries or nunneries, while others established fictitious ties of kinship with adopted children. These age-old customs were swept away with collectivisation. In the summer of 1958 retirement homes for the childless elderly appeared throughout the villages of rural China; at the peak of the Great Leap Forward over 100,000 of them were reportedly established.3
Abuse was rife. Some of the elderly were beaten, even those with only a few meagre possessions were robbed, and others were put on a slow starvation diet. In Tongzhou, just outside Beijing, the head of the retirement home systematically stole food and clothes earmarked for the elderly, condemning the inmates to a winter without heating or cotton-padded jackets. Most passed away as soon as frost appeared, although their bodies were not buried for a week.4 Further south, in Qionghai county, Guangdong, the entire village was put to work in the absence of able-bodied men, who were all conscripted on a distant irrigation project. The elderly slaved day and night, a seventy-year-old going for ten days without any sleep at all. A tenth of the village died in the winter of 1958–9, the majority of them children and those elderly people kept in retirement homes.5 In Chongqing county, Sichuan, the director of one home made the residents work nine hours a day followed by two hours of study in the evening. In another case the elderly were forced to work throughout the night, according to the demands of ‘militarisation’. Slackers were tied up and beaten or deprived of food. In Hunan too they were routinely tied up and beaten.6 In Chengdu, in the winter, the inmates of one retirement home slept on a muddy floor: they had no blankets, no cotton-padded clothes, no cotton hats and no shoes.7 In Hengyang, Hunan, the medicine, eggs and meat reserved for the elderly went to the cadres in charge of the home. As the cook succinctly put it, ‘What point is there in feeding you? If we feed the pigs at least we will get some meat!’ In the province as a whole, by the end of the famine a mere 1,058 had managed to survive in the remaining seven homes.8
Many of the homes collapsed almost as soon as they had appeared, besieged by the same systemic problems of funding and corruption which undermined kindergartens. The childless elderly who were abandoned to the care of collective entities had to scramble for survival by the winter of 1958–9. But life outside the retirement home was no better. Just as children were treated like adults, the elderly too had to prove their worth to the collective, as rations in the canteen were dished out against work points. Hunger was never simply a matter of lack of resources, but rather of their distribution: confronted with shortages in both labour and food, local cadres all too often decided to exchange the one for the other, in effect creating a regime in which those unable to perform at full capacity were being slowly starved to death. The elderly, in short, were dispensable. And just as children were harshly chastised even for small misdemeanours, so the elderly were subjected to an exacting regime of discipline and punishment, in which the family often shared. In Liuyang county, Hunan, a seventy-eight-year-old who complained about working in the mountains was detained and his daughter-in-law ordered to hit him. After she had refused she was beaten bloody. Then she was ordered to spit on the old man, who had also been beaten to a pulp: he died shortly afterwards.9
Inside the family the fortunes of the elderly depended on the goodwill of their children. All sorts of quarrels developed in times of famine, but new bonds also developed. Jiang Guihua remembered that her mother did not get on well with her blind grandmother. The grandfather was a cripple. Both were dependent on others for food but also for help in getting dressed and using the toilet. Jiang Guihua was the one to provide help, as her mother often lost her temper and tried to cut their food rations. But there was little she could do, and after a while her grandparents died of eating soil. They were buried without a coffin, wrapped in some straw and lowered into a shallow pit.10
In the end, when everybody left the village in a desperate search for food, only the elderly and the handicapped stayed behind, often unable to walk. In Dangyang, Hubei, seven people were all that remained of a once lively and noisy village, four being elderly, two blind and one handicapped. They ate leaves from the trees.11
Part Six
Ways of Dying
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Accidents
Poor safety was endemic to the command economy, despite detailed labour legislation and meticulous rules on every aspect of industrial work, from the provision of protective clothing to the standards of lighting. An extensive network of labour inspectors – from the Federation of Trade Unions, the Women’s Federation and the Communist Youth League, as well as from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour – periodically toured workshops, monitored health hazards and looked into the living standards of workers. They operated under huge political pressure and often preferred to turn a blind eye to widespread abuse, but they could file hard-hitting reports. Despite this vast apparatus, factory managers and team leaders, regardless of their personal sympathies for their workers, remained obsessed with increased output.
On the ground both zealots and dawdlers set the tone. Party activists cut corners, reduced standards, ignored safety and abused the workforce as well as every piece of equipment in their relentless quest to meet higher production targets. On the factory floor and in the fields, ordinary people tried to counter the blow of each new production drive with the force of collective inertia. But widespread apathy and negligence, while easing the pressure from above, also had a corrosive effect on safety in the workplace, as people abdicated responsibility for anything that did not concern them directly. And as collectivisation produced growing shortages of food, clothes and fuel, much riskier techniques of self-help appeared, from lighting a stove in a thatched hut to stealing safety equipment, leading in turn to more accidents. Worker fatigue only made matters worse, as people fell asleep by the furnace or at the wheel.
To this should be added a simple if grisly calculation: failure to fulfil a target could cost a manager his career, while violation of labour safety attracted a mere slap on the wrist. Life was cheap, costing a lot less than installing safety equipment or enforcing labour legislation. After all, what were a few deaths in the battle for a better future? As we have seen, foreign minister Chen Yi, comparing the Great Leap Forward to a battlefield, was adamant that a few industrial accidents were not going to hold back the revolution: ‘it’s nothing!’ he said with a shrug.1
Take the case of fire. We have noted how the Ministry of Public Security estimated that some 7,000 fires destroyed 100 million yuan in property in 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward. One reason for the extent of the damage was a lack of firefighting equipment. Most of the fire hoses, pumps, extinguishers, sprinklers and other tools had been imported, but foreign purchases were suspended in a drive towards local self-sufficiency. By the end of 1958, however, all but seven out of the eighty national factories making the equipment had closed down. In some cases firefighters had to stand by empty-handed and watch the flames spread, powerless to intervene.2
The situation did not improve over the following years. Workers in overcrowded shacks cobbled together from mud, bamboo and straw huddled around improvised fires, which sometimes got out of control. Hundreds of fires raged through Nanjing in a single month in 1959.3 Accidents also happened when people sneaked
away from the canteen to cook their own meals on the sly. When a young girl lit a fire in dry weather, the wind carried a spark and set fire to her hut, which erupted into a blaze destroying lives and property.4 When a kerosene lamp was kicked over during engineering work at Jingmen, Hubei, an inferno claimed sixty lives.5 Villagers recruited to work on large irrigation sites lived in hastily erected straw huts, which regularly went up in flames as exhausted workers bumped into lamps or furtively lit a cigarette.6 Few reliable statistics exist about actual death rates, but in Jiangxi a mere twenty-four incidents burned or asphyxiated 139 people in a single month.7 In Hunan about fifty people died each month; the Public Security Bureau listed some ten fires a day in the first half of 1959.8
Industrial accidents soared, as safety was considered a ‘rightist conservative’ concern. In Guizhou the provincial party committee estimated that the number of accidental deaths had multiplied by a factor of seventeen in early 1959 compared to a year earlier.9 The exact number of casualties was unknown, as few inspectors wanted to pour cold water on the Great Leap Forward with talk of death, while enterprises routinely concealed accidents. Li Rui, one of Mao’s secretaries purged in the wake of the Lushan plenum, later estimated the total of fatal industrial mishaps in 1958 at 50,000.10 According to the Ministry of Labour, some 13,000 workers died in the first eight months of 1960, equivalent to over fifty deaths each day. Although this was probably only a fraction of the actual accidents, the report highlighted some of the problems which beset the mining and steel industries. In the Tangshan Iron Plant more than forty powerful blast furnaces were jammed together in a square kilometre, but no protective fences were erected around the cooling basins. Workers slipped and fell into the boiling sludge. In coal mines across the country, inadequate ventilation allowed asphyxiant and highly inflammable gases to accumulate. Coal-gas explosions ripped through the mines, sometimes ignited by the sparks coming from faulty electrical equipment. Flooding was another mining hazard which claimed numerous lives, while badly maintained mine stopes collapsed and buried the miners alive.11 In March 1962, a blast tore through the Badaojiang mine, Tonghua county, Jilin, claiming seventy-seven lives, although the worst case was probably in the Laobaitong mine in Datong, where 677 miners died on 9 May 1960.12