A few fairly comprehensive documents have survived. One of these was compiled in March 1961 by a municipal unit in Linxia, a city south of Lanzhou. Linxia was heavily influenced by Islam, populated predominantly by Hui people and the capital of a region with a dozen other ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, Salar, Bao’an and Dongxiang. The region suffered from mass collectivisation during the Great Leap Forward, which ran roughshod over the habits and customs of minorities. An investigation of the region in the immediate aftermath of the famine showed that 54,000 people had died in a mere two years.10 The report listed some fifty cases – discovered in the city, not in the entire region – all comprehensively arranged in the kind of list that was so much in favour with the planners, reducing horror to a mere set of facts and figures. Here are the details of four such cases:
Date: 25 February 1960. Location: Hongtai Commune, Yaohejia Village. Name of Culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Status: Poor Farmer. Number of People Involved: 1. Name of Victim: Yang Ershun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Number of People Involved: 1. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.
Date: [void]. Location: [void]. Name of Culprit: Ma Manai. Status: Poor Farmer. Number of People Involved: Entire Family of 4. Name of Victim: [void]. Relationship with Culprit: [void]. Number of People Involved: 13. Manner of Crime: Corpses Exhumed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.
Date: 9 Jan. 1960. Location: Maiji Commune, Zhangsama Village. Name of Culprit: Kang Gamai. Status: Poor Farmer. Number of People Involved: 1. Name of Victim: Maha Maiji. Relationship with Culprit: Fellow Villager. Number of People Involved: 1. Manner of Crime: Hacked to Death, Cooked and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.
Date: March 1960. Location: Hongtai Commune, Xiaogou Gate. Name of Culprit: Zhu Shuangxi. Status: Poor Farmer. Number of People Involved: 2. Name of Victim: [void]. Relationship with Culprit: Husband and Elder Son. Number of People Involved: 2. Manner of Crime: Corpses Exhumed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.
Most of the culprits on the list practised necrophagy, either eating those who had passed away or exhuming and eating cadavers after burial. The seventy-six victims fell into three categories: killed and eaten (twelve), eaten after death (sixteen) and exhumed and eaten (forty-eight). Among those who were murdered roughly half were fellow villagers and half were strangers passing through. Only one murder took place inside the family.11
Linxia was no exception. When a team of inspectors was sent to review the Qiaotou commune in Shizhu county, Sichuan, in early 1961, they were startled by the extent of cannibalism. Rather than take note of a few cases to signal the practice, as was usual, they made the effort to investigate one brigade in depth with the help of the local Public Security Bureau. The list they compiled provided the details of sixteen victims and eighteen perpetrators. Necrophagy had apparently started after Luo Wenxiu, a seventy-year-old woman, unearthed the bodies of two small children and cooked them for herself. In some cases only parts of a body were eaten. Ma Zemin’s heart, for instance, was scooped out. Much of this may have been related to the fact that most of these corpses were already in an advanced stage of putrefaction. Some people covered the meat in hot peppers.12
In Russian there is a distinction between liudoedstvo, literally ‘people eating’, and trupoedstvo, or ‘corpse eating’. It is a very useful distinction, one which introduces much-needed nuance into a topic stigmatised not only by the party, but also by its enemies, keen to portray cannibalism as a metaphor for the very system itself. And as the villagers themselves told and retold stories about body snatchers, cannibals with red eyes or families swapping their children between them before eating them, the whole business was sensationalised to the point where it was placed under a cloud of scepticism.13
But as the cases of Linxia and Qiaotou show, very few people were actually cannibals who killed to eat. Most were scavengers, extending their survival techniques to the eating of cadavers. How they reached their decision to eat human flesh must surely have varied from one person to the next. But as desperate survivors all of them would have witnessed many of the horrors being inflicted on living human beings, from body parts being chopped off to people being buried alive. Surely, in the midst of state-sponsored violence, necrophagy was neither the most common nor the most widespread way of degrading a human being.
37
The Final Tally
How many died? There will never be a satisfactory answer to that question, if only because in the midst of the great famine so few reliable statistics were kept.
So far, every noteworthy estimate has been based on the official figures on population size and on birth and death rates for 1950–82, published for the first time in the 1984 Statistical Yearbook by the National Statistical Bureau, or on the official figures of the 1953, 1964 and 1982 censuses. Immediately following the publication of the Statistical Yearbook, Basil Ashton used the official evidence to propose a figure of 30 million premature deaths during the 1958–62 period, when the overall population stood at roughly 650 million.1 Judith Banister, a professional demographer, also looked at the population statistics and concluded that an estimated 30 million excess deaths appeared during 1958–61.2 Since the data present a whole range of problems, from lack of internal consistency to the under-registration of births and deaths and the exclusion of the armed forces, different authors have tinkered with this or that variable either to lower or to heighten the number. Peng Xizhi, an expert in population studies, proposed an estimate of 23 million in 1987, while Jung Chang, in her book on Mao, reached a figure of 38 million.3 More recently, retired journalist Yang Jisheng suggested a figure of about 36 million – also based on published statistics.4
New evidence was produced in 2005 when Cao Shuji, an historical demographer from Shanghai, systematically worked his way through more than a thousand gazetteers – official local histories published after 1979 by county or city party committees. While acknowledging that this widely diverse set of data, too, ultimately rests on figures made public by the party, it introduced a much more fine-tuned analysis of regional differences. Cao’s estimate was 32.5 million premature deaths.5
How reliable are official numbers? In the Soviet Union the Central Office of Statistics produced two sets of demographic statistics, one for internal use and one for publication. But as we have already seen in the case of grain procurements, the party archives in China have widely different sets of statistics at every level, from the commune, the county and the province up to the centre. Some were compiled at the height of the collectivisation craze and were intended to convey political zeal. Others were assembled by investigation teams sent to the countryside to oversee the removal of abusive party officials. In other words, debates about whether the released figures are doctored or not miss a very basic point. There is no need for anybody to falsify figures, it is merely a matter of compiling a set of statistics which appears to be the least politically damaging. Or, to put it slightly differently, the fact that public data in a one-party state are not falsified does not necessarily make them reliable.
At least three different sets of unpublished data exist in the archives, namely those compiled by the provincial Public Security Bureau, those from the local party committee and those from the local Statistical Bureau. Nobody has ever gained access to all three sets. But after 1979, as the new leadership wanted to find out more about the Maoist era, a team of 200 was instructed by Zhao Ziyang to go around every province to examine internal party documents. The erstwhile secretary of Guangdong who had pioneered an anti-hiding campaign in 1959 was now premier, and he asked the team to draw a picture of rural China. The team’s report was never published, but one of its members, a senior party official called Chen Yizi, fled to America in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. In exile, he claimed that the team had arrived at a death toll of 43 to 46 million people for the famine.6 Only one person who has investigated the famine has taken Chen Yizi’s claim seriously – namely Jasper Becker, who interviewed him for his
book Hungry Ghosts published in 1996. The archival evidence presented for the first time below vindicates Chen Yizi’s findings and conservatively puts the number of premature deaths at a minimum of 45 million for the great famine of 1958–62.
Even Chen Yizi and his team would have encountered difficulties in carrying out their research. Archives, in a one-party state, are not public. They belong to the party and are controlled by the party. Except for those under the remit of the Public Security Bureaus, most of them are located in a building inside the party headquarters. Even a high-powered delegation from Beijing could have been fobbed off or deliberately misled by experienced archivists, all the more so since a catalogue would not have existed for every collection. But, most of all, some sets were simply missing. In Hubei, for instance, the file from the party committee which should have contained the figures for all excess deaths during the famine is incomplete. Inside the brown folder is a handwritten note appended by an archivist, dated June 1979, which regrets that the item is ‘missing’.7 As to the Public Security Bureau, in Hubei it offered no more than a vague estimate, speculating that the death rate in 1961 was two to three times lower than the preceding year. The report wonders about the total death toll but provides no answers.8
In any event, all three organisations – the provincial public security, the provincial party committee and the provincial Statistical Bureau – would have had to rely on units lower down the party hierarchy to compile their reports. And obstruction from below was rife. In Gansu province, the provincial party committee sent out a request for estimates in 1962 for excess deaths during the famine. The project foundered, as only a handful of counties ever replied.9
But even when numbers were sent in by county authorities there were problems. First among these was the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ deaths. Demographers distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ deaths to tease out a rough estimate of how many people died prematurely as a consequence of famine. But in China the distinction was political. Industrial accidents, suicides, fatal epidemics or deaths from starvation were all a matter of great concern to the authorities. They stood as indices of social and political health, and they were diligently monitored by the party’s regulators. Even a single case of suicide could signal that something was amiss, warranting a political investigation from above. In the middle of mass death in Fuyang, one of the sites of horror in Anhui where up to 70 per cent of some villages were wiped out, the region reported 10,890 deaths for the first quarter of 1961 – of which a mere 524 were described as ‘abnormal’, including 103 deaths due to ‘emaciation’ and ‘oedema’.10 In Rongxian, Sichuan, the county head Xu Wenzheng simply dictated that in the official statistics two rules had to be followed: birth rates had to exceed death rates, and the death rate could not be higher than 2 per cent. In Fuling, also in Sichuan, two sets of statistics were kept. For 1960 local cadres managed to count a total population of 594,324 people but reported 697,590, a difference of more than 100,000.11
Even when cadres were willing to confront the harsh reality of famine, who could have kept track of an avalanche of death? In Jiangjin and Jiangbei counties in Sichuan, up to 250 people died each day in December 1960: the last thing on the minds of local officials would have been to do the rounds each day to produce a neat list of mortality figures, even if they were specifically asked by their superiors to do so.12 When local cadres or police officers did try to report the full extent of death they were generally labelled rightists. Zhao Jian, head of the Public Security Bureau in Wenjiang county, Sichuan, systematically compiled statistics for 1959 and discovered that 27,000 people, or 16 per cent, were missing compared to the previous year. He was taken to task by his superior at the provincial level but refused to modify his findings, which led directly to his political demise.13
To make matters even more complicated, obfuscation went all the way to the top. Provincial boss Liu Zihou – like so many others – dutifully reported 4,700 ‘abnormal deaths’ to Chairman Mao for all of Hebei in 1960, even though his own team of inspectors had discovered that in one county alone some 18,000 had died of hunger since 1958.14 The irony is that he chastised county leaders for covering up the extent of the famine, all the while keeping the incriminating figures from his own superiors in Beijing.15 At every level party officials badgered their subordinates for the truth but were deceitful with their own superiors, contributing to a maze of self-deception. To say that knowledge is power is a truism, and one that does not go very far in explaining why the more absolute power was, the less truth it managed to produce.
But death on such a scale could hardly be hidden all the time. Sometimes local leaders took a chance, sending in hard-hitting reports further up the hierarchy, occasionally directly to Zhou Enlai or Mao Zedong himself. Extraordinarily detailed reports compiled by the investigation teams that fanned out over the countryside after October 1960 led to the removal of a whole series of leaders who had presided over mass death. And sometimes retrospective investigations were carried out in the years following the famine, as the party tried to make sense of what had happened. The result is not so much a neatly arranged set of statistics revealing some absolute truth in a few telling numbers, but rather a mass of uneven and at times messy documentation compiled in different ways, at different times, for different reasons, by different entities, with different degrees of reliability. So assigning a team of 200 people to sift through the evidence would have been a good idea.
The very best of these documents were compiled by a powerful Security Bureau and covered an entire province. As we have seen, this did not happen in Hubei, but it did in Sichuan – by far the most devastated province in all of China. The head of the provincial Security Bureau authorised an investigation into the statistics from 1954 to 1961. The results undermined many of the reported totals, which underestimated the death toll by several per cent in 1960 alone. The corrected death rate for 1954 to 1957 was an average of 1 per cent. This increased to 2.5 per cent in 1958, to 4.7 per cent in 1959, to 5.4 per cent in 1960 and to 2.9 per cent in 1961. It added up to 10.6 million deaths from 1958 to 1961, of which 7.9 million were above 1 per cent and can thus be considered ‘excess deaths’.16 But in Sichuan, unlike the rest of the country, famine did not vanish in 1962. There are countless reports about continuing starvation from a range of counties until the end of 1962. The Public Security Bureau compiled figures which determined that 1.5 per cent died that year, meaning that another 300,000 perished prematurely, bringing the total to 8.2 million.17 Yet even this figure is no doubt too low by at least 10 or 20 per cent, if only because in Sichuan – unlike in other provinces such as Gansu – the party boss Li Jingquan remained firmly in power despite his responsibility for the deaths of many millions of people. Even in 1962 few county leaders in Sichuan would have been prepared to report the full extent of the disaster.
No other similar documents are available – so far. But we do have data collected by regional statistical bureaus. In the case of Yunnan, where the famine started in 1958, the death rate recorded for the year was 2.2 per cent, double the national average for 1957: this alone would have amounted to 430,000 excess deaths, when most historians using official statistics mention only about 800,000 deaths for the entire 1958 to 1961 period.18
The best available evidence comes from carefully compiled reports at the village, commune and county level. Since the work of the historical demographer Cao Shuji, who used published party gazetteers to estimate death rates on a county basis, is in agreement with other population specialists who propose a death toll of roughly 32 million, it provides a very helpful baseline. Common sense indicates that local party committees had every incentive to underestimate published death rates, and in that sense Cao Shuji’s estimate should be considered conservative. The purpose of what follows is to test his figures and provide a rough idea of how they should be adjusted. Not only is a focus on smaller entities such as counties much more accurate than larger aggregations at the national leve
l, but it also allows us to eliminate so many of the variables that have confused demographers working with censuses, from internal migration to the size of the army between 1958 and 1962.
However, an average death rate is required in order to calculate ‘extra’ death figures. What would be reasonable? Here is what Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, thought in 1961 when discussing the famine in his home town of Huaminglou, where hundreds died every month: ‘What are normal deaths? What are abnormal deaths? If you hit a man once and he dies of his injuries, or if somebody jumps into a river, it qualifies as an abnormal death. You can take the figures of the last two years to calculate a normal death rate . . . A normal death rate is below 1 per cent, in general 0.8 per cent, a normal birth rate is 2 per cent, any deaths above 0.8 per cent are abnormal.’19 To err on the safe side, given the wide variations across the country, 1 per cent should be taken as a normal death rate.
In the case of Hebei, we have some very detailed reports for 1960, compiled after provincial boss Liu Zihou gave the green light by asking for investigations into abnormal deaths ‘down to the level of the household’. Hu Kaiming, an outspoken party official in charge of Zhangjiakou who later incurred the wrath of Mao Zedong for proposing greater freedom for farmers to determine their own prices, reported that 1.9 per cent of the population had died in 1960, amounting to 59,000 people. In Weixian county, adjacent to Zhangjiakou, the death rate was 3.4 per cent in 1960, as 18,000 people died.20 That amounted to some 40,000 excessive deaths in one year. Using official documentation, Cao Shuji’s figure for excessive deaths in Zhangjiakou and Weixian is 15,000 for the entire three years of famine.21 In Tianjin and the surrounding countryside – hardly the most deprived part of the country – 30,000 people died within three months at the end of 1960. A normal rate of attrition would have claimed less than half of these lives. The figure provided by Cao Shuji, again based on official rather than archival sources, is 30,000 excess deaths for three years.22 Another example comes from Shijiazhuang, the seat of a region covering some fifteen counties. By reading the official data critically, Cao arrives at 15,000 deaths for the entire region over three years. But in the city of Shijiazhuang alone, close to 4,000 people died in a mere ten days in January 1961, when counting the victims of starvation was no longer politically taboo.23
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Page 37