Mao felt such achievements trumped those of the Soviet Union which had in 1957 launched the first satellite in space. The breaking of such records was therefore called ‘launching a satellite’ or ‘launching a sputnik’. He also declared that China was achieving such success that she was overtaking the Soviet Union on the road to Communism. No one dared challenge these bogus claims directly and later every senior official would explain that, like Deng, they had been innocently duped by the peasants.
In the belief that China was awash with food, everyone in the autumn of 1958 was encouraged to eat as much as they wanted, and for free. In Jiangsu province the slogan was ‘Eat as much as you can and exert your utmost in production’. In Guangdong, the Party Secretary Tao Zhu urged everyone to ‘eat three meals a day’.37 In Zengu village, peasants later told American anthropologists what it was like: ‘Everyone irresponsibly ate whether they were hungry or not, and in 20 days they had finished almost all the rice they had, rice which should have lasted six months.’38 In Shanxi, the American William Hinton heard the same thing: ‘If there was one facet of the Great Leap Forward that everyone remembers, it was the food. “We lived well,” said Wei-de. “We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary to eat meat. If you didn’t eat meat, it wouldn’t do... People even vied with each other to see who could eat the most...”‘39
What was happening in China was almost identical to what had happened in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s collectivization movement. In his semi-fictional novel The Soil Upturned, Sholokhov describes a similar scene: ‘They ate until they could eat no more. Young and old suffered from stomach-ache. At dinner-time, tables groaned under boiled and roasted meat. At dinner-time everyone had a greasy mouth, everyone hiccupped as if at a wake. Everyone blinked like an owl as if drunk from eating.’
In China, where there had never been enough food for all, people ate so much that by the winter of 1958-9, the granaries were bare. Some far-sighted rural Party secretaries saved their communities by planting sweet potatoes but elsewhere people trusted that they, like the city folk, would under Communism be provided for out of the state granaries. Yet Mao refused to accept that there was a shortage and, since he was convinced that the peasants were hiding their grain, he refused to open the state granaries. Even worse, over the three years from 1958 China doubled her grain exports and cut her imports of food. Exports to the Soviet Union rose by 50 per cent and China delivered grain gratis to her friends in North Korea, North Vietnam and Albania.40 This generosity spelt death to many in China.
The Chinese are still suffering from the greatest and most far-reaching consequence of Mao’s illusions. Convinced that China had entered an era of unprecedented abundance, Mao rejected any thought of China limiting her population growth. The country’s most prominent advocate of birth control was Ma Yinchu, the Chancellor of Beijing University. In 1958, he was dismissed and condemned as a Malthusian. Only a year earlier he had warned of the consequences if no limits were set on population growth. As with so many things, Mao took an orthodox Leninist view. From early on Communists had believed that modern science was the key to a limitless expansion of food supplies. In 1913 Lenin had declared that ‘we are the implacable enemy of the neo-Malthusian theory’ which he described as ‘reactionary’ and ‘cowardly’. Mao repeatedly attacked the warnings not just of experts like Professor Ma but also of foreigners such as Professor Lossing Buck and the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who feared that China’s population growth would outpace any increase in her food supply. In the early 1960s, as China was starving, Mao wrote in yet another criticism of Acheson that: ‘Among all things on earth man is the most precious. Under the leadership of the Communist Party miracles can be wrought as long as there are men. We are against Acheson’s counter-revolutionary theory. We believe that revolution can change everything. China’s big population is a very good thing.’41
Mao even feared that there would be a labour shortage. In December 1958, following a meeting of Chinese leaders at Wuchang, a communiqué was issued claiming that ‘it will be found that the amount of arable land is not too little but quite a lot and it is not a question of overpopulation but rather a shortage of manpower’. So, from the start of the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese peasants were encouraged to have as many children as possible because, as Mao liked to remind listeners, ‘with every stomach comes another pair of hands’. Within a generation, China’s population would double to 1.2 billion.
In the winter of 1958-9, people in China began to starve in large numbers but another two years would pass before the Party would come to grips with the terrible disaster. Within the Party leadership, however, a struggle over Mao’s policies was about to begin.
6
Mao Ignores the Famine
‘The history of the Chinese Revolution in the past decades has fully proved one truth. It is that the execution of Chairman Mao’s direct orders is sure to lead to victories and that contravention of the same is sure to lead to failures.’ Wu Zhifu, First Secretary of Henan province1
The famine could easily have been arrested after the first year of the Great Leap Forward if enough senior leaders had dared to stand up to Mao. Yet even before the first communes were established, Mao warned in the People’s Daily that dissent would not be tolerated. An editorial in February 1958 bluntly stated that ‘Anyone who does not make a Great Leap is a rightist conservative... Some people think that a Leap is too adventurous. It is new, it may not be perfect, but it is not an adventure. All must have “revolutionary optimism and revolutionary heroism”.’
Naturally, no one dared utter a word of caution. Mao had unveiled the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province in southern China, when he declared that the economic plans drawn up two years earlier had been too cautious. In April, the first ‘people’s commune’ was established in Chayashan in Henan province, one of China’s poorer regions. There, for the first time, private plots were entirely abolished and communal kitchens introduced for its 40,000 members. Soon the more left-leaning provinces began to follow suit, amalgamating existing collectives into communes, although the term people’s commune, or renmin gongshe, had yet to be adopted. This happened when Mao visited the Seven Li village collective in Xinxiang, northern Henan, in August and uttered the words: ‘This name, the People’s Commune, is good!’ The room in which he said this was turned into a museum and the phrase ‘The People’s Commune is good!’ became a rallying cry, and a slogan painted on walls all over the countryside.2
In Henan, Mao was impressed by the astonishing achievements of the new communes which Wu Zhifu, the province’s First Secretary, showed him. Mao himself does not seem to have drawn up detailed plans on how they should function and even now it is far from clear who was responsible for their design. As Mao told his doctor, Li Zhisui, before embarking on his grand tour of Henan and other rural regions: ‘There are lots of things we don’t know. How is this people’s commune organized? How does it work? How does it allocate income and verify how much people have worked? How do they implement the idea of uniting agricultural labour with military training?’
In Henan and everywhere else Mao went in the summer of 1958, he listened to reports designed to flatter him, which hailed the fantastic success in agriculture that he had wisely predicted. At the end of August when the Party leadership held its customary summer meeting by the sea in the colonial villas of Beidaihe, Mao was so confident that he issued a grand communiqué proclaiming that Communism was at hand. The great optimism continued as Mao went on to Anhui, where another favourite, Zeng Xisheng, turned out huge crowds to greet him. In the capital, Hefei, he was introduced to the wonders of the backyard furnace. By the beginning of November he was once more in Henan for another Party meeting to listen to further reports of dazzling success. Soon afterwards Party leaders gathered in Wuchang, Hubei province, where they discussed how much grain had been harvested. The weather in 1958 had been unusually good and the harvest was inde
ed the highest since 1949, but all pretence of dealing with genuine statistics had been abandoned. Mao was told that the national grain harvest had gone from 185 million tonnes to 430 million, even 500 million tonnes. Disregarding such claims, he settled quite arbitrarily on a lower but still high figure of 375 million tonnes. By the end of the year, Mao felt sufficiently confident of his success to relinquish his post as President of the Republic to Liu Shaoqi. Perhaps he felt he no longer needed such honours.3 No one dared challenge this atmosphere of heady optimism, not even the leader most sceptical of the Great Leap Forward, Chen Yun. He stayed silent, although he had wanted to adhere to the modest goals laid out in the second five-year plan that he had helped draw up. So did Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s most urbane and brilliant follower, and another moderate, who had already made a grovelling self-criticism, retracting his censure of the 1956 little leap forward.
Yet in the autumn of 1958, the great harvest was not being gathered in by the peasants. Many were too busy making steel or working on reservoirs and irrigation projects. In some places they had even melted down their scythes to make steel, and the grain just rotted in the fields. More dangerously, officials began to procure grain on the basis of the inflated harvest claims. Now that the peasants had been collectivized, the grain was not kept in the peasants’ homes but in communal granaries. No village cadre who had announced a record-breaking harvest could now back down and deliver less than a record allocation to the state. Provincial leaders, too, determined to demonstrate their achievements and their loyalty, increased deliveries to the central government. And China began to cut her imports of grain and to step up exports. Beijing wanted to show that it could repay Soviet loans ahead of schedule because Mao’s policies were so successful.
During the autumn months, the peasants had been encouraged to eat as much as they wanted but, as winter progressed, the grain in the collective granaries began to run out and the food served in the communal kitchens became sparser and sparser. The peasants traditionally call this season ‘between the green and the yellow’, because around the Spring Festival, as Chinese New Year is called, the fields are bare of both ripe and newly sown crops. In many parts of the country, around the Chinese New Year of 1959, starvation set in and the weak and the elderly began to die. Many years later, the Party veteran Bo Yibo would write that 25 million were starving in the spring of 1959.4
When, after the glowing reports of a few months earlier, stories of food shortages reached Mao’s ears he refused to believe them and jumped to the conclusion that the peasants were lying and that ‘rightists’ and grasping kulaks were conspiring to hide grain in order to demand further supplies from the state. He was therefore delighted when a senior official in Guangdong province delivered a report in February 1959 which exactly corroborated his suspicions. As one interviewee put it, ‘It was as if he had found treasure.’ The report was by Zhao Ziyang, who after Mao’s death would order the first commune to be disbanded and as Deng Xiaoping’s prime minister would oversee the rural reforms. In 1959 he was a senior official responsible for agriculture in the southern province and in January of that year he set out on an inspection tour of Xuwen county. If the peasants were hungry, he concluded that it was only because grain was being hoarded and so he launched ‘anti-grain concealment’ drives to ferret out the grain hoarders. This, according to a biography by David Shambaugh, resulted in ‘numerous purges, suicides and criticisms of local cadres’.5 In another county, Lei Nan, Zhao did the same, organizing a series of meetings which attacked brigade and production teams for ‘hiding and dividing’ 34,000 tonnes of missing grain.6
In response to such reports, Mao issued a decree ordering a nationwide campaign: ‘We must recognize that there is a severe problem because production teams are hiding and dividing grain and this is a common problem all over the country.’ During this ‘anti-hiding production and privately dividing-the-grain movement’, local officials had no choice but to turn a deaf ear to appeals for emergency grain relief. Mao himself continued to receive petitions from starving villages but discounted them. One letter from the Po Hu commune in Henan province requested an investigation into the behaviour of production team leaders who were savagely beating peasants for hoarding grain. It complained, too, that those who refused to beat the peasants were being condemned for exhibiting a low political consciousness.7 Mao responded by instructing the provincial leader, Wu Zhifu, not to be too hard on ‘those comrades who commit slight mistakes’. Interviewees have added that he consistently refused to condemn those cadres who behaved brutally and ruthlessly towards the peasants and that on one occasion he advised ‘We only need to criticize them a bit – let them make a self-criticism – that’s enough.’
In this climate of megalomania, make-believe, lies and brutality, only one major figure appears to have had the courage and honesty to say what was really happening. This was the Minister of Defence, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who toured parts of the country in the autumn of 1958 and began reporting that things were not as good as they appeared to be. In Gansu, he found orchards cut down to fuel furnaces and the harvest left to rot in the fields.8 He went on to Jiangxi and Anhui and to his home village in Hunan province and sent telegrams to Beijing warning that the ‘masses are in danger of starving’. On another tour in early 1959 he even went to Mao’s home village in Hunan and found untilled fields, falsified production figures and peasants dying of starvation.
Peng Dehuai was the only senior leader who not only genuinely came from a poor peasant background but had himself experienced famine in his home village and lost several brothers to starvation. Other leaders, such as Mao or Liu Shaoqi, were the sons of rich farmers, wealthy enough to educate their children in private schools. As a boy, Peng had enlisted in a warlord army before leading a band of peasant rebels in the mountains of Hunan. When he joined the Communists, he rose to a senior position through sheer ability. After 1949 he went on to command the Chinese forces fighting in Korea and then in mid-1959, as Minister of Defence, attended the Lushan summit.
This key Party meeting in July and August at a summer mountain resort above the Yangtze River in Jiangxi province lasted for six weeks and was the best chance the opponents of the Great Leap Forward would have of stopping Mao. The crude, barely educated but forthright soldier was encouraged by some of the more sophisticated leaders to write a petition to Mao raising objections. Far from issuing a public challenge to Mao’s authority, Peng privately gave Mao a handwritten letter running to 10,000 characters.
His mood at the time is evoked in a poem composed in the style of a verse from Beijing opera which is attributed to his pen:
The millet is scattered over the ground.
The leaves of the sweet potato are withered.
The young and old have gone to smelt iron.
To harvest the grain there are children and old women.
How shall we get through the next year?
I shall agitate and speak out on behalf of the people.9
At the Lushan meeting, Peng kept insisting on the most important point of all: the Party, which had won power on the back of peasants driven to revolt by hunger, must not now be responsible for a still greater famine. It was, as he later pointed out to his niece, a gross betrayal of trust: ‘I have experienced famine. I know the taste of it and it frightens me! We have fought decades of war and the people, poorly clothed and poorly fed, have spilt their blood and sweat to help us so that the Communist Party could win over the country and seize power. How can we let them suffer again, this time from hunger?’10
He was backed by a small number of other leaders: the First Secretary of Hunan province, Zhou Xiaozhou; Huang Kecheng, Chief of the General Staff; and Zhang Wentian, an alternate member of the Politburo who had studied in Moscow. According to Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui, Zhang said they must ‘pull the Emperor off his horse even if that means losing our heads’. Another member of this group was one of Mao’s secretaries, Li Rui, who later published an account of the meeting which gives an unu
sually detailed picture of what happened.11 Peng’s letter itself was mildly worded, not even referring to a famine. Instead, it praised the accomplishments of the Great Leap Forward, observing that there were more gains than losses, though it did warn against leftist tendencies and stressed the need to learn from mistakes. Mao, however, scented a conspiracy and decided to circulate the letter and demolish its criticisms. On 30 July, he summoned an enlarged meeting of the Politburo which he opened with a half-hearted apology:
The collective dining halls are not our invention. They have been created by the masses... Being basically not good at construction, I know nothing about industrial targets... It is I who am to blame... Everyone has shortcomings. Even Confucius made mistakes. In regard to speed, Marx also committed many errors. He thought the revolution in Europe would take place in his lifetime. I have seen Lenin’s manuscripts, which are filled with changes. He too made mistakes... Have we failed? No, our failure has been only partial. We have paid too high a price but a gust of Communist wind has been whipped up and the country has learned a lesson.
Mao refused to recognize that there was anything intrinsically wrong with his goal of ‘greater, better, faster and more economical results’, or that the shortcomings of the Great Leap Forward were anything but minor. They were, he said, nothing but the ‘tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience’ and amounted to temporary defects. ‘Come back in ten years and see whether we were correct.’ All this talk of food shortages was no more than wild exaggeration:
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