Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  Our family still had one jar of food and we had to hide it behind the door. This jar was full of sweet potatoes which we had dried and ground up. When the cadres came, Second Aunt sat on the jar pretending to sew clothes and so they missed it. This jar helped us a lot. I think it saved our lives because in our household no one died. You could not cook the dried sweet potato but if you were very hungry, you just grabbed some of it with your hands. Almost every day the cadres came. They searched every home for nine consecutive days. Later, we buried the jar underground but the cadres came and poked the ground with iron rods to see if we had buried anything. Then we hid it somewhere else. This went on until February.

  The communal canteen did not serve any proper food, just wild grasses, peanut shells and sweet potato skins. Because of this diet we had terrible problems. Some were constipated but others had constant diarrhoea and could not get beyond the front door. Yet the cadres still regularly inspected each house for cleanliness and if they found that a house or the area around it was dirty, they would place a black flag outside. If it was clean, they put up a white flag. I had to try and clean up the mess but at the time I had difficulty walking.

  My legs and hands were swollen and I felt that at any moment I would die. Instead of walking to the fields to look for wild grass, I crawled and rolled to save energy. Several old women tried to get grass from ponds or rivers but because they had to stand in the water their legs became infected.

  All the trees in the village had been cut down. Any nearby were all stripped of bark. I peeled off the bark of a locust tree and cooked it as if it were rice soup. It tasted like wood and was sticky.

  At the time the villagers looked quite fat and even healthy because they were swollen but when they were queuing up at the canteen to eat, they would suddenly collapse and could not get up. Some could only walk using a stick.

  One sister lived in a house that had been turned into the public canteen and her family were okay. Another sister became so weak she had no strength to draw water from the well. One day she suddenly fell down because her legs could not support her. In those days the ground was slippery because it was raining a lot. Her leg became inflamed and covered with running sores. She drained them with a knife. Our younger sister was only 10 then and was well enough to walk so she went to the older sister at the canteen to beg for food. She was given some buns which she hid by tying them around her waist and secretly brought her the food.

  Another relative lived with her mother-in-law, who refused to give her any food. She stole grain to eat but had to go a long way to do this. Actually, there was food hidden under the kang but her mother-in-law kept this from her. She was only saved when her brother-in-law took pity on her and told her. So she could raid the pot and eat something.

  No one in our family died. By February 1960, Grandpa’s legs were completely swollen. His hair fell out, his body was covered in sores and he was too weak to open his mouth. A friend came and drained off some of the sores and this helped. We still had three small goats and an aunt killed two of them secretly to help him. Unfortunately, the cadres discovered this and took the carcases away.

  More than half the villagers died, mostly between New Year [1960] and April or May. In one of our neighbours’ houses, three boys and a girl starved. In one brother’s family two children died. Another family of sixteen died. Many families disappeared completely with no survivors at all. The production team chief’s daughter-in-law and his grandson starved to death. He then boiled and ate the corpse of the child but he also died. When the village teacher was on the verge of death, he said to his wife, ‘Why should we keep our child? If we eat him then I can survive and later we can produce another child.’ His wife refused to do this and her husband died.

  When people died, no one collected the bodies. The corpses did not change colour or decay because there was no blood in them and not much flesh. After people died, their families would not report the death to the production team. This was because they could get another portion of food. One family had three children and they died. The father hid the bodies and claimed their rations. In the whole village only seven or eight families did not suffer any deaths but some fled.

  Later, when the wheat was harvested the situation improved, but we had to carry on eating at the canteen all through 1960. It was a good harvest and there were far fewer mouths to feed. The autumn harvest was also good and later we were allowed to eat at home. We had nothing to cook with and went to our neighbours to borrow pots. Some of the houses I went to were empty because everyone had fled.37

  This woman’s account, extraordinary though it is, is by no means unusual. Records at Fengyang show that the entire population of some villages perished. In Xiaoxihe commune, where enthusiasm for collectivization was extreme, all the inhabitants of twenty-one villages died. In such villages, people frequently resorted to cannibalism but even this did not ensure survival because the corpses provided so little sustenance. Finally, when there was not even human flesh left to eat, all died. According to official records, there were 63 cases of cannibalism in Fengyang. Thirty Years in the Countryside recounts examples, among them the following: ‘Chen Zhangying and her husband from Wuyi brigade of Damiao commune strangled their 8-year-old boy, boiled and ate him... Wang Lanying of Banjing brigade of Wudian commune not only took back home dead human bodies and ate them but also sold 2 jin [just under 2 lbs] as pork.’38

  Just how extensive cannibalism was may never be known. It was official policy to cover up such incidents, even when arrests were made. Zhao Yushu, Fengyang’s Party Secretary, insisted on describing cannibalism as ‘political sabotage’. The Public Security Bureau was ordered secretly to arrest anyone connected with such practices. Of the 63 who were arrested, 33 died in prison. An interviewee from another county in Anhui recalled that a traditional practice called Yi zi er shi – ‘Swop child, make food’ – was common.

  The worst thing that happened during the famine was this: parents would decide to allow the old and the young to die first. They thought they could not afford to let their sons die but a mother would say to her daughter, ‘You have to go and see your granny in heaven.’ They stopped giving the girl children food. They just gave them water. Then they swopped the body of their daughter with that of a neighbour’s. About five to seven women would agree to do this amongst themselves. Then they boiled the corpses into a kind of soup. People had learned to do this during the famine of the 1930s. People accepted this as it was a kind of hunger culture. They said: ‘If your stomach is empty, then who can keep face?’ One woman was reported and arrested by the Public Security Bureau. No one in the village criticized her when she returned from a labour camp a few years later.

  At first, the villagers tried to bury their dead in coffins but later, when the wood ran out, the living just wrapped the dead in cotton. Finally there was no cloth left, so at night people mounted guard over buried relatives until the flesh had sufficiently decomposed to prevent others from eating the corpse. In parts of Fengyang, officials issued regulations on the disposal of corpses to try and keep the scale of the deaths secret. An example of such regulations is cited in the report on Fengyang:

  1. Shallow burials are prohibited. All corpses must be buried at least three feet deep and crops must be grown on top.

  2. No burials are allowed near roads.

  3. All crying and wailing is forbidden.

  4. The wearing of mourning clothes is forbidden.

  In the Zhangwan production team of Huan Guan commune, the regulations were even stricter. Peasants were told that they must not wear white clothes, the colour of mourning, but red ones. In China, red is the colour for celebrations. Another cadre in Wanshan brigade also insisted that peasants must pay a tax of 2 jin of alcohol before burying their dead. He would then strip the corpses of their clothes and take them home.

  In many places where there was no one left to bury the dead, the bodies lay where they had fallen. One man I met recalled how as a child living in a small town,
he and others had even played with the corpses. He remembered, too, how a villager went insane and wandered around for days ranting and raving with four or five heads tied around his neck. Elsewhere the bodies were buried beneath a thin covering of soil but the stiffened corpses were so bent that often the feet and head stuck out of the ground. For years to come, he said, the carelessly buried skeletons would re-emerge from the ground during a drought.

  The first to die were often the strongest and most active members of a village who were worked the hardest. Left behind were the elderly and the children. By the end of 1961, Fengyang county was left with 2,398 orphans of whom 247 were given shelter by the authorities. Some were abandoned by parents who despaired of being able to feed them. Some were brought by their parents to Hefei, the provincial capital, to exchange for grain coupons. Sometimes they simply died on the streets. One interviewee remembered that as a child she had walked past small corpses covered with maggots lying at one of the main intersections in Hefei.

  Zhao Yushu, the Fengyang Party Secretary, tried to stop people abandoning their children by forbidding Party officials from giving them succour. The Fengyang report quotes an official:

  A lot of children were being abandoned and Zhao Yushu forbade people to pick them up. He said, the more you pick them up, the more children will be abandoned. Once he said that he had seen a landlord abandon his child so he got the idea that anyone who did this was a bad class element; if a cadre rescued an abandoned child, it meant that he was bad too.

  The authorities denied most orphans any shelter. In the winter of 1962 when they implemented a new policy and began rounding up orphans, they found 3,304. Most of the children were under 10 years old and usually boys. The shortage of females from that generation is striking in Anhui. One village that I visited had around forty men who had been unable to marry because there were only two or three women survivors of their generation. Now in their mid-forties, they had been in their late teens during the famine. According to Ding Shu’s book Ren Huo, the People’s Liberation Army also later issued a regulation forbidding the recruitment of orphans. They were considered politically unreliable because it was feared that they might one day take revenge for the disaster which had befallen their families. The author also describes how he met a man who had been at a state boarding school in Anhui during the famine. The school had enough food but the parents of many pupils were starving and some decided to make their way to the school. He recalled how they arrived at the gates to beg for food from their children but the school refused to let them in.

  A handful of brave souls risked their lives to speak out against what was happening. The Party Secretary of Yinjian commune in Fengyang, Zhang Shaobao, wrote a letter to Mao in 1959. Since he dared not use his own name, he signed himself ‘Shi Qiu Ming’ meaning ‘To pursue clarity’:

  To the Central Party and Chairman,

  I write this letter without seeking any personal gain. All I care about is the interests of the Party and the people. I am therefore resolved to report the massive deaths which have taken place in Fengyang county this winter and spring. To my knowledge four villages in three communes have had shocking mortality rates. In one village it is 5 per cent, in the second 11 per cent, in the third 15 per cent and in the fourth more than 20 per cent. In some villages 5-6 people are dying each day. Other villages are completely deserted because the people have either died or fled. I have seen with my own eyes 300 or 400 orphans whom the authorities have gathered together. Of these about 100 have died.39

  Those who addressed such letters to the county Party Secretary were arrested and accused of ‘spreading rumours and slandering the Party’. One local doctor, Wang Shanshen, the head of the Kaocheng hospital in Wudian commune, was arrested for telling the Party Secretary Zhao Yushu the truth. Zhao had asked the doctor if nothing could be done about the many people who had fallen sick. Dr Wang told him that people were dying not from any illness but from hunger. At one point a third of the population of Fengyang – 100,000 – was listed as sick, many of them with oedema.40

  Protests did not just come from the county level. In 1959, Zhang Kaifan, Deputy Governor of Anhui, reported what he had discovered when he returned to his home town in Wuwei county. This town lies near the Yangtze River in the far south of Anhui, in one of the richest regions in China. Zhang approved a local decision to abolish the communal kitchens and then, at the Lushan summit, gave Mao letters and petitions that he had received. Mao condemned him as a ‘right opportunist’ and he was dismissed from his post. Others, too, were purged as rightists for advocating more moderate policies, including Li Shinong, another Deputy Governor, and Wei Xingye, the deputy propaganda chief for Anhui.

  The case of Zhang Kaifan was significant because at Wuwei the local officials had independently decided to abandon the collective kitchens and the communes early in 1959. As a result, Anhui’s leader Zeng Xisheng had a number of officials arrested as ‘right opportunists’. A year later the complaints from Wuwei reached the ears of Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing. A Party history book includes a letter which Zhou wrote to Zeng in March 1960 urging him to investigate allegations that people had starved to death in Wuwei.41 In 1961, a report on Wuwei was used by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to urge the dismissal of Zeng. After 1979, when Deng Xiaoping overturned Mao’s policies, Zhang Kaifan was one of the first Party officials to be rehabilitated.

  For many lower-ranking officials such a reversal of verdicts came too late. After the Lushan summit in July 1959 and the launch of the campaign to root out ‘right opportunists’, Zeng set quotas for victims. Anyone who had made any kind of negative comment would be targeted. In the autumn of 1959 tens of thousands in Anhui were labelled as anti-rightists. In Fengyang, even the magistrate, Zhao Conghua, was arrested on a charge of opposing the people’s communes. According to Party documents, he had said that the communes were premature and should have been tried out and tested before they were introduced throughout China. He also opposed collectivization and recommended dividing up the land again as well as abandoning the canteens and the steel-making campaign.42

  To be labelled as a ‘right opportunist’ was in some places tantamount to receiving a death sentence. Anyone so labelled, and his entire family, was ostracized along with other outsiders such as landlords, counter-revolutionaries, Kuomintang followers and rich peasants, collectively known as the ‘five types of bad elements’. These received the lowest priority in the distribution of food. When ordinary peasants were dying of hunger, such a label spelt certain death. Tens of thousands of people in these categories fled their villages, many of them trying to get to the railway that would take them to Beijing and from there to the north or south-east to Shanghai. Few succeeded in boarding the heavily guarded trains. One source recalled how those trying to escape were locked in a cell at a ‘reception centre’ in Bangpu station, Anhui’s largest railway junction. There they were kept without food and each day the dead were taken and thrown into a pit. Those who did manage to board a train heading south-east were pulled off before they got to Shanghai. The authorities set up a camp on the outskirts of the city which provided food for work. No one was allowed to enter the city to beg. The most extraordinary attempt at flight took place in Wuwei county, on the north bank of the Yangtze River. Several sources claim that tens of thousands of starving peasants from the county decided to march to Nanjing, across the river to the east, in search of food and that to stop them crossing, the Party massed troops who opened fire, killing many.43

  Anhui peasants also dreamt of reaching the rich and thinly populated lands of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. A few managed to get as far as Harbin, in Heilongjiang province, over a thousand miles to the north. A doctor in Harbin recalled that each day the stationmaster had to remove a dozen or more bodies of starved wretches who had expired in the railway station. In Fengyang, the authorities made every effort to stop the peasants from escaping. As early as December 1958, the Party set up road blocks to arrest fleeing peasants. The Fengyang repo
rt claims that the militia were successful, since only around 4 or 5 per cent of the population managed to escape during the famine. Of these, a few returned and were punished, but most did not. In contrast to Henan, many Anhui peasants had a tradition of vagabondage. In the slack season, peasants would set off as beggars, pedlars or labourers. So, in some parts of Anhui, the local Party Secretary would organize begging expeditions, issuing all those who wanted to leave with certificates and a little food. Such a certificate entitled one to buy train tickets. If this was not possible, then at least the peasants could take to the road. These journeys were fraught with danger, however, because peasants in other villages would sometimes seize outsiders, forcing them to work for nothing, or abduct the women.

  On the other hand, flight could mean the difference between life and death. Ding Shu in Ren Huo recounts the story of one daring Anhui peasant who sneaked into the local Party Secretary’s office to steal a blank sheet of paper stamped with an official chop. With this he forged himself a travel permit and managed to reach remote mountains in Jiangxi province where he farmed some uncultivated land and survived the famine. When he returned to his village some years later, he discovered that his two brothers, who had stayed behind, had died of starvation.

  Perhaps the most horrible aspect of the famine in Anhui was that throughout it the state granaries were full. The existence of these granaries was confirmed by Zhou Yueli, the former secretary of Anhui’s leader, Zeng Xisheng, and by a number of county-level officials.44 Just as in Henan, the famine was entirely man-made and its chief cause was the state’s excessive levy of grain. The Party cadres obeyed their orders and extracted double or triple the usual grain levy in accordance with imaginary grain harvests. Once this was done, the grain lay safely guarded in state granaries. A part was exported, but most of it did not travel far, indeed could not, because China lacked the means to move large quantities of grain. Some was held in emergency granaries controlled by the military, in accordance with Emperor Zhu’s motto ‘Dig deep tunnels and store grain’, and there it rotted. Mao adapted this dictum by adding his own words: ‘Dig deep tunnels, store grain and oppose hegemony.’ The latter referred to the perceived threat from either a US-backed Kuomintang invasion, or an attack by the Soviet Union.