Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  As China moved to realize full Communism, the urban rationing system began to break down. As happened during the Soviet Union’s first five-year plan, China’s Great Leap Forward was accompanied by a massive internal migration of labourers to man the hastily erected factories or help finish crash building projects. In Beijing, ten huge building projects, including the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, were completed in time to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Communist victory in 1959. The sudden extra burden of these tens of millions of additional mouths imposed an immense and intolerable strain on the rationing system. According to statistics released in 1985, the urban population of China doubled from 99.4 million in 1957 to 187.2 million in 1958. If these figures are reliable, a staggering 87 million peasants took part in the greatest organized migration in Chinese history. Other sources suggest a much lower but still impressive total of 30 million.3 (It is possible that the larger statistic indicates that 87 million people received state grain for working in the cities and on various dams and other public works in the countryside.)

  At the end of 1959, as the famine deepened, most of these peasants were sent home. A further 10 million went back to the countryside in 1960 when the Party began to empty the cities to lessen the burden on state grain stores. This mass movement in and out of the cities makes it difficult to interpret official statistics on urban birth and death rates. Chinese statistics purport to show that there were no ‘excess deaths’ in the cities during the famine although the birth rate halved and the death rate rose steeply. These figures are contradicted by interviewees who made it clear that many did die of hunger but over a shorter time span than in the countryside.

  In the cities, the gravest food shortages began in the winter of 1959. Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, abandoned monthly food rations in late 1959 and stopped issuing cooking oil in early 1960 when all vegetables, including the ubiquitous winter cabbage, vanished from the shops.4 The same was true in most other cities where, by the spring of 1960, there was nothing but grain to eat. At that time the grain ration began to be cut. In Shenyang, the authorities reduced the adult grain ration from at least 28 lbs to just over 13 lbs a month. Children received half as much. In Beijing’s universities, male students who normally received top-grade rations saw their monthly allotment dwindle from 33 lbs a month to 26 lbs and then still less. (Rations for female students fell from 28 lbs to 22 lbs.) A former student of the Beying Institute for National Minorities, Tsering Doije Gashi, recalled the effect this had: ‘Students’ monthly ration fell to 22 lbs of food grain. No matter how carefully the students eked out their food, their ration would stretch to at most 25 days. For the remaining 6 to 7 days, the students had to survive on spinach, leaves or anything remotely resembling vegetables. Such a miserable diet drained both health and strength.’5

  A diet consisting of nothing but a pound of cereals a day contains only 1,600 calories. As has been noted, this is a starvation diet which causes weight loss and eventually oedema from a lack of protein. Those with a lower status and those living in smaller cities had still less to eat. In Anhui, people living in the town of Fengyang had a monthly grain ration of 22 lbs in 1960 supplemented with 6 lbs of food substitutes.6 As in other provincial cities, rice and other good-quality grains soon disappeared. In Fengyang, the town’s granary switched to bean powder and finally to flour made from dried sweet potatoes. Not all parts of the city benefited even from this. One place with four communal canteens serving a thousand people provided nothing but food substitutes. In Xining, the capital of Qinghai, a province filled with state farms worked by convicts, the adult monthly grain ration fell to as low as 13.6 lbs per month.7

  Shanghai seems to have had a better supply of food even than the capital, Beijing. Throughout the famine, Nien Cheng, who worked for the Shell Oil company and would later write Life and Death in Shanghai, received a grain ration of 40 lbs a month. In addition, her employer sent her hampers from Harrods filled with tinned sausages, Knorr soup and canned Australian butter. She recalls that in Shanghai restaurants remained open and there was a flourishing black market where you could buy an egg for 1 yuan and 4 lbs of mutton for 60 yuan – the average monthly wage. At the Shanghai Zoo, the animals continued to be fed while in nearby Anhui province millions died of hunger.8 On a commune outside Shanghai, the painter Fu Hua remembers that he ate the slops intended for the pigs and fed them boiled-up human excrement instead.9

  The most protected social group in the cities were Party members. As in the Soviet Union, they could buy scarce goods, above all food, in secret and unmarked shops. Although Party members claimed to share the same rations as others, this privilege shielded them from the worst hunger. One doctor, who continued to work long hours on shorter and shorter rations, recalls operating on an important Party official:

  He must have noticed my haggard face and unsteady feet. He asked me if I had had anything to eat that day and I told him I had not had a proper meal for two days. He said he would see to it, if his operation was successful. It must have been the most careful operation I ever did. Sure enough, a sack of rice and three pounds of pork were delivered to my house. I don’t remember my children ever being so happy with me, as if I were the almighty Goddess of Mercy, sent from heaven to save them.10

  Nien Cheng’s sister, who was a Party member in the municipal health department, continued to eat full meals in work canteens that included luxuries such as pieces of pork. In many places, top officials and their families lived in special compounds with their own canteens, shops and supplies of provisions. The army and navy used their special status to supplement their rations in other ways. Army officers in Beijing took jeeps, machine guns and spotlights to the Mongolian grasslands to hunt wild animals. Navy vessels spent their time fishing.11 In hospitals, the staff would cook and eat human placentas, and pharmacists sold dried and powdered placenta which was highly sought after as a source of protein.

  As the shortages worsened, access to these special shops was vital because the mere possession of a ration ticket no longer guaranteed a supply of grain. Queues became longer and longer and started earlier and earlier because those who came last might leave empty-handed. Fights frequently broke out and people resorted to various stratagems to reserve a place in the queue. Meat became absolutely unobtainable without special connections.

  As in the countryside, the food shortages in the cities caused terrible mistrust between family members. Initially, the old would give the young a portion of their food but by 1960 people had begun to steal from each other. In many families, members watched with eagle eyes as the food was divided. This became a matter of such bitter contention that many, even in Beijing, used scales at each meal to ensure that everyone knew they were getting exactly their fair share. Matters were made worse if families had to send their portions of rice to be cooked at a communal canteen. In Guangzhou, schoolchildren had to bring their lunchtime rice to school where it would be cooked. One interviewee recalled how the school cooks would steal from the children by scooping back some of the cooked rice. Often men stole their wives’ coupons and parents took food from their children. Divorces and separations became common as tensions rose and tempers were lost. There were cases of sons beating or even killing their own mothers. Several former prisoners remember sharing a cell with inmates who had murdered one of their parents for a bag of grain. The reverse happened, too. In Tianjin an interviewee recalled how when his younger brother stole a wotou, their father discovered this and beat the boy with such violence that his retina was permanently damaged. In Xining, Qinghai, a father cut his own throat after beating a son who had stolen his food.12

  Despite the efforts of the militia, peasants did sneak into the cities in search of food. One interviewee told of the terrible feeling of oppression that this created in Chengdu: ‘There were tens of thousands of people roaming the streets and looking for food. When you sat down to eat something in a restaurant – they had nothing except boiled noodles without fat – all thes
e people would be watching you. When you left, the plate would be snatched away by these beggars who would then lick the plate thoroughly.’

  When, in 1961, the Shanghai authorities tried to win over former capitalists as part of an attempt to restart the economy, they took Nien Cheng and other once wealthy Shanghainese on a luxury cruise up the Yangtze. There she noticed how difficult it was to keep the beggars at bay. When the party ate in restaurants, the doors were locked to prevent starving peasants rushing in, but they watched the guests eat elaborate meals of meat and fish with their faces pressed against the windows.13

  In Changsha, another interviewee recalled, if anyone in the street raised a hand to their mouth, dozens of people would start staring, and if they saw that someone was eating, then they would crowd around, asking where the food had come from. In canteens, beggars would deliberately spit into the food of people eating there in the hope that they would then leave it. One interviewee who grew up in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian, remembered that people would snatch food from anyone whose attention wandered even for a second: ‘I was playing at the entrance to a police station when four men dragged another in. They were carrying a bun from which this man had taken a bite. While they were struggling, the beggar grabbed it like a tiger. He didn’t care how much the others cursed and kicked him as long as he could eat.’

  Little mercy was shown to those caught stealing grain. In Beijing, some university students caught stealing were sent to labour camps. In Chengdu, Tsering Doije Gashi stopped to change trains on his way home:

  Stuck up on street walls everywhere we saw posters of men crossed out in red, and on enquiring what these meant, we discovered that these were thieves and robbers, shoplifters, people who robbed and stole from communal grain stores... Out of all this misery the sight which saddened me most was the spectacle of two children of tender years lying down on the pavement, their emaciated bodies shivering. They looked as if they were going to die at any moment. I was moved and wanted to give them some food but I clearly saw that they lacked the power even to open their mouths. Those living nearby related that the father of the children had stolen from the grain store and was killed and that the mother had starved to death not many days before. ‘It is better that these two die. They have neither the energy nor the strength to live,’ they said.14

  Between 1958 and 1961, it was an offence to buy or sell anything privately and pedlars were often sent to jail. One man recalled what happened to his grandfather in Beijing:

  We decided to raise chickens to sell. At that time this was strictly forbidden and the police patrolled the black market. My grandfather looked after the chickens – seven hens and three cocks. Once he wanted to buy some chocolate for his grandchildren. It was terribly expensive – 25 fen for a tiny bar in Wangfujing Street. So he decided to sell a chicken on the black market. He was soon caught by the police who were ready to send him to jail. My mother went down on her knees to apologize and said he was so old that he didn’t know that it was illegal. So they let him go. If he had gone to prison, he would have died.

  To raise money to buy food, however, people did sell their family treasures and heirlooms. Paintings, books, jewellery, furniture, porcelain and anything else of value all went to special state shops. These closely resembled the Soviet torgsin shops in the Ukraine in the 1930s, where people traded precious goods and hard currency for food vouchers. The state bought these goods at rock-bottom prices and they later reappeared in Hong Kong antique shops.

  By 1960, people in nearly all the major cities in China were beginning to peel the bark from the trees and pluck the leaves. In Jinan, capital of Shandong, the police started special patrols to protect the acacia and birch trees that lined the streets. In Beijing, the trees were stripped bare. In Shenyang, the idea spread rapidly: ‘Soon dozens of people were climbing the trees every day, stripping entire branches clean. Even green twigs were broken off. In the end not a touch of green life remained on any of the trees. It looked as if winter had set in again.’15

  Some local newspapers even printed recipes for ‘leaf pancakes’ and advice on edible wild grasses and mushrooms. Sugar became the greatest and most sought-after delicacy. In Lanzhou, one interviewee wrote, ‘the most serious problem was the shortage of sugar. Each person could only get four Hang [eight ounces] a month. Sugar was vital for people’s daily life. When people felt desperately hungry, they would drink a bowl of water with sugar and it would work. Therefore sugar was like gold and people had to acquire it somehow.’ Another recalled that in Changsha he once walked eight miles just to buy a cube of sugar.

  In 1960 the government introduced food substitutes. People in semi-tropical Fuzhou were given ground-up banana tree roots and stems which were mixed with rice flour and then steamed. They also tried to cook with coconut oil and cod-liver oil. One interviewee recalled how in his school, the headmaster forbade his pupils to mention the substitutes when they wrote to their overseas relatives because he said they were a brilliant Chinese invention which must be kept secret. This led the interviewee, then a child, to reflect that ‘We Chinese are the most intelligent people in the world. That’s why we know how to make this and the stupid foreigners don’t.’ Elsewhere, people were given cakes made of rice husks, sugar cane fibre, beetroot and turnip tops, and other substitutes. Newspapers advised people to double-steam their food in order to enlarge its bulk and make it go further. In the cities, cats and dogs disappeared from the streets. In Guangzhou, people hunted rats, sparrows and cockroaches.

  Just as in the prison camps, the authorities in the cities experimented with ersatz foods. One of the most bizarre was a green fungus called xiaoqiu zao, or chlorella, officially described as a unicellular hydrophyte with a ‘phenomenal yield of albumin, fats, carbohydrates and vitamins’ which multiplied so fast that ‘thirty crops a year can be expected’. This was used for everything from making biscuits and sauces to replacing milk powder for babies. People were ordered to grow the stuff in pots filled with urine and placed on window sills. Then it was collected, dried and sprinkled on rice. In Wild Swans, Jung Chang recalls how ‘people stopped going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seeds in: they grew into something looking like fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to eat, but did reduce the swelling [from oedema].’

  In Tianjin, all schools and colleges were closed down. Students spent the whole of each day trying to collect grass, tree bark and anything else they could find. Schoolchildren in Shenyang were told to put their heads on their desks, close their eyes and sleep. In Beijing, the government instructed employees not to work too hard to prevent more people from coming down with oedema. One man living in Beijing recalled that in his office ‘they often checked the staff and told people to rest to prevent the entire workforce collapsing’. Factories in Guangzhou sent home workers who were weak with hunger; and in schools there daily physical exercise was stopped and children just performed ear and eye exercises. To further conserve energy, children were told to lie down at home and to go to bed early. The authorities in Guangzhou even tried out acupuncture on schoolchildren in a bid to stem their hunger pangs. So serious was the malnutrition among the city’s schoolchildren that in 1961 the authorities issued pupils with a single sugar lump twice a day. Children in rural areas of the province ate papaya leaves and roots and were sent into the hills to find other wild vegetation and to catch snakes, birds, snails and grasshoppers.

  Yet, amidst all this, no one was ever allowed to mention publicly or privately that there was a famine or even hint at the fact. Propaganda encouraged people to make a virtue out of eating less while newspapers reported great strides in agricultural production. In Chengdu, the authorities declared that ‘a capable woman can make a meal without food’, reversing an ancient saying that ‘no matter how capable, a woman cannot make a meal without food’. In the north, the Beijing Daily reported what could be achieved by ‘alternating li
quid meals with solid meals’. It recounted the example of a man with a family of seven who had managed to save a third of his household’s monthly ration of 217 lbs by allocating each person no more than half a pound of grain a day.

  In most cities, a large proportion of the inhabitants had oedema in 1960. Several interviewees recalled that their teachers’ legs were so swollen that they could no longer stand up in front of their pupils and had to sit down to teach. In Beijing universities many students had swollen limbs, and in the canteens the porridge had so little rice in it that, as one former student put it, ‘you could almost see your own reflection in it’. One interviewee who grew up in Fengtai, a suburb of Beijing, remembered that many neighbours died after their limbs swelled up. His parents told him not to go outside because he might be caught and turned into dumplings. Rumours of cannibalism were rife – people told stories of buying dumplings and finding a fingernail inside.

  The utter failure of the cotton harvest in Shandong and other provinces where peasants were forced to try out vernalization led to further emergency measures. In 1958 China had boasted that its cotton crop was the biggest in the world, even bigger than that of the United States, but in 1959 cotton yields fell drastically. The growers, left with nothing to eat, refused to produce any more cotton, creating an acute shortage of cloth. The authorities began to dream up ways of making what was available go further. Tailors were urged to adopt a new method of cutting cloth using a cardboard pattern. The Worker’s Daily reported that the ‘broad masses of the people deeply love the advanced method of cutting’ which was hailed as a ‘technical revolution’. The newspaper calculated that if each of China’s 650 million people saved one foot of cloth a year, an extra 65 million suits could be made.16 The annual cloth ration was cut by 60 per cent to 4½ square feet per person and people were told how to make old clothes into new. For those outside the ration system, cotton cloth was often impossible to find and peasants sometimes resorted instead to using dried straw and grasses.