Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  Mao: This method is great! Allocating 5 per cent of the land as private plots is not enough, we should give even more land so that there won’t be more deaths by starvation!

  Zeng: We are prepared to fix the percentage of private land at 5 per cent and then each year give a little more to the masses and reach around 7-8 per cent...

  Mao: What about 10 per cent?

  This 180-degree turn by Mao was later hushed up during the Cultural Revolution when he ordered the punishment of his colleagues, including Zeng Xisheng, for taking the capitalist road. Indeed, even at this stage in mid-1961, he had secretly decided to write them off: as he lamented to his doctor, ‘All the good Party members are dead. The only ones left are a bunch of zombies.’

  In the meantime Zeng went ahead and spread the ze ren tian system throughout Anhui. By the end of 1961 grain production had risen dramatically from 6 million to 10 million tonnes. Other places followed suit and in around 20 per cent or more of the country, a diluted form of private farming began. However, many senior leaders were reluctant to confront Mao and back sweeping concessions to the peasants that would end the food shortages. At another Party meeting at Beidaihe in August, Tao Zhu, the provincial Party leader from Guangzhou, proposed giving 30 per cent of the land to the peasants but both Premier Zhou Enlai and Marshal Zhu De remained silent. Peng Dehuai reportedly sent a letter in which he begged to be rehabilitated and criticized Zeng’s experiment. And according to Zhou Yueli, Zeng’s former secretary, Hu Yaobang returned from an inspection trip to Anhui and likewise criticized the abandonment of collective farming.

  Officially, Mao continued neither to recognize the crisis nor formally to approve Zeng’s ze ren tian. Officials from other provinces visited Anhui to see what was happening for themselves but by the end of the year Mao was again talking of dropping the Anhui experiment. Matters came to a head at a huge meeting held in Beijing in January 1962 and called the 7,000 Cadres Conference. At the meeting, Liu Shaoqi declared that the famine was 70 per cent the result of human error and 30 per cent the result of natural causes.

  Liu had summoned the meeting to push through further rural reforms, and Anhui’s ze ren tian was a major topic of discussion. Yet Mao dug his heels in, determined to stop it. He said he had received letters from cadres in Anhui protesting against the change and he called upon the meeting to discover what was really going on in Anhui. With most delegates clearly on Liu Shaoqi’s side, Mao was facing a critical challenge to his authority. At this moment, his most loyal follower, Marshal Lin Biao, who had been promoted to succeed Peng Dehuai as Minister of Defence, spoke out in favour of Mao. According to Dr Li’s memoirs:

  Lin Biao was one of the few supporters Mao had left, and the most vocal. ‘The thoughts of the Chairman are always correct,’ he said. ‘If we encounter any problems, any difficulty, it is because we have not followed the instructions of the Chairman closely enough, because we have ignored or circumscribed the Chairman’s advice.’ I was sitting behind the stage, hidden by a curtain, during Lin’s speech. ‘What a good speech Vice-Chairman Lin has made,’ Mao said to me afterwards. ‘Lin Biao’s words are always so clear and direct. They are simply superb! Why can’t the other Party leaders be so perceptive?’

  Hua Guofeng also demonstrated his loyalty, saying: ‘If we want to overcome the difficulties in our rural areas, we must insist on going the socialist road and not by adopting the household contract system or individualised farming, otherwise we will come to a dead end.’15

  Most of the time, though, Mao did not attend the conference discussions. Instead, he remained in a special room in the Great Hall of the People, ‘ensconced on his extra-large bed, “resting” with the young women assembled there for his pleasure, reading daily transcripts of the proceedings taking place’.16 However, he did manage to insist on the dismissal of Zeng Xisheng. Despite his reforms, Zeng had little support within the rest of the Party and Liu Shaoqi wanted to punish him for the crimes committed in Anhui and have him executed. In the Cultural Revolution, Zeng allegedly asked Mao to rehabilitate him because it was Liu who had dismissed him. Another of Mao’s victims was Wang Feng, who in 1961 had been put in charge of Gansu province and had tried out similar experiments in free farming in one prefecture, Linxia. Wang was sacked as was Linxia’s prefectural Party Secretary, Ge Man. Four years later both men were among the first victims of the Cultural Revolution.

  Among the beneficiaries of the 7,000 Cadres Conference was Lin Biao, whom Mao later designated as his successor. Another was Hua Guofeng, promoted to head the Hunan Party secretariat. From his position there, Hua opposed Liu’s reforms with a vengeance. According to the People’s Daily, ‘In 1962 in order to oppose the influence of Liu Shaoqi’s san zi yi bao, Hua led a working team to every brigade and village where the bao chan dao hu was implemented in order to return them to the path of socialism.’ In the end it was not Lin Biao but Hua Guofeng who succeeded Mao after his death for Lin Biao died in 1971 while fleeing China after an attempted coup d’état.

  Though Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping lost a few pawns at this conference, they nonetheless went ahead with a nationwide emergency programme. This was a modified version of Zeng’s ze ren tian which allowed production teams, although not individual peasants, to contract out fields. Individuals could have private plots if they were on waste ground. At the same time the state’s purchasing price for grain was raised, and the peasants were permitted to trade animals as long as they were not, like oxen, considered a means of production. All over China, peasants were allocated materials to replace their traditional work tools, fishing equipment, boats and carts. Under the influence of Chen Yun, the production of cash crops was also encouraged. Each region no longer had to practise self-sufficiency in grain but was allowed to grow whatever best suited its natural conditions. The size of the communes was reduced and in many of them production teams were given more autonomy.

  In April 1962, Liu and Deng also introduced guidelines to rehabilitate most of the cadres and intellectuals condemned as ‘right opportunists’. Some political prisoners were released and in the camps new prison commandants took over.

  To ease the food shortages, the Party also began encouraging people to write to their overseas relatives and beg for food parcels. Until then the regime had treated anyone who had relatives abroad with deep suspicion. Contact could lead to imprisonment on charges of spying and an anti-Party label. During the xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, these charges were revived and some people who had received parcels during the famine were persecuted.

  Overseas relatives in Hong Kong sent 6.2 million 2 lb parcels in the first six months of 1962 (equivalent to 5,357 tonnes). The massive outflow overwhelmed the colony’s post offices where people stood in line for hours. Hong Kong Chinese were also allowed to visit their relatives again and bring food parcels, and there were long queues for the train to Guangzhou. The Chinese government extracted as much money as possible from these visitors, levying a 400 per cent duty on the 2 lb packages. Relatives in other parts of the world sent money orders to be used for importing chemical fertilizer. In return their families in China obtained grain coupons. The grain imported in bulk from Canada and Australia had begun to arrive in the cities but its origin was often disguised. As Chi An recounts in A Mother’s Ordeal: ‘Our family received a special issue of ten pounds of wheat flour from the state grain store. The government had put the flour in locally made sacks to disguise its origin but the employees at the store whispered that it was from Canada. It shocked me that the Party, still touting enormous increases in grain production, would import grain from a foreign country – and a hated capitalist one at that.’ In Henan, Xinyang peasants could, over thirty years later, still remember how good the Canadian grain tasted.

  In Shanghai, the government decided that it was now necessary to regain the confidence even of despised members of the former capitalist classes and sent them on excursions where they were treated to the best food. The city markets began to re-open and pea
sants were allowed to come into the cities and sell food legally. Albert Belhomme, an American soldier who defected during the Korean War and settled in Jinan, Shandong, described what happened there:

  At first the peasants with grain, vegetables or meat to sell were very timid. They came to the outskirts of the city at two or three in the morning. Transactions were carried on by the light of a match. People bought all kinds of things they didn’t usually eat like carrot and turnip tops. Prices were high. As conditions worsened, the peasants became bolder, coming right into the city at daylight. The police gave up trying to stop them. Soon parts of the city were so crowded with pedlars and customers you couldn’t ride a bicycle through certain streets.17

  Some peasants became rich from this trade but could buy nothing with their paper money. Industrial production had ceased and the shops were often empty. Others were more successful, as Belhomme relates: ‘They bought bicycles and even radios in spite of the fact that their villages had no electricity. They also spent huge amounts eating in the “free” restaurants where you could order good meals without ration coupons at high prices. Once in one of those restaurants, I saw a peasant in patched homespun clothes reach into his pocket and pull out a wad of cash that would have choked a horse.’

  China also began to open her borders. During the past three years, tens of thousands had repeatedly tried to escape south to Macao and Hong Kong. Those caught were imprisoned, the penalty usually two or three months in a labour camp, but many died in the attempt, their bodies later found drifting in the Pearl River. People said they died because they were too weak to swim the distance, or had been shot by border guards. Then, in the summer of 1962, 250,000 people were suddenly allowed to reach Hong Kong. According to some estimates, altogether 700,000 people in Guangzhou were preparing to leave, some of whom had come from other parts of the country to escape.18

  In the cities, the worst of the food shortages were over by the autumn of 1962, although people still lived on subsistence rations. In some places many women did not begin to menstruate again until 1965. The state continued to send as many people as possible to the countryside to minimize the problem of collecting and distributing grain. The peasants were understandably reluctant to hand over their grain to the state and for the next few years it was sometimes they who lived better than the city-dwellers, especially if they were able to sell food to the cities. In 1965, just before the Cultural Revolution began, food parcels from abroad were banned.

  New policies for China’s minority peoples were also launched in 1962. The Panchen Lama was encouraged to draw up his report on the treatment of the Tibetans while Beijing attempted to address their grievances. In the far western province of Xinjiang, tens of thousands of Kazakh nomads were allowed to cross the border and join their relatives in Kazakhstan and other parts of the Soviet Union.

  Nevertheless, none of this changed the fact that Mao was still head of the Communist Party, at the apex of the power structure, although he no longer attended government meetings. Indeed, he seems to have spent much of the first half of 1962 sulking in a villa in Hangzhou. However, at the annual August meeting at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, Mao returned to the political stage with a vengeance. He attacked Liu and Deng by name, shouting furiously: ‘You have put the screws on me for a very long time, since 1960, for over two years. Now, for once I am going to put a scare into you.’ With a gesture of disgust he reportedly swept the documents on the reform of the communes off the table.19 Later, he would complain that the rest of the leadership had treated him like ‘a dead ancestor’ and would accuse Deng Xiaoping of not wanting even to sit near him at meetings.

  It is not hard to understand the revulsion Deng and others must have felt towards Mao. The entire Party must have known of the terrible economic damage inflicted on China, even if a full reckoning of the death toll was not made available to all. According to a study by the US Department of Agriculture published in 1988, Mao’s Great Leap Forward had caused overall grain yields to fall by 25 per cent, wheat yields by 41 per cent. The production of coarse grains such as sorghum, millet and corn was lower than it had been before 1949. Oil-seed production, the chief source of fats in the Chinese diet, had collapsed by 64 per cent, cotton by 41 per cent and textiles by more than 50 per cent. The number of pigs, the main source of meat in China, had fallen in the four years to 1961 from 146 million to 75 million. The number of draught animals, used to plough fields almost everywhere in China, had fallen drastically too, so that there were half as many donkeys in 1961 as there had been in 1956. At the same time, in the five years from 1957, China had at Mao’s urging exported nearly 12 million tonnes of grain as well as record amounts of cotton yarn, cloth, pork, poultry and fruit.20

  The new policies might have been popular but Mao’s supporters were still in place throughout the Party hierarchy. In most of rural China, the power struggle had not been resolved. Instead, there were now ‘two lines’, and officials followed whichever line suited them. Often, they shifted from one to the other, depending on the local political situation and the prevailing wind from Beijing.

  As Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping implemented their reforms, Mao continued to insist that the order of the day was ‘Never forget class struggle’. Seemingly incapable of comprehending the scale of the disaster that he had instigated, he continued to act as if he believed the peasants were wholly behind him. The poor and lower-middle-class peasant associations, instrumental in the land reform campaign, were revived and villagers were ordered to attend meetings at which peasants would describe their hard life before 1949. At the same time, just as Stalin had done when he abandoned the New Economic Policy, Mao claimed that rich peasants and landlords had regained power and were rebuilding capitalism.

  In the continuing struggle for power and the attempt to root out opponents, Deng Xiaoping launched the ‘Four clean ups’ movement to purge cadres who had kept grain for themselves while the peasants starved. This had mixed success because Mao launched a counter-political movement – the ‘Socialist education campaign’ – aimed at targeting cadres who could be accused of practising capitalism. As before, the Party continued to send city-dwellers to the countryside to force peasants to comply with its sometimes contradictory demands. The students and officials who went were often ignorant of the real nature of the famine and baffled by the experience. One student dispatched to a village in Hebei recalled:

  In 1962 I and my fellow students were sent down to the countryside in a movement called ‘Consolidating the People’s Commune’. I still don’t understand what it was about. I think they wanted us to go and be used as cheap labour for the peasants. A gong would wake us up at 4 a.m. and then we would go straight to the fields. It took several hours of walking to get to them. We arrived in the winter and our job was to take compost – fertilizer – to the fields. The stuff was made of human and animal wastes, ash and any other rubbish, and this was to prepare the land for spring sowing. Then, around 9 a.m., we walked back to the village for our soup. We would try and drink as much water as possible because the next meal would not be until around 4 p.m. Even now I can’t eat porridge. The memories of that time make me throw up. Then, in the evening, we had to take part in meetings and everyone was supposed to talk about how to improve the communes. We all felt very tired and no one spoke. For hours twenty or thirty of us would squat on a kang feeling angry and tired. There was no electricity, just a flickering oil lamp. The cadre would ask people to speak but nothing happened for hours, we were all so tired. Some people just slept. Then, at 11.30 p.m., the cadre allowed us to leave. The peasants hated our presence there and we had little contact with them.

  Mao was determined to revive the communes and abolish the contract responsibility system. The rehabilitation of Peng Dehuai that had been prepared was thrown out. The new agricultural ministry was dismantled and its leader, Deputy Premier Deng Zihui, dismissed, Mao declaring that ‘Marxism will vanish if we implement his household responsibility system’. He went on to announce that
China was now ready for a new Great Leap Forward and justified himself by saying that ‘Good men who make mistakes are quite different from men who follow the capitalist road.’

  From August 1962 until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the split within the Party was hard to disguise and it spread through every level of the bureaucracy. When Mao finally recovered complete authority in 1966 his agricultural policies once again became law, but in the meantime each side stood by their respective policies. This meant that village leaders had a choice of whether to follow Mao’s ‘Ten points on agriculture’ or Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Ten points on agriculture’. Recovery from the famine was hindered by battles between the two factions as each tried to oust the other’s followers from positions of power in the countryside. One interviewee recalled what it was like when he became part of a rural work team:

  When I was a student I was sent to this village in Zhouxian county, Hebei. It was 1964 and Mao was trying to prove to Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi that their methods were wrong, that the peasants were corrupt, although production was rising. So we had to go to production team leaders and interrogate them. We had to make one confess to falsifying figures, to hiding grain and cheating the government. Then we could say we – our team – did our work the best because we had caught a big fish.

  Even high-ranking Communist officials took part in local power struggles. One known example involved Zhao Ziyang, then the leader of Guangdong province, who tried to oust Chen Hua, the Maoist leader of Shengshi brigade, forty miles south of the provincial capital.21 Chen was a national labour model whom Mao had received in person, but in the late summer of 1964 he stood accused of rape, corruption, extortion and ‘suppression of the masses’. A work team led by Zhao Ziyang finally persuaded two frightened old peasants to come forward and testify against Chen. However, once the team had gone, Chen had the two peasant informers beaten up. They then wrote a letter of protest to Zhao who sent a second work team. When they in turn left, the two peasants were beaten up again. A third work team was dispatched but this time headed by no less a person than Liu Shaoqi’s wife, Wang Guangmei who, somewhat bizarrely, turned up in disguise. At this point Chen Hua decided the game was up and boarded a boat to flee to Hong Kong. However, he was caught and soon afterwards died horribly, electrocuted by a high-voltage transformer at the brigade headquarters. The authorities said that he had committed suicide.