Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  Part Two The Great Hunger

  7

  An Overview of the Famine

  ‘The evil deeds of evil rulers are the source of disorder.’ Mencius

  The famine of 1958-61 was unique in Chinese history. For the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger, from the cold wheat-growing lands of Heilongjiang in the far north to the lush semi-tropical island of Hainan in the south. It was a situation which, even during the famines of the 1920s, experts had said was impossible. They had believed that even if one part of the country suffered shortages, China was so big and varied that there would always be a surplus somewhere else. Yet this time people starved everywhere.

  Dynastic records describe how other great calamities had reduced the population of China by as much as half, but these were the consequence of great convulsions such as the civil war which followed the Qin dynasty’s collapse some 2,000 years earlier, or brutal invasions, like that of Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the fourteenth century. In 1959, China was at peace, unified under one government, with a modern transport and communications system. Moreover, the Communist government was the first since the seventeenth century to be entirely in the hands of ethnic Chinese acting independently of outside forces. The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, who had regarded themselves as a separate race of conquerors, had been swept away. The Western powers’ influence had come to an end, and the Japanese invaders had been defeated. Even Russia, with the departure of her experts in 1960, no longer exerted any influence over the Chinese government. For the first time the Chinese Communist Party was free of the influence of the Comintern which supervised the affairs of other Communist Parties.

  The famine left no one in China untouched but it did not affect the country uniformly. Many factors played a role – geography, the policies of local leaders, nationality, sex, age, political affiliation, class background, and whether one lived in the city or the countryside. Geography was important but this famine was peculiar in that its effects were not concentrated in the traditional famine belt. Indeed, some of the richest regions suffered more than others. The traditional famine belt lies between the two main river systems of China, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, which flow from west to east. The Yellow River rises deep inland and flows through Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and on through the provinces of Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei and northern Henan across the North China plain. This is the ancient heartland of Chinese civilization but the river has been called China’s Sorrow. Its silt-laden waters bring fertility to the lands through which they flow but also disastrous floods.

  Further south, the Huai River is still more notorious because for much of its length through the provinces of Henan and Anhui, it winds through flat land, prone to extensive flooding. In times of drought, the soil is baked rock hard but in good years this region, like the North China plain, produces important grain surpluses to feed the coastal cities. Yet while all the provinces along these rivers have experienced severe famines, their fate between 1958 and 1961 depended as much on the acts of their leaders as on natural conditions. Henan and Anhui fared the worst, being governed by two ultra-left-wing leaders whose fanaticism led to both terrible atrocities and an enormous death toll. Events in both provinces are described separately in the following two chapters.

  China’s greatest river is the Yangtze. It rises in the Tibetan plateau, gathers in the fertile basin of Sichuan province, perhaps the most arable region in China, pours through narrow gorges and then meanders across the richest parts of central China until it reaches the sea near Shanghai. Historically, mass famines were rare in Sichuan, but in 1958-61 this great granary recorded the highest number of deaths of any province: it too was controlled by another Maoist stalwart, Li Jingquan. His enthusiasm for the Great Leap Forward ensured that food shortages hit the Sichuanese earlier than the peasants in some other provinces. On the other hand, Sichuan recovered more quickly than the northern provinces because in the south peasants can grow two or more crops a year. Events in Sichuan and the rest of south-west China are described in Chapter 10.

  Some of the last territory to be conquered by the Han Chinese lies south of the Yangtze and is still inhabited by large populations of minority peoples. During the Long March in the 1930s, even the Communists were astonished by the poverty of some minority peasants who could barely afford to clothe themselves. In these regions, Han Chinese tend to farm the flat valley lands. Though generally more prosperous than the indigenous peoples, in 1958-61 they had less to eat. Since they lived in the most accessible districts, the authorities were able to seize more of their food supplies and so they died in greater numbers than the minorities living in the remote hills.

  In the west of China, Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs and other peoples are scattered over steppes, mountains and deserts. In some ways, these minorities were better off during the famine because the authorities, however ruthless, found it harder to enforce their demands; and when the grain was taken away, they could forage in the mountains, forests and grasslands. This was not the case among the deeply religious and independent Tibetans. Communist policies there provoked a major revolt, and repression combined with famine wrought a terrible disaster described in Chapter 11.1

  The three provinces of Manchuria – Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang – and Inner Mongolia had been settled by Han Chinese in large numbers only in recent times. The famine of 1958-61 brought another wave of settlers fleeing hunger to the south. Inner Mongolia alone absorbed an extra million refugees and Heilongjiang province saw its population increase from 14 million to 20 million between 1958 and 1964, largely because of immigration. Yet even in Manchuria people starved, despite the fact that the region normally has a surplus of food, though the famine there seems to have struck later than in Sichuan and many other provinces.

  The coastal provinces and cities traditionally import grain, relying on the inland provinces for up to a third of their needs, but are prime exporters of cash crops such as tea, cotton, silk and fruit. When the customary grain imports from inland ceased, their inhabitants starved. However, in the later stages of the famine many of those living in Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong had the advantage of receiving food packages from overseas relatives, for their provinces are the ancestral homes of the majority of Chinese living abroad. One interviewee recalled how her mother travelled regularly by fishing boat from Malaysia to Guangdong carrying barrels of pork fat steeped in oil which saved her home village from starvation. Yet although these provinces are geographically similar, their experiences during the famine differed. Zhejiang had, before the launch of the Great Leap Forward, been a stronghold of private farming. In the campaign against opponents of collectivization, those who abandoned the collectives were subjected to brutal suppression. In 1958, in one county alone, Yongjia, near the city of Wenzhou, 200,000 peasants were ‘struggled’ as ‘right opportunists’ and many were killed or sent to labour camps.2 Neighbouring Fujian province had to bear the burden of being the first line of defence against a possible invasion by the Kuomintang across the straits from Taiwan. Between 1959 and 1963, the province was placed under strict military control and had to feed the large numbers of troops quartered there. Many people were arrested as suspected spies after the authorities required a considerable part of the population to report on their neighbours.3 In Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong, the government also took absurd measures to boost grain production. Peasants were ordered to cut down their orchards and uproot their tea bushes and instead plant grain. And to open up more land for grain, the hills in the lightly wooded interior were set on fire as part of a crude slash-and-burn programme and then sown with grain. The first year’s crop was good because ash enriches the soil, but the following year the harvest was poor. By 1960 the Fujianese were eating nothing but sweet potatoes. These regions are also noted both for breeding freshwater fish and sea fish but interviewees said that in the midst of the famine peasants and fishermen were strictly forbidden to engage in any private fishing.

  Generally
, those who lived in the great cities on the coast and along the main waterways, such as Wuhan on the Yangtze, suffered least for they received ration tickets. Moreover, plans to establish urban communes were never implemented and the urban population was never forbidden to cook at home. Many did die, though, especially the old and the very young, but the famine took longer to affect them, as Chapter 15 explains. Even in the very worst provinces, such as Anhui, the urban population was sheltered to such an extent that often they had no knowledge of what was happening in the villages.

  The most vulnerable section of China’s population, around five per cent, were those whom Mao called ‘enemies of the people’. Anyone who had in previous campaigns of repression been labelled a ‘black element’ was given the lowest priority in the allocation of food. Landlords, rich peasants, former members of the Nationalist regime, religious leaders, rightists, counter-revolutionaries and the families of such individuals died in the greatest numbers. During the Great Leap Forward, many more people were placed in these categories and often imprisoned. As Chapter 12 explains, the penal system underwent a huge expansion as millions were arrested without trial. Most of the new penal colonies were established in the frozen northern wastes of Heilongjiang or in sparsely settled lands in the west, where it is hard to grow food at the best of times. Up to half the prisoners dispatched to provinces such as Qinghai or Gansu died. Indeed the inmates of the penal colonies suffered a double misfortune. The provinces where they were imprisoned were led by hard-line extremists whose policies devastated the local population and prisoners alike.

  Not surprisingly, those who suffered least throughout China were Party members. They consistently had first call on the state’s grain reserves, they lived in separate compounds closed off from the outside world, and they ate in separate canteens. Even in labour camps, prisoners who had been Party members received more food than their fellow inmates.4 Members of the families of officials admitted in interviews that they often had little inkling of the misery outside their privileged world and what they did know came from their servants. In the countryside, the commune leaders did not eat in the collective kitchens with the peasants but in separate canteens. Many sources have testified that the food there was always adequate and often very good, with the cadres receiving not only sufficient grain but also meat of all kinds. Zhang Zhongliang, the First Secretary of Gansu, where at least a million people starved to death, travelled with his own personal cook. In Henan’s Xinyang prefecture, one of the worst affected areas in the country, the Party Secretary Lu Xianwen would travel to local communes and order in advance elaborate banquets of twenty-four courses, according to Party documents. Only at the village level did the lowest officials such as production team leaders sometimes starve to death.

  The death tolls during the famine will be discussed later, but broadly speaking the bulk of those who died were the ordinary Han Chinese peasants living in the new communes. By the end of 1958, virtually the entire rural population of some 500 million was under the control of this new and bizarre form of organization which formed the institutional framework of the Great Leap Forward. Mao and his cronies boasted that the communes were the gateway to heaven and Rang Sheng composed several ditties for the peasants to repeat:

  Communism is paradise.

  The People’s Communes

  are the bridge to it.

  Communism is heaven.

  The Commune is the ladder.

  If we build that ladder

  We can climb the heights.

  The peasants soon came to regard the communes as an instrument of terror. They were set up in a great rush in the summer of 1958, often within a month, sometimes within forty-eight hours. The source of their inspiration was the Communist Manifesto in which Marx envisaged organizing the peasants into industrial armies based in ‘agro-cities’ which would close the gap between town and country. Around 10,000 peasants were grouped into each commune, although sometimes they contained two or three times that number. To create a commune, the local authorities merely merged the ‘higher collectives’ which had been set up in 1955-6. The first commune established in April 1958 at Chayashan in Henan province brought together 27 collectives, 9,300 farms and 43,000 people. As the Party put it, ‘In 1958, a new social organization appeared fresh as the morning sun above the broad horizon of East Asia.’5 The communes formed one of the Party’s ‘Three Red Banners’ – the other two being the Great Leap Forward and ‘the general line for socialist construction’ which would propel China into Communism. They set out to achieve the abolition of all private property, the industrialization of the countryside and the complete fusion of the state bureaucracy, the Party and the peasantry into a militarized and disciplined organization. Early each morning, the peasants would march to work behind a red flag, in some cases even carrying rifles. Within the commune they were formed into production teams, which sometimes comprised the entire workforce of a small village, and these production teams were grouped within a larger unit called a brigade. Special detachments of exemplary workers were drafted as ‘shock troops’ who would work twenty-four hours without a break, while the rest of the commune worked two shifts. There were even militarized teams of shock women workers.

  For a few months in 1958, commune leaders actually separated men and women into different living quarters. (Indeed Mao even wondered whether it would suffice for men and women to meet twice a month for the purposes of procreation.) This separation first took place at the Xushui commune in Hebei but was later extended to many parts of the country, including Henan, Hunan and Anhui, as well as to battalions dispatched to work on dams and other construction projects.6 In one commune in Anhui province, men and women lived in dormitories at opposite ends of the village. The commune leaders believed that this separation was good for production and stressed that men and women, including married couples, could ‘collectively’ attend meetings and work in the fields.7 The Communist Party’s explicit aim was to destroy the family as an institution:

  The framework of the individual family, which has existed for thousands of years, has been shattered for all time... We must regard the People’s Commune as our family and not pay too much attention to the formation of a separate family of our own. For years motherly love has been glorified... but it is wrong to degrade a person from a social to a biological creature... the dearest people in the world are our parents, yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party... for it is not the family which has given us everything but the Communist Party and the great revolution... Personal love is not so important: therefore women should not claim too much of their husbands’ energy.8

  To this end, the elderly were sent off to live in ‘happiness homes’ portrayed as retirement homes, while children were separated from their parents and placed in nurseries or boarding schools. In most communes, such plans were only briefly realized, if at all, but the cadres were almost universally successful in destroying domestic life by banning cooking and eating at home. Collective kitchens were set up everywhere and operated for at least three years. Usually the largest house in the village was turned into the kitchen where the food was cooked in large pots. A few places had communal dining halls but, more often than not, people squatted on the ground to eat their food. Only later on in the famine were they allowed to return to their huts to eat as families.

  The agro-cities never actually existed as such, but in many places ambitious plans were set in motion. In Anhui’s Fengyang county, cadres decided that they would refashion the county town by straightening out its twisting lanes. ‘The streets should run in straight lines with four lanes, and in the middle there should be gardens and flowers,’ urged a planning conference.9 The dissident journalist Liu Binyan, who was exiled as a rightist to a village in Shanxi province in the north-west, recalled even more ambitious plans:

  There was no underground water in the mountain village but orders came for a fountain to be set up on the main street. The people rarely ever had a scrap of meat but
were ordered to carve out cave dwellings in the mountainsides to house a zoo containing tigers and lions. Their carefully tended terraced fields were destroyed to erect a miniature Summer Palace.10

  Many more such wonderful institutions were supposedly set up overnight. Fengyang county claimed that by the end of 1958 it had established 154 specialized red universities, 46 agricultural middle schools, 509 primary schools, 24 agricultural technical schools, 156 clubs, 44 cultural palaces and 105 theatrical troupes.11 The latter helped to provide a relentless programme of revolutionary songs which continued while the peasants worked and ate. If they were working around the clock, there were performances or broadcasts all night. Even when they were supposedly at rest, the peasants were obliged to attend political meetings and rallies.

  In theory, the fantastic harvests were supposed to create unprecedented leisure for the peasants. When Mao visited Hebei’s Xushui commune and heard of the great autumn harvest expected, he recommended: ‘Plant a little less and do half a day’s work. Use the other half for culture: study science, promote culture and recreation, run a college and middle school.’ Yet such was the reality that, at the end of 1958, the People’s Daily ran an article headlined ‘See that the Peasants take rest’. It pointed out that an experiment had been carried out which compared the achievements of peasants forced to work four or five days without sleep, with those of a team which stopped at midnight and had two rest periods during the day. More was achieved, it said, by those allowed to rest. So the paper recommended that the peasants should not be overworked but allowed to sleep.

  At the same time, the peasants were forced to hand over virtually all their private possessions. In some places, a Utopian madness gripped the villagers. One senior leader, Bo Yibo, later described what happened in a town in Hubei province: