Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  As well as instituting the rectification campaign, in 1961 Anhui also discarded the central tenet of the Great Leap Forward – complete public ownership of land. As Mao later remarked bitterly, the province reverted to capitalism. Just why the provincial Party Secretary Zeng Xisheng swung from an extreme ‘leftist’ position to one on the ‘far right’ is not clear. Perhaps, sensing that the tide was turning, he was motivated by self-interest. Perhaps he felt genuine revulsion at what he had done. For much of 1960 he had been in Shandong province to the north, where he had enforced Mao’s policies as brutally as in Anhui. In August 1960, he came back to accompany the senior leaders Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen on a tour of Anhui. It was at this moment that Zeng first proposed giving the land back to the peasants and abandoning Mao’s great endeavour. According to his doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao was still unwilling to confront his failures and was so depressed that he retreated to his bed. Zeng cautiously began to try out what came to be known as ze ren tian or ‘contract field farming’ under which peasants were given back partial control of their land and grain levies were reduced.

  What Zeng attempted to do created a split in the Party that would tear it apart. One camp supported Zeng’s ze ren tian and a return to private farming. The other camp, grouped around Mao, would admit no compromise and insisted on continuing with collective farming and the communes. Tensions rose in the winter of 1960-1 as central Party inspection teams produced incontrovertible evidence of the famine’s terrible cost. The events which followed are described later but, ironically, Zeng Xisheng lost his position, and later his life, not for causing the death of so many people but for introducing the reforms which saved many more lives. He was dismissed in 1962 and appointed to a lowly position in Shanghai before being brought to work in the South-West China Bureau in Chengdu alongside Peng Dehuai. In 1967, Red Guards were sent from Hefei to seek him out. They accused him of causing the deaths of millions. He was dragged from his home and beaten to death. Officially, the cause of death was high blood pressure. When he was cremated at the Babaoshan crematorium for revolutionary heroes in Beijing, Mao praised his achievements.

  In Anhui, Zeng Xisheng and his victims have been forgotten, wiped from the official memory. No photograph of him has been published for many years but older peasants still curse his memory. They say he held dancing parties at the height of the famine and forced women into his bed. Only a few will credit this crude, fat tyrant with daring to introduce reforms which in 1961 probably saved the lives of many of them.

  How many did die in the famine in Anhui? Officials now claim that 2 million died and that a similar number fled. The 1989 Anhui Statistical Yearbook indicates a death toll due to the famine of 2.37 million out of a population of 33 million. Chen Yizi, the senior Party official who defected in 1989, claims the real figure is 8 million, a quarter of the population. Chen based his figure on the research he carried out after 1979 when he was given access to internal Party records. This enormous figure seems entirely plausible. In Fengyang, 51,000 are recorded as having starved to death just in the winter of 1959-60, and altogether a quarter (83,000) of its 335,000 people are estimated to have perished. If anything, the death toll might be higher still. Ding Shu estimates that in Fengyang 90,000 died while Chen Yizi has said that one in three perished. Interviews in other parts of Anhui suggest that Fengyang’s death toll was not exceptional.

  10

  The Other Provinces

  ‘With a basket of fragrant flowers, let me sing for you. I came to the fair country of Nanniwan. This is a good land where nature is beautiful, With crops, cattle and sheep everywhere. Once, the mountains of Nanniwan were barren without a trace of human habitation But now it is different, the new Nanniwan has changed, It is like the rich farmland south of the Changjiang River.’ Popular Communist song from the 1940s

  The imagination balks at picturing a famine which brought hunger and fear to 500 million people across the vast territory of one of the world’s largest countries. For the first time, even in Sichuan which possesses some of the richest arable land in the world, peasants perished in their millions. Those in the rich and empty lands of the north, where life is usually easier, were reduced to a ration of 9 ounces of grain a day.1 In Liaoning province, a centre for heavy industry, peasants who fled to its cities starved to death. In A Mother’s Ordeal, which recounts the life of a woman who grew up there, the author Steven Mosher paints this picture:

  Conditions must have been desperate in the countryside, for the streets of Shenyang [the capital of Liaoning] were full of hungry beggars. There were patched and tattered scarecrows with hollow cheeks and lifeless eyes who resembled living skeletons. There were children with pipestem limbs and swollen stomachs crying piteously for food. There were young men so crazed with hunger that they would snatch a leaf pancake out of your hand if you ventured too close.

  In Hebei province, which surrounds two of China’s richest cities, Beijing and Tianjin, conditions were equally bad. The Chinese journalist Ge Yang, who was exiled as a rightist to one rural area of Hebei, recalled how on the streets people said peasants were selling the flesh of dead children.2 The authors of Chinese Village, Socialist State, the history of another rural district in Hebei, described what happened there:

  By late 1959 Wugong villagers were reduced to eating cornstalks. There was little fuel and no cooking oil. It would be two decades before cooking oil became readily available. That winter, vegetables grown in fields fertilised by excrement often had to be eaten uncooked... In the worst-off regions, weak, dispirited villagers left some of the meagre crop to rot in the fields... by winter and into next spring, there was no nutrition and no medicine. Sick people died: so did infants and the elderly. In Raoyang, a few husbands sold wives for food and cash.

  Perhaps the most terrible aspect of the famine was that there was nowhere to escape from it. Even in the most remote corners of the high mountains of Tibet or in the distant oases of Xinjiang in the far west, there was no sanctuary. An exodus was impossible because the country’s borders were closed and tightly guarded. People in Guangdong died trying to swim to Hong Kong just as Kazakh nomads in Xinjiang were shot trying to ride across the mountains to their fellow tribesmen in the Soviet Union. Since peasants had no way of knowing how widespread the famine was, many who fled their homes perished on the road, exhausted. Interviewees recalled seeing such beggars dying by roads in Gansu, Hubei and Guangzhou. Those who could tried to turn off the highways and venture on tracks up into the hills where the Party’s control was weaker and the chances of survival greater.

  Flight had always been the traditional response to famine and so it was in 1958-61. Although some provincial leaders in Anhui, Henan and elsewhere set up roadblocks, they could not always prevent the peasants from escaping. At least a million fled Anhui;3 a million and a half escaped from Hunan, equal to 4 per cent of the population; and in one year alone at least 1.6 million emigrated from Shandong.4 Henan peasants followed tradition and headed for the north-western provinces. Sichuan peasants set out for minority regions in the surrounding mountains or trekked across the border to Guizhou province. In Hebei, some local governments even organized a migration to Manchuria which was reputed to have land to spare and jobs in its giant iron and steel works. Minority areas lured many, both because they were less densely populated and because the Party dealt more leniently with the ethnic Hans within them, as its first priority was to control the indigenous peoples. At least a million refugees made their way to Inner Mongolia in just twelve months.5 Several hundred thousand are thought to have moved to the Tibet Autonomous Region, prompting Western newspapers to suggest that the rebellious Tibetans were being deliberately swamped with immigrants.6 It is difficult to put a figure on this mass internal migration but it may have been in the order of at least 10 million.7

  These migrations were often accompanied by the break-up of families. In Gansu the divorce rate rose by 30-40 per cent and in a few counties by as much as 60 per cent during the famine.
8 The peasants frequently sold their wives in exchange for food or money. Sometimes the wives had no choice but to leave when the last food was reserved for blood relatives or when, though there was nothing to eat, their husbands felt bound to stay and tend the graves of their ancestors. In some areas of China, a woman could easily find a new husband. In Heilongjiang, with its large labour force of immigrant workers, marriageable women were in short supply and it was common for two or even three men to share a woman between them. Often two brothers would agree to cohabit with one woman.9 Another source states that in general, ‘the poorer the region, the greater the amount of wife selling. To hide the shame, the wives were called cousins... If the chief family earner died, a teenage daughter might be sold to the highest bidder in a distant place to obtain grain to keep the rest of the household alive.’10

  When the famine was over, local governments in parts of Sichuan and Gansu negotiated agreements with authorities elsewhere, requiring them to force the wives to return to their original homes. Often they refused to go back to husbands who had sold them.11 In Hebei, one such husband went to court to recover his ‘property rights’ but the court decided for the wife.12 Prostitution was also frequently reported. In Gansu, one former prison inmate recalled how local peasant women came to the gates to prostitute themselves in the hope of obtaining a wotou, or bun, to eat. In Anhui, too, there were so-called ‘brothel work teams’ where cadres kept women who would sleep with them in exchange for food.13 At the end of the famine, some women migrated to areas of Henan or Gansu where large tracts of arable land had been depopulated. After the dismissal of Gansu’s hard-left leader in 1961, women made up two-fifths of the immigrants in the province and in Hebei peasants moved to resettle farmland in the Xinyang district.

  In their bid to find a place of safety, women had to abandon children whom they could no longer feed. Some children were sold in the cities or dumped at railway stations or in hospitals. A nurse in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, recalled one such incident:

  During that winter of 1959, there was an event which occurred in my hospital. The nurse of the night shift went upstairs to go to bed. She stumbled over something and screamed in panic. People came running, thinking she had been attacked. After a while, when she could speak, she said she had found a strange object on the stairs leading to the third floor. Others followed her there and found a small cardboard box in which a baby lay wrapped in cotton rags. On a scrap of old newspaper were written the words: ‘To kind-hearted people, please look after her. From a mother who regrets her faults.’ At the beginning, only female babies were abandoned but later on boys were left behind by those who hoped the hospital would feed them.

  Other infants were left by the roadside. In the yellow-earth country of north-west China, people abandoned their children by the roadside in holes dug out of the soft soil. One interviewee described what happened:

  Those who still had the strength left the village begging and many died on the road. The road from the village to the neighbouring province was strewn with bodies, and piercing wails came from holes on both sides of the road. Following the cries, you could see the tops of the heads of children who were abandoned in those holes. A lot of parents thought their children had a better chance of surviving if they were adopted by somebody else. The holes were just deep enough so that the children could not get out to follow them but could be seen by passers-by who might adopt them.14

  Still others were abandoned in caves and mine-shafts in the mountains. Stories also circulated about how, in some places, villagers would kill and eat such infants. In western Xinjiang parents gave their children to the nomadic Mongol or Kazakh herdsmen to look after as they were thought to have enough milk and other food. Many children who were adopted or purchased met unhappy fates. One interviewee from Nanjing told the story of how his neighbour, a childless worker, bought a 6-year-old girl from a starving Anhui peasant. She was cruelly teased by other children in the housing block as a ‘stray dog’ until her life was made so unbearable that she finally killed herself. Another source recalled that a writer and Party member in Hefei, Anhui province, was dismissed after purchasing a young girl from a starving peasant and later using her as his concubine.

  When the peasants could not flee, the only alternative was to rebel. All over China, desperate peasants organized attacks on local granaries. Sometimes the peasants fought each other: one source recalled a battle between Hebei and Henan peasants armed with sticks and rocks in which 3,000 were killed. It is hard to be certain about the scale and frequency of such attacks and fights but they were certainly not rare, especially in 1960. According to Chen Yizi, there were numerous attacks on lower Party officials: ‘There were some small-scale rebellions and even cases when whole counties rose up against the government, sometimes, as in Guizhou province, led by a village Party Secretary.’15 In Hebei province, Muslim Hui robber bands mounted an attack on a granary at Hejian which led the authorities to equip the militia with machine guns and to encircle the granaries with barbed wire.16 In Fujian, when a hundred peasants stormed a grain store under the leadership of a village Party Secretary, the authorities called out the army.17 In Shandong, former Kuomintang officers were accused of organizing the rebellions there and were executed.18 There are also reliable reports of riots and small-scale attacks on state granaries in Anhui. In Sichuan, a similar attack which has been widely recorded occurred in 1961 in Ruijin county. There, in the mountains east of Chengdu, peasants successfully stormed a granary and carried off the grain. Later, the head of the local militia was arrested and imprisoned for failing to order his men to open fire on the peasants. A similarly successful attack took place at Zhengya in the same province because the local militia, whose own families were starving, did nothing to prevent it.19 In addition to the granaries, starving bands of peasants frequently attacked trains. After one such band blocked a train on the line from Hebei province to Shandong and pilfered it for food, the authorities installed twelve guards on each train. Heavily armed guards also manned the trains carrying export grain to the Soviet Union. In Gansu, desperate peasants even attacked army trains. An eyewitness related how a garrison was cut off when the local populace stormed one train:

  The starving people behaved as if they had discovered a ‘new continent’ and crowded around the train begging for food. The soldiers raised their rifles with sharp bayonets and confronted the crowd. These people knew they had little to lose. Their only hope of surviving was to seize the grain on the train. The crowds erupted like boiling water and the soldiers trembled although they had rifles in their hands. One of them nervously pulled the trigger and the explosion shocked and agitated the crowd. They rushed on to the train and grabbed sacks of grain. The desperate guards fired their guns into the air, but this did not work. The train was quickly looted. A few days later, another train approached the station and many, many starving people flooded the place. They were agitated and carried guns, buckets and so on. But this time the soldiers fired their guns directly at the people. The station became a battlefield. People had to run away. How could the ‘people’s army’ now shoot its own people? Later, it was said that the military garrison had itself been without food for three days.20

  In a similar case, the local populace stormed a military train carrying grain for starving soldiers and scientists working to create China’s first nuclear bomb. In the middle of Qinghai, a gigantic complex of laboratories and workshops called the Ninth Academy had been established on a desolate plateau. Surrounding China’s ‘Los Alamos’ was a complex of labour camps and state farms. Despite the priority given to building the bomb, especially after 1959, both scientists and prisoners ran out of food. In 1960, Marshal Nie Rongzhen, who was in charge of the project, reportedly held a telephone conference begging all military commanders to donate food. A train carrying these supplies was blocked by starving villagers before it arrived. When the armed guards did not open fire, the villagers ransacked it. According to an article published in China in 1989, when th
e peasants discovered the food was going to the People’s Liberation Army, they returned and put the sacks of grain back on the train.21

  Such attacks and rebellions were numerous enough for President Liu Shaoqi to issue a dire warning in 1962. If nothing was done, he said, China would face a civil war as severe as that of the Soviet Union in 1918-21. He issued instructions to prepare for the imposition of martial law, although he stopped short of authorizing troops to open fire on civilians. Yet no matter how rebellious the peasants felt, the majority were usually incapable of organizing concerted resistance. They could not gather in sufficient numbers and almost always lacked arms. Indeed, at the height of the famine, they possessed virtually nothing and hunger had gravely weakened them. The militia guarding the grain stores were invariably stronger and better fed, and could usually rout them. If the militia failed to suppress an uprising or joined it, then the army was always available. Most army troops were well provided for and so did not starve during the famine. The only real threat to the government might have come from urban dwellers but they never became as desperate as the peasants.

  The famine may have tested the loyalty of Communist cadres but few of them dared break ranks either to join a rebellion or to distribute state grain on their own authority. One well-known exception was the author Zhao Shouli in Shanxi. He used his authority in Yangcheng county to persuade the authorities to distribute grain and is credited with having thus saved many lives. Ding Shu in Ren Huo recounts that for this ‘crime’, Zhao was seized by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. They then asked local people to come forward and testify against him. Although the locals refused, he was still struggled and later killed.22