Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  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.

  That year Wang Guangmei also turned up incognito at another commune called Taoyuan, in Hebei province. There she gathered evidence of the success of her husband’s agricultural policies. Mao ridiculed this research and countered it by promoting his own model village, Dazhai, in Shanxi province. Chen Yonggui, its peasant leader, claimed that by applying Mao’s ideas he had performed miracles and had turned a hillside wasteland into a paradise. As with all such model communes and villages, the claims were entirely fraudulent. Dazhai’s ‘miracle’ had been the result of a massive injection of state funds: as a model it was meaningless. Nevertheless, Mao presented Dazhai’s achievements as ‘proof’ that his ideas worked. Liu Shaoqi repeatedly tried to discredit Mao by sending in work teams, each consisting of up to 70 cadres, to gather evidence that its claims of high grain yields were bogus. Only in 1980 was it finally admitted in the People’s Daily that Dazhai had accepted millions of dollars in aid and the help of thousands of soldiers, and that in fact its grain production had declined year by year and Chen Yonggui had executed 141 people during the mid-1960s.

  Unbelievably, even in Xinyang the Maoists were able to make a comeback.22 After 1962, new cadres were assigned to take over from those responsible for the huge death toll. A middle-aged PLA veteran, Wang Zhengang, was appointed to run Gushi county. He began by organizing the delivery of Canadian relief grain because the peasants were too weak to labour in the fields and grow food. The san zi yi bao policies were implemented and the peasants were given a plot to grow food as they wished. The markets were reopened, as were schools, and Wang set up orphanages. Nonetheless, the political campaigns and purges instigated by Mao continued. Inspectors arrived and charged local cadres with under-reporting grain harvests to keep back food supplies. Peasants were summoned to accuse the very cadres who had saved them when they were on the brink of death. Wang, however, survived and was promoted to prefectural Party Secretary and moved to the city of Xinyang.

  In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to destroy those ‘Party persons in power taking the capitalist road’ and the entire province of Henan was torn apart. In this civil war, each side recruited Red Guards in the towns. One group, the Henan Rebel Headquarters, supported Mao, while their opponents supported Liu Shaoqi, naming themselves the February Second Faction after a strike Liu had led before 1949. In the summer of 1967, the Maoists went to Xinyang, seized Wang and brought him back to Gushi. There, in the main courtroom, Red Guards screamed abuse at him and interrogated him until he ‘confessed’. He was accused of betraying socialism and of practising capitalism. When he was broken, the Red Guards announced that he had committed suicide by hanging himself and published a photograph showing his corpse with its tongue hanging out. As loudspeakers broadcast his crimes, the peasants in the villages who had been so passive during the famine became enraged and thousands came to Gushi. There, they surrounded the Red Guards and began beating them to death. Dozens were killed and the rest forced to don white mourning clothes and to crawl across the dirt to pay their respects in front of Wang’s grave. Until 1993, this spot just outside Gushi remained a place of pilgrimage on Qing Ming, the festival at which the Chinese honour the dead. On such days, the peasants brought offerings of food and let off fireworks in his honour. (In 1994 his grave was moved to make way for a new Christian church and apartment blocks.)

  The same scenes were repeated all over China. In effect, the Cultural Revolution was nothing more than a purge of those who had been responsible for ending the famine, a device used by Mao to restore his authority, much as Stalin had done after the Ukrainian famine. It began with an attack on the play ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ and went on to target all those who had criticized the Great Leap Forward, defended Peng Dehuai and blamed Mao. Its chief target was Liu Shaoqi, who was so popular with the peasants that in some places they had begun to call him ‘chairman’. Mao tried to whip up a campaign of hatred against Liu even in his home province of Hunan. Liang Heng, a former Hunanese Red Guard, describes in Son of the Revolution how, on arriving in a town in Hunan, ‘I saw to my horror that in every doorway there hung a corpse! It looked like some kind of eerie mass suicide. Moments later I realised that the twilight had turned straw effigies of Liu Shaoqi into dead flesh.’

  A bitterly worded propaganda document accused Liu of being a ‘fanatical advocate of the rich peasant economy’. His ‘sinister’ policies were, it said, ‘drawn from the rubbish heap of his forerunners Bernstein, Kautsky, Bukharin and the like’. His household responsibility system was an ‘evil’ device for the ‘restoration of capitalism’ and amounted to an incitement to cannibalism: ‘These are the cries of a bloodsucker and in them we can discern the greed and ruthlessness of the exploiting classes, the rural capitalist forces, in their vain attempt to strangle socialism. From first to last this is the bourgeois philosophy of man-eat-man.’23

  Liu was arrested, interrogated, tortured and then left to die half-naked and forgotten in a cellar in Kaifeng, Henan. Peng Dehuai was treated no better. Lin Biao had him taken to a stadium in Beying where he was made to kneel before an audience of 40,000 soldiers. Then he was put in a cell where he was not permitted to sit down or go to the toilet and was subjected to incessant interrog
ations. He finally died in prison in 1973.

  Many other leading figures who can be credited with saving the country by ending the famine met with an equally merciless death. One of the first victims was the writer Deng Tuo who died on 18 May 1966, supposedly by his own hand. Two days later, Kang Sheng decided that he would profit further from his victim’s death and ordered his agents to raid Deng’s home and remove his collection of antiques and paintings which he wanted for himself.24 Wu Han, the author of the play about Hai Rui, died of medical neglect in 1969: his wife, daughter and brother were also persecuted to death.

  A few opponents of Mao survived. Deng Xiaoping, condemned as ‘the number two capitalist roader’ and sent to the countryside in Jiangxi, managed to escape death, though it is not clear why. Chen Yun wisely dropped out of sight from the end of 1962. Mao’s doctor Li Zhisui recounts how Mao’s personal secretary, Tian Jiaying, secretly stopped a document in which Mao explicitly condemned Chen Yun as ‘a bourgeois leaning to the right’. In Guangdong, Zhao Ziyang was seized and beaten by Red Guards who charged him with introducing the san zi yi bao policies and with being ‘an apologist for rich peasants’. He survived, perhaps because Mao recalled his help in early 1959 when he started the anti-hiding and dividing grain campaign. Hu Yaobang also managed to escape retribution but spent six months labouring as a peasant in what was called a May 7th Cadre School. This was of all places in Xinyang, near Luoshan, and has since become Prison Farm No. 51.

  17

  Mao’s Failure and His Legacy

  ‘There are comrades who day in day out talk about the Mao Zedong Thoughts, forgetting, as they do so, the fundamental Marxist concept of the Chairman and his basic method which is to seek the truth from facts.’ Deng Xiaoping, 1978

  For twenty years after the famine China stagnated. The population grew rapidly but little new was built. The airport in every county, like the electricity, the telephones, the cars and the roads that Mao had promised the peasants in 1958, never materialized. In fact, over the next two decades, China managed to complete the construction of only one new railway line. In the countryside, people did not starve but living standards never regained the levels seen in the 1950s. After the famine, Mao ruled for another fourteen years but remained obsessed with justifying his Great Leap Forward and rooting out those whom he felt had betrayed him. Huge numbers were killed or imprisoned in the Cultural Revolution: how many is still not known, but the victims ran into the tens of millions.

  In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao organized his own army just as he had threatened to do at the Lushan summit. These were the urban youth who enlisted as Red Guards and worshipped him as a god. Under his auspices, the Red Guards raided the army’s munitions factories and armouries to equip themselves with machine guns, and in places even with tanks, and then turned them against the Party leadership. Why Liu Shaoqi and his fellow leaders were unable to stop Mao is one of the most extraordinary and puzzling aspects of the famine, for Party members knew that Mao had allowed tens of millions to starve to death and that his Great Leap Forward had been a monumental failure. Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the Party’s decision to keep the famine secret. Mao was only able to call upon the Red Guards to do his bidding because they, out of the whole population, knew the least about his crimes. In the climate of fear that pervaded the country, parents could not bring themselves to tell their children what had happened. Mao wanted the young to distrust and betray the older generation and praised those who exposed their parents. These so-called ‘educated youths’ would not find out what had happened in the countryside until Mao dispensed with them after 1969 and they were sent to live among the peasants.

  As a group, the peasants did not participate in the Cultural Revolution and rural youths rarely left their homes to join the bands of Red Guards creating havoc around the country. Had the peasants answered Mao’s call to anarchy, the economy would have collapsed but no peasant wanted to abandon his fields and go through another great famine. The Cultural Revolution did, however, leave its mark on the countryside. In some places, the Party further impoverished the peasants by levying an additional 5 per cent tax to pay for the cost of organizing these political campaigns and the accommodation of the Red Guards. And some peasants used the political chaos that followed to turn on the cadres responsible for the worst atrocities during the famine, sometimes simply publicly humiliating them but sometimes beating them to death. As in Xinyang, peasants tried to protect those local cadres who had ended the famine and were now attacked for restoring capitalism by introducing Liu Shaoqi’s policies.

  Though the countryside was largely unaffected by the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s triumphant return to power was nevertheless a disaster for the peasants. The renewed effort to build a new society and make new men out of the starving and ragged peasantry meant a return to collective farming and the discouragement of any kind of private initiative. Mao’s vision of a rural Utopia, embodied by the Dazhai model, was revived as if the famine had never taken place and teams of ‘Dazhai inspectors’ patrolled the communes to ensure that Mao’s failed agricultural policies were closely followed. As one peasant from a mountainous region put it: ‘Really, for us the famine lasted twenty years.’ Though mass famine deaths ended after 1961, hunger remained endemic. Most peasants went without basic commodities such as cooking oil, meat, fruit and tea. One intellectual sent to work in the countryside of northern Henan from 1969 to 1973 recalled what life was like: ‘Even at that time the peasants were not eating wheat. Their main food was still dried sweet potato and, twice a day, this was all they ate. They lived in complete destitution. No house had any doors left, all the wood had been taken away.’

  Not until after Mao’s death in 1976 did per capita grain production reach the level of 1957, and in the early 1970s food production actually fell once more to levels seen during the famine. As a Chinese expert wrote in 1980: ‘For nearly twenty years from the Second Five-year Plan period (1958-62) to the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 there was little or no rise in living standards. Each peasant’s annual grain ration remained at around 400 lbs of unprocessed grain... and consumption of vegetable oils, eggs, and aquatic products, according to our estimates, did not return to the 1957 level.’1 Not until 1978 did the peasants eat as much as they had in the mid-1950s.

  Up until Mao’s death, China claimed that grain production had kept pace with the growth in population but the figures were falsified. Peasants grew sweet potatoes, the easiest and most reliable crop to plant, and local officials, under pressure to show that Mao’s policies worked, calculated grain harvests by weighing the sweet potatoes. Since a sweet potato crop from one field weighs five times as much as wheat grown in the same field they appeared to meet their quotas. Yet once the sweet potatoes were dried, they shrank to a tenth of their original weight and even then were no substitute for good and nourishing wheat or rice. This type of fraud was widespread and villagers often drew up a false set of figures to show officials who came from outside to inspect their work. The system functioned but it barely enabled the cities to be fed and the peasants’ diet was worse than it had been before the revolution. A study by the World Bank in 1985 concluded that peasants in equally poor countries had until recently a considerably richer and more varied diet than had the Chinese. Even in 1982, by which time the Chinese diet had become considerably more varied, ‘the direct per capita consumption of grain [in China] is about 209 kg per year and is among the world’s highest and exceeds that in India by 60 per cent and Indonesia by more than 30 per cent’.2

  In the years after the famine, the peasants not only ate a poor and monotonous diet, they also lived in the same broken-down mud huts. Few were able to replace the wooden windows and doors and the household goods taken away during the Great Leap Forward. The Party outlawed all carpentry and handicrafts which were not undertaken by state-run units. Peasants in poor agricultural areas, who in the past had supplemented their income by carpentry, basket weaving and
dozens of other trades, now had only farming on which to rely. Supplies of factory-made goods, even clothing, were often not available and many peasants were dressed in rags or in garments made of straw and grass. For years after the famine, the peasants lived little better than their draught animals, indeed they often had to pull their ploughs themselves.

  Mao’s policies stifled recovery from the famine. In the name of egalitarianism, no one was allowed to be seen to prosper from activities such as raising poultry or selling vegetables, even if they were permitted, without attracting censure and punishment as ‘rich peasants’. Peasants could not, for instance, raise more than one or two pigs per household. Nor could they sell these animals privately. Anyone caught slaughtering a pig without permission would be sentenced to one or even three years in prison. The penalty for buying or selling oxen (regarded as a means of production) was even higher – five or six years’ imprisonment. Peasant militia also patrolled the villages to stop the villagers from indulging in the most harmless pursuits if they smacked of bourgeois individualism. The small pleasures of life, even playing cards, became crimes against the state.

  The peasants were also left to struggle with another legacy of the Great Leap Forward, farming land that had often been ruined by deep ploughing, by ill-conceived irrigation projects or by growing unsuitable crops. In north China, the fertility of some 7.41 million acres of soil had been destroyed by wells and irrigation schemes which had caused the water table to rise. When the water evaporated from the sodden fields, a damaging deposit of salts and alkalis was left.3 And the crudely built dams and irrigation works that they had created at great cost proved worse than useless, and in some cases even fatal – the collapse in August 1975 of two dams in Henan built during the Great Leap Forward has already been discussed in Chapter 5.