Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  Despite the evident failure of the Great Leap Forward irrigation schemes, peasants continued to be sent to labour on still greater and more pointless projects, the most famous of which was the Red Flag Canal in northern Henan’s Linxian county. There, tens of thousands toiled without machinery in the late 1960s to re-route a river by tunnelling a channel through a mountain and then along a bed built on the side of steep cliffs. Unaided by engineers the peasants built 134 tunnels and 150 aqueducts, and moved enough earth to build a road 42,480 miles long. Aside from these showcase marvels, peasants had to terrace mountainsides all over the countryside, as had been done at Dazhai, and since grain was the only agricultural product that mattered, peasants had to grow it irrespective of natural conditions. Finally, to open more land for grain, forests were cut down and lakes drained.

  The reluctant peasants had also once again to follow the eight-point charter drawn up by Mao in 1958 (see Chapter 5). In China: Science Walks on Two Legs, the two American authors record how they were taken to Dazhai in 1974 and told of the benefits of using animal and human wastes instead of chemical fertilizer. Their hosts talked, too, of the advantages of close planting, the new hybrid species they had created and the innovative agricultural tools they had built.4 Many others were taken around Dazhai and books poured forth about its success and the heroism of its peasant leader, Chen Yonggui. As late as 1976, Penguin Books published China: The Quality of Life by Rewi Alley and Wilfred Burchett which lavished praise on Dazhai’s wonders.

  In the real world, the peasants resorted to passive opposition and evasion in order to feed themselves, as the journalist and dissident Liu Binyan records:

  The starving peasants resorted to the only legal form of protest in China – a work slowdown – and they would continue to do this for the next thirty years. Every morning and every afternoon, after we set out to work collectively, we would sit down and chat for half an hour upon reaching the fields. After starting work, we often stood still leaning on our hoes and chatting for another half-hour. Then, when the regular break arrived, the peasants would take out their pipes and smoke for an hour.5

  The peasants still talked about their hope that one day they would get their own land back, or that at least the Party would relent so that they could return to the policies of 1961 and 1962. ‘They knew that if they could only divide the land once more, they would all eat well again,’ said one writer who spent time in a village in Sichuan. In Anhui, a rural cadre told me that when he was obliged to go round the villages urging the peasants to grow more grain, they would tell him that the only way forward was to go back to the ze ren tian. In some places, the peasants secretly continued to farm the land they had divided up in that period or grew food on land in the hills, far away from official view. Some peasants even formed secret societies to fight for the return of their land. In one township in north-western Sichuan, a group of peasants banded together in what they called ‘The Chinese People’s Freedom Party’. In 1972, its twelve leaders were arrested and executed as counterrevolutionaries. It has been claimed that such movements were not uncommon and that they often had the backing of village-level cadres.

  Meanwhile, the majority waited for Mao to die and hoped that, when he did, the communes would be abandoned. After his death in the autumn of 1976, his successor Hua Guofeng was determined to continue with Mao’s policies but the peasants secretly started to share out the land. Anhui peasants say this began in 1977, and by the following year the Party had little choice but to go along with it. In 1978, 200 million peasants, or one in four, were not getting enough to eat and productivity had fallen to levels lower than during the Han dynasty. In 1978, an Anhui peasant grew 1,597 lbs of grain in a year, less than the average yield 2,000 years earlier when peasants had managed 2,200 lbs.

  Official Communist Party history records that the first peasants to challenge Mao’s policies were the Xiao Gang production team of Li Yuan commune in Fengyang county. The daring of this village derived from its experiences in the Great Leap Forward when 60 starved to death, 76 fled and only 39 people and one ox survived. The villagers were resolved not to suffer again, and on 24 November 1978, they attended a meeting organized by the production chief, Yen Chungang. The heads of eighteen households, most of whom shared the same surname as Yen, signed an agreement, solemnized by affixing their thumb print, under which they vowed to keep their acts secret. If discovery led to the arrest of the leaders, the rest promised to raise their children. The peasants then secretly split the production team’s land amongst themselves under the household responsibility system or bao chan dao hu, a variant of Zeng Xisheng’s ze ren tian. Soon, they were being held up as a national model for the whole country and later the original contract was enshrined behind a glass case in the Museum of Revolutionary History in Beijing.6

  An alternative version of events suggests that the abandonment of the communes was instigated by Deng Xiaoping. One of his followers, Wan Li, soon after being promoted to Party Secretary of Anhui following Mao’s death, issued six guidelines relaxing restrictions on private farming and trading. Peasants could now grow vegetables on 3/10ths of a mu instead of 2/10ths and did not have to pay taxes on wheat and oil-bearing plants grown on private plots. Deng Xiaoping, then Vice-Chairman of the Communist Party, gave his blessing to what were known as the Anhui liu tiao, or Anhui’s Six Measures, and suggested that Zhao Ziyang, who had been appointed to take charge of Sichuan, should follow suit. The latter soon issued further measures of reform and even led a group of commune bosses on a tour of Western Europe to introduce them to the marvels of commercial farming.

  The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress at the close of 1978 is now hailed as the beginning of a new era. At that meeting Deng was able to oust Hua Guofeng and begin to destroy Mao’s communes. Wan Li, in a speech entitled ‘Several key questions to be solved in agriculture’, mounted a fierce attack on the failure of the communes in Anhui and ridiculed Dazhai. Cautiously, a few provincial leaders began to dismantle the system of collective agriculture that the peasants had lived under for a quarter of a century.7

  The dismantlement of the first commune took place in August 1979 amid the greatest secrecy at Guanghan, a town forty miles from Chengdu, Sichuan. Nothing was announced in the press for at least another year and news of the daring act only became known when a Japanese journalist reported it. Nevertheless it took years for others to follow suit. In Sichuan, many communes waited until 1984 before daring to dissolve the system, and even in Anhui some places, such as Feixi county, did not allocate the land to households until 1985.

  Mao’s communes cost China dear. At a time when the agricultural productivity of other Asian countries was increasing in leaps and bounds, the Chinese peasant was hamstrung. Between 1960 and 1980, according to a World Bank study, the productivity of Japanese peasants rose twenty-fold and that of South Koreans sixty-fold. Even in 1980, Chinese peasants were half as productive as those in Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand.

  Chinese leaders constantly reiterate the fact that China feeds over 20 per cent of the world’s population on 7 per cent of its arable land, and the shortage of arable land is used as the excuse for rural poverty. But on a per capita basis, China has more farming land than either South Korea or Japan, as the following table makes clear.8

  Population density per hectare Population density per hectare of arable land

  China 1.05 10

  South Korea 3.89 17.3

  Japan 3.15 23.9

  Had Mao not reversed the initial redistribution of land after 1949 by establishing the collectives, China would not now be lagging so far behind. Peasant smallholders provided a good base for economic take-off in those countries which the United States dominated after Japan’s defeat in 1945. In Taiwan, the Sino-American Joint Commission for Rural Reconstruction set about boosting food output and winning the political loyalty of the peasants by giving them land. This resulted in the 1953 Land to the Tillers Act by which the amount of land cultivated by tenant farmers
dropped from 40 per cent to 15 per cent. The Act forced many disenfranchised landowners to start up their own businesses which now form the mainstay of the island’s economy. In Japan the Americans were similarly responsible for the 1952 Agricultural Land Law which consolidated and continued the break-up of large estates begun in 1946.

  Under Mao, China also failed to capitalize on the new farming methods developed in the rest of the world. Cheap chemical fertilizers, new varieties of wheat and rice, and the use of plastic sheeting to extend the growing season all helped spur farmers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to reap once unimaginably high yields. Small so-called walking tractors, cheap enough for a household to buy and use for tilling and transport, vastly increased the household farmer’s productivity. In Mao’s China the peasants were stuck with large and unwieldy Soviet-style tractors.

  After Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the peasants exploited these innovations with enthusiasm. The amount of chemical fertilizer applied in China doubled between 1977 and 1981 and had tripled by 1986. Grain production jumped from 286 million tonnes at Mao’s death in 1976 to 407 million tonnes in 1984. By the mid-1980s China was once again a net food exporter. Peasants no longer subsisted on sweet potatoes but could now afford to use cooking oil and eat meat, vegetables, fruit and fish.

  Though there is no doubt that Deng’s reforms were of great significance, in fact they consisted of nothing more than the abandonment of a system which had failed catastrophically twenty years earlier, and indeed which had failed in the Soviet Union two decades before that. Deng must share the responsibility for ignoring the lessons of both these earlier failures. His reforms have consisted largely of returning the peasants to the situation they were in before the Communist revolution, and indeed for centuries before. The peasants are once again small farmers – although this time all land is nominally owned by the state – obliged to pay an annual grain tax.

  To call Deng’s policies reforms is in a sense a misnomer and it is also becoming clear that they have not solved China’s Malthusian crisis. The Chinese are still confronted with a burgeoning population and hence the threat of famine, which may prove to be Mao’s most bitter legacy. When the Communists fought the Nationalists during the 1940s, they were able to promise the 500 million peasants that they would be rewarded with a plot of land (its size varied from place to place) large enough to support a family. Thirty years later, Deng had the same amount of land to redistribute (or perhaps less given the environmental destruction that had occurred in the interim), but the rural population had nearly doubled. The post-1979 redistribution of land gave a temporary boost to the Party’s popularity but it is still faced with the almost insurmountable problem of finding employment for a growing surplus of labour in the countryside. Throughout China’s history, dynasties have been overthrown by landless and frustrated peasants who have risen up in revolt. Without more land to placate the peasantry, the Party now faces the possibility of its own overthrow. The growth in grain production has slowed since 1987 and output actually fell for the first time in 1994. In 1995, the Party panicked over a report by Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in America which said that China is losing her ability to feed herself. By the year 2000 there could be a shortfall of 40 million tonnes. In just over fifty years, China’s population will reach 1.6 billion and China may well need to import more grain than the rest of the world can supply. The last famine may, officially at least, be forgotten but the threat of another great famine will haunt future generations.

  And what of Mao’s Utopian vision of the future for Chinese peasants? In some ways, his fantasies are coming true although for reasons entirely contrary to his beliefs. In increasing numbers the peasants do have access to the marvels of twentieth-century technology. They have new houses made of brick and tiles and equipped with electricity and television. Their fields now produce three times as much grain per mu as in 1960. Mechanization has arrived with walking tractors and threshing machines. Chinese pigs now grow to four times the weight they did in 1960 and modern science is creating giant vegetables and genetically engineered hybrids. Mao’s opposition to chemical fertilizers is now fashionable and foreign agronomists recommend natural fertilizers. It is not hard to imagine that if the famine is left out of the history books, Mao could continue to be worshipped as a great peasant emperor whose vision transformed China into a modern state.

  18

  How Many Died?

  ‘Any society that is alive is a society with a history.’ Vaclav Havel

  China has never officially acknowledged that the famine took place nor published an estimate of the death toll. The results of any internal investigations are a state secret and no public discussion of the famine is permitted.

  Western experts made the first estimates of the death toll in the early 1980s, nearly a quarter of a century after the famine had taken place, and these calculations are only educated guesses, carried out on the basis of limited information. Yet given that the number of victims of the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine are still being debated even though far more is known about them, such uncertainty over the death toll in China is hardly surprising. Moreover, in China the Party responsible for the famine is still in power and venerates the memory of Mao. Even in Russia, where the Communists have lost power, it is still proving difficult to determine how many died in Stalin’s purges, the famines or the Second World War. Nor have the internal records of Mao’s regime been scrutinized by an occupying power in the way the Allies were able to examine those of Nazi Germany.

  However, reaching a reliable figure about a famine which lasted for years and extended over such a large country would be difficult even if China were to open all her archives. Many records were lost during the Cultural Revolution and a great deal of other evidence has been deliberately destroyed. In addition, only three censuses were taken in China between 1949 and 1982, one in 1953, another in 1964 and the third in 1982. And, as will be seen, data from that of 1964 must be treated with considerable caution.

  During the Great Leap Forward, the State Statistical Bureau, set up in 1952 and modelled on its Soviet equivalent, simply did not function. Professional statisticians were relegated to other work and were only reappointed in July 1961. And only in the following year, on the instructions of Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, were plans drawn up for the establishment of a powerful, centralized and unified statistics system. At the same time, Party and government departments were forbidden to change statistical figures.1

  Provisional regulations governing statistical work were issued in 1963 but the newly reconstituted bureau functioned only for another four years or so. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Sihua, head of the State Statistical Bureau, was arrested and accused of implementing a revisionist line, ‘seizing power from the Party’ and ‘asserting his independence’. At the same time, large quantities of material from the bureau were burnt. Wang had been in charge of organizing China’s second national population census completed in 1964. The census had been conducted amid such secrecy that the outside world was unaware of it, and Mao refused to publish the results. Details of the 1964 census were only published in 1980. Thus for nearly a quarter of a century there was an effective blackout on all Chinese population statistics.2

  These circumstances parallel those during collectivization and the ensuing famine in the Soviet Union. Stalin had ordered a new census in 1937 but its results were never released and lay buried in the central national archives for half a century. The director of the Census Bureau, O. A. Kvitkin, was dismissed and later shot. Stalin had estimated that the Soviet Union had a population of around 170 million people. However, the census itself counted only 162 million people, clearly showing that 7 million or more people had starved to death in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus.

  The parallels with China do not end there. Researchers have discovered that the Soviet Central Office of Statistics produced two sets of demographic statistics, one for internal use and one for publication. During the Mao era, China
appears to have done much the same, at least as far as meteorological data is concerned. During the Great Leap Forward, the Central Meteorological Office continued to function accurately but the information it produced was restricted to senior levels of the Party. The meteorologists reported that there was no unusually bad weather or natural disasters in 1959, 1960 or 1961; indeed the weather was rather good. However, the official media reported claims by Mao and others that China had in this period experienced the worst natural disasters for a century. Official news reports even quoted experts as saying that China’s climate had changed. In fact, the worst years since 1949 have been 1954 and 19801 when there was neither a severe grain shortage nor a nationwide famine.3

  However, even if one is prepared to accept that the statistics released by China after 1980 were undoctored, there are doubts as to whether in the midst of a ruthless political struggle, an accurate census was taken in 1964. The count must have been made at the provincial level with the co-operation of the local Party organization and the results passed on to the centre only with the approval of the provincial Party Secretaries. In many provinces, the same officials who were responsible for the famine were still in power and would have had every reason to censor damaging information. In Sichuan, for example, Li Jingquan was still in power in 1964: the census would have revealed his responsibility for 7-9 million deaths. Nonetheless, the data from the 1964 census is crucial to making a proper estimate of the death toll for, without it, one is faced with a gap of twenty-nine years between the first census in 1953 and the third in 1982.