Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

China began to publish a flood of statistical and demographic data after 1980, when the State Statistical Bureau was re-established and the country’s few remaining statisticians returned from long years of physical labour in the countryside. It is now possible, using the data from 1953, 1964 and 1982, to track the progress of each age cohort from census to census and therefore establish how many of those born in 1950 survived until 1964 and then 1982. However, two factors in particular hinder a demographer from making a definitive study of the death toll during the famine – internal migration and the number of children who were born and died between 1958 and 1962.

  In a famine people flee their homes and often do not return, but a census count does not show whether they have starved to death or whether they have moved away and failed to register elsewhere. Census figures for Shanghai, for example, show that 950,000 people left Shanghai between 1953 and 1964, but they do not reveal what happened to these people or where they went. During the famine, uncounted numbers fled the worst-hit regions, over 10 million settling in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia alone.

  The other great challenge is to try and guess how many children were born during the famine years and, of these, how many died. This is not revealed by the 1953 and 1964 censuses although experts can make educated guesses based on birth rates and infant mortality rates before and after the famine. On the other hand, pre-famine trends are not a strong guide because it is clear that fewer babies are born in a famine. Many women stop ovulating altogether, and if they do give birth, they produce less milk and infant mortality rises sharply. One expert has calculated that Anhui suffered a fertility crisis for as long as two years during the famine but obviously the scale of the crisis varied from province to province.4 With a population the size of China’s, the margin for error is fairly high. Under normal conditions, China might in the late 1950s and early 1960s have seen around 25 million births a year. Even in famine conditions, the number of births might still have been 14 million a year. Thus in the four years from 1958 to 1962, the number of births could have ranged from a low of 56 million to a maximum of 100 million.

  The censuses are not the sole guide to calculating the death toll in China because the local authorities also maintain registers of births and deaths. Given the rationing system which existed during this period, a careful record would have been made at times of the number of mouths to feed. On the other hand, at the height of the famine in the countryside, no one was burying the dead, let alone recording the number of deaths. The births and deaths of small children, in particular, would often have passed almost unnoticed. Nor would officials have kept track of those who fled and managed to survive or of those who died on the roads. And there is another, final question-mark about Chinese figures: how were the inmates of the labour camps and prisons recorded? And the millions in the armed forces? Generally, both groups are excluded from provincial population figures but during the famine there were perhaps as many as 10 million prisoners and the death rate in the camps was exceptionally high, on average 20 per cent and often far higher.

  In the early 1980s, Dr Judith Banister undertook a major investigation of China’s population statistics which was published in China’s Changing Population. Taking all the above factors into account, she reached the following conclusion:

  Assuming that without the Great Leap Forward policies and experiences China would have maintained its claimed 1957 death rate of 10.8 during the years 1958-1961, the official data imply that those four years saw over 15 million excess deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward in combination with poor weather conditions. The computerized reconstruction of China’s population trends utilized in this book, which assumes under-reporting of deaths in 1957, as well as in all the famine years, results in an estimated 30 million excess deaths during 1958-1961.5

  This figure, arrived at in 1984, is the most reliable estimate we have but it is not the only one.

  While China has never formally rejected this total or put forward an alternative, a wealth of statistical information has been published which amounts to quasi-official recognition that millions did die of famine. One such work, Contemporary Chinese Population published in 1988, goes further by explicitly stating that the official data disguises the extent of the death toll. Official figures show that between 1959 and 1961, the population fell by 13.48 million but the authors say: ‘The problem is that there are false figures and 6.03 million people during the three years of difficulty were not taken into account when the calculations were made... If we take this into account, the death rate in 1960 should be 1 per cent higher at 3.85 per cent. So out of a population of 500 million, there were 19.5 million deaths in the countryside.’6 The authors also substantiate anecdotal evidence that large numbers of girls were allowed to die or were killed during the famine. According to the 1964 census, 0.5 per cent more boys than girls aged 5-9 and 0.4 per cent more males than females aged 9-14 years survived the famine. Generally, even in normal times a higher proportion of male infants than female infants survive in China but the 1982 census indicates that the normal difference is only about 0.1 per cent. This means that during the famine 4.7 million fewer girls survived than would have done so in normal years. In other words, nearly a quarter of the 19.5 million famine victims were peasant girls, who appear to have been deliberately allowed to starve to death or were killed by their parents.

  Articles published by some experts in China and by exiled dissidents claim that the death toll is far higher even than Banister’s estimate. In 1993, a Chinese scholar writing under the pen-name Jin Hui published an article in a Shanghai academic journal, Society, which was later withdrawn. The author looked at inconsistencies in official statistics on birth and death rates, sex ratios, rural and urban populations and provincial and national figures, and concluded that the figures had been falsified to hide a death toll of at least 40 million. Unfortunately, it also true that Chinese statistics about any subject are rarely internally consistent so it is hard to know how significant these discrepancies are. Whether or not this figure of 40 million is to be trusted, it is now used, almost casually, by various authors inside China who lump deaths and the reduction in births together. Cong Jin of the National Defence University writes in China 1949-1989: The Zig-zag Development Era that ‘From 1959 to 1961 the abnormal deaths plus the reduction of births reached about 40 million.’7 Another book, Disasters of Leftism in China by Wen Yu, published in 1993, claims that ‘from 1959 to 1961, the abnormal deaths plus the reduction of births reached altogether more than 40 million with direct economic losses of 120 billion yuan’.8

  The estimates of American demographers are also challenged by Chen Yizi, a senior Chinese Party official who fled to America after the crackdown that followed the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations. After 1979, Chen played an important role in the rural reforms as a member of a think-tank called the Tigaisuo or System Reform Institute patronized by Zhao Ziyang, then Premier and later Party General Secretary. The new Chinese leadership wanted to find out what had really happened under Mao, and one of the institute’s first tasks was to draw up a picture of rural China. Chen was part of a large team of 200 officials who visited every province and examined internal Party documents and records. The institute’s report concluded that between 43 and 46 million people had died during the famine and several sources said that an even larger figures of 50 and 60 million deaths were cited at internal meetings of senior Party officials.

  The institute’s report has never been released but in an interview Chen recalled the death toll for a number of provinces:

  Henan 7.8 million

  Anhui 8 million

  Shandong 7.5 million

  Sichuan 9 million

  Qinghai 900,000

  Thus, in these five provinces alone, 33.2 million people died. Chen argues that these figures are reliable because each province compiled detailed statistics on its population. In normal times, Chinese local officials keep records of household registration and these were particularly important
when the commune system operated because with all food rationed, great care was taken in counting the number of mouths.

  That such detailed records were kept is clear from the report on Fengyang county in Anhui. Such figures were also used when the Party compiled reports on the famine in each province at the end of 1960; and in places like Gansu officials kept a record of famine deaths as well as the number of mouths to feed. However, while it is clear that Beijing was aware of the scale of the disaster, the reliability of such figures is hard to ascertain. In addition, there is an added complication, because evidence suggests that the Party often produced different versions of the same report. Lower figures were released to lower-ranking officials. Until these internal reports are made public, we cannot be sure that they exist or, if they do, whether they take into account such factors as internal migration or include normal deaths in the totals.

  From a moral perspective, the debate is meaningless. Whether 30 or over 40 million perished, China managed to hide the largest famine in history for twenty years. In terms of sheer numbers, no other event comes close to this. Until the Great Leap Forward, the largest famine on record took place in China between 1876 and 1879 when 9-13 million died.

  In other great historical famines, a higher proportion of the population died than in China in 1958-61. At the start of the great Irish potato famine in 1845, Ireland had a population of about 8.5 million of whom around 1 million died of hunger and 1.5 million emigrated. Most historians recognize that the Irish famine was caused by a blight which destroyed the potato harvest on which the population depended for most of its food. Relief efforts were undermined by the slowness of communications and transport, and when grain was shipped from North America it did not relieve the hunger. The Irish economy was so dependent on the potato that it was not equipped to process the grain for human consumption. Indeed, before the famine bread was seldom seen and ovens virtually unknown. Even so, the British government still stands accused of acting with indifference to a subject people.

  In more recent times, except during war, famines have become rarer. China is often compared to India but in this century India has not suffered a famine of comparable dimensions. India’s largest famine in modern times took place between 1896 and 1897 when drought led to 5 million deaths. The Bengal famine of 1942, when around 1.5 million died, was caused by the Japanese invasion of Burma which cut off rice imports.

  What sets Mao’s famine apart from those in Ireland and India is that it was entirely man-made. China was at peace. No blight destroyed the harvest. There were no unusual floods or droughts. The granaries were full and other countries were ready to ship in grain. And the evidence shows that Mao and the Chinese bureaucracy were in full control of the machinery of government.

  The event which most resembles Mao’s famine is that in the Ukraine in 1932-3 where circumstances were almost identical, as has been shown in Chapter 3. A slightly larger proportion of China’s population died in the Great Leap Forward than in the Soviet Union – 4.6 per cent (if one accepts a figure of 30 million out of a total population of 650 million) compared to 4.11 per cent (7 million out of 170 million). In China, deaths were concentrated among the rural population, so out of a maximum 550 million peasants 5.45 per cent died, one in twenty. Around a quarter of the population of the Ukraine perished in the famine there, largely in one year, 1933. However, in parts of China such as Anhui, it is likely that a quarter of the rural population died just as in the Ukraine.9

  One can also compare China with Cambodia under Pol Pot. Inspired by Mao, the Khmer Rouge collectivized the entire population in the 1970s and it is reckoned that out of 8 million people, 1 million died. However, this number also includes the victims of a civil war and a war with Vietnam, so the extent of deaths due to famine alone is unclear.

  If we look at Mao’s famine as a deliberate act of inhumanity, then his record can also be measured against that of Hitler and Stalin. Some 12 million died in the Nazi concentration camps and a further 30 million were killed during the Second World War. Stalin is thought to have allowed 20 million to die in the gulags and overall he is believed to have been responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths. However, an investigation into Mao’s record by Daniel Southerland in the Washington Post suggests that Mao exceeded even these ghastly totals:

  While most scholars are reluctant to estimate a total number of ‘unnatural deaths’ in China under Mao, evidence shows that he was in some way responsible for at least 40 million deaths and perhaps 80 million or more. This includes deaths he was directly responsible for and deaths resulting from disastrous policies he refused to change. One government document that has been internally circulated and seen by a former Communist Party official now at Princeton University [Chen Yizi] says that 80 million died unnatural deaths – most of them in the famine following the Great Leap Forward.10

  19

  How to Record the Annals of a Place?

  ‘Must we force ourselves to forget the anguish and the wounds of the past so that we can look to the future and move forward? And by forgetting these wounds let them fester in our souls?’ Ba Jin, 1979

  In China’s collective memory, the famine is the dog that didn’t bark. Though it was the greatest trauma experienced by the Chinese people since 1949 and no one remained untouched by it, even now it is barely discussed or referred to. No books, no films, no plays are allowed to do more than make a passing reference to the ‘three years of natural disasters’ or the ‘three years of hardship’. And the communes in which the Chinese lived for a quarter of a century have been forgotten.

  By contrast, all talk of the Cultural Revolution which followed the famine is positively encouraged and the events of these ‘ten years of chaos’ are often portrayed as a sudden deviation from normality. The Cultural Revolution appears in films as an urban phenomenon, a political upheaval in which high-ranking Party officials were attacked and which brought anarchy to the streets of the cities. It is remarkable therefore that the event which dominated the lives of the vast majority of Chinese, the peasants, does not receive the same attention.

  This neglect often appears to be a matter of mere chance. Take, for example, the minor classic A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters by Yang Jiang, which appeared in the early 1980s. She and her husband, the prominent writer Qian Zhongshu, were sent from the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing to the countryside in 1970. The book, modelled on the classical Chinese work Six Chapters in a Floating Life, tells of the hardships that these middle-aged scholars endured working among the peasants in Henan province.1

  The poverty of the peasants is described well enough. They steal everything from the hopelessly incompetent literati, from old cabbage leaves to their faeces. Yet at no point does Yang Jiang hint at what she must surely have known – that they were living in Xinyang, an epicentre of the famine, alongside the peasants of Luoshan and Xixian who, ten years earlier, had eaten the corpses of their neighbours and, perhaps, even those of their own children. Though it is possible that the couple heard nothing of this during their stay, the former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and the dissident Chen Yi, both of whom were sent to May 7th cadre schools in Henan during the Cultural Revolution, became well aware of what had happened and why the peasants were still so hungry and impoverished. After all, it was surely no accident that so many were punished by being sent to this part of Henan to ‘learn from the peasants’ – in other words to copy their obedience and docility.

  Another leading intellectual, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who was also sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, did find out what had happened in Anhui and was horrified. Dubbed ‘China’s Sakharov’ for his outspoken criticism of the Communist Party and his advocacy of democracy, Fang Lizhi was a senior figure in Anhui’s Science and Technology University in Hefei who started nationwide student demonstrations in 1987. These led to the dismissal of the General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, and were the precursor of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Wh
ile Fang and his wife sought refuge in the American Embassy after the Tiananmen massacre, he wrote in the New York Review of Books:

  Much of the history of Chinese Communism is unknown to the world or has been forgotten. If, inside China, the whole of society has been coerced into forgetfulness by the authorities, in the West the act of forgetting can be observed in the work of a number of influential writers who have consciously ignored history and have willingly complied with the ‘standardised public opinion’ of the Communists’ censorial system. The work of the late Edgar Snow provides one of the most telling examples of this tendency. Snow lived many years in China: we must assume that he understood its society. And yet in his reports on China after the Communists took power, he strictly observed the regime’s propaganda requirements – including the forgetting of history. In Red China Today, he had this to say about China in the early 1960s: ‘I diligently searched without success, for starving people or beggars to photograph. Nor did anyone else succeed... I must assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine and I do not believe that there is famine in China at this writing.’ The facts, which even the Chinese Communists do not dare deny publicly, are that the early 1960s saw one of the greatest famines in more than 2,000 years of recorded Chinese history. In the three years between 1960 and 1963 approximately 25 million people in China died of hunger. As for beggars, not only did they exist, they even had a kind of ‘culture’ with Communist characteristics. In 1973 in Anhui I listened to a report by the ‘advanced’ Party secretary of a Chinese village. One of his main ‘advanced’ experiences was to organise his villagers into a beggar’s brigade to go begging through the neighbouring countryside.2

  Fang’s attack on Western observers such as Snow is discussed later, but from what he has written it is clear that Fang is only one of many Chinese intellectuals whose disgust with their rulers was strengthened by what they discovered about the famine. Another is the dissident Ni Yuxian. In A Chinese Odyssey, Ni recounts how, as a young soldier from Shanghai, he discovered what was happening from fellow soldiers, who had received letters from home: