20
The Western Failure
‘I think the time will come when historians will properly analyse the issue of collectivization.’ Nikita Khrushchev
A famine on such an enormous scale would never have occurred had it not been kept secret. As the economist Amartya Sen was the first to point out, famines are caused by censorship and are the result of political decisions.1 If Mao had not gone to great lengths to deny that there was a crisis, then however great the shortage of food, the famine would have been averted. However, since 1949 China had become a closed and tightly controlled state in which the Party wielded an absolute monopoly over information. With the press in China silenced, the role of Western observers became of vital importance. Had they alerted the world to what was happening, then the famine might have been averted or at least shortened.
At the beginning of the famine, there were only a few foreign journalists and diplomats stationed in Beijing. Still fewer journalists had permission to tour the country. The largest group watched China from Hong Kong where they interviewed refugees, read the mainland press and listened to broadcasts. Only these small groups of people had the time and patience to analyse the fragments of information which became available and they thus exerted an unusually strong influence on both public opinion and the reactions of Western governments. Above all they influenced the United States, whose citizens were kept out of China but which was reluctant to trust what its ally, Taiwan, said was happening. The China-watchers’ views also influenced the newly independent countries of the Third World as they sought new allies and fresh ideas on development. Neighbours such as North Vietnam and Cambodia were particularly swayed by the reported successes of Mao’s policies but so too were revolutionaries in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
During the famine, the role of these China-watchers became still more important as the world tried to evaluate the truth behind rumours filtering out. Was there really a famine? Should the West offer help? Would the Communists fall?
In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek became convinced that there was a famine, and intelligence reports of uprisings among the peasants on the mainland encouraged him to believe that the population would welcome his army as liberators. Around 1960, he ordered the Nationalist army to prepare for an invasion to recapture the mainland and his government broadcast promises of support to the insurgents and rewards for any Communist officers who changed sides, offering them high positions in a new government. The New York Times reported that in 1962 all Taipei was gripped by feverish expectations of an imminent return.2
Chiang repeatedly pressed the American government to back his invasion but was always turned down. The invasion never took place and Chiang missed perhaps his only chance of regaining the mainland. In reaching their decision the Americans were confused by the conflicting reports of relations between Beijing and Moscow. If an invasion went ahead would Khrushchev defend China against an American-backed invasion? Fantastic theories were spun which turned on whether there was a real split between the two Communist giants or whether it was merely a ruse to deceive the West.
The risk of sparking off a global conflict was one factor in Washington’s decision not to aid Taiwan but American domestic politics also played a part. In the early 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy had led a vicious campaign to root out supposed left-wing sympathizers within America. Old China hands came under suspicion and were accused of having ‘lost’ China to the Communists, a loss that became particularly grievous when soon afterwards American troops died fighting the forces of the new Chinese regime in the Korean War. Many China experts in the State Department were purged in an atmosphere of suspicion and anger. Thus, for years to come, those academics and journalists who wrote about China risked embroilment in a war between two bitterly divided camps, and reports of the famine in China appeared in a highly politicized, if not partisan, context. Any invasion of mainland China needed first to have the support of the American public: the more horrible the famine, the more support there would be for tough action. American reporters therefore came under pressure from different sides to show China in a particular light.
As it now appears, the mainstream American press reported the famine accurately. In December 1958 the Scripps-Howard newspapers printed a series of articles entitled ‘Chain Gang Empire’, one of which stated that
the abolition of the family is an avowed, primary sociological objective of Red China’s new commune system – the first serious effort in history to put a whole nation on what amounts to a prison chain gang... We may suspect that no people has ever been forced to work so hard and for so little as the Chinese people... They have suffered much in these years and have been regimented as has no other people in modern times by the most totalitarian regime of the twentieth century.
A report in 1959 by the New York World Telegram and Sun described how in ‘famished Red China slaves steal pig’s slop’.3 In the following year Time magazine reported that in 1960 ‘hunger stalks mainland China for the third straight year’.4 In 1961 the Weekly Post recorded that ‘China must endure an ordeal of famine and pestilence on a scale which even this unfortunate country has not had to face in this century’. In 1962 The New York Times claimed that ‘Communist China is a land of massive malnutrition and hunger. Three successive years of poor harvests have reduced the food available to most Chinese to little above the barest subsistence level.’5
At the time, however, such reports were ridiculed by many, not least by the respected BBC journalist Felix Greene, brother of the writer Graham Greene. Though based in New York he visited China in 1960 and in his subsequent book, A Curtain of Ignorance, he denigrated these reports in the American press, accusing their authors of exaggeration and misinformation, and of having been duped by warmongers in American Intelligence.
The most outspoken and influential figure to argue that something truly terrible was happening in China was Joseph Alsop, a Washington columnist. Throughout the famine he published articles which have turned out to be accurate. At one point, he gave serious consideration to a report that the famine was so bad that the amount of food available per capita had dropped to 600 calories a day: ‘A hospitalized person on a strict diet of 600 calories a day can normally be expected to lose about 20 pounds a month... in short the population of China is starving. The starvation is methodical and rationed but it is not even very slow starvation.’6
Greene dismissed this as ‘a medical absurdity’ but Alsop was correct in blaming Mao and his mad rush into establishing communes for the catastrophe, instead of the alleged natural disasters. Mao, he argued, was trying to follow a pattern of industrialization set by Stalin, but the Russians had got away with it because their standard of living was higher. Even if living standards fell by 50 per cent the Soviets had still had a sufficient safety margin to protect them from complete disaster. But China, he insisted, had no safety margin at all. Alsop repeatedly posed the question of whether mass starvation might lead to an uprising. Such concerns were given very serious consideration by the US State Department which was aware of the deep split between Liu Shaoqi and Mao. In the summer of 1962, Alsop wrote in the academic journal China Quarterly that no Western nation in modern times had experienced the ‘nadir of wretchedness’ seen in China:
The most reliable data obtainable in Hong Kong this spring, derived from great numbers of refugee interrogations and collected and analysed with extreme care, showed an average food intake for mainland China of 1,300 to 1,600 calories per person a day, according to the individual’s labour category. These figures are squarely based on the best first hand evidence that exists; and they are therefore unchangeable except by those experts who think they know more about the Chinese diet than the people who have recently been eating it.7
The trouble was that it was all too easy to challenge refugee accounts. As an editorial in The Times pointed out: ‘Most of the dispute over how much food the Chinese have been eating in the past three years centres on the evidence of refugees who cross t
he border into Hong Kong... Many of the experts question this evidence, arguing that the refugee is sometimes biased, rarely accurate, usually interested in painting an adverse picture.’8 This prejudice reflected an earlier opinion of The Times that ‘the sufferings of the ordinary peasant from war, disorder, and famine have been immeasurably less in the last decade than in any other decade in the century’.9
Amidst this debate, no Americans were allowed into China to see for themselves, partly because of the obstacles erected by Beijing but above all because of Washington’s own restrictions. The United States did not recognize the Communist Party as the legitimate government of China and McCarthyism’s influence ensured that a very tough line was taken to prevent American citizens from going there. The only American journalist who found a way round these impediments was Edgar Snow. Snow had met Mao and other Communist leaders in Yanan in 1936, just after they had escaped encirclement by the Nationalist armies. His subsequent account of the Communists, Red Star over China, was a great scoop and even now still ranks as one of the best sources of information on the early history of the Chinese Communists. In 1960 Snow somehow managed to get into China and for five months was taken around the country. In The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, he later wrote an exhaustive account of his visits to communes, factories and schools, his talks with senior leaders and his travels to disparate parts of the country, from Inner Mongolia to Chongqing in Sichuan province. He concluded that the famine did not exist:
Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials and headlines referred to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued to cite no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-communist visitor to China provided an authenticated instance of starvation during this period.
I assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine (and only one beggar, among flood refugees in Shenyang) and that the best Western intelligence on China was well aware of this. Isolated instances of starvation due to neglect or failure of the rationing system were possible. Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.
With no other American visitors to hoodwink, the Chinese made use of other Westerners, especially the British. Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, President of the Royal Society, returned from a visit saying, ‘There is much that is tremendously impressive and admirable in new China... it is quite likely that many of them are now freer in some ways than they have ever been.’ The distinguished poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read visited China in 1959 and praised the communes: ‘It does not matter what the system is called... what counts more than statistics is the happiness and contentment of the peasants.’10
Generally, the Chinese preferred to invite people who knew as little about China as possible, such as the war hero Field Marshal Montgomery, who in 1961 was given an audience with Mao and afterwards reported that China’s population had not fallen, rather it had increased.11 Even those who should have known better were duped. Lord Boyd-Orr, an agricultural expert and former head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, came back from China in May 1959 full of praise. He concluded that China had indeed increased food production by up to 100 per cent and believed that ‘modern farming methods had increased Chinese yields to levels comparable with those of Britain and had ended the traditional Chinese famine cycle... China has one quarter of the world’s population but seems capable of feeding it well.’12 The distinguished scientist and sinologist Dr Joseph Needham thought it was nonsense even to think that the peasants might be oppressed, claiming that the collective kitchens were ‘a matter of pride in China today, not of compulsion or regimentation’.13
The British were not alone. A Swiss economist, Gilbert Etienne, wrote with great confidence in Le Monde in December 1961 that ‘It may be said at the outset – and it is one of the rare points on which we can claim to be categorical – that it is false to speak of “general famine”. The grievous times of the Kuomintang, when millions of human lives were eliminated for want of minimum subsistence, have not reappeared.’
At the height of the famine in 1960, only two writers other than Edgar Snow were allowed to enter China. One was Felix Greene. After his Potemkin-like tour he asserted that ‘death by hunger has ceased in China. Food shortages and severe ones there may have been, but no starvation... The indisputable fact is that the famines that in one area or another constantly ravaged the farmlands of China and the fear of starvation, which for so long haunted the lives of Chinese peasants, are today things of the past.’
The third visitor in 1960 was the part-Chinese writer Han Suyin, who also saw no famine. Although her hosts pointedly ran a film for her about the Soviet famine in the 1920-1 period of War Communism, she missed the hint. Even in Sichuan she found no famine and concluded that ‘despite the errors of the Leap [and] the shortages owing to agricultural disasters, the Leap did achieve its main goal which was accelerated industrial development’.14
She was followed by other admirers such as Che Guevara from Cuba and the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal who in 1962 was even allowed to spend time in a Chinese village. None of them came back with anything but praise for China. The most outspoken defender of Mao was the French socialist politician, François Mitterrand, who later became France’s President. He spent three weeks touring China and was granted a two-hour interview with Mao which he reported in L’Express on 23 February 1961. Mitterrand was certain that ‘Mao is not a dictator... the mastery which he exercises is conferred on him by a power over his people which is not produced by the demagogic fanaticism backed by a strong police state of Hider in Germany, nor the cynical energy of Mussolini in Italy...’ Unlike such right-wing dictators, Mao was a ‘humanist’ and ‘a new type of man’ in whom, Mitterrand said, doctrinal rigour was allied ‘with a vigilant realism’. As such, Mao had to be speaking the truth when he said that ‘the people of China have never been near famine... I repeat in order to be clearly understood: there is no famine in China.’ In his meeting with Mitterrand, Mao boasted that Western newspapers had been unable to find proof of famine:
Oh, I know your Western newspapers have printed headlines about what they call the famine in China. Their propaganda needs a large helping of deaths. What they are looking for is proof that we have failed. Above all it is our people’s communes which annoy them. They already see the rebels, the millions of peasants marching against our regime... but I want to make this point – we do not care about this campaign of lies which is nothing more than a new form of imperialist aggression... We are used to this. Honest and serious people will understand us in the end. All we care about is their verdict.
Among these ‘honest and serious people’ were the Western ‘foreign experts’ actually living in China at the time, such as the New Zealand poet Rewi Alley, the British left-wing journalist Wilfred Burchett and Isobel and David Crook, who in 1959 wrote Revolution in a Chinese Village – Ten-mile Inn. Such people at best remained silent but some went further, undermining reports of a famine by publishing books that showered praise on the Great Leap Forward and Maoist farming.
The worst apologist was probably Anna Louise Strong. A journalist and propagandist in the Communist cause in both China and the Soviet Union, she should have known better. She had been in the Soviet Union during collectivization and the subsequent famine. In their 1930s’ paean to Stalinism, The Soviet Union: A New Civilization, the British socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb quoted her as denying that there was any brutality or even force used to expel the kulaks. On the contrary, she said, ‘the meetings I personally attended were more seriously judicial, more balanced in their discussion, than any court trial I have attended in America’. In 1962 Strong was in Beijing writing propaganda booklets for the Chinese that eulogized the communes. In China’s Fight for Grain, published in 1963, she repeated Mao’s line that China was suffering from the worst natural disasters in a century. The drought was apparently so serious that in 1960 a child could wade across the Yellow River. In this crisis, she claimed, th
e communes actually saved China from famine: ‘The lives of the people and the lives of the communities were cherished. The nationwide slogan became: “No one shall starve! “... there was no pulverising of communities, no scattering of starving people to beg and die along the roads. All communities even when hungry stood, fought and were given aid.’
It is impossible to say whether such people really knew what was going on and told deliberate lies, whether they deluded themselves, or whether they had no way of finding out the truth, but not all of the 300-400 foreigners then living in Beijing can be accused of bias. One example was the resident correspondent for the Reuters news agency, Clare McDermott.15 The Chinese Foreign Ministry insisted that Reuters could only send journalists who did not speak Chinese and had no prior knowledge of the country. McDermott therefore relied heavily on his interpreter who was given careful instructions as to what he could tell the foreigner. One interpreter who confided too much disappeared. Not surprisingly, McDermott, though suspecting that there were acute food shortages, was unable to obtain much evidence or even grasp what the thinly disguised attacks on Mao in the press were alluding to. The significance of Deng Tuo’s articles or Wu Han’s work on Hai Rui, all too obvious to the Chinese, were also missed by more expert analysts in embassies. One of McDermott’s translators, who went back to his home in Wutaishan, Shanxi province, in 1962 and found that his family was reduced to eating tomato leaves, returned to Beijing shaken, but McDermott could not make much of this. Felix Greene was thus able to claim that ‘Reuters from their bureau in Peking, reported the food shortages, but never described them in terms of “famine” conditions.’
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 33